Quotes About Agnosticism

She herself vacillated when it came to belief. She did not particularly believe in God. Or, rather, she didn't believe in a particular God. Nevertheless, she kept an open mind. She was not a melancholy agnostic, but the optimistic kind. She liked to give God the benefit of the doubt.

I'm actually, for the most part, a complete agnostic politically.

Intellectually, now, I believe that it is a complete vanity to say positively there is no God.

I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator.

To a certain extent I am taking a leap of faith. I'm adding up the evidence on either side, and I'm seeing the evidence of there not being a God is overwhelming compared to the evidence for there being a God.

Me? I was pretty much an Orthodox Agnostic. I figured God probably existed, but I didn't have the time or energy to investigate.

Often times when I meet atheists and we talked about the god they don't believe in, we quickly discover that I don't believe in that god either.

Jubal paused, surprised at himself. He had intended to make the usual agnostic approach . . . and found himself compulsively following his legal training, being an honest advocate in spite of himself, attempting to support a religious belief he did not hold but which was believed by most human beings. He found that, willy-nilly, he was attorney for the orthodoxies of his own race against—he wasn't sure what. An unhuman viewpoint.

The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called model agnosticism and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski , the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, The map is not the territory. Alan Watts , a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as The menu is not the meal.

The agnostic principle refuses total belief or total denial and regards models as tools to be used only and always where appropriate and replaced (by other models) only and always where not appropriate.

For the paranoids, this increases their paranoia, which they seem to enjoy. For a guerrilla ontologist like me, it increases my agnosticism, which I prefer to paranoia, because I find it more amusing and less depressing.

My answer to that is that there is an alternative which appears more reasonable to some of us; namely to avoid the leap of faith and remain agnostic about all methods, although willing to learn from them in an open-minded way. The justification for this is entirely empirical and only probabilistic, of course. It is that those who have taken a flying leap of faith generally look rather silly within a few generations, or sometimes even within a few years.

Subsequent learning will tend to get processed through these imprints, and those with strong neophobic reflexes will usually, if they ever reject the initial dogmatic family reality-tunnel, settle at once into an equally dogmatic new reality-tunnel. E.g., if raised Catholic, they seldom become agnostics or zetetics; rather, they will move, like iron filings drawn by a magnet, to dogmatic atheism or even a crusading atheist religion like Marxism, Objectivism or CSICOP.

Against the paranoia that easily infests either Establishment dogma and anti-Establishment dogma, the only defense I see is agnosticism, well-flavored with a sense of humor, and an awareness of one's own fallibility. I suspect a great deal, but as long as Government Secrets exist, I am not sure of anything.

When we get down to sub-atomic or quantum level we encounter the model agnosticism I have been presenting. We have not one model but several; and we have also a widespread opinion that having more than one model may not be a fault or defect but a useful procedure in freeing up creative energies. We arrive — at least temporarily, and maybe permanently — at multi-model agnosticism rather than one-model Fundamentalism.

The trouble with being an agnostic is that you are always wondering, a bit. That's what a-gnosis means: you lack the Inner Certainty of those Fully Enlightened Beings like the Pope or the Ayatollah or some Marxists we have all encountered.

It now appears that we may have a more complete quantum theory at hand, one that includes Hidden Variables. However, at this point, that does not mean we have found deep reality and can junk the Copenhagen Interpretation. It simply means that we have another new model — which implies, for most physicists, another argument for model agnosticism or zeteticism.

The Old Agnosticism defined itself chiefly by its opposition to the dogmas of religious Fundamentalism. The New Agnosticism of this book seems to define itself by its opposition to the dogmas of materialist/rationalist Fundamentalism. Yet the agnostic attitude — which I keep gently hinting is also the creative attitude, the Po attitude — remains similar. The agnostic does not want to be bulldozed into joining a stampede of any sort, or bowing to any Idol.

The only escape from this trap, as far as I can see, is to be skeptical about one's own skepticism: which is what I mean by the New Agnosticism.

Some call this Liberal Copenhagenism model agnosticism. Dr. Marcello Truzzi calls it zeteticism.

Under the circumstances the only honest answer an intelligent person can give to the question 'Is there a God?' is to say, 'I do not know.

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence

There is not one single established religion that an intelligent, educated man can believe.

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist.