Is agnosticism unreasonable?

Thomas V. Morris, ‘Agnosticism,’Analysis 45, pp. 219–220.Google Scholar

Norwood Russell Hanson, ‘The Agnostic’s Dilemma’ and ‘What I Do Not Believe,’ each inWhat I Do Not Believe and Other Essays (Dordrecht: Dordrecht Reidel, 1971), ed. by Stephen Toulmin and Harry Woolf.Google Scholar

Hanson doesn’t really argue that the agnostic aspects FC, but reasonably, I think, assumes that the agnostic does since the principle appears quite intuitive.Google Scholar

It might be objected that we can’t confirm this claim. If a creature resembling a bat laid an egg, we might conclude that the creature was not a bat; since given what we know about bat physiology, it’s physically impossible for bats to lay eggs. Nothing, however, turns on this here; another example would do just as well.Google Scholar

Hanson,.Google Scholar

Hanson,.Google Scholar

To be fair to Hanson, despite the two quotes of his I have given in the text, there are places where he seems to endorse the weaker, defensible view. He says, e.g., p. 323, ‘When, there is no good reason for thinking a claim to be true,that in itself is good reason for thinking the claim to be false.’Google Scholar

Morris, Thomas V. Morris, ‘Agnosticism,’Analysis 45, p. 219. All subsequent page references in the text are to this work. See also his ‘Pascalian Wagering,’Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (1986), pp. 437–454 for some interesting and related points about agnosticism.Google Scholar

Michael Scriven,Primary Philosophy (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966). See also B.C. Johnson,The Atheist Debater’s Handbook (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1981).Google Scholar

I am grateful to my colleagues Kenneth Ferguson, Nicholas Georgalis, and Thomas Kapitan for comments on an earlier version of this paper.Google Scholar