UCTAA churchlight

Site Search via Google

Talk Back 42
Errors in the Articles of Faith

by Mark Rotchell

To open a discussion on this article, please use the contact page to provide your comments.

I have been an agnostic for many years now and have only just stumbled accross your site in the last few days. I offer great praise to your efforts, and thank you for generating a e-home for my beliefs.

As an agnostic, however, I feel I am duty bound to make a few comments about the articles of faith.

Article one suggests that the existance or not of a supreme being is unknown. I believe this to be a statement of faith as there may be people in the world who have been presented with complete and unrefutable evidence of the existance or not of a god(s); many claim to. I do not have any evidence that their experiences were false and so claiming that they do not know is irrational and un-agnostic. Thus the existance or not of a higher being is not necessarily unknown. An agnostic can only rationally say that they themselves do not know, not that it is unknown in general. I pick the same fault with "unknowable"; again there is no evidence to show that eventually an answer could not be found. An agnostic can merely say that they themselves, with the limitations of their own intellect, can not reach any rational conlusion about the existance or not of a higher being with the evidence they have encountered, nor can they claim this will always be the case.

Sorry to pick fault, but I feel the reason that most people are not agnostics is because they have not analysed their own religion enough, and as such it is our duty as agnostics to analyse our own "religious" statements completely to ensure rationality. Also I feel it is better that agnostic point these things out rather than an over zelous theist trying to condemn agnostics as hypocrits.

Thanks very much for your time.