Ask Wednesday: Chuck, why are you agnostic with respect to "God"?

Guessing at the inconclusive

By Chuck Smythe

Chuck, a couple of weeks ago, in our question to Susan C. Price ("What do you think about religion?"), we indicated that you’ve said you don’t know enough to go one way or the other, so we labeled you agnostic. Please tell us what that means for you. Why are you agnostic with respect to "God" and other religious beliefs?

How much do you "know about religion"?

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which conducted the recent "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey," has posted a quiz to test how much we ourselves "know about religion."
    Take the quiz to find out how you compare with a nationally representative sample of 3,412 adults!

By the way, the opening statement of the Pew Forum's own report of its survey seems to support my friend Ken's observation that "no one [among the groups identified by the study] is more ignorant about religion than a Christian."
    Opens the Pew Forum report:

Atheists and agnostics, Jews, and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history, and leading figures of major world religions.

For those so indifferent to religion that it might be termed a miracle that they're even reading this, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, and Catholics are considered to be Christians, although that has been disputed on the basis of unfavorable comparisons of the ethics of members of these groups with the core teachings of Jesus Christ.

Evidence to support the term "bright"?

A phone survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life was released on Tuesday. Among its findings:

• Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.
• Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish.

These findings were reported in The New York Times (September 28), in the article, "Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans," by Laurie Goodstein, who led off with the statement that "Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion."

I had somehow missed the news, even though the survey had apparently been very widely reported.
    My friend Ken alerted me by email:

The article contains a memorable observation from the president of American Atheists: “I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people. Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”
    Some of the stats in it are jaw-droppers. For example: "53% of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation."
    [Given the religious views that predominate in the Western world and the fact that I've met a great many ignorant Christians,] I must conclude that no one is more ignorant about religion than a Christian.

As qualified, Ken's conclusion doesn't seem to be a non sequitur (in the original, logical way that Aristotle and I use the term). Christians, among the groups identified by the study, might indeed be the most ignorant about religion. [Note that as Goodstein's article points out, "There were not enough Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu respondents to say how those groups ranked."]
    The alleged superiority of atheists' (and agnostics') knowledge of religion might have been involved in philosopher Daniel C. Dennett's suggesting the term "bright" for atheists¹, even though he claims that he didn't intend it that way, any more than "gay" for homosexuals is meant to imply that homosexuals are less morose than other people.
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1. "In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon he admits to being 'a bright,' and defends the term." –Wikipedia

"Agnostic" = theistically neutral

The pleasure has passed that I felt on Thursday at discovering that Mr. Sheepandgoats and I are both agnostics. It isn't that I mind having this in common with Tom, it's just that I realized today that "everybody" is agnostic in the root meaning of that term, not knowing [whether or not god exists]—notwithstanding Carl Jung's statement that he knew. (So far as I know, he never said how he knew, and—again, so far as I know—no one ever even asked him to.)

No, it just isn't helpful or particularly enlightening to say that we're both (or all of us) agnostic in that way. The main thing, theistically speaking, about Tom and me is that I don't believe in god, and he does. In fact, even if I don't know that god doesn't exists, I believe (for reasons I will address, but not today) that it does not exist (and I employ "it" to get away from associations with the masculine deity of the Abramaic religions). And the same, mutatis mutandis, for Tom: he believes, for his reasons, that "God" (capitalized and masculine) does exist.

Another thing I realized today is that when Tom says (and he does say this on occasion), "Agnostics are a dime a dozen," he doesn't use the word in the root sense. If he used that [inflated] sense (where everyone except Carl Jung is an agnostic), he'd say they're a dime a hundred or a thousand!

I propose that, theistically speaking, agnostic be used to mean neutral. Acceptable synonyms might include "undecided," "undeclared," or "indifferent" (or still others). These particular alternatives seem inferior to "neutral," however.

"Undecided" implies that the agnostic can't have decided to be neutral, but he can. Or if he or she hasn't decided, that a decision has to be made at some point, and I don't think it does (although sometimes it is on the deathbed).

"Undeclared" overlooks the fact that theists and atheists may be undeclared too; they don't have to tell anyone their position (it can just be between themselves and their "God"...or their no-god).

I would like "indifferent" (and most agnostics may, in fact, be indifferent to whether someone else is an atheist or a theist) except that agnostics need not be indifferent—may, in fact, object to what theists get up to "in the name of God." They may also object to people like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins (or me) getting in people's faces with anti-religious books or blogs.

So, in the theistically neutral sense of agnostic that I recommend, I am atheist and Tom Sheepandgoats is theist, and never the twain shall meet (unless a miracle occurs and one of us persuades the other to turn). And agnostics are neither theist nor atheist, although they may or may not have decided to be, may or may not have declared it, and may or may not be indifferent to what anyone else is or does because of it.
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February 16. Note:I have written a sort of footnote to this, published as "Carl Jung wasn't the only one."