Ignosticism

The term was coined by the rabbi Sherwin Wine, founder of Humanistic Judaism, in the 1960s. The position is closely allied to theological noncognitivism (the broader claim that God-talk lacks cognitive content) and to the verificationism of A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (1936), which held that statements neither analytic nor empirically verifiable are literally meaningless.

The ignostic's core move is to refuse the standard atheist/agnostic/theist trichotomy until the question is properly framed. Asked “do you believe in God?”, the ignostic asks back: “which God?” A god defined as the impersonal ground of being is a different claim from a god defined as a watchmaker engineer, which is a different claim from a personal moral agent who answers prayer. Many “arguments for God” succeed at establishing one of these and are then used to defend belief in another, which the ignostic considers a definitional bait-and-switch.

The position is taken seriously in academic philosophy of religion. Michael Martin's Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1990) defends a version of theological noncognitivism alongside positive atheism. Sophisticated theists like David Bentley Hart often agree that popular God-talk is incoherent and insist that classical theism's God is something quite different from the “sky-fairy” atheists are usually denying — a move that, ignostics note, is itself a kind of reset of the conversation.

Critics argue that ignosticism sets the bar for meaningful discourse impossibly high; any sufficiently abstract concept (number, justice, mind) could be subjected to the same skepticism, and yet we manage to talk about them. The defender replies that the bar is not arbitrary high — it is precisely the bar that other supposedly meaningful claims meet, and that God-talk in popular usage often fails. The position remains a useful first move in any serious religion debate, even if it is rarely the last word.