The Practice of Agnosticism

This book argues for agnosticism as a practice: one which, contrary to its popular image, demands courage, and is not just about God.

This book argues for agnosticism as a practice: one which, contrary to its popular image, demands courage, and is not just about God. Agnostics defy the entrenched weight of opposing false dualities, where traditional thinking presents us with the unnecessarily restricted framing of only two options. Instead, we can reframe: applying provisionality and incrementality as an alternative to opposing positive and negative metaphysical absolutes. In addition to the debate about God, agnosticism gives an alternative to other metaphysical dualities, such as realism v idealism, mind v body, and freewill v determinism.

The Middle Way Philosophy series, of which this forms a part, has built up a case for the Middle Way as an alternative to absolutized thinking in human judgement, drawing on Buddhist practice, embodied meaning, systems, psychology and neuroscience as well as philosophy. This book then applies the Middle Way more fully to resolving the range of metaphysical dualities that have entrenched absolute thinking in philosophy – not by opposing negative metaphysical claims (like atheism or idealism) to positive ones, but by offering a genuinely practical alternative supported by evidence from a range of disciplines.

• By (author) Robert M. Ellis