F o r m an y . niants basic pred icam ent is uncertainty
by T IMOTHY FETLER
THE AGNOSTIC AND CHRIST
A s an agnostic you’ve decided to be intellectually honest at any cost, to weigh claims and counter-claims objectively and with utmost care. Having faced ideologi cal conflicts with an open mind, you have been driven into agnosti cism as the safest and most sensible viewpoint an unbiased thinker could adopt who manages to retain complete i n t e l l e c t u a l integrity. Doesn’t the world as a whole pre sent us with some form of univer- salism, a mixture of good and bad in everything and variation only by degree? Doesn’t first-hand evi dence contradict any one group’s dogmatic claim to the monopoly of truth? Do not hundreds of contra dictory claims of this nature make the careful thinker skeptical of one and all? Haven’t many of the most brilliant minds searched for an answer to the riddle of the universe
since the dawn of history without obtaining as much as a shred of evidence? Isn’t science agnostic concerning any absolutes, resting its purely contingent knowledge on a calculus of probability? Haven’t the various proofs for God’s existence, the ontological, cosmological, teleological and moral arguments, been shown to contain basic flaws as well as an inability of arriving at anything more con clusive than a stalemate? Isn’t it mostly the uneducated religious bigot who uses these arguments with smug complacency without even understanding their true im plications? Don’t the basic Christian dogmas reduce themselves ulti mately to unresolvable paradoxes? Isn’t the careful Christian thinker forced to fluctuate between a mon istic, no-evil universe, and a dual- istic ‘good and evil’ but ‘finite God’
universe without ever resolving the problem? Isn’t it true that no theologian has successfully dealt with the problem of predestination and free will without retreating into irra tionalism at some point or other? Isn’t it also true that Christian groups divide and subdivide on unessentials, b u i l d i n g impossible barriers between themselves and even their closest brethren, cutting off communication and fellowship and contradicting the very spirit of Christ: “ By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” ? Isn’t all this and much more enough to drive any reasonable man into agnosti cism as the only safe and tenable viewpoint? Let us admit, that from the standpoint of an unbiased observer who tries to take into account all CONTINUED
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THE K IN G 'S BU SINESS
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