An Agnostic's thoughts on Ron Rosenbaum article, An Agnostic Manifesto

I wanted to share my thoughts on Ron Rosenbaum's article that's called An Agnostic Manifesto. I have heard many talk about it on podcasts and other media, but I never considered sharing my thoughts on it until I started reading Thomas Huxley's writings. I believe that many know about agnosticism and have a sense about the attitude behind it (towards religion and atheism), but it can get muddied when many agnostics apply it or express it differently. This is why I always tend to find a primary source, which in this case it would be Thomas Huxley. I judge all expressions of agnosticism based on his writings.

With that said, I will offer my thoughts on Rosenbaum's agnostic manifesto in a point-by-point format. I'm not offering my thoughts as some part of a rebuttal (as if I disagree with the article), but it's just simply my thoughts on it. My views on what agnosticism is will be based on Huxley's conception of agnosticism. I rearranged the order of the information from Rosenbaum's article based on topics. I wanted all of the areas that talks about what agnosticism is, the problems with atheism, and other topics grouped together.


My thoughts on the article, An Agnostic Manifesto by Ron Rosenbaum...

Rosenbaum starts out by stating the following:

Let’s get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer.

The only disagreement I have with the view that agnosticism is about "doubt in the possibility of certainty" is that Thomas Huxley was not against certainty or knowledge. Huxley was against unwarranted certainty and only that. These unwarranted certainties were basically strong or accepted opinions, usually in the form of religious dogma or atheistic philosophies, that were being taken for knowledge. Some good examples of this today would be how the religious tend to accept Creationism or how atheists tend to accept materialism.

Rosenbaum brings up unwarranted certainties but he does so in connection with doubt in certainty itself and that's where he strays from Huxley's conception of agnosticism. Besides that, all of his other points here are excellent and speak for themselves!

Clarification: Towards the middle of Rosenbaum's article, Rosenbaum states that "Agnosticism doesn’t contend there are no certainties". I wish he made that point from the start otherwise it would never be noticed unless someone reads the article in its entirety.

Rosenbaum:

Agnostics have mostly been depicted as doubters of religious belief, but recently, with the rise of the “New Atheism“—the high-profile denunciations of religion in best-sellers from scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and polemicists, such as my colleague Christopher Hitchens—I believe it’s important to define a distinct identity for agnosticism, to hold it apart from the certitudes of both theism and atheism.

I couldn't have said it better. Rosenbaum clearly explains the need for agnostics to distinguish themselves from atheists, especially the new atheists. However, this doesn't mean that the ultimate conclusions of the new atheists on religion and God are wrong. I just don't agree that they've proven their case but some of them act as if they have proven it. Some even go as far as trying to push others to accept it which brings in that religious orthodoxy feel to it.

Again, the agnostic is not against the atheist or theist claims of knowledge because of our doubting knowledge itself. But rather we doubt that your claims are really as solid (in terms of logic and evidence, if any) as you're passing them off to be. The agnostic sees a lot of gray areas where many atheists and theists may only see black-and-white.

Rosenbaum goes on to explain what agnosticism is:

So let us be more precise about what agnostics are and aren’t.
...
In fact, the term agnostic was coined in 1869 by one of Darwin’s most fervent followers, Thomas Henry Huxley, famously known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his defense of evolutionary theory. Here’s how he defined his agnosticism:

This principle may be stated in various ways but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.

I can't disagree with the person who coined the word!

Rosenbaum:

Agnosticism doesn’t contend there are no certainties; it simply resists unwarranted untested or untestable certainties.

????Finally, someone that really gets agnosticism.

Rosenbaum:

Agnosticism doesn’t fear uncertainty. It doesn’t cling like a child in the dark to the dogmas of orthodox religion or atheism. Agnosticism respects and celebrates uncertainty

Agreed. I tend to emphasize that agnosticism is actually for knowledge, but that can also coexist with embracing uncertainties as well. Just as long as one doesn't limit themselves to just uncertainties, then they are being consistent with Huxley's agnosticism. Refer to the previous quote.

Rosenbaum:

Humility in the face of mystery has been a recurrent theme of mine. I wrote most recently about the problem of consciousness and found myself allied with the agnostic group of philosophers known as the Mysterians, who argue that we are epistemically, flat-out unable to know the nature of consciousness while being within consciousness.

Yep, that did it to me, as well. I was an agnostic before studying consciousness but studying it reinforced my agnosticism. Many atheists think they can explain it or that scientists will inevitably explain it just as they have any other phenomenon. If anything, this is the strongest disagreement that I tend to have with many atheists, moreso than with God's existence.


Rosenbaum:

Indeed agnostics see atheism as “a theism”—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.

I know Rosenbaum was only referring to the "New Atheists". To be fair, I can also say that not all atheists are dogmatic. Unfortunately, the non-dogmatic atheists may either be the minority or they don't speak up as much as the dogmatic atheists.

From hereon, Rosembaum starts explaining how atheists can display a faith-based like attitude:

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

[emphasis added]

I sum up this reason as being overconfidence. It's an overconfidence in science, i.e. scientism. Some might say that there is good reason to accept science on this level given its great successes so far. But looking at this logically, I can say that scientists have not explained everything. There are indeed some serious philosophical reasons for considering that scientists can not explain everything using naturalism and materialism. Naturalism and materialism, are themselves, unproven ideologies, but we continue with them for practical reasons. Here's some historical perspective on scientism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):

The roots of scientism extend as far back as early 17th century Europe, an era that came to be known as the Scientific Revolution.
...
Englishman Francis Bacon, the Frenchman Rene Descartes, and the Italian Galileo Galilei spearheaded an international movement proclaiming a new foundation for learning, one that involved careful scrutiny of nature instead of analysis of ancient texts.

Descartes and Bacon used particularly strong rhetoric to carve out space for their new methods. They claimed that by learning how the physical world worked, we could become “masters and possessors of nature.”(4) In doing so, humans could overcome hunger through innovations in agriculture, eliminate disease through medical research, and dramatically improve overall quality of life through technology and industry. Ultimately, science would save humans from unnecessary suffering and their self-destructive tendencies. And it promised to achieve these goals in this world, not the afterlife. It was a bold, prophetic vision.

As this new method found great success, the specter of scientism began to emerge. Both Bacon and Descartes elevated the use of reason and logic by denigrating other human faculties such as creativity, memory, and imagination.

[emphasis added]

Rosenbaum gets back to explaining how many atheists display a dogmatic attitude:

Paul Kurtz, the much-admired former editor of the agnostic/atheist publication The Skeptical Inquirer who had taken to the pages of the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry to attack the “true believer atheists,” whom he called “true unbelievers” for behaving just like religious zealots:

We need to ask: are there fundamentalist “true unbelievers”? Many secular-atheists in twentieth-century totalitarian societies were indeed fundamentalists in the sense that they sought to impose a strict ideological code and willingly used state power and brutal violence against anyone who dissented. Stalinism is the best example of the readiness to punish deviation in the name of “the holy secular doctrine,” which the commissars in the gulags used to enforce obedience.
... Nonetheless, there still lingers among some true unbelievers an unflinching conviction toward atheism—God does not exist, period; they are convinced of that! This kind of dogmatic attitude holds that this and only this is true and that anyone who deviates from it is a fool. This insults a great number of reflective believers.

So on Rosenbaum's charge, not only are some atheists overconfident but they also tend to display a strict religious orthodox-like attitude.

Back to Rosenbaum's article... he gets into specifics about what atheists have not answered for:

Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing. But the question presents a fundamental mystery that has bedeviled (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle to Aquinas. Recently scientists have tried to answer it with theories of “multiverses” and “vacuums filled with quantum potentialities,” none of which strikes me as persuasive.

Agreed. Such theories only push back the starting point of existence rather than explaining exactly what the starting point is.

Rosenbaum again:

And so atheists really exist on the same superstitious plane as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to prove by logic the possibility of creation “ex nihilo” (from nothing). His eventual explanation entailed a Supreme Being standing outside of time and space somehow endowing it with existence (and interfering once in a while) without explaining what caused this source of “uncaused causation” to be created in the first place.

I can accept an uncaused cause. Theists have not proven what this uncaused cause is. If it is God, then you must show that God exists, and that it is your conception of God.

Let me make clear that I accept most of the New Atheist’s criticism of religious bad behavior over the centuries, and of theology itself. I just don’t accept turning science into a new religion until it can show it has all the answers, which it hasn’t, and probably never will.

????????(speechless - such good insight)



Rosenbaum goes on to talk about the war of words (or war on labels) between atheists and agnostics. He also refers to an email exchange he had with an Australian thinker named John Wilkins.

When I e-mailed Wilkins about what the most important points of contention in these debates were, he sent me back this provocative five-point response, which I’ll reprint below with my own annotations:

“For now my objections to the “New” Atheists (who are a vocal subset of the Old Atheists, and who I call Affirmative Atheists) are the same as my objections to organized religion: 1. Too much of the rhetoric and sociality is tribal: Us and Them.”

My problem with the divisions is not so much the division itself. It's very possible for one side to have truth while the other doesn't, and the two end up in a back-and-forth about it. What I dislike is partisan behavior, like when it becomes more about taking sides than it does getting to the truth. You'll definitely find such behavior among politicians but you also find it among many Christians and atheists.

Rosenbaum offering more of John Wilkins view:

2. [The New Atheism] presumes to know what it cannot. More on this below. 3. As a consequence of 1 and 2, it tries to co-opt Agnosticism as a form of “weak” Atheism. I think people have the right to self-identify as they choose, and I am neither an atheist nor a faith-booster, both charges having been made by atheists (sometimes the same atheists).

I also hate it when people try to label you differently than what you say you are. This happens to me a lot when I agree with some of the points that Christians make or that of atheists. Those who label me tend to have a hard time accepting that it's possible to agree with some of the views from BOTH sides of an issue.