The Lecture
This is perhaps Ingersoll’s most personal and philosophical work — a direct, clear, and moving account of why he came to call himself an agnostic, what that word means, and why he considers intellectual honesty the highest moral virtue. It was delivered as a lecture across the country and widely reprinted.
What Is an Agnostic?
An agnostic is a man who neither believes nor disbelieves in the existence of a personal God. He does not know; and he does not pretend to know.
The word was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, and it is a good word. It comes from the Greek a-gnosis — without knowledge. An agnostic is one who says: “I do not have knowledge of this; I cannot know.”
The Christian says: “I believe.” The atheist says: “I do not believe.” The agnostic says: “I do not know.” Each of these is an honest position, if sincerely held. The dishonest position is to say “I know,” when you do not know — to say “I believe,” when you have never examined whether what you believe is true.
How I Came to Be an Agnostic
My father was a minister. I was brought up in an atmosphere of religious orthodoxy. I was taught to believe in the God of the Old Testament, in the inspiration of the Scriptures, in the divine authority of the Church.
I tried to believe. I was not a rebel by temperament. I had no desire to cause pain to those who cared about me. I wanted to believe what they believed.
But I could not.
I could not believe that God had created billions of human beings over thousands of years, and that the vast majority of them — who had never heard of Christ, who had been born in Asia or Africa or the Americas long before the gospel reached them — were condemned to eternal torment for their ignorance.
This seemed to me not the action of a good being. It seemed to me cruel.
I could not believe that an omnipotent God had chosen to reveal himself only to a small tribe in Palestine, leaving the rest of humanity in the dark. If God were truly all-powerful and all-loving, could he not have made himself known to all?
I could not believe that the God who created the universe — who set the stars in motion, who breathed life into matter — was deeply concerned about whether the people of ancient Palestine ate pork, or wore garments of mixed fibers, or worked on Saturday.
I could not believe that the doctrine of eternal punishment was consistent with a God of perfect goodness. No finite sin justifies infinite punishment. No doctrine of endless torment for honest error is compatible with any definition of justice I could understand.
And so, after long thought, and with great reluctance, I concluded that I did not believe. And I concluded that the most honest name for this position was: agnostic.
What I Do Know
I want to be clear: agnosticism is not nihilism. It is not despair. It is not the position that nothing matters.
I know many things with great confidence.
I know that love is good. I have seen it in the faces of my wife, my daughters, my friends. I have felt it, I have given it, I have received it. Whatever the metaphysics of love, the fact of it is beyond dispute.
I know that suffering is real, and that the relief of suffering is good. I do not need a theology to tell me that a child in pain deserves comfort, or that a family in poverty deserves help. This knowledge is written in our nature.
I know that reason is the best tool we have for understanding the world. Not perfect — reason can err, and has erred — but better than any alternative.
I know that the pursuit of knowledge is one of the highest human activities. I know that honest inquiry, however uncomfortable its conclusions, is more admirable than comfortable self-deception.
“We are not endeavoring to chain the future, but to free it.”
On Honesty
The deepest conviction of my life is that intellectual honesty is the highest virtue.
It is the hardest virtue. It requires us to say, against all the pressure of tradition and authority and social comfort: “I do not know.” It requires us to change our minds when the evidence demands it. It requires us to hold our convictions lightly, always open to revision.
This is difficult. The human mind craves certainty. It is uncomfortable to live with open questions — to say “I don’t know” about the most important things: whether there is a God, whether there is an afterlife, what the universe ultimately is.
But the alternative — false certainty, pretended faith, the performance of belief in things we do not actually believe — seems to me not only dishonest but genuinely dangerous. A society that trains its citizens to pretend, to perform, to claim certainty they do not have — such a society erodes the very faculty of honest inquiry that is the source of all its progress.
The Religion of Humanity
I have sometimes been asked what I believe in, if not in the God of orthodox religion.
I believe in humanity. I believe that we are here, in this world, together, and that our duty is to each other. I believe that every human being is worthy of dignity and consideration. I believe that every child deserves an education, that every person deserves freedom of thought and conscience, that every man and woman has the right to live by the light of their own reason.
I believe in the family — in the love of parent for child, of husband for wife, of friends for one another. I believe these are the real goods of human life, the things that make it worth living.
I believe in the beauty of the world — in art and music and literature, in the wonder of science, in the grandeur of the natural order.
These are enough. They are more than enough. They are everything.
“Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.”
A Final Word
I do not ask you to become an agnostic. I ask only that you be honest — that you examine what you actually believe, and why, and whether the evidence supports it.
Honest doubt is worth more than dishonest faith. A question mark is more admirable than a false period.
I am an agnostic because I am honest. If that is a crime, I plead guilty.
The complete text of “Why I Am an Agnostic” is available through the Secular Web and Project Gutenberg.