Why Aren't We ALL Agnostics?

The Call to “Holy Agnosticism” is the Call to Faith

I don’t know beans about God. – Annie Dillard

In this space I have proposed that healthy faith include regular purging doses of atheism. We get easily barnacled up by tired beliefs, and these tie us up in knots when we try to keep believing something worn out.

Today I wish to suggest agnosticism for the same reason: the idea that we really don’t know beans about God. Some things we can know, but many more we cannot in the spiritual dimension of things. Two stories about elephants illustrate. I’ll comment after they’re told.

1 Two fleas live on the tail of an elephant. One flea is happy where it is. He has all the food and shelter he wants. He thinks he knows the elephant, though it’s only a small part of the tail. Its imperfect knowledge is nonetheless comforting.

The other flea lived with this first one, until one evening she grows discontent with the usual eating, drinking, and hanging on. She travels a far distance from the first flea. In human measurement, she travels down the tail about a foot. Wow, the environment is different: smells, tail-movement, and other vermin are all different.

She now has a doubled-up knowledge of the elephant. She returns later to report her experience of the elephant to the first. The first one disbelieves her. The second flea keeps insisting that there’s more out there to explore and to know.

2 There were six blind persons who traveled together, and they come upon an elephant for the first time. No one told them what it was, and each got positioned at one body part of the elephant. Each felt, and came away with sure knowledge about what the elephant must be like.

The person at the side of the elephant was sure it was like a wall. “No,” said the person at the tusk. “An elephant is like a spear.”

“You’re both wrong,” exclaimed the trunk-holder. “This elephant is like a snake.” The fourth one, at the elephant’s knee, concluded this animal was more like a tree.

The fifth blind person, touching ear, felt an elephant is like a huge fan. And the sixth one, hanging onto the tail, felt certain that an elephant is a rope.

***

Which flea, which blind person was (most) correct? None had faulty knowledge. But everyone’s intelligence was incomplete, and thus misunderstood. Each story character was quite sure of the certainty and veracity of their facts.

No one questions their intelligence. We feel pretty darn confident like the first flea that we’ve received adequate/accurate view of God. We may even self-congratulate ourselves on being versed in two religious traditions, like the second flea, and feel that is enough.

Or we may be like the blind who ever-so-quickly under-interpret the elephant: “mine’s the right one, once and for all.”

Everyone’s understanding of the elephant called God is partial at best, and outright wrong at worst. And so we live our lives, vote, fight, discriminate and other everyday things based on this image we carry around within us. These are necessary images, but make no mistake, they’re misunderstandings at the very best.

Every understood deity is partially known, thus an idol. Idols are images based on insufficient evidence and maintained by constant and ever-louder affirmation within a tribe of believers. They are conveniences, for we don’t explore beyond their image.

And if we think the elephant is ‘out there,’ external to us, and not internal, the idolatry worsens. The divine life is our own life. (Repeat until understood.) If that realization brings a “holy agnosticism” vis-à-vis our received idea of God, this blind flea has done his job. Next time you’re at your flea circus (religious house), remember we don’t know beans about God.