The Problem of Evil is compelling enough evidence, I think, to dispel a literal belief in Christianity. As I understand it, it presents similarly severe issues for the other Abrahamic faiths. The argument that suffering is a necessary by-product of God giving us free will is not an effective rejoinder. God clearly hasn’t given us free will: our actions are, shaped by human nature, which God — if he existed — chose to impose on us.
I’m not as familiar with other faiths. Some — no doubt — don’t have to deal with the problem of evil, or deal with it in plausible ways (like Gnosticism?) but none, as far as I’m aware, has produced any evidence they have reliably tapped into something bigger than the here and now.
And yet, I’m not an atheist. I’m not sure that no god exists. I’m keen on evidence, and there’s no evidence that a god of some sort didn’t create the universe and maybe doesn’t pay some sort of interest in how it is playing out. As a result, all I’m certain of is that I’m uncertain. I’m an Agnostic.
Atheists sometimes contend that agnosticism is untenable, because anyone who wants evidence for everything would also need to be a professed Agnositic about everything we don’t know for certain, including apparently crazy things like whether there are fairies at the end of the garden. But the case of god isn’t that simple. The reason it’s not, is that there are some profound problems — things we cannot explain — that would be easier to explain if god was factored into the equation.
There’s the question of existence, foremost. Why is there something not nothing?
There’s also the question of design. Why did the universe end up with physical laws conducive to life.
There’s the puzzle of why a material universe that is decidedly un-alive, manage to generate life.
There’s the problem of consciousness.
There’s even the issue of free-will.
All of these questions and problems can, and indeed have been, discussed in meaningful ways that don’t inevitably lead to god. But they are very big questions, and the existence of god plays quite a plausible role in some good answers to them. None of this proves god exists. But it does at least suggest that the question of whether god exists or not is considerably more important than the question of whether there are fairies at the end of my garden.
So I’m agnostic.
I’m agnostic in another way too: I don’t think anyone should be religious or needs to be religious. But years ago I was debating religion with a religious Jewish friend of mine. When I asked her whether she really thought the Old Testament and Torah were literally true her response was, (to paraphrase a bit), “No, but I feel that there is some larger purpose or meaning, and it’s much easier for me to access this in a tangible way through the cultural traditions of my family and ancestors.”
And that, to me, seems to be a perfectly good justification for being religious. I occasionally ponder whether it would work for me and Anglicanism, but I never get far. I get much further again still with Pantheism, but that’s a whole other story. The main point is that it works for my friend, and I have no reason to be sure she’s mistaken. I’m an agnostic in that way too.
Agnostic doesn’t mean fully tolerant of other religious beliefs though. If we’re to accept that religion is personal and that literal justifications of religious texts really don’t hold, then we also need to accept that you cannot impose your beliefs on others, including — obviously — through the laws of the state. The religion I think is defensible is defensible in the private domain, not as a source of law.
That is, why, and what it means to me to be an agnostic.