The Way of the Agnostic

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January 20, 2013, 5:30 pm
By GARY GUTTING

Two of Simon Critchley’s recent Stone columns, “Why I Love Mormonism” and “The Freedom of Faith,” offer much-needed reflections, sympathetic but critical, on particular religions. Such reflections are important because religions occupy an ambivalent position in our world.

On the one hand, religions express perennial human impulses and aspirations that cannot plausibly be rejected out of hand as foolish or delusional. The idea that there is simply nothing worthwhile in religion is as unlikely as the idea that there is nothing worthwhile in poetry, art, philosophy or science. On the other hand, taken at their literal word, many religious claims are at best unjustified and at worst absurd or repugnant. There may be deep truths in religions, but these may well not be the truths that the religions themselves officially proclaim. To borrow a term Jürgen Habermas employs in a different context, religions may suffer from a “self-misunderstanding” of their own significance.

I read Critchley’s discussions of Mormonism and Catholic Christianity as good examples of how to think through the ambivalent nature of a given religion. Here I want to suggest a general framework for this sort of thinking.

To evaluate a religion, we need to distinguish the three great human needs religions typically claim to satisfy: love, understanding, and knowledge. Doing so lets us appreciate religious love and understanding, even if we remain agnostic regarding religious knowledge. (For those with concerns about talking of knowledge here: I’m using “knowledge” to mean believing, with appropriate justification, what is true. Knowledge in this sense may be highly probable but not certain; and faith—e.g., belief on reliable testimony—may provide appropriate justification.)

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/the-way-of-the-agnostic/