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Antecedents of secular agnosticism
The ancestry of modern secular and atheist agnosticism may be traced back to the Sophists and to Socrates in the 5th century bc; not, of course, the “Socrates” of Plato’s Republic—the would-be founding father of an ideal totalitarian state—but the shadowy historical Socrates supposedly hailed by the oracle of Apollo’s Delphi as the wisest of men—who knew what, and how much, he did not know. But the most important and immediate source of such agnostic ideas was surely Hume, while Hume’s successor Kant may well be seen as the prime philosophical inspirer of religious reactions against them.
Huxley, as noted above, demanded that a thinker recognize and accept the limits of his knowledge. In taking it that these limits do not include either the findings of a general positive natural theology or the contents of a particular special divine revelation, Huxley was accepting a Humean critique. (It is significant that Huxley’s study of Hume was the most sympathetic appraisal to be published in the 19th century.) Hume’s critique is found in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (first published in 1748 under another title), which attempts, in the manner of Locke and later Kant, to determine the limits of man’s possible knowledge, and in his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).
Two sections of the Enquiry refer directly to these limits: “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State” and “Of Miracles.” In the first, Hume starts from his basic Empiricist claims: that, generally, “matters of fact and real existence” cannot be known a priori (prior to and apart from experience); and that, particularly, one cannot know a priori that any thing or kind of thing either must be or cannot be the cause of any other thing or kind of thing. These considerations dispose of all the classical arguments for the existence of God other than the argument to design—that the structure and order of the universe and its constituents implies a design and a designer. But here, Hume urges, argument from experience can find no purchase because both the supposed effect, the universe as a whole, and the putative cause, God, are essentially unique and incomparable. Later, in his Dialogues, he develops the suggestion—which he acknowledges as stemming from the 3rd-century-bc philosopher Strato of Lampsacus, next but one after Aristotle as head of his Lyceum—that whatever order man discerns should be attributed to the universe itself and not to any postulated outside cause.
In the section “Of Miracles,” Hume takes his stand on the agnostic principle: “A wise man . . . proportions his belief to the evidence.” He then argues that no attempt to appeal to the alleged occurrence of miracles—conceived as authoritative endorsements by a power beyond and greater than nature—can succeed in establishing the truth of a claim to constitute special divine revelation. Hume’s distinctive contribution here is methodological: the contention that the principles and presuppositions upon which the critical historian must rely, in first interpreting the remains of the past as historical evidence and in then building up from this evidence his account of what actually happened, are such as to make it impossible for him “to prove a miracle and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.”
In this two-phase attack, Hume challenged what was in his day, and long remained, the standard framework for systematic Christian apologetics. Indeed, the contrary contentions—of the possibilities, both of developing a positive natural theology and of establishing the authenticity of a supposed revelation by discovering endorsing miracles—were defined as essential and constitutive dogmas of Roman Catholicism by decrees of the first Vatican Council of 1869–70.
In view of the future history of Western thought, it must be emphasized that Hume’s position, like Kant’s, was (officially) that knowledge in this area is practically impossible. This thesis is stronger than that of those who simply confess that they just do not know:
The God-men say when die go sky
Through pearly gates where river flow,
The God-men say when die we fly
Just like eagle, hawk and crow—
Might be, might be; I don’t know.
(Aboriginal song from the Northern Territory, Australia.)
Yet Hume’s thesis was, on the other hand, weaker than that of his 20th-century neo-Humean successors, the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, who held that any talk about a transcendent God must be “without literal significance.” This view was presented brilliantly, and in an uncompromisingly drastic form, by A.J. Ayer in his Language, Truth and Logic (2nd ed., 1946). Similar conclusions were reached less high-handedly by several contributors to New Essays in Philosophical Theology (ed. by A. Flew and A. MacIntyre, 1955).
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