Believe me on this

I agree with Kent on his statements about faith vs. reason:

The essence of faith is to believe what you cannot prove. If you question it, if you can make the argument that it is logically impossible, yet you still believe it- that is faith. The more capable you are to question it, the stronger your faith is when you conclude that you believe it anyway.

If anything, the ability to admit that your logical construction of the universe may not encompass and explain everything reveals a greater intellectual maturity. But that’s where true agnosticism departs from atheism and materialism. The Greek a (not) + gnosis (knowledge) = “no knowledge”. An agnostic doesn’t claim to know. Atheism asserts that there is no God. Materialism asserts that there is no spirit, everything is matter/energy. I assert very little, because it seems to me that every assertion and every belief has its limitations. The words of assertions like “God is on our side” or “There is no God” may contain some truth for a listener who appropriates them well, but there are so many other ways to take or use those statements that nobody can ever say with complete certainty that they are either true or false. The words themselves are merely metaphors. Faith is appreciating the poetry.

I’m a faithful agnostic.