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This is what Thomas Huxley meant when he coined the term agnostic in 1869: “When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist … I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer. They [believers] were quite sure they had attained a certain ‘gnosis,’—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.” In the now-classic 1966 Time magazine cover story, “Is God Dead?,” the editors came to the same conclusion after spending a year conducting more than 300 interviews with leading theologians from around the world:

For one thing, every proof seems to have a plausible refutation; for another, only a committed Thomist [a follower of the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas] is likely to be spiritually moved by the realization that there is a self existent Prime Mover [a first being that moves all others but itself does not need to be moved—see Chapter 5]. “Faith in God is more than an intellectual belief,” says Dr. John Macquarrie of Union Theological Seminary: “It is a total attitude of the self.”

One either takes the leap of faith or does not. Faith is the art of the insoluble.

There are many positions one can take with regard to the God Question (see the Bibliographic Essay at the end of this book for suggested readings on both the theist and atheist positions). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), our finest source for the history of word usage, defines theism as implying “belief in a deity, or deities” and “belief in one God as creator and supreme ruler of the universe.” Atheism is defined by the OED as “disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God.” And agnosticism as implying “unknowing, unknown, unknowable.” At a party held one evening in 1869, Huxley further clarified the term agnostic, referencing St. Paul’s mention of the altar to “the Unknown God” as: “one who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and so far as can be judged unknowable, and especially that a First Cause and an unseen world are subjects of which we know nothing.” Belief in God is the art of the insoluble.

To clarify this linguistic discussion it might be useful to distinguish between a statement about the universe and a statement about one’s personal beliefs. As a statement about the universe, agnostic would seem to be the most rational position to take because by the criteria of science and reason God is an unknowable concept. We cannot prove or disprove God’s existence through empirical evidence or deductive proof. Therefore, from a scientific or philosophical position, theism and atheism are both indefensible positions as statements about the universe. Thomas Huxley once again clarified this distinction:

Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle. Positively the principle may be expressed as, in matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it can carry you without other considerations. And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend the conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable. It is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.

Martin Gardner, mathematician, former columnist for Scientific American, and one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement, is a believer who admits that the existence of God cannot be proved. He calls himself a fideist, or someone who believes in God for personal or pragmatic reasons, and defended this position to me in an interview: “As a fideist I don’t think there are any arguments that prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. Even more than that, I agree with Unamuno that the atheists have the better arguments. So it is a case of quixotic