Agnosticism understood, or why I’m not an atheist

Do you know what the difference between atheism and agnosticism is? It’s pretty simple. Atheists say, “There is no god,” while agnostics say, “I don’t know it there’s a god.” A simple look at the etymology of the two words can help. Atheist is basically Greek for ‘having no god’. Agnostic is basically Greek for ‘having no knowledge’.

Atheism has become the default ‘religion’ for people who don’t believe in Jehovah, Vishnu, Allah, Waheguru, baby Jesus, Santa Claus, or Xenu, and I can definitely see where they’re coming from. It’s pretty easy to step a little too far and say, “These religions are preposterous fairy tales. Clearly they are all wrong and there is no god.” But remember, the opposite of something wrong is not always right.

I see atheism as something reactionary, whereas agnosticism is born out of true critical thought. Socrates once said, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” This is the tenet upon which agnosticism is built. The fact is that our ignorance is a universe unto itself, and it takes a good deal of critical though to understand this.

Our high-dimensional world

According to our primitive senses, we live in a 4-dimensional world. Three of these are spatial dimensions — if we look at a cardboard box, or a desk, or a fridge, we can see that it has height, depth, and width. The fourth dimension that we perceive is time, and it’s no small feat to truly get that time is a dimension just like height, depth, and width.

Now imagine somebody who just couldn’t comprehend that there are more than two dimensions (if it makes it more plausible, let’s say this person has no depth perception and cannot move their head in any way). They argue, “I can see left and right, that’s the first dimension, and I can see up and down, that’s the second dimension.” You try to explain the concept of depth, and they don’t understand. You try to explain the concept of time as a dimension, and they really don’t understand. Don’t even start about relativity theory because you don’t even understand that, so how on earth could they? They see life in this world like we see a photograph. Unchanging. Flat. An accurate but unliving, unenlightened representation.

But we’re not so enlightened ourselves, seeing the world in all its four-dimensional grandeur. Our prophets (physicists) have spoken with god (the universe) and apparently there are likely between 10 and 26 dimensions. Life as we know it is a flat representation of reality. A photograph. An unliving snapshot. We live in this universe and we cannot even begin to fathom the lush and vivid truth.