But love and understanding, even without knowledge, are tremendous gifts; and religious knowledge claims are hard to support. We should, then, make room for those who embrace a religion as a source of love and understanding but remain agnostic about the religion’s knowledge claims. We should, for example, countenance those who are Christians while doubting the literal truth of, say, the Trinity and the Resurrection. I wager, in fact, that many professed Christians are not at all sure about the truth of these doctrines —and other believers have similar doubts. They are, quite properly, religious agnostics.He presents such agnosticism as a sort of "middle way" between "no arguments" atheism, which is the presumption that the burden of proof lies on the religious, and the presumption by religion that faith justifies knowledge.
One of the more interesting passages takes me back to quite a few dialogs that I've had with believers over the years:
It may well be that physical science will ultimately give us a complete account of reality. It may, that is, give us causal laws that allow us to predict (up to the limits of any quantum or similar uncertainty) everything that happens in the universe. This would allow us to entirely explain the universe as a causal system. But there are aspects of our experience (consciousness, personality, moral obligation, beauty) that may not be merely parts of the causal system. They may, for example, have meanings that are not reducible to causal interactions.I would wager all my earthly goods that many people believe in religious knowledge claims because of these aspects of our experience. Religion has done a great job of packaging together some really hard-to-swallow claims about history and science with a much easier-to-swallow sense of appreciation for these aspects of our experience, and insisting they be taken together or not at all. Many believers I know have pointed this exact thing out to me before after a long dialog in which they may see that I have some good points/arguments in favor of rejecting some of their knowledge claims about history and science.
Here are some recent posts dealing with those same issues:
- Accepting these knowledge claims is not evidence that theists have lower IQs - http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-iq-study-on-theists-vs-atheists.html
- The roots of anti-intellectualism in Evangelical churches - http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2008/06/correlations-between-reading-and.html
- Some people have assumed for years that with the advance of science, religion would disappear. They were wrong, largely because of these "aspects of our experience" listed above: http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2006/11/more-things-change.html
- Some religious people mistakenly see science and liberalism as threats, although they really aren't. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2008/05/kennedy-parishoners-on-threats-to-faith.html
- The existential "cost" of atheism as regarding beauty, morality, meaning, etc. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-morality-and-hope-vs-godlessness.html
