Gospel & Universe 🧩 Introduction
Core Beliefs
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Change, Being, & Science
While agnostics avoid doctrines and final conclusions, they do have core beliefs. They’ll scrap these beliefs if they’re struck by a lightning bolt of Reason or Revelation, yet for the moment they’re beliefs nonetheless. These beliefs are largely grounded in physical or empirical reality, yet they allow for the possibility of supernatural, metaphysical, or spiritual dimensions. Given the overall contingency of agnostic belief, the following five “core beliefs” should be taken with five large grains of salt:
1. Everything changes and hence our understanding of everything also changes. To insist on universal or fixed truths in such a context is, in time, to invite the mockery of Time.
2. We’re basically animals with amazingly complex nervous systems. Our brains allow us to think, to become self-aware, and to create ideas about where we come from and who we are. Our brains also allow us to debate these ideas and to consider alternatives. Since neurology (and medical science in general) hasn’t yet fully explained the way the brain and body work, we can’t exclude the possibility that we’re capable of experiencing — or making contact with — dimensions or entities that are beyond verification. We clearly live in a 4-D world, yet we can’t rule out the possibility of what Mircea Eliade calls hierophanies or irruptions of the sacred into our world. Nor can we rule out possible synchronous states between our finest perceptions, feelings, and thoughts and otherworldly patterns or states, be these of waves or quantum states or some other form of pattern, force, or essence.
3. Since astronomy has explored only a tiny percent of the universe, we remain ignorant about the largest parameters of material reality, of which we’re only a tiny part. We live in a world of constant change, and these changes take place within a tiny fraction of both the spatial and temporal framework of the universe. We can’t claim to know what realities exist sextillions of parsecs from Earth, and we can’t claim to know how what’s above us affects or determines what’s around and within us. Any gospel about the nature of the universe, or the relation of the universe to life on Earth, is premature.
“The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant, all that remains of a tremendous stellar explosion. Observers in China and Japan recorded the supernova nearly 1,000 years ago, in 1054. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)” — link here
4. Although science hasn’t fully explained the brain, and has only started to explain the universe, it still appears to be the most reliable method of arriving at truth. Science’s domain is vast, since it includes observations and speculations about things we don’t yet understand. In this sense, the open exploration of scientists is very close to the open exploration of agnostics. Here it’s very important to distinguish the scientist from the positivist. A scientist can be theistic, agnostic, or atheist, whereas positivists argue that only the scientific method can guarantee truth. Agnostics cherish the scientific method, yet they aren’t convinced that science can or will explain everything.
5. Because of the gaps in our knowledge, and because of the limitations of our senses and our means of verification, agnostics believe that we should remain open to all possible sources of information and to all sorts of ideas and experiences. We should even remain open to religious ideas which contradict our records of history and other writers, as well as to ideas which contradict the laws of physics. While agnostics believe in these records and laws, they doubt the completeness of our understanding. Just as we discovered the two libraries at Nineveh in the middle of the 19th century, and just as we discovered the Dead Sea scrolls in the middle of the 20th century, so we might find other ground-breaking sources in the years to come. While agnostics are in no way convinced about religious assertions, they’re not willing to close the door on the possibilities of religion. They often have a sense that science and religion are different methods of getting at the wonder of existence. Even when they dismiss literal readings of religion, there remains a great deal of mythic, symbolic, and poetic value.
Not to mention Beauty. Agnostics tend to read scripture as literature, and to see religion as art. Not surprisingly, many agnostics also see literature and art as religion — in the sense that they awaken us to the beauty that lies in the sensual yet also to a Beauty that projects itself further, as if on an epic sentiment, toward the open sea.
