I. Agnosticism as a Philosophical Position
1. Definition. The term agnosticism, as well as other modern words (Fr. agnosticisme, It. agnosticismo, Germ. agnostizismus), has its etymological roots in the Greek word gnostos, that is, unknowable. Although agnosticism as a philosophical school of thought has a long history and has been described from time to time with diverse connotations, it was the English naturalist Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895) who coined the term agnosticism as an antithesis to the gnostic of Church history. Huxley saw the gnostic as someone who claims to know much about things which another does not. (cf. Collected Essays, V, London, 1898, pp. 237-245). Huxley coined the term in the context of a congress of the Metaphysical Society of London in 1869 and later re-iterated the same in his work Agnosticism in 1889. It is important to point out the antithesis posed by Huxley between a religious gnosis, which would claims to know the unknowable, and the agnosticism of the scientist, which refuses to determine a priori the solution to the problems that form the object of his or her research. In fact, it is within this refusal that the meaning of modern agnosticism resides inasmuch as it does not wish to be, in the majority of cases, a hostile refutation of metaphysical or religious topics as in the case of atheism but rather a suspension of judgment in regard to the question of God and of the Absolute. The question of God and of the Absolute is neither denied nor affirmed by agnosticism in order to allow scientific research to be uninhibited. Whereas atheism holds that God does not exist, agnosticism limits itself to affirming that we do not possess above all from a scientific and cognitive point of view adequate rational instruments to affirm or negate the reality of God or of the Absolute. In a letter of 1879, C. Darwin declared himself an agnostic in the same sense as coined by Huxley. Similarly, H. Spencer, maintaining in his work First Principles (1862) the impossibility of scientifically demonstrating the mysterious force that sustains natural phenomena, was classified as an agnostic. The physiologist Raymond Du-Boys in his work The Seven Enigmas of the World (1880) held that in front of the great enigmas of the world and of existence, it is most responsible for man, and above all for the scientist, to pronounce an ignorabimus (we will not know), since those enigmas go beyond the realm of scientific knowledge. One may conjecture that modern agnosticism, which is not to be confused with the agnostic tendencies that have been around even from the origins of the history of philosophy, predominantly has a scientific background and is motivated in particular by the imposition Kantian criticism gave to the metaphysical question.
2. The Critique of the Principle of Causality. In fact, the most rigorous modern formulation of metaphysical agnosticism was formulated by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kants metaphysical agnosticism has decisively influenced both philosophical and scientific agnosticism as well as the religious agnosticism of the 19th and 20th centuries. In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), especially in the third part (Transcendental Dialectics), and in The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant clearly shows how the presuppositions of metaphysical agnosticism derive, on the one hand, from the empiricism of David Hume (1711-1776), particularly from his critique of the metaphysical concept of causality, and on the other hand from the idea of ratio separata proper to modern rationalism. The empiricism of Hume did indeed affirm as absolute the principle of experience, already formulated by John Locke (1632-1704) in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1688) and later elaborated by George Berkeley (1685-1753) in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) with the famous statement esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). Basing himself upon the principle of experience, in A Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and later in his Exposition Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume denies that abstract ideas have truth-value corresponding to experience, including even the idea of matter. It follows then that both the idea of cause and the consequent metaphysical principle of causality, according to which ontological causes are the foundation of physical causes, must be rejected as deceptive because they are contrary to the principle of experience. The distinction between ideas and impressions leads Hume to sustain that only those ideas which make reference to immediate impressions have truth-value. Now since the idea of cause makes reference only to an impression of sequences of events, it signifies only the order of this succession, and not the inference of a causal principle other than experience. The idea of cause then, Hume concludes, is only something that one feels, or rather a belief, which arises in ones consciousness because one observes the repetition in the experience of sequences that tend to repeat. These repetitions mistakenly lead one to believe in the possibility of locating in one of the elements of the sequence the cause, and in the other the effect (cf. A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, part III, 14-15; cf. also part II, 6 and part IV, 2).
The demolition of the idea of cause based upon the radicalization of the principle of experience formulated by Hume inevitably led to the elimination of the very foundation of metaphysics. Starting from the second period of Platos works (cf. Phaedo, 79a, 98c-e, 99e, 100c-d) and later with the Metaphysics of Aristotle (cf. Books I and II), metaphysics had made precisely the principle of causality the cornerstone of ontology, setting out from there to a knowledge that would no longer limit itself to observing effects, but rather would be capable of rising to the fundamental causes of being.
1. Kant and Metaphysical Agnosticism. From Humes critique of the idea of cause, Immanuel Kant knew in effect how to draw out all the essential gnoseological consequences in order to formulate his critical evaluation of metaphysical knowledge. Already Sextus Empiricus (180-220), in Outlines of Pyrrhonism, had criticized the principle of causality, just as would some of the representatives of nominalism do much later in the Middle Ages, in particular, Nicholas DAutrecourt (1300-1350), Pierre DAilly (1350-1420), and William Ockham (1280-1349). Yet, as already observed, in the Kantian metaphysical agnosticism such critique joins itself to that acceptance of the primacy of experience proper to empiricism, as well as to the recognition of the value of the autonomous activity of the intellect proper to modern rationalism.
For the philosopher of Knigsberg, all knowledge that would have truth-value must be modeled upon the type of knowledge that makes science possible. In other words, only knowledge that results from the synthesis between matter, constituted by phenomena as the proper object of empirical observation, and the action of forms a priori, through which those phenomena are grasped by a specific category of our intellect, would have truth-value. So, for Kant, one is dealing with the examination of the nature of synthetic a priori judgments, in which he reforms the foundation not only of scientific knowledge, but also of all knowledge valuable for humanity. All knowledge that one desires to have the character of science must therefore be the result of a synthesis between matter, offered from the vastness of phenomenal experience, and an a priori form, given by the intellect. In as much as the I think is fount and root of every a priori category of the intellect, it therefore constitutes the transcendental condition of all knowledge, and such knowledge must be understood as the transcendental constitution of experience. As a result, philosophical knowledge is modeled after scientific knowledge, which in turn will become the paradigm of all sensible knowledge. Post-Kantian philosophy will often recognize solely itself as the methodology of science or epistemology, i.e., as a reflection on the scientific status of the theories of science. Thus, philosophy progressively loses its nature as knowledge in order to become a reflection on the modalities of knowledge. It is clear then that metaphysics, which claims to go beyond the appearance of experience (phenomenon) to grasp the essence of things in themselves (noumenon), which are not subject to experience, becomes, in a Kantian scheme, a knowledge that has no object, and therefore cannot claim to be a well-founded knowledge. According to the image of the same Kant, metaphysics appears outside the realm of experience as a dove that seeks to fly without air beneath its wings. For this reason, when metaphysics asks questions about the existence of God, of the soul, of the world, of freedom all realities that escape from a phenomenal type of experience it falls into insurmountable antinomies (cf. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, I, 2, ch. 2: The Antinomy of Pure Reason). Metaphysical agnosticism, therefore, consists not in the a priori denial of such realities, but in the thesis that one cannot attain any metaphysical knowledge, because it lies outside the domain of phenomenal experience.
2. Kant and Scientific Agnosticism. Numerous philosophies were inspired by the Kantian model of knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries, and have dealt with all the implicit consequences of metaphysical agnosticism expressed in The Critique of Pure Reason. One can say that scientific agnosticism constitutes the flip side of metaphysical agnosticism, in as much as it presupposes it and radicalizes it by affirming the primacy of an agnostic scientific knowledge, being indifferent in principle to the great themes of metaphysics, particularly those of religion. Thus is the positivism of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), which considers as the only truth facts, i.e., that which can be described according to concrete experience and, similarly to Kant, judges all research of the metaphysical causes of the facts themselves to be without foundation (cf. Discourse on the Positive Spirit, 1844; Course of Positive Philosophy, 1830-42). And by applying the principles of Comtes positivism in the study of primitive peoples, it will be the French sociological school (E. Durkheim, M. Mauss, L. Lvy-Bruhl), that will bring about a strong critique of religion by affirming that the religious dimension manifested by a specific people is nothing other than the fruit of an imposition exerted by the dominant part of the group (cf. E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912).
A particular type of scientific agnosticism was represented by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). In his work The Factors of Organic Evolution (1887), Spencer maintains that all of nature and the entire cosmos are regulated by an evolutionistic principle which is not finalistic (seefinalism), in the sense that, departing from the study of natural phenomena, it would not be possible to infer the existence of God as creator and orderer of the cosmos. Nonetheless, for this reason alone such existence cannot be denied, in as much as the same Spencer holds that at the confines of human experience and of scientific knowledge, there exists the Unknowable, which is precisely that which is beyond the confines of experience and science (cf. System of Synthetic Philosophy, London 1858). The Unknowable is for Spencer that which metaphysics and religion have called God and which, even though it is not a part of the cognitive categories of science, nonetheless cannot be denied by them, as scientific atheism on the other hand would claim to do.
Contemporary epistemology, developing after the crisis of scientific positivism, which had attributed to scientific knowledge a paradigmatic value, subjected this latter to a dense critique on the part of authors such as Poincar, Boutroux, Duhem, Mach, Bergson, Hilbert, Peano, and Frege. Numerous scientific discoveries as well as the progress made in mathematics and logic and in the new relative paradigms of interpretation formulated in the 20th century drove scientists and philosophers of science towards a conception of the laws of nature formulated from scientific theories, one no longer static and mechanistic, but dynamic and probabilistic, marked by unpredictability because it had been opened to the emergence of complexity. Such rethinking gave birth to diverse epistemological currents: neo-positivistic logic (Schlick, Carnap, Ayer, Russell), according to which only experimental propositions or factual propositions have scientific value, or those whose content is empirically verifiable; the metaphysics of science (Meyerson, Eddington), according to which all science implies a metaphysics, and the same scientific knowledge must be understood as a progressive discovery of reality, able again to find its ultimate foundation in a metaphysics; scientific rationalism (Popper, Feyerabend), according to which science is nothing other than a rational construction of man and the observed facts nothing other than elements dependent upon the scientific theories utilized to organize them, whereas the theories themselves are, in their turn, responses to preceding theoretical problems and, in an ultimate analysis, systems of rash conjectures to which the experiment adds nothing true. If the scientific theory is the elaboration of a theory capable of resolving unresolved problems, the experimental verification plays then the role of a continuous control of the theory itself, with the warning of Karl Popper (1902-1994), that one ought not to speak of a verification in a positivistic sense, but rather of a falsification, because every scientific theory is not definitive, but provisional, subject to being falsified on the part of a better theory.
Although contemporary epistemology has strongly contested the Kantian and positivistic conception of knowledge, it did not know how to remove from scientific agnosticism its implications. In effect, the Kantian anti-metaphysical prejudice has remained present in almost all forms of contemporary epistemology, in the sense that although science itself evolves and the same evaluation of objective value of scientific theories transforms itself, science nonetheless continues to be considered the sole area of knowledge valuable for humanity. The questions that go beyond the domain of science the problem of God in particular can at most be accepted as questions that, as in Kant, have sense for the existence of man, but not for his knowledge. Scientific agnosticism consists precisely in dismissing the idea that science, however one understands it, represents an area where metaphysical and religious questions can be formulated or at least recognized as significant, i.e., have the sense of a question and the value of knowledge.
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