Phil Donahue vs. the Tooth Fairy

If you ask noted atheist Richard Dawkins, I am a “Tooth Fairy Agnostic,” which is a name he ascribes to people who allow for the possibility that there is a God, much as many people allow for the possibility that the Tooth Fairy (or the Easter Bunny, or Santa Clause) is real because you can’t prove a negative.

 But there’s a problem with that, and it points to the reason I have such a hard time embracing a label as absolute and final as atheist.

I know there’s no Tooth Fairy because there’s no mystery that her existence would solve. I know who put money under my pillow when I lost a tooth, and that’s that. There are no other unexplained phenomena that require any additional explanation.

But the same can’t be said about the existence of God. Or a god. Or something. There are simply too many things that can’t be explained using the intellectual tools we have at our disposal.

I’ve heard several stories about people dying, and then coming back with knowledge no one lying on that bed could possibly have. I’m not talking about bright lights and starry encounters with long-lost relatives powered by a lifetime of loaded expectations and wishful thinking, I’m talking about knowing what happened somewhere else at the same time that person was dying.

And as much as I scoff at Creationists, there sure seem to be a lot of things in nature that just can’t be explained by Evolution. Not every strange attribute found in the mind-boggling diversity of life on Earth points back to survival and propagation of the species.

For these reasons and many more, I can’t discount the notion of something, some power, being involved, on some level, with life here. Further, I think only a fool would say that nothing like that could possibly exist. Expressing certainty about the impossibility of “God” seems as silly to me as expressing certainty and detailed knowledge about His existence.

I’m not a Tooth Fairy Agnostic, I’m a Phil Donahue Agnostic, who I first heard say, “I don’t know and you don’t either.” That simple statement hit me like a ton of bricks when I first heard it back in the ‘80s, and I’ve been chewing on it ever since. Here’s what it means to me today.

All I really know for sure is that no one knows if there is a God. I see religions as attempts to understand the unknowable, and I’m confident that their followers are waaaaay off base[1]. Christianity, for instance, is based entirely on millennia-old writings from people who had such a limited understanding of the world that everything they couldn’t comprehend--which was a lot--just ended up on the God pile. You miraculously survived that illness? God is great! You’re wife died? Hey, it’s God’s will. Even today, stories about one person surviving a disaster that killed thousands is held up as proof of God’s love and mercy. What?

But those are all decisions made by us flawed, stupid humans, and our minds abhor a vacuum. I get it, leaving an open space for the unexplained sucks and it’s wholly unsatisfying. But I think that leaving that space open and not allowing it to get cluttered with the implausible and unknowable takes a certain kind of discipline. But that, I think, is the definition of agnosticism.

-Doug

---

[1] There are degrees here, of course. The more closely and literally you adhere to these ancient teachings about magical beings, the further you’ve travelled down the wrong road. IMHO.