Agnosticism

In response to this post, Anactoria writes:

I can understand your opinion on atheism. But agnosticism is intellectually cowardly? You're taking away all of my choices! :P How is it "intellectually cowardly" in your opinion?

First, I should say that it's not a coincidence that I think theism is the only tenable choice. I'm a theist. I don't think atheism is philosophically tenable and I don't think agnosticism is intellectually courageous enough, but that shouldn't surprise anyone. I believe that what I believe is the best thing to believe. That's why I believe it. If I thought atheism was tenable I'd be an atheist. If I thought agnosticism was a valid position, I'd be an agnostic.

My problem with agnosticism is this: Agnosticism is the position that we can never know with certainty whether there is a God or not. Which is fair. But we can also never know with certainty whether there is a spoon or not. We can never know for sure if our senses are trustworthy, we can never know for sure if reason is reliable. When it really comes down to it, we can never know anything for sure. But if we want to do anything in this world we need to decide to believe in something. If we want to have any intellectual life at all we need to decide to trust our senses or our reason or tradition or something.

Skepticism is philosophically valid, but it seems paralyzing to me. And at the root of that paralysis I find cowardice. I feel like that kind of skepticism is grounded on a fear of being wrong. But any intellectual work has the danger of being wrong. Intellectual honestly means that we need to be open to being corrected if our error is pointed out to us, but—to me—intellectual courage means that we can't just remain positionless in the mean time. Eventually, you need to believe something.