The inescapable paradox for agnostics is that, with increased knowledge, especially in the past hundred years or so, we have seen corresponding greater ignorance and uncertainty. Only a century ago the Milky Way was thought to be the entire cosmos, and now we know there are a hundred billion observable galaxies. The more we have learned about the universe, the more mysterious it has proven to be, and we now have the respected hypothesis that there are perhaps many universes. Quantum physics gives us the multiverse hypothesis, which, like God, is plausible but presently beyond proof.
As we have applied historical and archaeological scholarship to our understanding of the scriptures and holy books, it has undermined faith and created greater uncertainty about what has long been regarded as the word of God. This has not been the case among what I call the true believers, however, those irretrievably tied to fundamentalist Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, or religious Islam. Most true believers, it would seem, have remained immovable in their faith even as knowledge has advanced and made uncertainty appear more certain and literal interpretations of holy texts impossible to accept without the bulwark of strong and unbending faith. Religious dogmatism has paradoxically helped to ignite greater and wider secularism, as well as prompted new clerical explanations and interpretations anchored in metaphor and myth. But this dogmatism has also hardened into a more unrelenting insistence on the word of God even in the wake of all the uncertainty and despite the alleged word of God being available only in translation.
This is a book for seekers who long for answers. Answers, however, lead to some of the most vexing philosophical questions of our civilization’s history, and so the book is designed as an investigation into the nature of spiritual-truth-seeking and as an aid in the quest for a moral code. It is also a book about agnosticism. Much polemical writing on atheism, and on perceived religious or spiritual truth, exists in the world; but, I discovered, there is little of especially recent vintage that offers a deep or truly meaningful exploration of agnosticism. The relevance and legitimacy of agnostic thinking was important for me to explore and write about. As I plunged deeper into the subject, I realized I also wanted to consider some of the major agnostic thinkers, such as Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas H. Huxley, who gave us the word agnostic, and Robert Ingersoll, who was known as “the great agnostic,” as well as the celebrated philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was inclined to call himself both an atheist and an agnostic.
The agnostic waits to find spiritual truth and often, in waiting, envies those who no longer wait or who maintain certainty. This includes those who refuse to subscribe to any individual religion or belief but feel certain they have discovered a higher or ennobling spiritual truth or an entrance to it. This, then, is a book about waiting and seeking, about agnosticism, good and evil, spiritual envy, and what may quite possibly be life’s most important questions.
As a boy I used to imagine that God was watching over me and could do anything he wanted with me, could move the chess pieces of my life to any spot on the board he chose, but would not, as Shakespeare would have it in King Lear, play with me as a wanton boy plays with flies. I trusted him. How could I not? God suffused my young life. I felt he (I use the male pronoun for convenience and because he was solely a he to me) was a companion, a presence with whom I could share my most secret thoughts and fears and wants.
My parents were believers, and while my doubts spread as I grew into young manhood, my mother was certain that God marked down even our smallest lies and indiscretions. She would speak of God as the creator who had filled the world with an amazing range and variety of people, and she spoke with near wonder at how the differences in people were what God handed out at birth — talents and abilities, defects and disabilities, handsomeness and ugliness. To her, the beauty of the divinity was in the wondrous diversity and breadth of human creations, the miraculous feats of a master builder. “God made no two people the same. Not even twins,” she would say. “And,” she assured me, “God gave you many blessings he did not give to others.”
My supposed good looks and intelligence and winning personality, which a loving Jewish mother complimented and brightened at, were gifts handed to me at birth by God himself. Such notions sustained me like mother’s milk. They were difficult to shake even as I was increasingly drawn away from belief. When as a young child I asked my mother how I was born and came to be, she had a stock answer: “Your father planted the seeds, and we prayed to God.” So I imagined my parents getting a package of seeds like the ones on the rack of flower and vegetable seeds sold at the pharmacy in our Cleveland Heights neighborhood. And for many years the facts of life to me meant planting seeds, as one did in order to grow roses or asparagus, but with a requisite preconception prayer to God. In my mind, childbirth depended on God’s allowing planted seeds to grow. My entering the world was the result of God answering my parents’ prayers.
As a boy I liked feeling God was my father. I loved my biological father and tried to honor him as the commandment dictated. But he worked terribly long hours and came home too tired to do anything but eat supper, read the newspaper, and head off to sleep. If he told me he loved me, he did so only on rare occasions, usually when I was being disciplined or if I became ill. He would say, “You know your father loves you.” It was never “I love you.” It was always “Your father loves you.” I desperately wanted his attention. I wanted above all in life to know he cared about me and loved me. it was the same with God. I wanted to know he approved of me. I wanted to make both him and my earthly father proud. How could I be certain of God’s love or my father’s? How much did my heavenly and earthly fathers even like me?
I had an imaginary friend who had a full name — Michael Berber. I also had Sammy Kaye. Doubtless out of father hunger, I announced one day that Sammy Kaye, the bandleader, was my second father. God was my imaginary friend, too, but he was also, like Sammy Kaye, my imaginary father. Was he imaginary? He surely seemed real to me then, even if I vested him with a reality formed from my imagination, a reality that many who exalt art tell us is superior to the reality we identify as the reality. As a kid I watched Miracle on 34th Street, with Maureen O’Hara and Natalie Wood, the warm and bathetic Christmas story of Kris Kringle, played by Edmund Gwenn, who claimed he was the real Santa Claus. When the child played by Natalie Wood sat on his lap and asked him about the reality of Santa Claus, he told her there was another nation called the imagination, a line I fancied just as I fancied the sound of the word Godspeed, which concluded many orations. Was hunger for God simply a result of an oedipal need for a strong father who could be relied on for whatever one needed or longed for? Was the God whom I felt was my heavenly father merely a production of my seeded imagination? Was there such a thing as Godspeed?
When I write that God suffused my young boyhood, I mean it. The words under God were officially added to the Pledge of Allegiance when I was a boy, despite the many people who insisted on keeping them out. In courtroom television dramas like Perry Mason, men and women testified in court after putting a hand on the Bible and swearing to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help them God. As youngsters we argued about God questions with a seriousness that bordered on passion. We did not argue about whether God existed, because for nearly all of us his existence was a given. What did it mean to take the Lord’s name in vain? Were