The Agnostic’s Hope
Suppose you are a religious agnostic. You find yourself thinking it is possible that karma is real whether or not this or that branch of Hinduism describes it correctly, it is possible that there is a personal God such as preached in Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, it is possible that there exists a “moral arc” to the universe such that the universe tends toward justice, and it is possible that all these versions of transcendence are false. The last option is what philosophers call “naturalism,” the doctrine that the natural world described by science is the whole world. As an agnostic, you think that all these possibilities are possibly true, though you might also think some one of them much more likely than the others. Your belief that some religious doctrine might be true distinguishes you from the atheist, who says we can know that such doctrines are false.
What might you, as a religious agnostic, hope for?
Traditionally, philosophers have said that hope combines desire and belief, in the following way. First, we hope for things we want or think will be good for us. Since Socrates, philosophers have said that people pursue the good, or at least what they think is good. The various religions offer a variety of object-states (to borrow a technical term from Andrew Brei) that people might hope for. In Hinduism, one might hope for reincarnation at a higher level of being. A Muslim might hope for resurrection to a blissful garden of delights. A Christian might hope for the Kingdom of God to come. All of these are images of a future people might desire.
Second, hope requires a belief that the desired good is possible. The probability of the desired object-state must be greater than zero and less than one. If some desired outcome is certain, we don’t hope for it, because it’s already here. If the desired outcome is impossible, we might wish for it, but we can’t be said to hope for it.
It seems to follow that the religious agnostic may hope for any of the object-states proferred by the various religions he thinks might be true. He does not need to believe the religious doctrines are likely to be true, only that they might be true. In the extreme case, the religious agnostic might think philosophical naturalism has a 90% probability of being true—and still hope for a good reincarnation, a garden of delights, or the kingdom of God.
Now, some philosophers—Friedrich Nietzsche or Simon Critchley—may advise us that such hopes are dangerous, especially if we let low probability hopes influence important decisions. If President Obama based policy decisions on “audacious hope” (Obama’s campaign slogan in 2008), he invited disaster. So wrote Critchley. These philosophers advice is, “Don’t get your hopes up.” If some desired object-state has a low probability, don’t let that desired outcome affect your decisions.
Adrienne Martin argues that sometimes it makes perfect sense to “hope against hope.” I may judge that my desired object-state is unlikely—e.g. the cancer drug offered by the doctors may have a one-in-ten thousand chance of curing me—and still I may decide, based on the importance of that desired object-state to “license” myself to hope for it.
I have written extensively about the debate between the cautious view advocated by Critchley and the more expansive position taken by Martin. My book, Understanding Hope, will come out this year. For now, though, I will set aside that question.
My point now is this: the agnostic may hope for religiously inspired object-states. Whether or not she should is a matter of practical reason. The person who cannot hope for such good things is the atheist.
To be consistent, the atheist must shun any hope proffered by a religious system he knows to be false. As a naturalist, he knows (or believes based on overwhelming evidence), in the words of Carl Sagan, “The cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.”
Sometimes it is hard to pin down philosophical naturalists as to what that means. Is it possible that alien species have invented resuscitation machines to bring dead people back to life? Some naturalists might say yes, since advanced alien technology is possible; but with the same breath they would deny that God might resurrect people. I leave it to the naturalist to specify what it is she thinks does not exist. But once she does, she should not hope for object-states based on definite unrealities.
Thus, I think, there is an important difference between the hopes of the religious agnostic and the atheist.
