ABSTRACT
Agnosticism is popularly supposed to be a rather safe, non-committal position. But there is another view: that, insofar as it is a stepping stone between two opposing positions (theism and atheism), it is an unstable position to hold for long – just as stepping stones in rivers can be. This chapter compares agnosticism with two other intellectual stepping stones that emerged in the nineteenth century, to do with mind and time respectively, positions whose instability caused them ultimately to give way to other theories. Three questions are asked: does agnosticism exhibit the same kinds of instability as these other positions? Does it have some other kind of instability? And if it is unstable in some sense, is that necessarily a flaw?
