Agnosticism
Agnosticism In The Twentieth Century
The scientific and religious creed of agnosticism died with Leslie Stephen in 1904. However, the philosophical and theological questions around which it was based, especially about the relationship between the observable and the unobservable, persisted into the twentieth century (although not generally under the banner of agnosticism).
The logical positivism of the earlier twentieth century, along with more recent antirealist philosophies of science (such as Bas van Fraassen's "constructive empiricism" as developed in his 1980 book, The Scientific Image), have contained some of the radically empiricist elements of agnosticism as endorsed by Huxley (and derived from Hume and Mill). These philosophers have insisted that all true knowledge must be grounded in experience and that since we cannot have direct experience of unobservable substances, entities, laws, or causes, we must treat them as, at best, useful fictions that serve as shorthand for empirical generalizations. Logical positivists dismissed all "metaphysical" discourse, which claimed to describe underlying realities, as meaningless. In this they agreed both with Comtean positivists and with agnostics.
In the realm of religion and theology, the problems that were central to the agnostics—especially the difficulty of reconciling religion and morality with a scientific worldview—continued to occupy religious thinkers (see Dixon). Some, such as Thomas Huxley's grandson Julian Sorell Huxley (1887–1975), put forward "evolutionary humanism" as a scientific religion based on reason and morality but without revelation. Others took a similar approach but while remaining within the Christian tradition. Don Cupitt, for instance, in books such as Taking Leave of God (1980) and The Sea of Faith (1984), adopted a "nonrealist" metaphysics and articulated a post-theological version of the Christian religion. For Cupitt, himself a minister in the Church of England, the claims of Christian theology should not be taken to refer to unseen supernatural realities, such as a personal God, but to be expressions of human values and aspirations.
So scientists seeking to give expression to a religious impulse while retaining their intellectual integrity along with theologians looking for an interpretation of the gospel that will resonate in a secular and scientific world have both continued the religious project that the Victorian agnostics had begun.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
Blinderman, Charles, and David Joyce, eds. "The Huxley File." Available at http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley. This is an invaluable online resource at Clark University, providing information on Huxley's life and works and access to hundreds of Huxley's published and unpublished writings.
Cupitt, Don. Taking Leave of God. London: SCM, 1980.
Huxley, Thomas H. "Agnosticism," "Agnosticism: A Rejoinder," and "Agnosticism and Christianity." Nineteenth Century 25 (1889): 169–194, 481–504, 937–964. Reprinted in Thomas H. Huxley, Collected Essays, vol. 5: Science and Christian Tradition. London: Macmillan, 1894.
——. Collected Essays. 9 vols. London: Macmillan, 1893–1894.
Pyle, Andrew, ed. Agnosticism: Contemporary Responses to Spencer and Huxley. Bristol: Thoemmes, 1995.
Spencer, Herbert. First Principles. London: Williams and Norgate, 1862. Especially pt. 1.
Van Fraassen, Bas. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Budd, Susan. Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society, 1850–1960. London: Heinemann, 1977.
Cockshut, A. O. J. The Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought, 1840–1890. London: Collins, 1964.
Desmond, Adrian. Huxley: From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest. London: Penguin, 1998.
Dixon, Thomas. "Scientific Atheism as a Faith Tradition." Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33 (2002): 337–359.
Helmstadter, Richard J., and Bernard Lightman, eds. Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Lightman, Bernard. "Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism: The Strange History of a Failed Rhetorical Strategy." British Journal for the History of Science 35 (2002): 271–289.
——. "Ideology, Evolution, and Late-Victorian Agnostic Popularizers." In History, Humanity, and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, edited by James Moore. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
——. The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Peel, J. D. Y. Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
Turner, Frank M. Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974.
——. Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
White, Paul. Thomas Huxley: Making the "Man of Science." Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Thomas Dixon
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