A Shadow of a Doubt

You know, as I was pondering religion again as I often do, I decided I needed to make a post on agnostic's. I am absolutely sure that every person who strongly believes that faith is the best method to obtain religious truth ought to happily and proudly declare themselves agnostics.

This isn't as crazy as it might sound at first. An agnostic is a person who ( in the strongest version of agnosticism) believes that it is impossible to know if God exists. Now faith, as defined by dictionary.com, is a belief which is not based on logical proof or physical evidence. Many practicitioners of religion believe that looking for proof is sign seeking, and will be punished by God. And in my past religious life I heard many talks claiming that the very weakest form of religious belief is based on evidence.

So, we can see that faith based belief is not based on any kind of clear physical evidence. In fact, faith based belief is almost the exact opposite of justification based belief. Justification, as the term is commonly understood is a process of pointing to logical reasons and evidences that would logically support the issue in question. Usually, justification is a process of establishing credibility between multiple parties, and as such the evidence must be of a physical or logical nature.

Now, most philosophers for centuries have believed that knowledge is 'true justified belief.' Let me elucidate on this a bit. First off, there is clearly a reality our there that is independent of our beliefs. For a person to know something, it must be the case that what the person believes corresponds to what is actually out in the world. It must be true. I can't correctly say that I know that 3+3 = 7 despite how strong my convictions are since this is false. I am just wrong. However, the truth or falsity of our beliefs is often beyond our ability to directly ascertain, so lets just say that just in case what we are claiming matches the reality in the universe, that it is true. Next point. I think it is obvious that we must actually believe whatever is in question to know it. Enough said. Finally, what we believe must be justified for it to be known. To show this let me give you an example. Let's say that I am extremely paranoid and I believe that every person who wears red is a criminal. Now lets suppose that today I happen to see a person on the street in a crowd wearing red. I say to myself, well that person is clearly a criminal. Now, it just so happens that by coincidence that woman did indeed rob a bank. Just because I have a belief that is true doesn't mean that I know it. It is called a lucky guess, because red clothing is a poor indicator of a persons criminal nature. My belief has no justification. I think if you will reflect on this you will see that true justified belief is the standard model for what constitutes knowledge.


So you see, a person who uses faith as a basis for beliefs must, and should deny that they have justification. Without justification there is no knowledge. If someone believes that the only way to gain the truth of something is by faith, and she seeks no justification, then she can never know that thing. Hence, a person of faith should be, by definition, an agnostic.