Atheism and Agnosticism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

6. Philosophical vs. Pragmatic Reasons for Preferring the Term ‘Agnostic’

As was hinted earlier, a person may call herself an agnostic, as Huxley did, because of questionable philosophical motives. Huxley thought that propositions about the transcendent, though possibly meaningful, were empirically untestable. We have seen that it is unclear that the conclusion of the fine tuning argument is untestable. One can at least compare it with other and non-theistic hypotheses. Thus there are conjectures that there are many universes, so many of them that is not surprising that there should be some among them in which the constants of physics allow for the possibility of life, and if so our universe must be one of them. Some cosmologists give independent grounds for thinking that new universes are spawned out of the back of black holes. Others think that there are independent grounds for thinking of a single huge Universe that has crystallised out into various universe sized regions each with randomly different values for the fundamental constants. Some such speculations get some support (it has been suggested) from string theory. Though such speculations are at present untestable and should be taken with a grain of salt, one or another may well one day be absorbed into a testable theory. It must be left to cosmologists and mathematical physicists to go into the pros and cons here, but they are mentioned here to indicate a grey area between the testable and the untestable.

Some scientists when canvassing these issues of philosophical theology may prefer to call themselves ‘agnostics’ rather than ‘atheists’ because they have been over impressed by a generalised philosophical scepticism or by a too simple understanding of Popper’s dictum that we can never verify a theory but only refute it. Such a view would preclude us from saying quite reasonably that we know that the Sun consists largely of hydrogen and helium. When we say ‘I know’ we are saying something defeasible. If later we discover that though what we said was at the time justified, it nevertheless turned out to be false, we would say ‘I thought I knew but I now see that I didn’t know’. Never or hardly ever to say ‘I know’ would be to deprive these words of their usefulness, just as the fact that some promises have to be broken does not deprive the institution of promising of its legitimacy.

Another motive whereby an atheist might describe herself as an agnostic is purely pragmatic. In discussion with a committed theist this might occur out of mere politeness or in some circumstances from fear of giving even more offence Samuel Butler, though a complete unbeliever in the doctrines of Christianity, in the preface to one of his books Erewhon Revisited(Butler 1932) described himself as the broadest of broad churchmen. That is, I take it that broad churchmen often were unbelievers, but treated the doctrine as mere myth suitable for literal consumption by the local yokels in the interests of social stability. It is unclear to me whether or not Butler was sympathetic to a very abstract sort of theism. Some may call themselves ‘agnostics’ rather than ‘atheists’ merely because they are equally repelled by the fanaticism associated with some forms of theism and by the boring obsessiveness of what Hilary Putnam has called ‘the village atheist’. (Contrast, however, Clifford’s view of the matter and also the example of the radical and intellectual tinker, Mr. Shaw, in Butler’s powerful novel The Way of All Flesh.) Still, these considerations are perhaps more a matter for sociologists than for philosophers.