In their introduction to Agnosticism, Francis Fallon and Gavin Hyman note that, in spite of how widespread and philosophically significant agnosticism about God is, its nature and ramifications have been discussed by philosophers much less frequently than those of theism and atheism. This assessment is supported by the fact that the work they introduce is the first book-length general discussion of agnosticism in English from a predominantly analytic perspective since Robin Le Poidevin’s 2010 Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction. This in itself provides a reason to take a close look at the account(s) of agnosticism presented in the book.
The contents of the book reflect the fact that during the decade separating it from Le Poidevin’s work the interest in agnosticism has grown in both general and religious epistemology. The general epistemological debate on what is involved in the suspension of judgement, along with the continued attention to topics such as non-doxastic faith and alternative concepts of God in the epistemology of religion, have made agnosticism a broader and more complex notion. This, in turn, drew the attention of philosophers who work on agnosticism away from the issues surrounding evidence towards practical questions. The latter are the main theme of the set of essays edited by Fallon and Hyman, making the book a marking point – both a commentary on and an illustration of the problems increasingly recognised as important.
One challenge in providing a unified account of agnosticism about God is that it has historically been discussed within wildly different conceptual frameworks. Originally rooted in nineteenth-century epistemology, where it described a position inspired by the views of Hume and Kant, the term ‘agnosticism’ acquired a new meaning within analytic philosophy, where it is usually defined as suspending judgement on whether something is true. At the same time, the term occasionally makes appearance in continental thought, where it signifies a general existential perspective rather than an attitude towards a proposition. All these senses of agnosticism are present in the book, interpreted and combined in various ways – a situation made necessary by the ambitious goal of extending the discussion onto the authors either independent of the analytic tradition, like Hegel, or, like Wittgenstein, placed on the border of it.
Though the authors of particular chapters approach the topic very differently, they all share an interest in what James C. Livingston in his overview of the thought of Victorian agnostics dubbed ‘right-wing agnosticism’ (1985: 235) – the kind of agnosticism leaning towards a supernaturalistic rather than naturalistic worldview. In a way, the entire book tackles the question of how agnosticism can be combined with a religious outlook. It can also be divided into two parts based on the angle from which the question is approached: while the first four chapters address it more or less directly, the three remaining ones discuss the responses made by particular authors. Since the authors in question are either initiators or leading representatives of major philosophical traditions, the result is an overview of the positions on agnosticism simultaneously broad and selective.
A less obvious dividing line between the two parts of the book is that the position presented in the first four chapters is more or less positive and pragmatist, while the message of the remaining three is primarily negative or apophatic. Notably, while apophaticism tends to be explicitly named, the presence of pragmatism is implicit: though the only author whose name appears in each of the first four chapters is William James, his ideas are always invoked on the margin of the main line of thought. Despite this and multiple declared disagreements with James, something very much like Jamesian epistemological postulates – an appeal to individual religious experience and some form of the ‘will to believe’ (James 1896/1979: 13ff.) – underpins much of the reasoning in the first part of the book.
The Jamesian concern to not miss the most practically important truths is a part of the motivation behind Robin Le Poidevin’s ‘semantic agnosticism’ (33ff.) described in the first chapter. The view in question combines accepting religious beliefs with suspending judgement on whether they can be understood realistically or only as a kind of existentially inspiring fiction. Though elsewhere, while outlining this position, Le Poidevin rejects Jamesian religious pragmatism as wishful thinking, here he mentions ‘excited imaginings’ (31) as underlying the mindset on which his position is modelled. More straightforwardly pragmatist is the position defended in the second chapter, which its author, Yuval Avnur, calls ‘agnostic belief’ (49ff.). The proposal is to hold religious beliefs we believe to not be evidentially supported – though, contrary to the Jamesian spirit and in an echo of Gary Gutting’s ‘interim assent’ (1982:105), in a ‘non-categorical’ (72ff.),hedged way. Avnur’s rejection of the categorical, like Le Poidevin’s suspension of judgement about the status of religious discourse, serves as a sceptical safeguard put on the positive attitudes held on at least partially pragmatic grounds.
The interplay of sceptical and pragmatist elements is equally visible in the next two essays. The third chapter, by Francis Fallon, opens with the proposal to treat agnosticism as a ‘living option’ (81)in James’s sense. Since James famously deemed it impossible, the whole chapter is partially a polemic with him, but a polemic framed in his own terms – a modification rather than rejection of his central claims. While Fallon considers his position to be opposed to that of James, Pascal, or Gutting, the spiritual ambiguity and ‘openness to religion’ (98) he takes to be natural for agnostics is grounded in personal religious experience. Accommodating the latter is also one of the foremost concerns of David Leech, who devotes the fourth chapter to the discussion of James Elliott’s ietsism, John Hick’s Kantian pluralism and J. L. Schellenberg’s ultimism as competitors to the position of the best model of agnostic spirituality. Leech tentatively concludes that it is ultimism that is best supported by practical considerations. That is because, apart from its potential in guiding behaviour, it can most easily be ‘brought into focus’ (137) given the limits and requirements of human imagination.
The presence of a mitigating sceptical element is what allows the authors of all four positions to defend their positive proposals. Le Poidevin’s stance is essentially ‘half-fictionalism’ in that it is the status of the content of religious beliefs, and not their truth value, that is at question. This allows him to walk the fine line between robust religious realism, vulnerable to sceptical objections, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the view that second-order agnosticism necessitates agnosticism of the first order, making the introduction of the positive element more difficult. In a similar vein, Leech’s conclusion that ultimism best models the agnostic’s spiritual mindset is based on the claim that it occupies a Goldilocks zone in terms of evidential support, economicness, and the relation to naturalism and religious realism. Fallon’s defence of the agnostic’s reliance on personal religious experience likewise rests on a kind of sceptical balance: such reliance is possible when it is ‘episodic’ (99-100) or ambiguous. For Avnur, in turn, the concept of the non-categorical belief serves as a means of fending off the objection that beliefs without evidential support are akratic, devoid of justification, or Moore-paradoxical (i.e., impossible to assert in the first person without falling into contradiction).
A common feature of the visions of agnostic spirituality outlined in the first four chapters is that they all go beyond the simple neutrality between classical theism and atheism (in Leech’s terms, ‘local’ (109) agnosticism), taking into consideration different concepts of God and sets of religious beliefs. This is much less the case in the three final chapters, where the Christian concept of God is, to varying degrees, a point of reference. Importantly, it is the apophatic tradition within Christianity that, explicitly or not, gets most attention: the central issue is what and why cannot be said about God. Despite the diversity of the authors under discussion, there are unifying themes: agnosticism is understood as ‘not knowing’ (163) or ‘not being able to know’ (208)and flows from the complete or partial rejection of metaphysics as traditionally conceived.
Gavin Hyman, who in the fifth chapter juxtaposes Hegel and Wittgenstein, focuses on the Hegelian rejection of the individual subject detached from the world as entailing the denial of the possibility of pure, theoretical knowledge. As a result, for Hyman, Hegel comes to represent agnosticism: when the knower and the known are not separate, there can be no question of knowledge – especially of the knowledge of an Absolute whose cognitive perspective leads to the ‘view from nowhere’ (cf. Nagel 1986). The impossibility of cognitive detachment has similar results according to Hyman’s Wittgenstein. Here it is the multiplicity of language games entangling the subject that implies that there can be no universalising account of reality in which the question of God’s existence could be asked: the metaphysical language to which such question belongs is empty, as it does not correspond to any form of life.
The objection to the traditional framing of the question of God’s existence, found by Hyman in both Hegel and Wittgenstein, is the one which the varieties of apophaticism described by Paul O’Grady and Guy Collins in the last two chapters – on Thomas Aquinas and Richard Kearney respectively – attempt to answer. Notably, O’Grady’s Aquinas introduces an apophatic element to his metaphysical system in order to compensate the latter’s inability to accurately reflect his own form of life – the form of life of a medieval Dominican friar. As a result, while metaphysics is acknowledged to have limits, it is also permitted to deliver a positive verdict on the question of God’s existence.
For Collins’s Kearney, who, like some critics of Aquinas mentioned by O’Grady, subscribes to the Heideggerian critique of ontotheology, making meaningful metaphysical claims about God is impossible. It is his impossibility, however, that opens the door for a way of talking about God more faithful to the experience of the speaker. Kearney’s ‘anatheism’ (2011), far from neutral in the conflict between theism and atheism, contains the elements of both by combining the theistic openness to the experience of God with the atheistic denial of the possibility of the positive knowledge of its object. Without denying that God can be known and described in metaphysical terms, the existential attitude of openness to God could not be expressed. Thus, though Aquinas’s apophaticism differs from that of Kearney’s, their strategies, as seen by O’Grady and Collins, have more than a little in common.
Taken as a whole, the book is an example of the problem it seeks to address – that of the multiplicity of conceptual frameworks in which agnosticism has historically been discussed and the resulting challenges affecting the debate. For instance, depending on the initial assumptions, agnosticism is presented as neutral between the theistic and atheistic perspectives (Fallon), conditionally committed to one of them (Leech) or combining a kind of neutrality with a form of conditional commitment (Le Poidevin), while divine transcendence is taken to have either crucial consequences for observable reality (Kearney) or none at all (Avnur). The degree of the divergence between the resulting conclusions shows how weighty the differences which may at first sight look minute can be.
Probably the biggest terminological difficulty of the book is that none of the authors makes a distinction between agnosticism and noncognitivism (which some chapters admittedly do not require), so that ‘agnosticism’ becomes an umbrella term for both. As a result, thinkers such as Hegel or Wittgenstein can be read as either paradigm representatives of agnosticism or its staunch opponents. (This, incidentally, shows how much hinges of whether agnosticism is understood as ‘not knowing’ or as ‘suspending judgement’ – an issue not often explicitly pointed out.)
In spite of the diversity of the positions outlined in the book, all authors seem to share the view that, implicitly but clearly, is the core claim of the collection: the cognitive transcendence of God implies that it is natural for the agnostic’s perspective, seen in the practical light, to combine positive and negative elements. If that is the case, then, at least in the case of God’s existence, scepticism and pragmatism seem to be not as much opposed as interrelated or even interdependent. Within religious epistemology, this is something which has gradually been brought to light in the debate on the nature of faith but not often noted in the agnostic context. It is to be hoped that Fallon and Hyman’s collection of essays will draw philosophers’ attention to this aspect of agnosticism, possibly making space for both the sceptic’s questions and the pragmatist’s answers.
