We live in a bad age for prophesy. Any man or woman who in the modern day claims to have personal revelation from God is rightly considered a lunatic. The secret esoteric knowledge of Scientology, for example, is used as a punchline in South Park. Old prophesy doesn’t fare much better than the new stuff; ancient religious texts are constantly being picked apart for logical inconsistencies, of which there are many. The response to “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet” might be “Why does the Quran tell men to hit their wives with a toothbrush?” In such a skeptical culture as ours, new revelation as well as old can only be debunked and derided.
Even still, we find ourselves drawn to religion. New Religious Movements constantly crop up throughout the Western world, even when their critics label them as cults. A few adventurous people have abandoned the dominant universalizing religions for new kinds of heathenry and folk practice — About 680,000 people in the United States identify as Pagans or Wiccans. Those who do not deliberately apostasy themselves from their mothers’ religion often still identify with it — There are more “Secular Jews” and “Cultural Catholics” than people drawn to either creed by pure piety. Despite the development of an increasingly secular world culture, the thirst for faith remains; only few militant atheists adopt the anti-religious radicalism of the Jacobins or Bolsheviks.
Perhaps there is something innate to the human spirit that drives us to revere the world around us, adopt moral codes, and consecrate ourselves with holy rituals.
Yet our skepticism towards religion remains. It’s impossible to prove any religious texts to be true, yet it’s very easy to prove them false. Classical apologetics provide no help. Many of the faithful will cite the cosmological or ontological reasons for God’s existence, but these sort of arguments only bring us closer to a dull Deism. There is a logical gap between the rationalist justifications for monotheism and belief in divinely revealed religious doctrine, which can only be bridged by faith.
Perhaps it’s lack of knowledge itself that can provide the basis for faith in Divinity.
Agnosticism was coined as the opposite of Gnosticism — The belief in a divine knowledge that provides salvation from the material world. My religious views are exactly antithetical to Gnosticism. There is no esoteric knowledge that will rapture us from our pitiful material existence. Nothing you read from a holy book or learn from an ancient sage can reveal the divine mysteries of the universe. Rather, it is existence itself that is a divine mystery. The unknown God pervades every aspect of our lives.
I refer to a ‘God’ because my language and the religious tradition of my mothers require that I do so. But Divinity need not take the shape of a personal God, as in Christianity. This Divinity could take the shape of Spinoza’s Being, or Hegel's Absolute, or a collection of Celtic deities. But crucially I do not know, and I believe that you cannot know the nature of this Divinity at all.
You might say that a theology based on ignorance is a religious dead end — that Agnosticism cannot provide the moral code or system of rituals needed to live a religious life. I disagree. First is that ignorance is the basis for curiosity and awe. The young child who doesn’t yet know how to spell his name and the atomic physicist on the verge of identifying new principles are both full of wonder that there is much about the world they do not know. To know your own ignorance is to be wise, hence the famous self-doubt of Socrates. Second is that a lack of metaphyiscal conviction allows any given ritual to become meaningful. Does the bread and wine really turn into the Body of Christ? I’m not sure, but gathered in this room with these people who believe it does, then it may. To practice culture with your own fellow-subjects is to share collectively in the divine mystery that surrounds us all. Third is that doubt is necessary for any rigorous philosophical or scientific inquiry. Descartes established his first principle: cogito ergo sum. To be aware that you are aware is to build the foundation for reason. Doubtful awareness can bring us to new heights of knowledge is ways that prophetic revelation never could.
I invite anyone reading this to consider at length their own ignorance, and their place in the world as an ignorant subject. Meditate on it. You will come away happier and wiser.