The other day I came across a well written essay by Dr. Henry F. Schaefer III entitled “Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence?” (aka Scientists and Their Gods) and so I thought I’d share the link with you. He is described by the US News & World Report as being “Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia.” He is a multiple Nobel Prize nominee and is a highly cited chemist. As a Christian and a scientist, he has some insightful comments on the relationship between science and religion and observations regarding Christian scientists (or scientists who also are Christians).

I can understand why a person would choose to be agnostic. I myself was agnostic for many years. I would have called myself an atheist, though in reality I was in fact agnostic.

Though I’ve written on agnosticism before and in particular whether the “we cannot know anything about God” hypothesis is a good one, but I wanted to make an observation re agnosticism that I’ve been thinking about recently. This may not be a particularly well crafted argument as I’ve written it, but such is the nature of blog posts!

Agnosticism is, in my humble opinion, the least reasonable position with regards to God’s existence (if having a lack of opinion can truly be called having a position, that is). Here I am referring to “closed” or “strong” agnosticism which is content to not believe nor disbelieve in God’s existence, not actively seeking agnosticism.

First of all we can ask whether it is more important to a) Discover truth, or b) Avoid error. In my opinion it is more important to try to discover truth. The process of discovering truth may lead sometimes to error, while avoiding even searching for truth may avoid error but will never find truth. Often it is through making mistakes that we learn, so it would seem that making errors (while the error in itself may be negative) will often have a positive end result. As Adam Osborne supposedly said, “The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake - you can’t learn anything from being perfect.” (Thank you ThinkExist.com!)

Now apply this reasoning to the agnosticism question. Note that in regards to God’s existence, there are only two possible options: Either God exists or God does not exist. God cannot “kind of” exist. (I am here not referring to any particular conception of God, merely whether God of any kind exists or not.)

Here then is the situation regarding the God dilemma: The theist has a chance of being right and the atheist has a chance of being right. They will of course differ on their appraisal of the odds, but regardless, at least by taking a position they have a chance of being correct. The closed agnostic, however, has no chance of being right, because they take no position one way or the other. Therefore, since the strong agnostic has no chance of being correct, it seems to be a poor (lack of) position to uphold.

However, as I said earlier, I can understand why someone might have strongly held agnostic (lack of) beliefs. “Don’t you think it’s arrogant,” the argument might go, “to think that YOU have the truth about God?” Thus sometimes strong agnosticism may be the result of the perceived modesty of the position. But agnosticism of the closed or strong variety turns out to be rather arrogant when it supposes that it is impossible for anyone to really know that God exists or what God is like. Is it really humble to suggest that no one, anywhere, at any time or any age or under any circumstances, has really got it right about God? Or is it more humble to say, “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this issue, and I may be wrong, but here’s what I think.”? I’d say the latter is more reasonable.

Please check out my previous post Is God unknowable? for further discussion on whether the claim that we cannot know anything about God is well founded.

I saw an interesting post today on Thinking Christian commenting on one of Richard Dawkins’ opinions expressed in the recent Dawkins / Lennox debate (and also in Dawkins’ book The God Delusion).

Read it here: Religion Leads Logically To Violence, But Atheism Doesn’t–Richard Dawkins

I agree with Tom Gilson’s opinion on this issue, and this is an issue that is raised often (and will continue to be raised given the fact that it is often repeated by the new atheists) so it’s worth thinking about. I haven’t yet watched the debate but it should be interesting.

Here’s a video where Greg Koukl and Deepak Chopra discuss the meaning of faith. Click the link to see the streaming video. (6:22 long)

Chopra seems to love saying what people want to hear rather than saying things that actually make sense. Is sin merely ignorance as Dr Chopra says? That seems ridiculous. Certainly if a person truly isn’t aware that what they are doing is immoral then we cannot blame them for what they are doing. But that is not what sin is. Sin is when people do things they know are wrong … and if we are honest with ourselves we know that we sin all the time.

On the topic of sin, Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron encourage an evangelism style that confronts people with the Ten Commandments. They ask people if they’ve broken the Ten Commandments, and then when people inevitably admit that yes, of course they have, then therefore they are “sinners” in need of forgiveness. While true in a sense, a non-Christian could easily simply deny the Ten Commandments and their argument falls apart. After all if a person doesn’t believe the Bible is the word of God, why should they give credence to the Ten Commandments? However, IMHO it’s totally unnecessary to bring the Ten Commandments into the argument, and it works just as well without even mentioning them. Here’s why:

Regardless of whether a person is Christian or not, everyone has their own moral standards; aka their moral conscience, or moral rules. And whether a person accepts God’s moral rules or not, every person must admit that they have broken THEIR OWN moral rules.

The question then becomes: Who do you think has higher standards when it comes to morals … you or God? If you say God has higher standards, then we’re in a heap of trouble, because we’ve already admitted that even by our own standards we don’t measure up, so that means we fall WAY short of God’s own standards, whatever they may be. If someone were foolish enough to claim that we have higher standards than God, then they would be claiming that we have greater (more just, more accurate) moral standards than the God who is the source of all moral standards, which is absurd.

Greg makes a great comment near the end of the video regarding “guilt”, which is also made in an article on Greg’s website:

Folks, we don’t get rid of guilt through denial . We get rid of guilt through forgiveness. And that forgiveness can only come from the One whom we have offended. The One who gave the law in the first place. (Read Greg’s full article here.)

Further reading:

• I’m essentially a good person! What’s wrong with that? - Read one of my previous articles where I discuss what it means to be a “good person”.
• Why did Jesus have to die? - He paid the price for our sins so that we wouldn’t have to. The beautiful thing about grace is that it’s unfair: We don’t get what we deserve.