that there is no God.
The word “agnosticism” was coined in 1869 by the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. A staunch defender of Darwinism, Huxley made agnosticism central to his conception of scientific rationality. In an 1889 essay, “Agnosticism and Christianity,” he wrote: “It is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and, in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism.” Clearly Huxley’s conception of agnosticism was of the broader sort, because he identified it closely with a general prescription governing rational beliefs; this maxim is now commonly called “the evidentialist principle” and is associated especially with the empiricist philosophy of John Locke. Huxley inferred from his prescription that belief in God’s existence is not rationally assertible. Another Darwinian, Herbert Spencer, expressly associated agnosticism with the unknowability of basic facts about God.
The Greek root of “agnosticism” may mean either “unknown” or “unknowable.” Similarly, an agnostic may admit to lacking knowledge about God because he or she has, in fact, failed to secure such knowledge or because he or she is convinced that, in principle, this sort of knowledge is not attainable by even the most persistent and proficient human inquirer. Protagoras and David Hume were philosophers who exemplified a sort of ironic humility toward theological matters, while Plato and Immanuel Kant confessed to a principled science about God’s nature and existence. Kant argued that belief in God arises as a postulate of practical reason rather than from a proof of theoretical reason. The wide influence of his view made agnosticism an ironic and polite form of atheism that led some philosophers to accentuate the immanent character of God and prompted some theologians to acknowledge the confessional character of faith.
Broader social forces also have effected the diminished prominence of agnosticism as a category for describing basic beliefs about the world. Secularism, as the social legitimation of nonreligious values and behaviors, makes unqualified atheism less shocking, while at the same time making systematic indifference to religion more feasible. Also, historicism, as the acknowledgment that one’s beliefs are historically conditioned—often in unconscious ways—makes a professed suspension of judgment regarding religious matters less credible. Thus in its specific meaning as disbelief in God based on methodological grounds, agnosticism has lost its original status as a prime alternative to theism or atheism. It may just as easily be understood today as a critical moment within theism or as an undisguised adjunct to atheism.
In the sense that nineteenth-century agnostics not only eschewed belief in God but likewise eschewed theism and atheism as classical doctrines regarding God, they presaged current thinkers who are not convinced of the value or necessity of foundational discussions about God’s existence and nature. Having rejected philosophy’s function of arbitrating between competing truth claims, Richard Rorty practices a more conversational variety of philosophy and feels no obligation or inclination to continue traditional theological disputations. Upon the assumption that beliefs are epistemologically innocent until proved guilty, Alvin Plantinga says that God’s existence is in no greater need of demonstration than the existence of other minds or past historical events. Among theologians, Karl Barth excluded epistemological concerns from the task of theology, and Gustavo Gutiérrez has urged theologians to reorient their attention from nonbelievers to the poor and oppressed. Many philosophers and theologians no longer consider agnosticism itself an important topic of discussion.
PETER VAN NESS
Bibliography
R. A. Armstrong, Agnosticism and Theism in the Nineteenth Century.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Thomas H. Huxley, Collected Essays: Volume V: Science and Christian Tradition. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 1862; 6th ed.
Cross-Reference: Atheism, Theism.
ALIENATION
Alienation is one of the virtually indefinable terms that distinguishes the spirit of its time. Two distinctions, however, help to establish clarity from the chaos of its various uses. The first distinction emerges out of the contrast between alienation and estrangement. Works like Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground or Camus’s The Stranger have engraved the image of the modern anti-hero in current thought. Out of the dark and irrational depths of the anti-hero arises estrangement from the self and the loss of a worldly anchorage. Although the individual experience of alienation may be as profoundly irrational as that of estrangement, alienation more properly derives from a social malformation.
Second, alienation is not adequately defined as a secularized version of the concept of sin. More adequately, it is understood as a strikingly modern way of defining evil as it infects the entire social order. As such, it inevitably has religious implications. Alienation takes its place beside the concepts of shame and guilt as an alternative expression of the way a society experiences and symbolizes evil.
Although the term in its verb form is of Latin origin and has been used since ancient times, G. W. F. Hegel established the paradigm for the modern understanding of alienation in his Phenomenology of the Spirit. Hegel presents alienation as a necessary and recurrent moment in the self-realization of both finite and Absolute spirit. Freedom is empty self-assertion unless it embodies itself in the objective structures of reality. Yet initially the self confronts the world as something that stands over against it. Alienation derives from the inability of self-conscious, self-determining realities to find themselves reflected in the objective structures of the historical world. The Phenomenology traces the stages of the becoming of Absolute spirit through the human struggle to achieve freedom in the mutual recognition of self and other.
At least five traits are common to virtually all theories of alienation after Hegel:
1. Alienation is a product of history. All theories assume that alienation takes many forms and that each form is rooted in its historical setting. These malformations are a product of human action and can, therefore, be transformed. Theories of alienation are always accompanied by a theory of liberation that overcomes alienation.
2. Alienation is the antithesis to self-determination. A theory of alienation and liberation presupposes some vision of the truly human. Given the historical character of alienation, these visions commonly stress agency and self-determination as central to human life. The substance of our vision of the truly human is, therefore, historically relative. Numerous African American and feminist theologians, in particular, have insisted upon the situated character of all theological reflection.
3. Alienation is a systemic, structural deformation of the social world. Evil is present not as a social problem that can be compartmentalized but as a malignancy of the whole. To devise a systemic theory of alienation the theologian draws upon some critical social theory. Various theories trace the genesis of alienation to a single root, such as racism, sexism, or classism. Others reject monocausal theories as unhistorical and inadequate to the complexity of evil. These theories examine what Rosemary Ruether calls the “interstructuring” of different forms of alienation. Cornel West, among others, argues that theologians must devise criteria, including theological criteria, for selecting an adequate social theory.
4. Alienation manifests itself in some form of false consciousness. Marx’s famous criticism of religion in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right stressed the role of self-deception in the loss of self that occurs in an alienated condition. For Karl Marx, religious ideas were the quintessential expression of false consciousness, the flowers entwined in the economic and political chains that imprison us. Subsequent to Marx, Walter Rauschenbusch,
