I'll begin by distinguishing two kinds of agnosticism. TAP, or
Temporary Agnosticism in Practice, is the legitimate fence-sitting
where there really is a definite answer, one way or the other, but we
so far lack the evidence to reach it (or don't understand the
evidence, or haven't time to read the evidence, etc.). TAP would be
a reasonable stance towards the Permian extinction. There is a
truth out there and one day we hope to know it, though for the
moment we don't.
But there is also a deeply inescapable kind of fence-sitting, which
I shall call PAP (Permanent Agnosticism in Principle). The fact that
the acronym spells a word used by that old school preacher is
(almost) accidental. The PAP style of agnosticism is appropriate for
questions that can never be answered, no matter how much
evidence we gather, because the very idea of evidence is not applicable.
The question exists on a different plane, or in a different
dimension, beyond the zones where evidence can reach. An
example might be that philosophical chestnut, the question whether
you see red as I do. Maybe your red is my green, or something
completely different from any colour that I can imagine.
Philosophers cite this question as one that can never be answered,
no matter what new evidence might one day become available. And
some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced - too eagerly
in my view - that the question of God's existence belongs in the
forever inaccessible PAP category. From this, as we shall see, they
often make the illogical deduction that the hypothesis of God's
existence, and the hypothesis of his non-existence, have exactly
equal probability of being right. The view that I shall defend is very
different: agnosticism about the existence of God belongs firmly in
the temporary or TAP category. Either he exists or he doesn't. It is
a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile
we can say something pretty strong about the probability.
In the history of ideas, there are examples of questions being
answered that had earlier been judged forever out of science's
reach. In 1835 the celebrated French philosopher Auguste Comte
wrote, of the stars: 'We shall never be able to study, by any method,
their chemical composition or their mineralogical structure.' Yet
even before Comte had set down these words, Fraunhofer had
begun using his spectroscope to analyse the chemical composition
of the sun. Now spectroscopists daily confound Comte's
agnosticism with their long-distance analyses of the precise
chemical composition of even distant stars.29 Whatever the exact
status of Comte's astronomical agnosticism, this cautionary tale
suggests, at the very least, that we should hesitate before proclaiming
the eternal verity of agnosticism too loudly. Nevertheless, when
it comes to God, a great many philosophers and scientists are glad
to do so....
