“Mommy, is God real?” I questioned. Startled, she looked at me over the newspaper she held and gave me a confused look. “You told me about the bad things in the Middle East and I thought God was supposed to be loving.” I explained.

“God’s ways are mysterious,” she answered. “but if we trust Him, everything will be fine.” I nodded, sensing something was amiss.

In the days that followed, the feeling intensified, becoming like an unscratchable itch. Seeing no alternative, I gambled that the Internet had the answers. I searched for the religious perspective first, discovering certainty but not a lot of evidence. Frustrated, I decided to try other perspectives but quickly became lost in the battle between science and religion. In the following years, I thought of solution after solution, but my attempts to reconcile these two ideals met with repeated failure. I eventually realized that there was no way to prove how they fit together with our current knowledge and, with that realization, the intensity of my pursuit gradually faded.

Ever since this realization, I discovered that not only has my thought process changed, but more importantly, my thinking about my thinking. Through this journey, I’ve come to realize the importance of being analytic, accepting what can be currently known, and intellectual perseverance. During this expedition, I often felt like giving up. The feeling of constant frustration drained most of my concentration, leaving me feeling like an electronic extension cord with all outlets at use.

Eventually, I exhausted all the options I could find, yet felt no closer to a solution. Like a swinging pendulum, I came back to this question nearly every week for almost two years.

Looking back, I realized how intellectually naive I was. I had assumed that with certainty, came knowledge. Both theists and atheists were certain of their position, but often neither could provide sufficient evidence to dispel reasonable doubt.

Agnostics, however, seemed to recognize the legitimacy of the claims on both sides as well as the limitations of our
current knowledge. Although I had not found a solution, I had found a way of thinking that I had respected the most.

This way of thinking not only paired certainty with knowledge, it also paired analyticity with intuition. As a child, I tended to take intuitive leaps, unable to explain how I had gotten from one conclusion to another. With this approach, studying religion felt like building a brick house without any mortar. Because of this, I was forced to develop my analytical skills by thinking through how assumptions and implications linked together to form different chains of reasoning. I soon discovered that intuition and analyticity were complementary: as one leapt ahead, the other followed behind, filling in and correcting the steps.

Although I wasn’t always comfortable with the label “agnostic,” I’ve come to realize that in the face of so much conflicting information, “I don’t know” is not an admission of ignorance, but a sober depiction of my intellectual limitations.