To put it right up front, when people ask me, “Is there a God?” my answer has to be “I don’t know.”  A simple “Yes” or “No” is not possible because the question contains a term that is subject to definition, namely God.  Likewise, “Do you believe in God?” is a question that I must answer noncommittally.  Since the person who asks the question most likely means, “Do you believe in God, as I define the term?” my answer must be, “I’m not sure” or “Most likely not.”

These responses clearly classify me as an agnostic, and I won’t quarrel with that label as long as it is used properly.  An agnostic is, by definition, “one who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God.”  (In its broader sense, it refers to “one who is doubtful or noncommittal about something.”)  All right, then – my personal position, which I have held all of my adult life, is that I am doubtful that it is possible to know, with absolute certainty, that there is a God.

Unfortunately, many – probably most – true believers* misconstrue and misuse the term “agnostic” and attribute to agnostics far greater disbelief than agnostics themselves really have.  The most serious distortion is that agnostic and atheist are synonymous.  Even the dictionary makes a distinction by stating that an agnostic is “one who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism.”  Skepticism is not total disbelief; uncertainty does not constitute denial.   It is ironic that true believers, who have little trouble with a term that is subject to a wide variety of definitions (God), have so much trouble with a term that is quite clearly defined (agnostic).

True believers also tend to attribute to agnostics many characteristics that agnostics do not have.  First, they maintain that agnostics, in being skeptical about God, believe that the only concepts with any validity are those that can be rationally or empirically demonstrated – or, to put it another way, that spiritual phenomena have no reality.  They insist that agnostics must therefore doubt that anything unexplainable by science has any reality.  Such a view is as inaccurate as the view that agnostics are really atheists in disguise.  Most agnostics have experiences that they recognize to be unexplainable, but they do not deny that these experiences are quite real.  They may say that they cannot explain them, and even that they will never be able to explain them, but they do not deny their reality.  Indeed, agnostics may even refer to such  events as “spiritual experiences.”

To illustrate for a moment:  When I listen to classical music, I often have feelings that I cannot explain or even define.  Nothing I have read about human psychology or music comes close to capturing my experience of music, which I can best describe as a curious synergy of thought and emotion.   Yet it is absolutely real, and it is spiritual.  As another example, I once viewed a sunrise from a mountaintop and was so overwhelmed that I count this as one of the most spiritual experiences of my life.  (That actual sunrise is shown to the right.)   I know enough basic science to fully explain everything that I saw, and I know enough of psychology and esthetics to understand why we may have a pleasurable response to something that strikes us as beautiful.  However, what happened inside me that morning, like what happens when I listen to music (only more so), could not be explained in any rational way.

Did that make me affirm that God must exist?  No.  Did it make me profoundly aware that there is more to our world than I can ever begin to explain?  Yes.  Indeed, my inability to explain what I felt actually enhanced what I was feeling.  It filled me with a sense of wonder.  Would a highly religious person who believed absolutely in the existence of God have been more moved than I?  I don’t think so.

A second characteristic – let’s be honest and call it a defect or flaw – that true believers tend to attribute to agnostics is that, without a belief in God, they also lack the foundation on which to build a code of ethics.  In short, in the realm of ethical conduct, agnostics are thought to be anarchists.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  One can have principles that guide one’s conduct without believing that they are directives from a supernatural source.  If one believes that human life is not to be taken lightly, one does not go about randomly killing people.  Indeed, if respect for human life is an integral part of one’s mindset and not something imposed from outside by secular or religious law, one is probably less likely to engage in killing – less likely even to entertain thoughts of killing.  It is simply against one’s nature.  And the same is true of less dramatic questions of ethics.  The individual who feels deeply that taking what belongs to someone else is wrong will be unlikely to steal – and needs no external commandment to refrain from doing it.

Indeed, agnostics could argue that those who devoutly believe in God seem to have at least as much difficulty in behaving ethically as nonbelievers do.  All around us, people kill, cheat, lie, steal, and mindlessly inflict harm on other human beings, and they have done so throughout human history.  Some have even justified crimes against humanity on the grounds that they are doing God’s will.  If there is no demonstrable correlation between religiosity and ethical behavior, it is unfair and inaccurate to correlate agnosticism with a lack of ethics.

Those who hold to traditional beliefs are likely to respond that ethics have to come from somewhere; we aren’t born with them.  That is true.  Like all living beings, we are born amoral – which is to say neither moral nor immoral.   Our ethics are mostly learned, either from parental teaching or from society’s laws, both of which may vary markedly in different cultures.  Certainly, many of these teachings and laws have their roots in religion, but agnostics would argue that whether the religions acquire their ethics from the society, or society acquires its ethics from the religions is a chicken-and-egg question without a definitive answer.

The agnostic position to which I subscribe is a paradox of arrogance and humility.  It is arrogant because we tend to view the certainty of the true believer as foolish or, at least, misguided.  How can one be certain of answers to questions that are unanswerable?  And the agnostic will also point out that subscribers to any given faith are being arrogant when they assert that they – and only they – have the answers (even when they disagree among themselves).

On the other hand, it takes considerable humility to say, “I don’t know.”  To go even further and say, as the agnostic does, “Not only do I not know, but I believe that I cannot know” is even more humble.  On the whole, true believers, who ironically often include humility as a cornerstone of their religions, are reluctant to admit that they don’t know and cannot know the answers to fundamental questions about human existence.  They are, they believe, privileged to know what people throughout history have not.  Such self-serving certainty, I submit, makes them less than humble.

We thus face the unpleasant truth that not knowing is uncomfortable.  A state of doubt is not an emotionally cozy place to be, nor is it intellectually restful.  Lolling in the reclining chair of blind faith is far more pleasant than wandering about the mansions of our thoughts, upstairs, downstairs, into the darkest corners of doubt.  Yet, oddly enough, the agnostic is even more ill at ease depending solely upon the easy chair for support, especially when he suspects that the chair may be an illusion.

Sometimes the agnostic faces the charge, usually rendered by someone comfortably ensconced in the easy chair of faith, that agnostics deny faith and lack faith.  “All you need to do is make the leap of faith,” such a person will say.  “Jump off the cliff.  God will support you.”  I admit that I haven’t done that.  One reason I haven’t is that I’ve met few people who have.  Most true believers claim that they have, but I observe that most of them have been given the rope ladder of childhood conditioning to navigate the cliff or the parachute of dogma to keep them aloft after they jump.  To me, a leap of faith is like crossing Niagara Falls on a wire, and I don’t know many people who would do that.

Nevertheless, to say that the agnostic completely denies and lacks faith is as absurd as the other charges.   Everyone operates on faith – more than we realize.  At the simplest level, virtually all of us function on the faith that we will be alive tomorrow.  Since the future is unknown and unknowable, and the conviction that we will be continuing with our lives tomorrow rather much as they are today is an article of faith governing almost everything we do.  Even though evidence and experience inform us that we could have an accident or a heart attack, we have faith that we will not, at least in the immediate future.  When I began writing this essay several days ago, I had faith that I would complete it; if I had no such faith, I would never have begun.

What distinguishes the agnostic, perhaps, is the acceptance of uncertainty.  The principal uncertainty accepted by the agnostic is that the existence of God is not an established fact because it is unknowable.  Once one accepts this concept, one can become, much to the surprise of the true believers, quite comfortable with it.  With complete acceptance of this state of affairs, one can resign from the debating society and get on with the business of living in accordance with right principles that do not depend for validity upon divine inspiration.

Having thus written an explanation of the agnostic’s – or, at least, this agnostic’s – position, do I not contradict myself?  No and yes.  I am not attempting to persuade anyone else to believe or disbelieve as I do, so this is not debate.  But, yes, the debate continues in my own mind because, though I have accepted much to be “unknowable,” I have also accepted the possibility that what appears to be unknowable may, in a world of paradoxes, someday be known.  Even as an agnostic, I believe that we are all engaged in spiritual journeys where, by a process that we do not fully comprehend, what we once considered unknowable becomes known to us. That process is called spiritual growth.

I believe that, just as I have grown physically and have acquired some intellectual knowledge, I have grown spiritually.  I believe further that spiritual growth is enhanced by keeping an open mind.  As I have grown older, my physical growth has turned the corner and is now declining.  My intellectual growth may soon turn the same corner, if it has not already.  However, I am convinced that my spiritual growth will continue indefinitely, as long as I maintain an open mind.  Nevertheless, what others call God remains unknowable to me, and to declare otherwise would be a kind of hypocrisy upon which I believe God – if he, she, or it exists – would not look kindly.

*The term "true believers," as it is used here, is not intended to imply that all those who hold to traditional beliefs are necessarily narrow-minded or fanatic.  It refers merely to those who subscribe to traditional faiths – and I have taken pains, where applicable, to qualify generalities by saying "most" or stating that they tend to think in a certain way.  However, to designate them as merely "believers" would imply that agnostics are "nonbelievers," and my point is that we agnostics have beliefs.  We simply do not have the unqualified belief in the existence of God that "true believers" have.