Like many Americans, I grew up in a Christian home. A Lutheran home to be specific, and there really were lots of great things about that. Religion can offer a sense of peace and community, and even some pretty fun holidays. Seriously, have you ever been to Lutheran church basement gathering? The lard filled tasty food alone is worth the reflux later. Not to mention the plethora of hotdish recipes you’ll gather for your single years. I genuinely enjoyed all those church picnics and delightfully bad Christmas pageants my parents forced me into, and if I hadn’t been raised in the church I wouldn’t have met some of my oldest childhood friends.

But as I grew into an adult, I found myself questioning the existence of God from an early age. No one mark or event in my history defines it, but I do recall even in Sunday school when I asked why God exists and how do we know it’s truth, and why do we go to church and Sunday school (when I for one would have preferred to pray to the horse gods in the stable on Sundays instead), the answer I was often met with was, “Well because that’s the way it is. That’s the way its always been.” I was now a cog in the Sunday ritual with little concrete explanation of why.

One of the things humans especially seem to fear is uncertainty, which is why they tend to just make shit up. We’ve seen alot of that since covid has become a political tool. An essay for another day perhaps. As a member of a generally dimwitted species, I feel most humans need myths just to get out of bed in the morning these days.

I was indoctrinated with religion since birth. I don’t call myself an agnostic because I think there’s a 50% possibility that, say, Christianity, Mormonism, Hindu, Muslim or any other religion may be true, but strictly because I know I am a smarter than average primate and I am incapable of explaining the universe’s origins. So, the word agnostic has very little to do with the idea of God in my eyes and more to the point of I recognize that I’m an evolving species that doesn’t have all the answers.

When it comes to world religions, I really would need to delve deep back into pre Christianity and pagan orders to make this a well rounded paper but I gave up writing those in my graduate program. So I am going to focus specifically on theism to explain my position of agnosticism. Although if I did subscribe to a sect, Eastern religions seem to make more sense to me because if they posit a deity at all, i.e. Buddhism, it is one that permeates the world, the universe and everything. That’s more reasonable to me than the Western notion of a God who is in some way, separate from the rest of existence. Because if God can be separate from something, then he/she obviously has limits and therefore isn’t all-powerful. Hmmm…

Atheism itself, seems to require blind faith in the idea that the universe just occurred at random, that everything suddenly decided to belch forth from the void of the big bang. It also depends on a blind faith that human cognition is capable of grasping the universe’s origins at all. While most people have a general understanding of atheism, agnosticism can be a little more confusing since it falls in the grey area between total belief and total disbelief, in the existence of a higher power and/or God.

To clarify, agnosticism “is the view that the existence of a god or the supernatural is unknown and perhaps unknowable.” It’s a belief system that is held by 34 percent of Americans. The term was first coined by English biologist Thomas Huxley in 1884. He stated agnostics confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters…Agnostics are not committed to believing in either the existence or non-existence of God,” or some sort of higher power.

So Jenn, get on with it, what does this mean, exactly? Well, what does it mean to believe in a god? Many of the world’s major religions; Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, believe there is a higher power that controls the universe and orchestrates the events in a person’s life and that their existence is pre determined by the will of ‘God’. While these religions disagree about the particulars of who and/or what god is, they believe this higher power is incredibly powerful and transcendent, continues to intervene in both the world and human life, and is totally beyond man’s comprehension. This is something I can neither prove or disprove, nor has it been proven or disproven to me.

Strangely enough there are 3 levels of agnosticism. A strong agnostic feels under no circumstances can a higher power be proven or disproven. An apathetic agnostic, just honestly doesn’t give a rats ass in either direction. I fall into the third category of weak agnostic. And no, it has nothing to do with weak mindedness. My middle of the road belief agrees with strong agnosticism in that I believe no one currently, and I emphasize that word, knows whether a higher power exists. But also believe that just because something cannot be proven right now, doesn’t mean it can never be proven.

This can be explained by germ theory. Waaaay back in the 1500’s. Scholars at that time, particularly Giacomo Fracastoro, wrote that epidemic diseases were caused by tiny, seed-like organisms called seminaria morbi that were spread by touch or by air. It would be another 300 years before scientists like Pasteur would prove that his hypothesis was correct. So, just because Fracastoro couldn’t prove his idea was right in the late middle ages, that didn’t mean it would never be proven. Thus, people who are weak agnostics are so because we’re waiting on objective evidence. We don’t believe that the answer to this question will forever be unknowable…we just think the answer isn’t knowable yet. In many ways, weak agnostics are just withholding judgement on whether God exists until undeniable facts can be brought to the table. But tell you what, if I eat an apple handed to me by a snake and the universe unfolded before me, while not under the influence of some forest shroom of unknown origin, I’ll get on my knees. (Get your mind out of the gutter.)

Ultimately, the bedrock of my agnosticism is the suspicion that most of us humans may simply be too dumb to figure out the nature of existence. And likely, it’s probably hanging right there in front of our faces, but our powers of comprehension may be insufficient to get the hint. It’s like walking up to a platypus and telling him what the best episode of The Simpsons is. Platypuses simply can’t grasp the concept of “sitcom.” Of course we all know Homer at the Bat is the correct answer.

Being agnostic doesn’t mean you hate religion. In fact, many agnostics were raised religious, and still consider themselves culturally religious like those brought up in Judaism. I may not believe Christianity is the one true way to a heaven I’m not convinced does or doesn’t exist, but I will always support my secular religious friends and family because that is their faith and I respect them. In addition, the world’s religions have inspired people like Mother Theresa and Mahatma Ghandi to do great things for humanity. Plus, religion itself has a benchmark in most of our human history and therefore deserves that respect as well.

Atheism is just as hard for me to wrap my head around. But that doesn’t mean I don’t respect and value it as well. Do I believe that we, tiny humans, can just know that there isn’t any possibility of a higher power? No. But I don’t necessarily believe there’s a guy sitting in a room somewhere being God either. So I kind of get where atheists are coming from. I also respect true atheists because their desire to do the right thing doesn’t come from a potential supernatural reward and punishment system. Not that there’s anything wrong with doing the right thing to please your chosen deity (except maybe drugging innocent children and sacrificing them to a volcano) but I’ve always found it a tad more impressive to be a good person when you feel with total certainty that the end is the end and that you’re truly just being a good human.

Agnostics understand that there are reasons people believe in the creation of the universe by a higher power, and we also understand that there’s reason to believe our existence may have been purely a spontaneous phenomenon. The one thing I have found in common between agnostics is that many of us have done a shit ton of reading and researching to prove or disprove our beliefs because it’s important to us to understand where we stand.

Being agnostic has brought me more peace than religion ever could. I’m perfectly comfortable not knowing, or even thinking I’m capable of knowing, all the answers to endless metaphysical questions we humans think up. The fact is, my entire existence is going to be less than a blip on this universe in a few short years, and I think it would be pretty arrogant to assume I could ever know with total certainty that there is or isn’t a God out there calling the shots. But it doesn’t bother me to not know. Rather, accepting uncertainty brings me a lot more peace than fighting it ever could.

Another reason agnostics choose to be agnostic is because it’s so freeing to think that, concerning the metaphysical, anything is possible. Being agnostic means you can question everything, question nothing, or both. It means you are open to, and can genuinely value, every spiritual belief system without having to pick one to hold onto forever. I’d like to believe in extraterrestrials and ghosts too which is something many religions don’t believe in. But as Ted Arroway said to young Ellie in the movie Contact, “if its just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

Some will accuse me of being a fence-sitter, but that requires belief in the fence’s existence. It’s the most non-committal way to commit to a belief system, and because of this, it’s never constricting or suffocating in the way that religion can be, and it’s not as inflexible as atheism can be either. Essentially, agnosticism is spirituality’s hotdish.