An Agnostic Manifesto

An Agnostic Manifesto

At least we know what we don't know.

By Ron Rosenbaum|Posted Monday, June 28, 2010, at 2:03 PM

An Agnostic Manifesto

My one thought...... Although his descriptions of orthodoxy and atheism both need more room for divergence within each camp, I think he has rightly discovered a false epistemology (one might say a modernist epistemology) that comprises the foundation of both groups.  However agnosticism is not the only option in the quest to leave that foundation.  Embracing mystery and uncertainty has plenty of room with the religious world (I would argue that this is fundamental to being christian) and I assume within the world of atheism as well.

Some quotes below......

"Indeed agnostics see atheism as "a theism"—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)"

"Faced with the fundamental question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" atheists have faith thatscience will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing. But the question presents a fundamental mystery that has bedeviled (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle to Aquinas"

"John Dewey, the noted American philosopher, observed that "The aggressive atheist seems to have something in common with traditional superstition. … The exclusive preoccupation of both militant atheism and supernaturalism is with man in isolation from nature." [A Common Faith]"