Full disclosure: the following is the fulfillment of an assignment for one of my classes. I was required to create a public argument and to share it, obviously, with the public.

I have been what you might call an Agnostic for most of my life. Like many, I grew up with some undefined notion of spirituality, but no religion to identify it with. My family was decidedly agnostic, with some vaguely pagan leanings. Basically, they were, and are, hippies. I never really felt that the question of whether there is a God was particularly interesting or relevant until a few years ago. I was 21 years old (I’m 24 now), and I suddenly decided that the question of God was of dire importance in determining how I was going to experience my life. If there were a God, then I wanted proof. And if there weren’t, something had to fill that void and give my life purpose. I could not simply sit on the fence and lazily say things like “well, I don’t really follow any particular religion, but I’m open to the idea that there might be a God.”

So I read a bunch of Richard Dawkins, leafed extensively through Darwin’s theory of evolution, scoffed at Thomas Aquinas, put together my own idea for a system of Universal Morality based on Kant and Neitszche, and declared myself a hardcore Atheist. Problem solved. Life has meaning based on it’s own inherent beauty + the will to power + do only what you would make a universal rule, and voila. We have a simple and powerful (though arguably impractical) ideology. And yet, something was missing. It began as a vague itch, the idea that I was addressing some kind of result of eons of cosmic confusion, rather than the root of the problem.

It wasn’t until about a year ago that I began to scratch that itch. I watched a series called The Atheism Tapes (one of the byproducts of being dissatisfied with one’s Atheism is to seek constant reaffirmation of one’s lack of faith…be it the latest Dawkins essay, or anything on Netflix with the name Atheist in it). The series, for those who have not seen it, is hosted by Jonathan miller, well known british intellectual and theatre director. He claims that the problem of whether there is a God has never seemed of much importance to him. He says things like “watching a sunset produces enough awe in me. I don’t need religion.” The sort of wishy washy bullshit that I had grown to despise. But he was intelligent, almost irritatingly so at times, and perfectly able to keep up with and hold his own against the litany of biologists, playwrights, evolutionists, and even one theologian that he interviewed in his show.

In fact, it was this theologian who helped me begin to scratch my itch. While the other interviewees were often edifying, and at the very least entertaining, it seemed to me that this man, Denys Turner, was really trying to do what I was trying to do: get to the root of things. At least until he made the cardinal mistake of many theologians: starting out with a brilliant argument and ending up in Bethlaham.

In any case, I will summarize the gist of his thesis, as it is very complex and lengthy (it took me a total of three viewings to fully be able to comprehend all the theories he was connecting). Essentially, what he was saying was that Atheists are going about it wrong; the question of whether or not there is a God (and Turner believes in the affirmative) is, while extremely important in his estimation, really only the beginning of a much more vexing question: how is there anything at all?  This question ultimately affects the validity of everything we know or could conceive of, and so, it would seem to be the most important question one could possibly ask. Period. Turner acknowledges that, as Marx once said, “each age asks only what questions it can answer”, but he goes on to say that he doesn’t believe this is a valid approach. He says, “It’s almost as if the methods we’ve got for answering questions dictate what questions we allow to be asked.” He continues to paint Atheism as no longer an interesting intellectual position, essentially making the argument that it is a doctrine of the past, and the narrow set of questions which it seeks to answer in order to affirm itself, really aren’t the questions we should be asking ourselves today. We should be attacking bigger targets.

Rather than continue to talk about Turner, or to talk about the utterly inane and stupifying way he manages to tie all of this into Christianity, I’d like to diverge and talk about what this new question did for me: it gave me back what I think Agnostics find so comforting about indifference: the sense of uncertainty. Being an Agnostic, one finds it very easy (and I am speaking from experience) to console oneself about the eternity of death, the question of whether one’s self is limited to electrons, etc. by simply saying “anything is possible.” As an Atheist, one consoles oneself (rather poorly) by citing the beauty of the natural world, the importance of the cycle of birth and death, etc., and of course with Descarte’s old chestnut that no animal can legitimately fear that which it cannot feel. Fine then: watch us illegitimately fear the hell out of it.

It seems to me that this uncertainty could be the uplifting mantra of a new way of thinking; one that could honestly overtake and overshadow the narrow, often fanatical Atheism that one finds today. Theologians have been talking about the idea of infinite regress for centuries, and yet Atheists treat it as the end of an argument. “Well, if we allow that God exists, then we must allow that he was created out of something, or by something, or by someone, etc. etc. etc. and therefore God does not exist.” 

But does he? Or she? And more importantly, who cares? Why not start with the problem of the infinite regress, instead of ending there?

My argument is this: God is irrelevant. That there could be anything, including the presence of a God, dung beetles, subatomic particles, taxidermists, golden retrievers, helium, oxygen, or Donald Trump is the question. If we refuse to ask that question, we refuse ourselves our own intellectual and societal growth, and we refuse ourselves one of the greatest gifts of all: uncertainty. Because when one is still trying to get at the root of things, one can hardly be certain about the results, and if one is certain of the results while refusing to participate in an understanding of the roots, then one is simply an ideologue with a narrow perception of reality.

And so I say:

God Is Irrelevant. Uncertainty Is Power.

Sources cited:

Miller, Jonathan. “Episode 5: Denys Turner”. The Atheism Tapes. 2004. BBC UK.

Kant, Immanuel. Foundation for the Metaphysics of Morals. 1785.

Neitzsche, Freidrich. The Gay Science. 1882.