Agnosticism is the Correct Religious Stance

I am glad that you brought atheism into this debate, since I believe it is actually atheism that makes the more subtle, yet flawed assumptions that I would not have gotten to point out otherwise. I should quickly point out that I avoided using websters definitions because they did not reflect philosophical definitions I'll be referring to. Agnostic refers to the act of not knowing but "we may one day know," wheras skepticism refers to not knowing and "we can never know. " If you feel the need to play devil's advocate in later rounds by all means feel free to do so, since I would technically lose this debate if you can better support either perspective. The main premise of my argument is that if we encounter a situation in which we do not have enough information to make an informed decision, instead of jumping to a conclusion that may be wrong it is more intelligent to claim that we do not have an answer. For example, give a solution from the set of real numbers to the following equation:x+y=The solution literally has an infinite set of infinite answers. To illustrate the atheist, let's say they assume the answer is 0. This is most certainly a possible answer, but the atheist knew nothing of the nature of x or y. Therefore to conclude 0 without knowing what x or y may be is jumping to a conclusion without a full understanding of the equation. Now let's say that the atheist spends years and years and millions of dollars to discover that x is 5. They still cannot solve this equation, all they know is 5+y= something. Therefore until we have a complete understanding of the equation, it is more intelligent to say we do not know the answer, as we have not proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the solution is 0. Likewise, both the theist AND the atheist make critical assumptioms that have not been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The theist assumes that there is a God or Gods, and they center their beliefs around that assumption. The atheist makes several assumptions that as I've said before is much more subtle, but nonetheless they have not been logically proven. They assume first that the world we live in is veridical (or that it is real), they assume that science is foolproof, and then they assume that science disproves the existence of a god. Rene Descartes was a French Philosopher who is the founder of perhaps the most famous qoute in the history of philosophy. "Cogito ergo sum," or "I think, therefore I am. " To keep it brief, Descartes woke up one morning after having a dream he could have sworn was real. Then he thought, what if the world around me isn't real, what if I'm not even real, what if all this is another dream, or what if I'm being deceived by some evil and infinitely powerful demon? Descartes began thinking more and more, and he realized that even if he was in some dream, even if some demon was deceiving him, he must still exist to be deceived. And he knows he exists because he can think that he exists. Thus "I think, therefore I am. " This is known as external world skepticism. I wrote a brief paper on this for an assignment, and I concluded through the use of Occam's Razor that it is more likely that the world around us is veridical than it is not. The idea being that simpler solutions are more likely to be true, it is simpler for the world around us to be the way it appears, therefore it is more likely that the world we live in is real. The next assumption made is that science is foolproof. For example, if we heat copper at room temperature it will expands. But even this is going to far, what we've really proven is that every time we heat copper at certain room conditions it expands a certain amount. Probability dictates that in order to determine the likelihood of an outcome we must know the total possibilities of that outcome. We have heated copper probably billions of times and it has expanded every time, so we have good reason to believe it will expand the next time we heat it. But the only way to ensure that copper will ALWAYS expand when heated would be to firstly perform a test on all copper in the universe (a practically impossible task) and we would have to heat each piece of copper the same way an infinite number of time (another impossible task). The purpose of above paragraph may seem somewhat abstract, but it's meant to show that all science can really tell us is how the universe is likely to behave, not exactly how it behaves. This claim is further proved if you study quantum mechanics, where probability plays key roles in the laws of physics. Next, the atheist assumes that since we can explain the way the universe behaves without the presence of a God proves there is no God. To the contrary, the fact that we can explain the way nature interacts with mathematical equations, the fact WE CAN model equations to explain the way nature behaves, can suggest a grand creator. The fact that we exist, despite the fact that we are (in a sense) defying the second law of thermodynamics, can suggest a grand creator. The fact that if certain physical constants (such as the gravitational and electromagnetic forces) were even minutely stronger or weaker then life, and even reality, would not exist. All of these miracles can lead us to believe that there is in fact a God, but it does NOT prove the existence of a God. Since both atheism and theism make basic assumption that cannot be logically proven or even disproven, I argue that it is more intelligent to claim that we simply do not know yet, but perhaps someday we will. To be fair I referred to a form of atheism that is much stronger than the one proposed by my opponent. Matthew proposed that since the existence of God is unfalsafiable, he's inclined to believe a God does not exist. I have shown why I believe it is more likely God exists, so now I leave it to Matthew to show why he is inclined to believe a deity does not exist given the reason I put forth.