Protagoras · Philosophy
Protagoras opened his book <em>On the Gods</em> with a famous declaration of agnosticism: ‘Concerning the gods, I cannot know whether they exist or not, nor of what form they are; many things prevent this knowledge - the obscurity of the matter and the shortness of human life.’ It is the first reasoned statement of agnosticism in the Western tradition.
Protagoras wrote a treatise titled On the Gods, and its opening sentence is one of the most famous and most consequential in the history of religious thought. He wrote: ‘Concerning the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for there are many things that prevent knowledge - the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.’ With these words Protagoras became the first thinker in the Western tradition to give a clear, reasoned statement of agnosticism - the position that the existence and nature of the divine are simply beyond the reach of human knowledge. He does not say the gods exist; he does not say they do not exist; he says we cannot know, and he gives his reasons: the subject is inherently obscure, hidden from our faculties, and human life is too short to penetrate it. It is a model of intellectual honesty, refusing to claim knowledge where knowledge is not to be had.
To grasp how startling this was, we must remember the world in which Protagoras spoke. Fifth-century Greece was a deeply religious society, woven through with the worship of the gods - public festivals, sacrifices, oracles, the gods of the city whose favour was thought essential to its survival. To declare publicly that one could not even know whether the gods existed was not a quiet academic position but a profound challenge to the foundations of civic and religious life. The ancient tradition reports - though some details may be embellished - that the Athenians were so scandalised that they condemned Protagoras for impiety, burned his books in the marketplace, and forced him to flee the city; he is said to have drowned at sea during his escape. Whether or not every detail is accurate, the story captures a real truth: Protagoras’ agnosticism was felt as a genuine threat, and it marks one of the first great collisions between free philosophical inquiry and the religious authority of the community - a collision that would recur, with Socrates, with Galileo, and down through the whole history of thought.
Protagoras’ agnosticism is not an isolated provocation but the natural religious consequence of his entire philosophy, and seeing the connection deepens both. Recall his master-principle: man is the measure of all things - the standard of what we can know is human experience. Now apply this to the gods. The gods, if they exist, are by their nature beyond the ordinary reach of human perception and experience: we do not see them as we see the wind or taste them as we taste honey; they are, in his word, obscure. If the human measure is the limit of what we can know, then the divine, lying outside the range of human experience, falls precisely into the region about which we must confess ignorance. Protagoras’ agnosticism is thus ‘man is the measure’ turned toward heaven: it locates the gods beyond the horizon of the knowable and draws the honest conclusion that we cannot pronounce upon them.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Protagoras’ book On the Gods began: ‘Concerning the gods, I cannot know whether they exist or not, nor what they are like in form; for many things prevent knowledge - the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.’ This is agnosticism (the question is beyond human knowledge), not atheis…
Leads to Democritus.
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