I’ve decided to write this for my own catharsis and nothing more. I don’t expect it to change anyone’s mind. To quote Jethro Tull, “I may make you feel, but I can’t make you think.” I can only say that I’m being true to myself.
To clarify some unfortunate cultural ignorance, Agnosticism actually has two definitions. One is what most people say, which is that they’re undecided on Theism or Atheism and they’re still looking for evidence. The other definition, of which I fall under, is that any talk of God or any ultimate explanation as to why we’re here is fundamentally unanswerable. I’m not waiting for new evidence to come in, because any possible data we receive would be inherently unacceptable under the lens of scientific rigor.
I want to make another distinction here, in that I’m only talking about being Agnostic in the sense of a prime mover or a Deistic creator that metaphorically “wound the clock” of the cosmos. Or perhaps even that life was seeded by an alien species so advanced that they would functionally appear as gods to our primitive ape-like minds. All of these are interesting and plausible ideas. Hell, if you really want to go crazy, you can even say that since philosophically we can’t prove our five senses past brain chemicals, we could all be in the Matrix. Of course, the probability for the last one is pretty low I’d wager… Not that I wouldn’t want to be Neo. Despite the lack of evidence, I even admit in wanting to believe that there's an afterlife.
What makes me an Agnostic as opposed to an Atheist would be my attempt to be humble about not knowing everything. Science is the best tool humanity ever invented. In just a few hundred years from Galileo, we understand so much about our universe. We know the Earth rotates around the sun and not vice-versa. We know that all species evolved from a common ancestor through natural selection. We know that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. We even know what the surfaces of all the planets and moons in our solar system are like through photographs sent back from probes like Voyager 1 and 2.
As grand as all that is, science is only capable of answering “how” questions. In which I simply mean that science explains natural phenomena in the material world. It cannot, and is not even supposed to, try to answer a question like, “Why are we here?” That’s not to say we can’t fight back against pseudoscience like young earth creationism, but it does mean that there are boundaries. For example, what caused the Big Bang is a realm that we cannot enter. Theists say God created everything, however, this only begs the question as to who created God. Atheists say that there might be billions of universes, a sort of “multiverse.” Of course, that also just begs the question as to where the multiverse came from. So, at the end of the day, we merely have to be skeptical of any “grand theory” be it theistic or atheistic.
Concerning the religions on this small planet, specifically the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, I am as close to being an Atheist as I possibly can be as an Agnostic. I view their likelihood as I would with Greek or Roman myths. However, I also recognize that the Golden Rule found in all major faiths has tremendously helped progress our collective ethics. Stories like Jesus' Sermon on the Mount still have moral power and relevance.
I was a Christian for a long time. In fact, I only left it very recently, so I don’t view religious people in contempt or anything of the sort. As I said, I simply must be true to myself. I could easily spend pages upon pages dismantling Christianity and all its intellectual pretenses as a justification for my apostasy, but the truth is there are better things to do. I was born Jewish by heritage, an Atheist for most of my life, then a Christian, and now an Agnostic. However, these things don’t define me, nor should it anyone. The only thing that ought to matter is how we treat one another. If humanity fails to love everyone, even those they disagree with, then it won’t much matter who was right when we all kill each other.
"I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came from and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty." -Charles Darwin, 1873
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