There are a lot of "ultimate questions" that humans have: why does something exist rather than nothing, why is the universe the way that it is, things of that nature.
Whenever we ask "Why?" about any subject whatsoever, we will reach the boundaries of human knowledge in just a few iterations. That's always fascinated me and has motivated my lifelong interest in philosophy.
Now, I don't want to draw a caricature of theists and theism here, so let me couch my words carefully: some theists have a tendency to smugly tell us non-theists, "I have the answers, and you don't."
True. Of course atheists can often be guilty of the same sin, when they fall prey to scientism and to the belief that science will not only provide the deepest kind of answers, but also that those answers will be favorable to their atheism.
That is where I (an agnostic) most often part company with the atheists.
I'm just not convinced that this is the case: theism doesn't ultimately explain anything.
Let me pick some example.
"Why does anything exist rather than nothing?"
One might follow natural theology's traditional course and simply
define 'God' as whatever the answer is to that question. If we do that, and if we accept the principle of sufficient reason, then it becomes trivial to concoct a logical proof for the existence of God.
Of course that doesn't provide us with a
mechanism, an account of how God accomplished it, of how this hypothetical ultimate explanation that we have decided to call 'God' actually works. But not all 'scientific' answers are mechanistic. Physics often 'explains' things by citing various purported 'laws of nature', without trying to explain the nature and origin of those 'laws' or exactly how they exert their control over natural events. 'It's just how things are'.
Ultimately it's just as mysterious, and not a whole lot more enlightening, than theism's more traditional accounts. It's just the hypothesis that natural events fall into predictable patterns, it isn't an account of the nature and origin of those patterns.
But does this really explain anything at all?
It doesn't in any way that's deeply satisfying to me. But that being said, I don't want to use it to bash theists. Like I said, I don't think that atheists can do a whole lot better. The theistic accounts at least have the virtue of embedding events in narratives that give the events of life meaning (or the illusion of meaning). It embeds the events of life in a context that's far more emotionally evocative than the arid abstractions of applied mathematics.
In my opinion, the most intellectually defensible position to take is probably to admit that we don't have the answers to the deepest questions. What's more, I doubt if human beings ever will. (I can't know that of course, but it's my intuition.)
It's important to note that the various theistic traditions, Jewish, Christian, Islamic and very notably Hindu, all provide resources pointing to how an agnostic theism might be possible. Typically these are motivated by the felt need to preserve God's
transcencence. But they do arguably provide good resources just the same for the more philosophically inclined theist.
Apophatic theology - Wikipedia
