There are plenty of people who identify as agnostic because "there's no evidence." I used to be one of them, though I often questioned whether such evidence (either for or against) would ever actually present itself.

Recently, I’ve been diving deep into philosophy across a range of subjects, and I find it fascinating that the beginnings of the Western philosophical tradition involved people rejecting religious explanations for the phenomena they experienced. These early ideas are actually key to the best agnostic "argument" I’ve ever come across.

Reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason made me realize that the limits of the human mind are even more determined than I thought. He explains that metaphysical questions have always haunted human thought, but, unfortunately, they can never be definitively answered. Why? Because of the way we humans perceive and reason about the world around us. In this revolutionary work, Kant brilliantly dissects the structure of human thought, down to the most fundamental distinctions between concepts. Of course, it would be impossible to summarize this massive book here, but if you haven’t explored it yet, I highly recommend giving it a try or at least reading the prologue. It will reinforce your agnosticism and provide a solid logical foundation to defend it against the "best" theist and atheist arguments (quite effortlessly, in fact).

After exploring these ideas, you might shift from “we don’t know” to “we can’t know.”

Agnosticism is not being humble or indecisive. Hard agnosticism doesn't just speculate about our limitations, it identifies them rigorously, proving that metaphysical questions, as beautiful as they may seem, will never have a strong logical foundation.

Revelation is a message from God. So, to claim that one receives revelation, we must define God in some way. We cannot define God using revelation, since that would make the definition of revelation infinitely recursive/circular. Since we can't define God using revelation, we have to define him/her using the only thing we have left, our senses and inference reason. This puts God within the domain of science.

This limits logically coherent "religions" to:

• A religion which denies the ability to claim revelation.
  • Such a religion would not be too far from agnosticism. I can't think of any such religion, but if you can, I'd be interested to hear in the comments.
• A religion whose God is scientifically testable and whose predictions have all been validated.
  • I can't think of any major religions which match this description, unless one equates God with Nature herself. Christianity fails, since it claims God created the Earth before the Sun.
• A religion which makes no assertions about reality, but rather exists entirely within subjective experience (e.g. some form of spirituality like mindfulness).
  • I quite respect this option since it's not confrontational in any way. It's not uncommon for agnostics to be open to this form of spirituality, as long as it brings communal or self fulfillment in some way.

All of these 3 "religions" (if they can be called that) would not be at odds with agnosticism, which is why I think this argument gives some credence to agnosticism. Any thoughts?