Agnostotheism

Agnostotheism (n.) [coined 2025 by Justin A. Bledsaw]

1. Theological Concept – The belief that God intentionally allows for ambiguous or misleading evidence regarding existence, origins, and the nature of reality as a test of faith, leading some toward atheism while rewarding those who maintain belief despite uncertainty.

2. Philosophical Perspective – A worldview combining elements of agnosticism and theism, wherein divine truth is deliberately obscured, requiring faith beyond empirical or logical validation.

I am not writing to proselytize, but to invoke a thought experiment.
 

Agnostotheism

The commonly accepted theory is the idea that the universe exploded from an infinitely dense singularity, and several billions of years later, a gas clump with a heated disk of matter around it made us. A star was born, our home was made, the Moon was formed possibly by the impact of a Mars-sized planet, and after an asteroid bombardment which gave us water and electricity, life was made. This life lived on slates of rock and dust floating over a sea of magma, forming our continents. Through natural selection, mutations and mass extinctions, and other circumstances, we evolved as primates diverging from chimpanzees.

Last year, an ex-friend converted me out of atheism and into Christianity, and I thank my Father for all the good He has provided me. I was desolate, pitiful, and rife with sin and lust, and now I am found.

In high school biology, I learned about homologous structures- similar structures that are visible in parts of creatures, i.e. the arm bones of different animals. There are also vestigial structures- for example there are still hip bones in whales and dolphins, and they appear in development but shrink back and are unusable once born. Additionally, embryos appear similar, and there are evidences of changes in atmospheric composition, terrain, or generic bottlenecks, such as the Chicxulub impact which is supposed to have ended the dinosaurs. Many of you have also heard of DNA being chemically the same across all species, and of fossil records too.

But, what about with faith?

The Abrahamic religions agree that about six thousand years ago, it took God seven days to create the world. On the first day, He introduced light. On the second day, He created matter in water, and divided the waters. On the third day, He formed dry land and on the subsequent day he made plants. The next couple of days, animals came, and on the sixth day God formed life out of mud in His image: Adam, and eventually his wife, later Eve. They were situated in the Garden of Eden where everything was perfect, and they ate from every tree except one in the center.

When Eve found the tree in the center and Satan in the form of a snake tempted her, she consumed the fruits and convinced Adam to do so as well. They learned that they were naked and covered themselves in leaves, hiding from God who was seeking them. When He found out, He banished them both from Eden and clothed them to survive on their own.

When generations passed and Noah and his family were the only upright people, God instructed Noah to build the Ark. After 120 years, He flooded the world and essentially destroyed everything. Only Noah, his sons, and their families survived and the world was rebuilt.

This is how the world was created, according to Christianity. This is how I believe the world to be created.

Let's talk of the Omphalos hypothesis. This is from the book, Omphalos, written in 1857 by a British naturalist named Philip Henry Gosse. Gosse's intent was to show that the world was created with evidence of age. The book theorizes that Adam and Eve had navels, hence the name Omphalos which in Greek means "navel," and that the trees had growth rings. Gosse claimed that this was all fabricated, though critics say that God would have to be deceptive and not true or revealing.

Now my thought experiment is this: A twist on the Omphalos hypothesis, but rather now with more evidence, and a test of faith.

God has tested us and warned us in many ways, including with pandemics, sudden events, natural disasters, and other drastic changes in the environment.

Perhaps, God made homologous structures, chemicals, and fossils. He made evidence of evolution to test us. God wanted to find out how many of us would turn to atheism by putting evidence of evolution, mass extinction events, and geological processes in the Earth's surface. Evidence of evolution is not for deception or just as a prank, it is a way that our one true Creator tests our faith, and so many of us have turned away from our true God.

I leave this with you. I ask you, what are your thoughts on this? I hope this was worth your time, and I have given you something to think about today.