From the Rector's Desk - Confession of a Frustrated Agnostic

Letter from George S. Kephart to his son Reverend Roy Kephart,
October, 1970, Page One

When I was a youngster, at the turn of the century, religion was a strong and sobering influence in many communities. Differences in creed among the denominations were more rigidly defined than they seem to be today, and intolerance of each denomination for all others was more pronounced. In many churches the smell of brimstone and the sweet odor of sanctity were equally in evidence, as ministers consigned sinners to the fires of everlasting Hell; and promised eternal bliss for the repentant, who would personally sit among the Heavenly clouds, and raise their voices in praise to the visible Father. Fundamentalists looked with horror, or at least with pity, upon the Unitarians -- the church my family attended.

By the time I entered college the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was being widely read by on-campus sophisticates, and quotations from Omar were often heard, even in mixed company. Some heady thoughts could be induced by a properly intoned recitation of:

"A Book of Verses underneath the bough,
A jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread -- and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness --
Ah Wilderness were Paradise enow."

Omar also influenced the religious thinking of his devotees by providing support for their latest impulse to depart from the generally held beliefs of the time. Thus, Atheism had a transient appeal for me, because there was no laboratory-supported proof that a God existed. As Omar said:

"I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some lesson of the After-life to spell;
And by and by my Soul returned to me,
And answered, "I myself am Heav'n and Hell.
Heav'n but the vision of fulfilled Desire
And Hell the Shadow of a Soul."

My leaning toward Atheism was short-lived, however, for I soon realized that the lack of laboratory proof of God's existence was balanced by an equal failure to prove his non-existence. And my science-oriented training held that when a premise can neither be proved nor disproved, the truth of the premise remains in doubt. It therefore pleased my immature vanity to proclaim myself an Agnostic.

Through the following years the smug assurance of youth wore off, such as the dead outer bark of a tree is continually flaked off by expanding pressure from the growing inner bark. Where I had once been quick to proclaim my agnosticism, uncertainty crept in, and there came the time when the best I could do was to say, "I guess I must be an agnostic." There was no pleasure in this uncertainty.

Of all that contributed to this increasing doubt, the most influential was my work as a forester, with its many days of camping in the deep woods. One can hardly live in such close association with the natural world without becoming increasingly aware of its wonder. In these surroundings there were visible and persistant indications that a Grand Plan governs the workings of the entire Universe, from its mighty whole to its tiniest particle. The whole, itself, seems to reflect an exqusitely complicated interrelationship among the countless parts.

The very foundation of my agnostic belief had been an assumption that science could neither prove nor disprove God's existence. Over the years this foundation eroded and crumbled as personal experience continually suggested the error of that assumption. Gradually I began to realize that no matter how far the scientists reach, into the microscopically minute, or into the vastness of space, they still find evidence of this mysterious Plan.

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St. Margaret's Episcopal Church - from the Rector's Desk

Confession of a Frustrated Agnostic