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Agnostics as well as theists should answer evidential arguments from evil, at least when confronted with them. In this paper, I answer such an argument by appealing to sceptical agnosticism. A sceptical agnostic is not only undecided about the existence of a perfectly good and omnipotent God, but also believes that we cannot make any judgement about whether or not seemingly gratuitous evil probably is gratuitous. I argue that such agnosticism has several advantages compared with sceptical theism.

Once they could no longer believe in the immortality of the soul, many Westerners substituted the project of improving human life on Earth for that of getting to Heaven. Hoping for the achievement of Enlightenment ideals took the place of yearning to see the face of God. Spiritual life came to center around movements for social change, rather than around prayer or ritual.

Rorty reviews Saturday by Ian McEwan.

What is agnosticism? Is it a belief, or just the absence of belief? What is the 'agnostic' principle? Robin Le Poidevin takes a philosophical approach to the issue of agnosticism challenging some of the common assumptions, arguing in favour of the agnostic attitude, and considering its place in society and education.

Brian L. Johnson's remarkable biography of W.E.B. Du Bois describes the evolution of religious views from Du Bois's birth until his resignation as editor of Crisis magazine in 1934. W.E.B. Du Bois, Towards Agnosticism (1868-1934) traces Du Bois' mounting skepticism through his earliest church experiences to his sociological training in Berlin culminating with his writings in Crisis Magazine. Johnson argues that despite Du Bois' frequent use of Protestant religious rhetoric, the mature Du Bois was a critic of African American religious organizations and their leaders, and a scientifically orien

Controversial view agnosticism (CVA) is the thesis that we are rationally obligated to withhold judgment about a large portion of our beliefs in controversial subject areas, such as philosophy, religion, morality and politics. Given that one's social identity is in no small part a function of one's positive commitments in controversial areas, CVA has unsurprisingly been regarded as objectionably 'spineless.' That said, CVA seems like an unavoidable consequence of a prominent view in the epistemology of disagreement—conformism—according to which the rational response to discovering that someone you identify as an epistemic peer or expert about p disagrees with you vis-à-vis p is to withhold judgment. This paper proposes a novel way to maintain the core conciliatory insight without devolving into an agnosticism that is objectionably spineless. The approach offered takes as a starting point the observation that–for reasons that will be made clear—the contemporary debate has bypassed the issue of the reasonableness of maintaining, rather than giving up, representational states weaker than belief in controversial areas. The new position developed and defended here explores this overlooked space; what results is a kind of controversial view

Theorists of racial justice in the United States have long disagreed about the respective merits of integration versus separatism. In an attempt to reframe this debate, Andrew Valls has developed a liberal approach that purports to cut across the integration/separation divide. On this approach, the goal is to establish fair choice conditions for individuals choosing where to affiliate; when fair conditions obtain, the theory espouses a normative agnosticism toward whatever patterns of spatial distribution result. If successful, Valls's choice-based framework represents a potentially transformative intervention in debates over racial justice. However, this article argues that the framework's agnostic approach is in tension with its putative applicability to liberal-democratic societies. Specifically, it contends that the theory's criteria for fair choice are excessively permissive, and that its conception of racial justice relies on an unwarranted assumption that under just conditions, individual choices will produce just aggregate outcomes. The maintenance of the theory's agnosticism requires it to adopt positions that are better described as libertarian, rather than liberal-democratic. These problems suggest that the integration–separation debate cannot be circumvented via an agnostic appeal to individual choice, because that agnosticism obscures questions about the nature of democracy which are at the heart of the disagreement.

With the position, he labels as "new" or "metalinguistic agnosticism" Robin LePoidevin can avoid some problems with which fictionalists about religious language are confronted. Religious fictionalism is a position according to which all religious claims[1] are considered to be false when taken at face value. But because fictionalists about religious language think that certain religious worldviews have pragmatic benefits, they interpret several claims in such worldviews as true in fiction. This enables them to gain pragmatic benefits because they live as if a certain religious worldview were true. Nonetheless, they don't believe that the respective worldview represents the non-fictional reality.[2][1] In the following I understand a "religious claim" either as the claim that God exists or as a claim that presupposes the existence of God. Since also Le Poidevin focuses on theistic religions I want to keep this focus in my response. Nonetheless, it should be kept in mind that religious fictionalism is not restricted to theistic religions. I also think that metalinguistic agnosticism and the argumentation in this paper could in principle be extended to non-theistic religions.[2] A defense of religious fictionalism can be found in for example Andrew S. Eshleman, "Can an Atheist Believe in God?", Religious Studies 41, no. 2 (2005) and Andrew S. Eshleman, "Religious Fictionalism Defended: Reply to Cordry", Religious Studies 46, no. 1 (2010).