Agnosticism

Thomas Henry Huxley decisively coined the term agnosticism.

Agnosticism (from Greek: ἀγνοεῖν a-gnoein "not knowing") refers to an everyday conviction or also well-founded philosophical view that certain assumptions - especially those of a theological nature concerning the existence or non-existence of a higher authority, for example a God - are either unexplained or fundamentally impossible to clarify. The term was coined by the British biologist and anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895).

Agnosticism is a worldview that emphasises in particular the principled limitedness of human knowledge. The possibility of the existence of transcendent beings or principles is not denied. Agnosticism is compatible with both theism and atheism, since belief in God is possible even if one denies the possibility of certainty regarding his existence. Accordingly, agnostics do not answer the question "Is there a God?" with "Yes" or "No", but with "I don't know", "It is not clarified", "It is not answerable" or "It is not relevant".

„This agnosticism, one might say in its pure culture, has arisen from the same foundations in the philosophical field from which Darwin, for example, worked in the field of natural science: from the way of thinking of the Western world. One can study him in this pure culture in particular with such minds as Herbert Spencer. If one wants to say what the essence of this agnosticism consists in, one will perhaps best do so in the following way. This agnosticism wants to be a kind of philosophy, a kind of world view, and it wants to work from scientific premises. In doing so, it only accepts that method of human cognition which is also used by natural science in its various limited and restricted fields. This natural science pursues the individual phenomena of nature in their lawful interrelationships; it intersperses what ideas it forms about the individual phenomena of nature with all kinds of hypotheses about causation; but it refuses - and in its own field, rightly so - to ascend from sensuous observation in experiment, in observation, and from that which results from experiment and observation to the intellect, which is bound to sensuality, to any formulation of knowledge that goes to the supersensible. It summarises the phenomena, or rather only the areas of phenomena, and presents what it can fathom in this way in terms of the lawful connections between the phenomena.“ (Lit.:GA 78, p. 8f)

„"This agnosticism is then extended to the mental sphere. It is said: One can well fathom how those things which appear as ideas in our consciousness join together, hold and support each other, how feelings attach themselves to these ideas, how a world of will works into this world of ideas from unknown depths, how these ideas are stimulated by stimuli which come from sensual perceptions. But one cannot approach that which now flows forth within the interplay of ideas, the tinging of this interplay with feeling, the pulsation of the same interplay with will forces, one cannot approach that which flows forth and which the consciousness sums up in the word "I", It cannot be approached in such a way that man's aspirations for knowledge of an immortal, an eternal soul can be satisfied by a science of this soul - agnosticism in the field of natural science, agnosticism in the field of psychological soul life.“ (Lit.:GA 78, p. 10)

„By very many people everything religious is categorically rejected. It is all too easy to be categorised as a religious nut, esoteric crush or naïve scofflaw as soon as you start talking about gods and angels. Here, many people are deeply hurt by all that has emanated from the church. And they are rightly disappointed, because either they have been persuaded to believe in untenable things, or they have not been made aware of any of this, so that the natural closeness to the spiritual in the world could not be formed. One can say that the Church has turned many of us into atheists and materialists and has thus caused enormous damage, especially in Central Europe. Countless souls can no longer find the way to the spirit, because church Christianity has driven the unpremeditatedness out of them.“ (Lit.: Hans Bonneval, p. 193)

Literature

• Hans Bonneval: Das Denken als Weg zu einer spirituellen Welterkenntnis, Band I, Occident-Vlg., Rieste 2010
• Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophie, ihre Erkenntniswurzeln und Lebensfrüchte, GA 78 (1986), ISBN 3-7274-0780-8 Template:Vorträge

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