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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.

Consider the agnostic who thinks that reason and evidence are neutral on the question of God's existence, and as a result neither believes that God exists nor believes that God does not exist. Can such an agnostic live a genuinely religious life – even one in which God is the central animating idea? They might do so by accepting Pascal's Wager: the expected rewards will always be greater if one bets on God's existence than if one does not. Or they might accept William James's argument that religious beliefs are properly activated by our passional nature. But both of these routes involve abandoning the initial agnosticism, and so are open to charges of irrationality. In this paper I explore a third route to the religious life, suggested by Pascal's discussion, one which uses fiction and make-believe as the central prop. It might seem that this too entails abandoning agnosticism in favour of the view that religion just is fiction. I suggest, however, that there is a phenomenon which I term "serious make-believe" in which one can remain agnostic about whether the object of make-believe is real or a useful fiction. Applied to religion, the result is a religious life that is both genuinely engaged (and not merely experimental) and yet, by remaining agnostic, cannot be accused of irrationality.

I am very grateful to Natalja, Jacob and Sebastian for their kind attention to my paper, and for their many insights on this topic, which have materially helped me get clearer about some of the issues. All the points of disagreement are constructive and it has been both a pleasure and an education to engage with them. I'm also happy to note some points of agreement, too! Here I attempt to reply to some of the objections.

Does a proper understanding of the Atonement – the restoration of mankind's relationship with God as a result of Christ's sacrifice – require a particular conception of time? It has been suggested that it does, and that the relevant conception is a 'tensed' or 'dynamic' one, in which distinctions between past, present and future reflect the objective passage of time. This paper examines two arguments that might be given for that contention, and finds that both may be answered by appeal to the asymmetry of causation. The Atonement leaves us free to think of all times as equally real, as traditionally they are for God.