This morning we are here to ask the question, “What do I believe about God?” During this year I’m giving a series of six sermons – and I Believe statements by members of the congregation – on a variety of different beliefs about God. This is an opportunity for you to clarify what you believe and why you believe it.
In this church there is no wrong answer to that question. This is a place where we can feel free to share our beliefs honestly and openly and to learn from others.
Last month we explored the belief of atheism, concluding that the atheist is a religious person with no invisible means of support but with substantial support of the mind. This morning we will explore the belief of agnosticism.
I’m sure you’re all eagerly awaiting the results of your recent voting. We do not know yet the results of the latest presidential elections, but I can give you the final results of the God-talk survey, even though I understand there has been some confusion about the ballots. Apparently there are some people who voted for God when they thought they were voting for Al Gore.
As you know, we took a survey last month at the beginning of this series to see what our congregation believes about God. Here are the results of the God-Talk survey -- that is until a court overturns them:
ATHEISM
(28) CASUAL ATHEISM: The concept of God is unimportant to me.
(16) STRICT ATHEISM: I believe there is no God of any kind.
Total = 44
AGNOSTICISM
(37) CASUAL AGNOSTICISM: I am undecided about whether God exists.
(32) STRICT AGNOSTICISM: I believe we cannot know, and will never know, whether God exists or not.
Total = 69
NATURALISM
(32) PANTHEISM: I believe that nature is the source of revelation and God and nature are one.
(9) PAGANISM: I affirm the Goddess as a metaphor for my earth-centered spirituality.
Total = 41
THEISM
(37) SUPERNATURAL THEISM: I believe in a personal and supernatural God who participates in my life and history.
(42) PROCESS THEISM: God is interdependent with the world and developing with it.
79
MYSTICISM
(60) THEISTIC MYSTICISM: I believe that our purpose in life is to be at one with God, letting divinity shine through us in our deeds.
(66) NATURAL MYSTICISM: I believe that we may directly experience spiritual truths and a unity with the universe without a supernatural being.
126
As you can see, the most popular single category is natural mysticism with theistic mysticism right behind it. And there are by far a larger number of mystics than any other group.
The next largest group is theism, with process theism just ahead of supernatural theism. The agnostics are next with casual agnosticism just ahead of strict agnosticism. Then atheism comes in just ahead of naturalism.
Let me repeat what I said last month: we shouldn't take these results too literally or too seriously. This is not a contest. Though I do think it's helpful to take a look at who we are from time to time, don't forget that not everyone participated in this poll, and that the definitions were my own.
My hope is that by the end of this series you will have a better understanding of what you believe and why you believe it. And I hope that you will be more aware of your commonality with those who have different beliefs. I’ll give another poll at the end of this series so we can see if there have been any changes in our God beliefs.
We did get responses to the Other category that I thought you might be interested in, including Natural Theism, Theistic Gnosticism, Deism, Humanist, Unitarianism, Pragmatic theism, Southern Baptist, and Ethical atheism. I was surprised no one claimed to be an agnostic pagan. That is someone who doubts the existence of many gods.
What I find fascinating is the wide variety of beliefs we have here in this congregation. Where else can you find so many people who not only believe differently but who are also willing to enthusiastically share their beliefs. For me this is one of the great joys of being a Unitarian Universalist.
As you see, there is a significant group of people in our congregation who define themselves as agnostic. But what is an agnostic?
The agnostic has many similarities to the atheist but also some important differences. In 1869 Thomas Huxley, the English biologist and intellectual, coined the word agnosticism. The word came from the Greek meaning the unknowing or unknown.
In religious terms it’s the view that we don't know if there's a God or not. In Huxley's own words, "Agnosticism simply means that individuals shall not say they know or believe that for which they have no ground for professing to believe."
Huxley goes on to explain how he became an agnostic:
“When I reached intellectual maturity I began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist or a pantheist, a materialist or an idealist, a Christian or a Free-thinker. I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer. The one thing on which most of these good people agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were sure they had . . . more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure that I had not. Furthermore, I had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble . . . So, I . . . invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "Agnostic." ...To my great satisfaction, the term took.”I imagine many of you have found yourselves in a similar situation when confronted by friends, acquaintances or colleagues who were certain they "knew" the Truth with a capital "T." You may have reacted as Huxley did, suspecting that those who proclaim to know the answers to the riddles of the universe are displaying their ignorance far more flagrantly than their wisdom.
The agnostic would agree with Thomas Edison who wrote, "We do not know one millionth of one percent about anything." Or, in the words of Norman Ford, "Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time."
I’ve noted two different kinds of agnostics. First, there are casual agnostics who say they don't know about the existence of God. They claim that they don't have enough personal evidence now to say whether they believe in God or not. If they are given adequate evidence at some future time, then they may well become believers.
Strict agnostics, on the other hand, proclaim that they can't know about the existence of God. That's a big difference. Whereas causal agnostics believe there is the possibility of their belief in God, strict agnostics say that the human mind is much too limited to ever have enough evidence to grasp hold of that indefinable concept. It would be analogous to an ant crawling across this pulpit trying to comprehend this church or the meaning of this message.
Strict agnostics go on to say that the problem is that human beings eternally attempt to lay hold of Reality with words, but our minds are not broad enough or bright enough to encompass it. Our mind has evolved a system to support our survival in this natural world by adapting itself to deal with finite objects. But to expect us to corner the infinite with a finite mind is like asking a dog to understand Einstein's equation with his nose. It's just not possible.
Both the casual and strict agnostics agree on the value of doubt. Their spirit is captured well with these words by Alfred Lord Tennyson: "There is more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds."
Why is doubt so necessary for agnostics? Agnostics believe that as long as we refuse to use our rationality, our minds, our critical skills to decide for ourselves what we believe and do not believe, then our decisions will be made for us by the powers that be. And if we give up our right and responsibility to choose our own beliefs then we lose our individuality, our self.
I don't know anyone who has said it better than the great Unitarian minister of the 19th century, William Ellery Channing:
“I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith: which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come; which receives new truth as an angel from heaven . . . ”What Channing tells us is that we cannot let others make our choices for us, either out of habit, tradition, or sloth. We may choose to be an atheist, agnostic, theist, naturalist, mystic, or other; we may choose to be Christian, Hindu, Jew, or Unitarian Universalist; but it must be our choice, not someone else's.
Let me remind you that agnosticism is not only concerned about God; it's a commitment to question all the accepted truths within our culture. It's a call to always be open to new knowledge and experience, so that we might deepen our sensitivity to the longings of the human spirit.
There's a story about a woman who one day serves a baked ham to her family, and one of the children asks her why she always cut the end off the ham off when she served it. She thought for a while and then replied that her mother had always cut the end off her hams, and so she followed that tradition. Her own curiosity sparked, the next time she talked with her mother she asked the same question: why did you always cut the end off your hams? The mother looked puzzled and then responded innocently, "I never had a baking pan large enough for the entire ham, so I cut off the end to make it fit."
This makes you wonder how many of our own beliefs have come about through the same kind of blind acceptance of tradition. The agnostic is someone who challenges us to hold truth above tradition.
An example of the openness of the agnostic is provided again by Thomas Huxley when he writes about the death of son nine years prior to his awareness of his own agnostic position. At the time, Charles Kingsley sought to comfort Huxley with the views of religious orthodoxy. Huxley read Kingsley's letter, then replied:
“To begin with the great doctrine you discuss, I neither deny nor affirm the Immortality of Humanity. I see no reason for believing in it, but on the other hand I have no means of disproving it. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing it, and I will. Why should I not? It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of matter.”Later in the same letter Huxley writes: "The longer I live the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a person's life is to say, and to feel, 'I believe such and such a thing to be true!'" This may at first seem like a contradiction, but what Huxley is saying is that when we are absolutely certain that something is true, when we have questioned and doubted and then embraced it, then it is the most sacred act to say and feel that we believe it to be true.
This then is the agnostic: the person whose beliefs are not fixed, who neither affirms nor denies, but who is seeking, searching, questioning, and doubting. The agnostic refrains from judging other people's beliefs and instead commits to a lifelong exploration of truth.
Agnosticism is the search that leads into deeper realms of truth and meaning than we could ever discover by following someone else's path. That's why we need agnostics: so they will remind us not to shut the door on doubt, to warn us not to check our brains at the door, to challenge us to search for truth in every nook and cranny of our lives.
Clarence Darrow, one of the most renowned agnostics of our age, said: "I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant people are sure. That is all that agnosticism means." Bertrand Russell was more militant when he said: "The stupid are cocksure, and the intelligent are full of doubt."
In our reading this morning Robert Weston wrote: “Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the attendant of truth . . . ” Weston also writes: “Each person is a question and many answers, And many questions and no answers . . . From our questioning may come a growing understanding, And still more questions. The answers fail us and the questions multiply . . . ”
This I believe is the essence of wisdom: the more answers we discover the more questions grow out of those answers. But it is in asking the questions and the continual never-ending search for answers that many of us find meaning in life.
That struggle to question and doubt is certainly not an easy one. It's a skill that's difficult to learn. And often it requires the pain of breaking away. Those who dare to doubt are often forced to leave behind old institutions, friends, and even family in their search for truth. There are many people in this society who do not understand why we must question, why we must doubt. And often we are called heretics for doing so.
Many of the great minds and hearts down through the ages have been labeled heretics because they dared to doubt. But let me remind you that the word "heretic" comes from the Greek, and it literally means "able to choose."
I like that! It's a definition that puts a much more positive meaning on the word. Heretics are able to make their own choices instead of having decisions made for them. They use their freedom to forge their fate.
Agnostics are heretics do not live by a creed, but by the faith and values that they have woven together from their own experience. They piece together their own theology, a theology that they have chosen to live by.
That, of course, is the most unforgivable heresy of our liberal religious movement. We challenge people to be skeptics and heretics. We encourage people to think for themselves, to listen to their own inner voice and to take the less-traveled path when necessary.
To be an agnostic is not to be simply a dissenter -- it is to be a creator, a person who dares to create relationships with the world around them -- and who dares at the same time to be an individual who accepts the responsibility of their freedom.
That is why many of us end up in this church. Every religion and every church has a different vision of what truth is and how it should be lived out. Our vision of truth is different not so much in what we believe as in how we believe.
We believe that truth is not static and still. Truth is not monopolized by any one religion, holy book, or messiah. Instead, truth is continually revealing itself in every moment of time, in every living being and inanimate object, in every breath we take. We fling open the doors and windows to truth so that we may be sustained by its eternal power.
May we give thanks for our ability to question and to search. May we always have the desire to call into question those truths which have been given to us by others. And may we always have the courage to dare to doubt and then to dare to believe.
Let us welcome the agnostic -- and the spirit of doubt -- into our church and into our hearts.
Amen.
"I Believe" Statement.
Sara F. Anderson
November 12, 2000
Windows
High in the walls of the Fairfax UU Church where we sang last Sunday are two circular windows. They provide a view of the canopy of woods in which their church is set, just as our clerestory windows do.
I've always loved our windows here at UUCA. They can be a metaphor for our beliefs.
We are open to the world. Just as we draw in the seasonal views of our tree canopy, we draw in ideas, stories and wisdom from all the world's religions and philosophies. We are not confined to imagining God as residing in a building with stained glass windows. In a recent "Family Circus" cartoon, one child said that God's hardest job was seeing the world through the windows of his house. I'm sure the cartoonist did not intend for it to be used by a UU to illustrate what she found good about Unitarian-Universalism, and wrong with Christianity!
All the great religious figures, Abraham, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Lao Tse, send remarkably similar messages of regard for one's fellow humans and a Golden Rule approach to living in communities. This similarity can mean one of two things. That there is a god up--out--there somewhere who reveals him/her self to humans in ways that differ only slightly. OR That the human mind is similar in all cultures and creates deities in its own image. The psychologist Carl Jung described a universal consciousness. Maybe the reason for the similarities of all the world's religions lies there.
One reason agnostics accept the second explanation is that followers of all the religious leaders emphasize the differences, not the similarities. Christianity and Islam are particularly intent on the idea that they have the one true faith and all others are 'infidels' to be either converted or killed. It seems inconsistent with the image of the Deity that he/she wants followers to insist that their particular image is the only correct one. It seems more likely, then, that humans have created the deities rather than the other way around.
An alternative perspective that intrigues me is that there are many deities. They reside in plants, animals, weather phenomena and Earth itself. The brother/sister-hood of humans thus extends to the entire natural world, and a "Golden Rule" applies to all beings and to the Universe. Formerly dismissed as "Paganism," this view is now the foundation of Earth-based spirituality. When we view the universe in this way, we are less inclined to want to dominate nature than do those who accept the usual Western attitude toward the natural world. When I focus on this belief, I feel connection with my Scandinavian pre-Christian ancestors, especially at holidays such as the Winter Solstice.
When confronted with the God survey a few weeks ago, I took the Chinese restaurant approach. You know, one from "A," one from "B." It seems I am a "strict" agnostic, that is, I don't think we can ever know whether God exists. I believe in the Pantheistic statement that Nature is the source of revelation about things religious. God and nature are one. And, as the Process Theists state, God, or perhaps gods, is/are interdependent with the world and developing with it. All those windows through which to draw ideas and inspiration!
The power of our UU religion lies in its diversity. Regardless of your personal answers to the "God" question, look out the windows. Let your mind and spirit flow into the Universe. Draw its strength in to you.
BENEDICTION:
For all who seek God,
may God go with you.
For all who embrace life,
may life return your affection.
For all who seek a right path,
may a way be found,
and the courage to take it, step by step.
Shalom, Salaam, Blessed be, Amen.
-Amen and shalom!
