Agnosticism

“For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

Agnosticism holds that whether God exists is a question the human mind cannot settle: it neither affirms his existence, as theism does, nor denies it, as atheism does, but declares the question permanently unknowable.¹ Its most influential nineteenth-century form, associated with Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, restricted genuine knowledge to what can be directly observed and treated everything beyond that limit, God included, as forever inaccessible to reason.²

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession opens by affirming that “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable.”³ That clause already answers agnosticism’s central claim: general revelation makes enough of God known, through creation itself, that no one lacks the knowledge needed to be held accountable before him. What natural revelation does not supply, on the confession’s own account, is not knowledge that God exists but “that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary unto salvation,” which comes only through God’s special revelation of himself in Scripture.³

Historical Development

Bavinck traces agnosticism’s roots to Kant, for whom the three “transcendental ideas—the soul, the world, and God—cannot be objectively demonstrated; they can only be postulated as the necessary conditions for knowledge,” so that “the concept of God does not belong in metaphysics… but in ethics.”¹ “This commitment to philosophical agnosticism and divine unknowability was shared by Fichte and Schleiermacher,” who held that God, as the “whence” of existence, “cannot be the object of our knowing but only the content of the feeling of absolute dependence.”¹ Auguste Comte’s positivism carried the same commitment further, limiting real knowledge “to the observable” and treating everything past that limit as a matter for confessed “ignorance (agnosticism)”; Herbert Spencer likewise “vigorously combated God’s knowability with an array of arguments” while still leaving room for “a religious veneration of the Unknowable.”⁴

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t honest recognition of human finitude make some agnosticism about God unavoidable? Bavinck grants the premise real force before rejecting the conclusion drawn from it: “all human knowledge is subjective and relative. Nothing in the universe stands by itself: object and subject are interdependent. We can therefore never say what a thing essentially is aside from our observation of that thing… ‘Man is the measure of all things.’”⁵ But he judges the argument too broad to do the work agnosticism asks of it: “this is indeed a weighty argument; it proves too much… Excessive appeals to the subjectivity of our thought render the entire external world meaningless to us; it discredits all knowledge.”⁵ Consistently applied, the same reasoning that makes God unknowable makes ordinary knowledge of the world unknowable too, a conclusion agnosticism does not itself draw. What real difficulty remains, Bavinck argues, is a mystery rather than a gap revelation failed to close: “what agnosticism regards as irresolvable contradiction, Christian theology regards as an adorable mystery.”⁶

Isn’t agnosticism just a more cautious form of atheism, not a distinct position? Historically, agnostics have resisted exactly that equation. Herbert Spencer, Hodge notes, “claims to be religious. He does not oppose religion, but dogmas. He acknowledges inscrutable power,” reducing all knowledge to the bare facts that “force is,” and “force is persistent,” a cause of which “nothing can be predicated… not consciousness; not intelligence; not will; only that it is a force. This is all the God the new philosophy leaves us.”² Hodge’s reply presses on the word itself: “the word God… has a definite meaning, from which no man is at liberty to depart. If any one says he believes in God, he says he believes in the existence of a personal, self-conscious being. He does not believe in God, if he only believes in ‘motion,’ in ‘force’… or in any other abstraction.”⁷ By that reasoning, an agnosticism that empties God’s name of theism’s actual content, personality, will, moral character, is not a third option between theism and atheism. It has denied theism’s claim while keeping the name of atheism at arm’s length.

Related Doctrines

• Atheism
• Theism
• Incomprehensibility of God
• Natural theology
• Revelation of God
• Apatheism

References

1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Anti-Theistic Theories,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 241-335. ↩ ↩²

3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩ ↩²

4. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩

5. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩ ↩²

6. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩

7. Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume I, chap. III, “Anti-Theistic Theories,” 241-335. ↩