were to marry someone with a given trait or identity (would it make them happy, unhappy, or would it not matter?), only 7 percent said that they would be unhappy if a family member married someone who had been born outside of the United States, 9 percent said that they would be unhappy if the marriage was to an Evangelical Christian, 11 percent would be unhappy if the marriage was to someone of a different race, 14 percent would be unhappy if a family member married someone who had not gone to college, 19 percent would be unhappy if the new spouse was a gun owner—but 49 percent of Americans said that they would be unhappy if a family member married someone who did not believe in God, making atheist the worst possibility, by a long shot.14
Certainly, many people who lack a belief in God resist identifying as atheists so as to avoid the negative stigma that comes with the identity.
But there is also the dogmatic nature of atheism at play, which many people find off-putting. Atheists can sometimes come off as closed-minded haters of religion, curmudgeonly types who go out of their way to mock and deride other people’s beliefs.
For those folks who do not believe in God, or rather doubt God’s existence and are simultaneously less staunch in their nontheism, agnosticism is a more comfortable, intellectually sound option.
Agnosticism
Is there a God? Who knows?
Why are we here? Who can say?
What happens after we die? Who knows?
Why does the universe exist? Who can say?
Welcome to agnosticism: the secular orientation that replaces the Christian crucifix, the Jewish star of David, and the Islamic crescent with a hallowed question mark. Like their atheist cousins, agnostics today number over one hundred million globally.15
In its most common usage, agnosticism asserts that maybe there is God, maybe there isn’t, and no one can really say for sure one way or another. Thus, while the theist believes there is a God and the atheist believes there is not, the agnostic isn’t completely convinced by either position.16 As the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras—perhaps the world’s first known agnostic—remarked back in the fifth century B.C.E.: “Concerning the gods, I am unable to discover whether they exist or not . . . for there are many hindrances to knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.”17 Or as contemporary philosopher Julian Baggini explains, an agnostic “claims we cannot know whether God exists and so the only rational option is to reserve judgment.”18
The term “agnostic” was famously coined by English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley back in the 1860s. Huxley offered up the term—which literally means “without knowledge”—to capture an ideological position expressing the limits of knowledge, and the limits of our ability to know, with empirical certainty. This underlying feel for—and steady sentiment of—existential unknowingness pervades agnosticism. As the American orator Robert Ingersoll, known in the ninteenth century as “The Great Agnostic,” wrote, “Many people . . . have tried to guess the riddle—tried to know the absolute—to find origin—to know destiny. They have all failed. These things are beyond our intellectual horizon—beyond the ‘reaches of our souls.’ Our life is a little journey from mystery to mystery.”19 Or as nineteenth-century British scholar Leslie Stephen expressed it: “we are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness . . . dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe ultimate origin . . . [and thus] we shall be content to admit openly . . . that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute.”20
Embracing mystery, and letting that mystery be, is at the heart of agnosticism. Agnostics are thus happily down with Hamlet, who said to Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy—or any and every possible philosophy stemming from human consciousness.
It’s a pretty humble position. After all, it’s hard to be dogmatic, truculent, or fanatical when you are admitting a lack of knowledge.
Naturalism
Theism, atheism, and agnosticism all revolve around the God question: the first says there is a God, the second says there isn’t, and the third says, well, no one can really ever know. But the secular orientation that transcends the God question and attempts to encapsulate all of reality is naturalism. And to understand naturalism, you need go no further than Scooby-Doo.
Scooby-Doo—the TV cartoon that started in 1969 and has never let up—presents the antics of Scooby and his human friends: Shaggy, Fred, Velma, and Daphne. But here’s the funny thing about that show: every episode is the exact same. In every single installment, the main characters stumble upon a spooky mystery—a ghost haunting an old mine, a monster terrorizing a popular beach, a witch bewitching a remote hotel, an alien unnerving a summer camp—and in every episode, the four protagonists and their dog Scooby come to reveal that it was all a hoax. Through basic sleuthing and intrepid skepticism, the heroes show that it is all smoke and mirrors—or silly costumes and fancy lighting, or chemical reactions and audio trickery, and so forth. And the message is thus always the same: there is nothing supernatural out there, only natural phenomena.
Naturalism takes this very position to the extreme: that which can’t be observed or proven empirically does not exist. Whatever is out there, it is natural. As the Carvaka thinkers of the ancient Indian school of Lokayata philosophy pronounced over twenty-six hundred years ago: “Only the perceived exists; the unperceivable does not exist by reason of its never having been perceived.”21 But who paints the peacocks such delightful colors? Who causes the birds to sing so sweetly? The Carvaka were adamant: “There exists no cause here excepting nature.”22 Or as contemporary naturalist philosopher Kerry Walters affirms, “there is nothing apart from nature, and nature is self-originating, self-explanatory, and without overall purpose.”23
For theists—and many other religious people of various traditions—there are essentially two realms of existence: the this-worldly and the otherworldly. Or to use terms already employed: the natural and the supernatural. Religious believers accept that there is a natural world, but they also insist that in addition to this natural world, there exist other realms or planes of existence: heavens, hells, purgatories, etc. And they will claim that in addition to the plentiful beings of nature—such as people, plants, animals, etc.—there are other beings out there: angels, demons, gods, ancestral souls, spirits, imps, jinn, ghosts, etc., etc. Naturalism denies the existence of these otherworldly, supernatural places and things. According to Professor Tom Clark, director of the Center for Naturalism, “what science reveals . . . is a vast, interconnected, multilayered, diversely populated, and yet single realm in which all phenomena partake of the same basic constituents. This realm we simply call nature. There seems no reason to suppose, given scientific observations thus far, that there exists another, supernatural realm that operates according to different laws or that contains radically different phenomena.”24
The scientific method, empiricism, rationalism, materialism, evidence-based beliefs, and accepting what actually is true, rather than what we wish were true—these are the smooth, strong pillars of a naturalistic worldview. And while some may find such a naturalistic worldview less enchanting than a world filled with poltergeists, angels, shamans, healing crystals, amazing miracles, and gods and goddesses, others find it replete with endless opportunities to marvel and gaze in awe at the intricate, chaotic, beautiful, terrible wonder of nature, in all of its majesty and vastness. And while some may
