Agnostic Theism

[Postmaster]

Hey I was wondering what people’s views are on Agnostic Theism?

The great western philosopher Søren Kierkegaard created the best philosophical concepts and arguments for existentialism from a theistic perspective. Existentialism can lead to many roots, but I think Soren was spot on with Agnostic Theism, an absolute genius, not enough credit can be given to him.

The most important part of this philosophy is the agnostic part, which represents the absolute unknown nature of life, god himself and the importance of free will and its effects and consequences of each and every single action we take, that ripple out.

The theist part is the part that requires the least effort to sustain in this philosophy, it requires a leap of faith in our theist. We give these leap of faiths daily in our lives, either through calculated guesses, intuition or precognitive and to me the thiest is also the ultimate source of all happening, both rational, non rational and mysterious.

This philosophy for me tells me that there is no such thing as right or wrong. And that hostility as a course of action will always end in vain for whoever perpetrates it and for whichever cause. Everything is under constant condition of change and as we move forward we always have obstacles that will be repeated, with severity or less severity. Ones own free will choice is the central and most important focus of someones life and that religious insitutions and religious works are important external guides to help us along with this progress.

 

[lunamoth]

Excellent topic. I love Kierkegaard and his leap of faith. Good insights in your post above too...but no time for further comment now.

I hope to get back to this thread soon.

Cheers,
luna

 

[Postmaster]

Thanks looking forward to your next reply

 

[path_of_one]

I'm also intrigued but will have to read a bit first as I am only nominally familiar with this.

 

[Postmaster]

Yeah it is..

The reason I prefer Agnostic theistic over simply agnostic is if you remove a theist out of your philosophical views, your taking away the very important catalyst for teaching and passing on philosophical views. Esoteric knowledge is only good for a limited amount of people of certain intellects. Religion has always been a powerful tool for spreading philosophy to the masses. That why it’s always been important to intellects and non intellects. I think there's more altruistic reasoning behind religion then most people will have you believe.

 

[lunamoth]

I like the term leap of faith. It is exactly that: we trust in God. And you are right PM that we all make leaps of faith all the time. No, scientists are not having faith when they predict certain outcomes of experiments or conclude that their theories will hold sufficiently to let us build a space shuttle. But we have faith in reason because all reason is, ultimately, circular. There is no way to validate our reason, to show that all that we think we know actually has any basis in reality, besides faith.

If we trust our reason there can be only two reasons: utility or the leap of faith to the supernatural. If mere utility, then there is no truth, only what what is useful.


For the theist, faith in God is also trust, but it is not trust in a material thing or law of our universe, but trust in a Person, and we 'know' God the way we 'know' someone we love. It is a trust in a relationship.

The leap of faith comes first. We all have personal, spiritual experiences. We can see from the posts around this forum that someone can have a profound spiritual experience and explain that they think it is all just psychology, nothing supernatural. Others of us see the sacred in every day experiences. I am sure that there is not one piece of material evidence that could ever occur that would on its own lead someone to believe in God. There are, however, lots of experiences and pathways of investigation that could transform a person so that they come to believe in God, once they decide to set themselves on that path. And, I think, God woos us to turn to those paths.

We put on the glasses first and the key is: neither set of glasses (theist or atheist) can be logically proven. Thus the term 'agnostic.' Unknowable in a material, testable sense.

You can be a simply agnostic person, neither theist nor atheist, and that would be quite rational, but it leaves unaddressed a whole host of human experiences and questions that, I believe, enriches our lives and gives meaning.

This philosophy for me tells me that there is no such thing as right or wrong. And that hostility as a course of action will always end in vain for whoever perpetrates it and for whichever cause. Everything is under constant condition of change and as we move forward we always have obstacles that will be repeated, with severity or less severity. Ones own free will choice is the central and most important focus of someones life and that religious insitutions and religious works are important external guides to help us along with this progress.

I don't quite fully agree with the above. I think there is right and wrong, but the course of action to take us out of the cycle of right and wrong is love and as you say, peacefulness, non-resistance, non-hostility. Free will is the key concept in Christian ethics. I agree with you that religions play an important role in helping us shape our moral compass. But, the compass can be warped by misuse of religions as easily as it can be used to help guide people.

 

[Postmaster]

Great post Lunamoth.. I added some of my own insights at the end. From an interfaith point of view I don't think there is a right or wrong. However from an ethical point of view I definitely think there is.

 

[Eudaimonist]

If we trust our reason there can be only two reasons: utility or the leap of faith to the supernatural. If mere utility, then there is no truth, only what what is useful.

IMV, the consistent usefulness of reason shows that reason is efficacious and therefore reality-oriented. It confirms that there is indeed truth available to us. We couldn't have gotten to the Moon unless we possessed truths, for instance in physics. We might not understand physics perfectly, but we know it well enough in order to travel there. This is far more than mere "utility" -- it is a contextual comprehension of reality, i.e., the possession of truths.

I think the reason-as-utility argument is flawed by placing too high a bar on what counts as "truth", thinking that truth must be some kind of god's eye view on things, rather than a distinctly human form of comprehension.


eudaimonia,

Mark