Why I'm Agnostic

How's this for a headline? "Vatican May Drop Concept of Limbo."

For those of you not up on your medieval Catholic doctrine, limbo is the place where unbaptized babies go when they die, a place "free from the fires of hell but without the rewards of heaven." In other words, the Vatican is currently debating whether or not to do away with an entire metaphysical realm. You know, it's one thing for our esteemed theologians to reverse themselves with respect to normative pronouncements about how we should live our lives. If the Vatican decides that eating meat on Friday is no longer a hell-worthy offense, well, that's one thing. But it's quite another thing to disavow a purely descriptive doctrine about the actual state of the world. The concept of limbo isn't some obscure ethical prohibition, it's supposed to be an actual place, like Heaven or Hell. You can't just do away with an entire realm without--at least to some degree--undermining the credibility of your entire enterprise. If you religious folks have ever wondered why so many of us are agnostic, this is why. We're convinced that the great religions of the world are just making things up as they go along.

To be fair to the Vatican, this is one of those 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' kind of situations (pardon the pun). That's because the doctrine of limbo has always been a bit of an embarrassment to serious-minded Catholics. The concept was a crude way of dealing with a major disconnect between Catholic doctrine and people's intuitive notions of fairness. Catholic doctrine said that you could not ascend to Heaven unless you were baptized. But that posed a significant conundrum, particularly in an era of tragically high infant mortality rates: what happened to babies who died before they could be baptized? Surely these innocents would not be banished to Hell for all eternity. To solve this dilemma, some early theologians (who were too clever by half) came up with the idea of limbo, a realm that was neither Heaven nor Hell, a strange place where, apparently, the souls of tiny unbaptized infants float around in a perpetual state of, you guessed it, limbo. I can see why modern Catholic theologians are so eager to sweep this idea under the rug. But it's not so easy; the fact that a purely descriptive doctrine can be voted into existence and then voted out again is an embarrassment to say the least.

Let me take a step back and explain why I consider myself an agnostic. I think we can all concede that there is no empirical way of demonstrating the existence of God or an afterlife. If there was, we'd all be believers. I also think it's fair to say that most people have not spoken personally with God and therefore cannot know from personal experience alone that God exists. (I'm positive God has never spoken to me). So, for the average person (and I suspect all sane people) religious knowledge is based on neither empirical evidence nor first hand experience. Instead, religious people accept as authoritative the accounts of others who claim to have, in one way or another, communicated directly with God. This rather long list includes, among others, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Joseph Smith: all people who lived and died long before our time.

Now think about how strange that is. If someone came up to you and told you that God had spoken to him and told him the secrets of the universe, would you believe him? Of course not. What if that person was someone you knew well and respected? I suspect that the answer for virtually everyone--including the most religious among us--would still be no. Yet many of these same people are perfectly willing to accept as truth the very same kind of claims made by long-dead historical figures about whom we know next to nothing.

And this might be easier to accept if everyone in the world followed the teachings of the same prophet. Unfortunately, history is replete with examples of men (and a few women) who have claimed to have a direct line to God, and these prophets have given rise to all of the world's major religions (as well as countless minor ones). Clearly they can't all be right.

So pretend you were not born into any particular religious tradition. On what basis would you even begin to determine which of these people were lunatics and which were true messengers of God? What possible evidence would you use to evaluate the relative credibility of, say, Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an atheist. I think that our current state of knowledge about the universe leaves plenty of room for a Higher Power of some sort. I don't claim to know the answers to life's eternal questions, and frankly, I find it very hard to believe that anyone else really knows either. I do know that we as human beings have been blessed with the ability to reason, a gift which allows us (and compels us) to evaluate all the information reasonably available to us. In the absence of any empirical evidence or first hand experience, and with only questionable and competing authorities from which to draw any relevant information, I choose to remain agnostic. You may disagree with me, but can you really say I'm being irrational? If there is a God, I find it hard to believe He would penalize people for exercising their God-given ability to think for themselves.