>am i agnostic? i don't know. it must be an old joke. agnostics claim that they do not know whether or not god exists. theists surmise they are reprobates. atheists suppose they are cowards.

agnostics are often labeled weak, wishy washy, lax, lazy, passive, apathetic - even pathetic. i could find myself an agnostic. i wouldn't want to be labeled any of those. are there different kinds of agnostics? how do they each think? can agnosticism deepen appreciation for existence? why argue for agnosticism? i'm robert lawrence kuhn and closer to truth is my journey to find out. if i were to be an agnostic, i would like to be so with sword and flame. that's why i begin in london with a philosopher who calls himself a passionate agnostic. mark vernon is a former

anglican priest who rejected theism and became an atheist and rejected atheism and became an agnostic, finally finding he says - rich comfort. i'll hear his story. >>i was a priest in the church of engliand and i was ordained and i did a first job of curiousy. for about three years. but during that process i became disillusioned with the church, partly because of the current debates that are going on in the church. being a liberal i found the conservative rise uncomfortable. but at the same time i started to read humistic philosophers and i became very suspicious of the power games that are played in theology, so i left. and i left an atheist and i felt like i was breathing the fresh air of rationalism. it didn't feel like i was losing my faith. i felt like a very positive step forward. then a few years on i started to become disillusioned with that as well and i sensed it was a kind of puritanism involved in atheism that wants to clear itself of anything

that smacks of religion and that seemed to be to involve denying certain parts of life as well - the human condition, which i think is to be limited, and i found that i was becoming an agnostic. i read an essay by t.h. huxley who was a person that invented the words agnostic and he invented the word as a rebuke both to those religious people who claimed to know things that actually are only their opinions, but also to the scientists of his days who claimed to know things but are actually only their best guess. and so i embraced this agnosticism and like huxley and others around him, i didn't just feel that this was a kind of a shrug of the shoulders position, as though nothing more could be said - it actually matters. the reason why it matters is that it's the agnostic spirit i think is both inherited in good religion and in good science, but today because of extremism of various sorts, religion and scientific, it tends to be squeezed out. think of the religion first. it seems to me to be a part of the religious quest,

that the closer that you get to god, the closer that you get to something that is beyond comprehension, that is unknown, similarly in science, i think that the most attractive kind of science is the science that sure explains an awful lot and answers an awful lot of questions, but at the same time throws you on to deeper and deeper questions about life - because theologists are the people that can explain an awful lot about the universe - amazing amounts about the universe - but at the same time, raise these bigger questions such as why we are here at all, why there is something and not nothing. i think that i am a passionate agnostic because it matters both philosophically you might say but also politically. if you think about science, science can heal us but it can't make us whole. it can entertain us but it can't make us happy. so we need to have an understanding of science that understands its limits and i think that's where the agnostic spirit in science becomes so important. similarly in religion, you only have to say the word fundamentalist to realize that religion - when it thinks that it knows it all, and particularly when it

thinks that it knows it all about god, becomes very dangerous. and so it matters both for religion and for science - this agnostic spirit i think. >well what you're saying and what excites me about your agnosticism is it's not a barrier to prevent further exploration - but its energy on both sides. if you start a new synagogue, temple, or a church, or mosque, of passionate agnosticism i may be your first member. >>i would be delighted to have you along if such a thing were going to happen. i have been a priest once and i don't really want to return to it again. >passionate agnosticism - i do like that. appreciating both science and religion - goating them too. coming front he high church, mark is a religious agnostic. fine for him. not for me. if i am to consider agnosticism, i need to speak with diverse agnostics -

discern their reasons, dissect their arguments. i would like an agnostic unfettered by religious rituals and unaffiliated with a religious organizations. i would like an analytic agnostic. i needn't go far. an hour's drive from london to oxford, where i meet the director of the future of humanity institute at oxford university. nick bostrum. nick is a pioneer in trans humanism - what our species may become. existential risk, the threats to our survival, and the nature of the universe. why is he agnostic? nick, i would be really interested in how you reflect on the ultimate questions of reality - theistic, atheistic - what are your views? >>well i guess the first step would be to specify

more precisely what you would mean by these possibilities so i will say the theistic possibility. what exactly would you include in that? >you would say that there is a - an ultimate creator god, who is infinite in all of his primary virtues in corporals of no body. and that is the terminus of explanation. so rather than an infinite regress of causation, that entity is determinous of explanation. that is the god hypothesis. >>so there are a lot of smart people who believe that. >yes and a lot of smart people who don't. >>exactly. so it's one of those situations where you could pick sides but how do you know that you don't pick the wrong side? like why would you be more likely to be right than all of these other clever people who have thought about it for a long time? now normally when you have a situation like that, you should acknowledge

that you don't really know where the answer lies. it seems to be that a similar thing should be done in this situation - that if you have experts on either side who have opposing views, and if the evidence seems insufficient to settle their quest, then you should be agnostic. you should maybe try to assign probabilities to it, but not hundred percent to one and zero to the other. there are two levels of reasoning that you can apply to this. so on the one hand you can study the specific arguments, the pieces of evidence, one by one, and learn all of the details. and so you would think about the theology problem, like the problem of evil. how could a perfectly good, perfectly powerful god create children dying of cancer? and you can think about the argument theologians have tried to make that circumvent this. you can think about the puzzle of the universe looking fine tuned and how could that have happened by chance and what are the alternatives and so on and so forth. the other level of approaching this is by taking a step back and realizing that there

are a lot of people who have already thought about these things and the specific arguments and they have formed some over all assessment on the basis of that. and unless you have some reason to think that you are much more likely to find the truth if you look at all of these specific arguments than these other people, then maybe you should just look at the distribution of opinion that you find among people that have looked at it and tried to match that in your own probability estimate. now if you do that - there are still complications. like you might want to try to take in to account, biases that you think have affected some people's opinion. you might want to consider whether not just the numbers of people who hold these different opinions, but whether they are independent of each other. so if the reason why you have a billion people holding one view is that it was one person who decided was this was to be to hold and everybody else just copied that person then clearly you don't have a billion independent pieces of evidence - you really just have one. and so you can, you can begin to think about these things at the molecular level in that way. it is very easy to sort of find ways in which the other

side is imperfect but you've really got to apply the same critical scrutiny to your own side before that sort of reasoning would actually give you evidence that you are right. and it's still not clear exactly what in the end you will believe, but it does seem that if you do accept this indirect approach it would undermine any very huge confidence that you would have either in the atheistic or theistic argument. >nick is a realist, not a radical. he argues from common sense, for and against god - assigning each argument reasonable probabilities. he also weighs the opposing opinions of thoughtful people. nick's how to think guidance is good, but his approach will not appeal to theists or atheists because both are convinced they already know the truth.

i should speak with theists and atheists - get their separate takes on agnosticism, treat them equally. i'm looking forward to this. first, a theist. i go from oxford to cambridge to meet the director of the faraday institute for science and religion. he's a molecular biologist, a leader in cancer research, a scientist who believes in both god and evolution - dennis alexander. we meet in his lab. dennis, isn't agnosticism an honest recognition that i really don't know the best solution? >>well i actually think although intellectually, you know it sounds as if one could be an agnostic, i think that in reality, pragmatically, because we all have to construct our own biographies, we actually are committed to certain philosophies, actually - which actually either pragmatically say there

is a god or there isn't a god. we have to behave as if we know the answer, even if intellectually we say that we don't. >i don't use the term agnostic in the sense of well i don't know, it doesn't matter. i would use it in its strongest possible meaning - saying i am deeply concerned, i deeply want to, to investigate both sides and really understand what, what works - not because i want a behavioral mechanism for my life, but i am really concerned because it is a burning question for me. >>spoken, if i might say so, as truly committed person. the difficulty about, let's sastaying in an agnostic position all of one's life would be - you know you've only got one life. now if we could replay the tape of life again, you know we could have several runs of that and we could try out different views. but as far as we know we don't have that luxury. so i think that that kind of helps one to become committed maybe to one direction or another. >if i really am committed to

a desire to believe in god, i am equally scared and frightened to make the wrong choice, to fool myself into believing in something that really isn't true - because it would almost be to me - a form of blasphemy, to force myself to believe in a god if i really didn't. >>i think that attitude is exactly right and i think that one should never, ever force one self into a certain belief, either in science or in the more general decisions of life. and i have to say the main case - you know i'm looking for, you know, a broader explanation of why something exists. >i am too. >>and i'm sure you are as well. but you know then obviously it comes down to this finely balanced argument of whether the god's hypothesis gives us the better explanation for all that we see around us in the universe and our daily lives and in our science, or whether it doesn't. it's like living in a play. we sometimes feel that

we are living in a theater; we are living out a drama. morality has come out of matter. i mean it's such an amazing thing, isn't it? >yes, yes, yes. >>so what is the kind of upper level narrative that makes best sense of that? now to me theism - the idea of a personal god who has intentions and purposes and bringing this whole play in to being - the great drummer of life - that seems to me to make quite reasonable sense as an inference to the best explanation. >when you see many of your colleagues that you know personally who affirmatively do not believe in god and you know that they are good people in their personal lives, they are committed scientists, and they really do seek to understand the nature of reality - does that ever give you pause for thought and potential doubt? >>potential doubt, of course - yes. i was brought up in a home where belief in god was part of the normal every day life. so by the time that i came in to science, i was already a believer in god and

therefore my faith and my science have grown up together, as two very natural domains of my every day life. and i think that many other people have been brought up in a secular home, where that wasn't the case. so it's not unexpected that many of my scientific colleagues would have a secular view on life. >but that argument all by itself would give me doubt that would actually move me more intellectually towards an agnosticism because i would doubt my own internal feelings because it may be culturally bias or bias because of my own home life. >>i agree with you absolutely - but i think that the gre thing is, is that we can look at our intellectual beliefs and we can see if they are well justified or not. now to me, faith in god is a well justified belief. i think that's an incredibly important pilgrimage to be on. >i respect dennis' beliefs - perhaps envy him in his certitude, but i can not make those beliefs my own.

i feel his pressure - the difficulty as he says, of staying in the agnostic position in the whole of one's life when i have only got one life. i know dennis is concerned with my welfare, but still - i tense up and slightly withdraw. i go to stanford to meet one of the originators of string theory - a visionary physicist who describes a vast, cosmic landscape of innumerable universes and who proclaims the illusion of intelligent design - leonard suskind. lenny is a tough guy, especially when it comes to god. we meet in his home. leonard, why isn't agnosticism the best philosophical position for everyone to take?

>>well first of all what does agnosticism mean? i'm fairly sure about some things and less sure about other things. i am fairly sure, no supernatural entity will intervene if i step off a cliff - i will fall. the laws of gravity will do that to me. i am fairly sure that if my genetic make up happens to be of a certain kind, no matter how hard i pray, i will get cancer. i am fairly sure that god doesn't intervene to be able to move electrons around in a way that that does things that we or he or she likes. there is no evidence for that. all of the evidence points in the opposite direction, that the laws of nature go the way that they go. if you were to ask me about the very beginnings of the universe, the origins of it, why it is there, does it have a purpose, could an intelligence have been involved in creating it, and so forth - there i would

have to say i am completely agnostic. i am completely agnostic to the point where i just don't feel that we are anywhere near understanding enough about the world to even address those questions - not only not to answer them, but to even ask them properly and to make sense out of the questions. so i would say that i am almost beyond being an agnostic, that to say that i'm not sure if there is a god or not a god, i have the feeling that it's the wrong question. >or that we're not at the point where we can formulate this kind of question. >>right. i always think of it as a kind of curtain. there are the things that are hidden behind the curtain and there are the things which are exposed in front of the curtain. it is always a tendency to believe that the things which are behind the curtain are controlled by a super- natural and the things that are in front of the curtain which we can see, are not controlled by the super natural. >well the history of science moves the curtain back. >>and the history of science just keeps moving the curtain back. but it never gets quite all the way back and we never

really know how far the - it has to go. and so that's the situation. we push back the universe earlier and earlier and earlier - and always that curtain is still there. what is behind the curtain? if i knew what was behind the curtain, i would publish it. >some would point to the very comprehensibility of the universe which didn't have to be - as if not an evidence of a supernatural intelligence, at least consistent with what such a supernatural being would have created. >>yeah it does look like there are patterns in the universe, that the universe respects certain laws, certain principles. first of all, could we live in a universe that had no pattern? what would it mean for it to not have a pattern? just complete randomness? >so as you - as you push further and further back, what is the end point? do you see the laws of physics ever be self

explaining? >>i can't tell. and i think it's, i think it is a very interesting and big question. i know that another way of asking it is could the universe have been otherwise? and i don't think that we know. i have no idea. i think its way, way beyond what we are presently capable of answering. >lenny rejects any personal god and he is radically agnostic, whether there is any over-arching intelligence or purpose or meaning in the universe. asking about god, he suggests, may be asking the wrong question. i still lack coherent thinking about agnosticism, so i go to berkeley to meet one of my favorite philosophers whose relentless pursuit of truth captivates me - john sero. even when i disagree with

john, which isn't often, i am enlightened by the originality of his insights and the precision of his arguments. >>i am closer to balance and agnosticism than i am to absolute certain atheism but for a purely illogical reason, and that is you can't demonstrate a universal negative - that is i can't demonstrate to you that there aren't invisible animals running around this room and i can't demonstrate to you that god does not exist. a point, however, is that it is a very ambitious hypothesis that god exists, and there is very little reason to suppose that it's a true. what a rational person i think has to do is to say, well there isn't enough evidence to support such an adventurous hypothesis, so we have very serious doubts about it. but that doesn't mean that we know that its false. it's just that its insufficient reason to know that it is true. i can't resist telling you an anecdote - as an under graduate i was a member of the voltaire society and we used to have dinner with burtron russell and he was eighty five years old and we

thought, you know, well he's getting on in his years and we put the question to him - we said, well suppose it were all true that after you pass away you show up at the pearly gates? what would you say to him? and russell didn't hesitate a minute - he said, i would say to him - you didn't give us enough evidence. and that i think is the right answer. if god does exist, which i think is very unlikely, then he is guilty of one thing - we have very inadequate evidence of his existence. now maybe he has some deep reason that he wants to test us and test our faith, but there is something else about this and that is that i am suspicious of believing in something which we desperately want to believe. and of course one reason that this is such an important issue is that we would all like to believe that their is a meaningful world beyond our own capacity to inject meaning in to it. we would like to believe that the people that we most love will continue to exist

and it's very hard to be told that all of these wonderful people will cease to exist all together. furthermore another feature is we like there to be justice in the end. since it is obvious that there is no justice here on earth, we would very much like for there to be a divine justice which will come. i think that religion is here to stay because it does satisfy these needs. but intellectually i don't think that you can justify it. the arguments for god's existence are uniformly bad. >so when you look at the argument, the only reason you are not an absolute atheist is because you can't prove a negative. there is no other reason why you would skew towards agnosticism versus atheism? >>i can imagine experiences that would convince me that god existed. but the experiences that would show that god did not exist - they seem to me readily available. but there are intelligent people who believe in the

existence of god and i can only think that they believe it because they think that the reality that we know about is not the only reality and they might be right - it's just i don't know of any reason to suppose that they are right. >a friend of mine seeking truth about god asked me what i believed. he seemed overly credulous and i worried that he might act on what i said. so here is what i said: i have no confidence in my ability to know truth about god. zero. even though i have more confidence in my ability than in anyone else's. i was joking. well, half joking. most agnostics are indifferent and unconcerned. they do not know whether god exists, and they do not much care, either.

i go for the combative, intense kind of agnostics. pugnacious, persistent, passionate - argumentative agnostics who probe and push, who resist the false comfort of forced certitude, who challenge conventional wisdom of theists and atheists. i do not like compromise on matters of ultimate concern. if agnosticism would merely betwixt theism and atheism, i would want nothing of it. here is my credo: agnosticism properly pursued can be enriching and ennobling, engendering all in humility, amidst the great crush of existence. even without expectation of resolution and even if atheism were to wind up true, human beings should wonder whether god exists.

there is no greater quest that is closer to truth.