Why I am an agnostic.

As much pleasure and gratitude as I feel when such famous and erudite atheists as Richard Dawkins, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan take on backwards ideas like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, astrology, and similar faith-based and self-conflicting systems of belief, and subsequently rip them to shreds using logical analysis that even schoolchildren should be able to understand (and yet don't for some reason, possibly because their parents and other theologically-minded adults have drilled into them from an early age that religion is not something to be questioned, that faith in absurd ideas is, in this one special case, not only allowed but encouraged), I myself could never be an atheist. Dispelling a creator may be the only way out of the trap of the infinite regression (yes, but who made God?) argument; likewise, dozens of other atheist arguments may seem self-evident and convincing to an intelligent person who wants to move beyond the fairy tales they learned as children. And of course I would opt for an atheist stance rather than, say, a Christian stance if those were the only choices available to me. But they're not. I can also claim simply not to know - agnosticism - while perhaps assigning likelihoods to each idea based on my own experiences and internal reasoning. But how can I ever presume to know what the Truth is, or even if such a thing exists? To claim there is definitely nothing which exists outside what we currently consider natural and material seems just as reliant on a faith mechanism that I do not possess than, say, Tarot does (although in a more subtle way of course) and strikes me as no real improvement on those irrational religious ideas atheists love to attack.

I'm not even going to cop out and claim to be "spiritual" but not religious, as so many people do these days. While some so-called New Age beliefs seem an improvement over the dogmatic and inane ideas from thousands of years ago, they are just dressed up-versions of the same human-centric or life-centric ideas and are no more provable even if some seem more palatable. Nevermind the nebulously-worded precepts like "energy," "unity," and so forth that a spiritualist can fall back on, and that such broad concepts can never be rigidly defined or tested. It is still a belief system, one which requires faith ("an open mind" is usually how it's put, although if you tell a spiritualist that you've an open mind, have mulled their ideas over and found them to be rubbish, you'll quickly see how open their minds are). So let me try to put the case for agnosticism, which is not a system of belief but merely the admission that "I don't know anything for sure and I can never know anything for sure, regardless of what seems reasonable and functions well for me as a system I can adhere to and trust while living my life" (e.g., science for me), as plainly as I can.

Philosophers will never all agree, but it strikes ME (and this is my essay) in some profound way that one can never prove or disprove anything in an absolute sense, simply because you cannot prove that there is an absolute, unchanging "frame" in which we live wherein things like reason and physical laws exist and are consistent. All you can do is satisfy a given human mind that something is so implausible as to be absurd, or so self-evident as to be commonsense. Note that absurd and commonsense are human value judgments either born into us or developed experientially, most likely both. They are not something you can see in a microscope or prod with a stick. In short, we reason based on ideas. We can only ever create a sandbox within which to play (the human experience, our universe, etc.) and define the parameters which operate within it, like logic and truth, and only then can we go on and test further ideas against this set of parameters. This in essence is what science is, though many would like to believe it is something more ambitious and general. The fact is, in science too there must be a set of "givens" - the idea that the laws of nature hold all over and don't capriciously change over space or time "for no reason." They might do, of course, since even our human brain, which has evolved in a milieu which apparently does behave consistently, has the ability to imagine inconsistent realities. Fantasy, psychedelia, occultism, (religion,) and the like are all examples of realities which are incompatible with the one in which we've evolved, and yet we can postulate their existence, and even enjoy novels, movies, and games set in such realities. So in the end it is never possible to create a system of logic or a definition of truth which absolutely underlies and encompasses all possible things. Anything imaginable may be possible in some alternate realm. And within any reality one wishes to construct, some truisms must be taken on faith, and that is where any polemic in favor of true atheism must fail, no matter how elegantly constructed. Yes it is quite easy for us to show that organized monotheistic religions on this planet are nonsensical according to our understanding of reality. It is much more logical to suppose a non-supernatural universe. But that is only probabilistic reasoning; science itself admits is never provable. We can only ever operate within the sandbox we find ourselves in, and using the scientific method we can ascertain certain unchanging features of that sandbox. But of the existence of other sandboxes which we cannot observe, and which may or may not interact with ours in ways we cannot even conceive of, we can say nothing. There may be magic. There may be a guy up in the clouds with a white beard checking off boxes as we say our prayers each night. All we can really say is that according to our (human-defined) ideas of truth, provability, reason, and so forth that we have packaged and called "science" or "rationalism," we can find no evidence of any such magic, and that things seem to be ultimately describable using this method, without ever having to appeal to faith or going outside the system (except, as noted, for the initial acceptance of the givens of the method itself). This power is not to be taken lightly. Science is the most predictably-accurate and inerrant idea man has ever worked out, and it continues to hold the further up and down the scale of size and time we traverse. It is breathtakingly held together by a surprisingly few numerical models (laws), which give rise to all the beauty and complexity we see and experience. But to say it shall always be so or that there is not some completely unrelated and unreachable realm in which different numerical laws govern reality, or indeed where chaos simply reigns, is and shall forever remain beyond our ability to judge.

I applaud scientific atheists who combat religious zealotry simply because it helps to level the playing field and possibly make the world a safer and more rational place. It raises peoples' consciousness. Take away all religion (save for science itself, of course) and you'd have a lot less needless conflict out there - though don't kid yourself that other dissonant forces at work, such as economic disparity, wouldn't still contribute their share of violence. But to claim atheism (naturalism) and its toolbox (science), is Truth is simply to substitute one faith for another. I cannot accept faith. Thus, I shall always remain an agnostic, however unfulfilling that prospect may seem at times. To me, it is the only tenable position one can hold.