Agnosticism

Skepticism is a healthy thing.  It helps to prevent mistakes and wasted time and resources in meaningless causes.  I admit to being quite agnostic with respect to many various societal aspects, particularly when it comes to the doctrines expounded by the supposed guardians of societal truths (i.e. journalists, teachers, media), who do nothing more than regurgitate the imaginations of intellectuals who have no recourse for their misguided theories and ideas.

But agnosticism is dangerous inasmuch as it is taken to extremes.  Hayek, one of my favorite economists and philosophers, became a staunch antagonist of what he called scientism, which refers to a faith in science to the point of rejection of anything unobservable.  In his book, The Fatal Conceit, which I'm currently reading, he classifies this ideology into four correlated philosophic concepts, defined here:

Rationalism: denying the acceptability of beliefs founded on anything but experience and reasoning.
Empiricism: maintaining that all statements claiming to express knowledge are limited to those depending for their justification on experience.
Positivism: the view that all true knowledge is scientific, in the sense of describing the coexistence and succession of observable phenomena.
Utilitarianism: 'takes the pleasure and pain of everyone affected by it to be the criterion of the action's rightness'.

These philosophies are very common in modern society, particularly among the so-called intelligentsia.  It should not be surprising, perhaps, that many of the most intelligent among us tend to overvalue that intelligence to the belief that such intellect can grasp vast complexities of the modern world.  But such faith is misguided, as it is impossible, by nature, for one complex system, such as our brain, to fully comprehend a system more complex than itself.  Instead it must rely on simplifications of various types to estimate, guess, or ignore various details that may or may not be of importance to the actual functionality of the complex system being analyzed, inevitably leading to misunderstandings and errors.

What these increasingly popular philosophies have done, as Hayek puts it, is to create "the impression that only that which is rationally justifiable, only that which is provable by observational experiment, only that which can be experienced, only that which can by surveyed, deserves belief; that only that which is pleasurable should be acted upon, and that all else must be repudiated.  This in turn leads directly to the contention that the leading moral traditions that have that have created and are creating our culture - which certainly cannot be justified in such ways, and which are often disliked - are unworthy of adherence, and that our task must be to construct a new morality on the basis of scientific knowledge - usually the new morality of socialism."

Such conclusions, as were growing in popularity when he wrote this summary in 1988, and are nearly dominatingly popular today, "contain the following presuppositions:
1) The idea that it is unreasonable to follow what one cannot justify scientifically or prove observationally.
2) The idea that it is unreasonable to follow what one does not understand....
3) The related idea that it is unreasonable to follow a particular course unless its purpose is fully specified in advance.
4) The idea, also closely related, that it is unreasonable to do anything unless its effects are not only fully known in advance but also fully observable and seen to be beneficial."

To the faith-minded reader, these presuppositions might seem close-minded, or perhaps even evil.  But such arguments do little to persuade the rationalist, who essentially needs to be shown a sign to believe.  Yet, even such should be able to acknowledge two glaring issues with these presuppositions, as Hayek points out.  "First, not one of them shows any awareness that there might be limits to our knowledge or reason in certain areas, or considers that, in such circumstances, the most important task of science might be to discover what these limits are.... Second, one finds in the approach underlying the requirements not only lack of understanding, not only the failure to consider or deal with such problems, but also a curious lack of curiosity about how our extended order actually came into being, how it is maintained, and what the consequences might be of destroying those traditions that created and maintain it."

In essence, it is supposed by such rationalists that the modern order of society, which has survived through the millenia, and advanced mankind out of the dark ages of stagnation, is inept and must be replaced by a more enlightened constructions of the human mind.  Thus the trial and error of generations which have led us to our modern traditions and morals (whether you believe these morals to be developed by human action, or given by the divine as I do), and proven their superiority by natural selection, are eschewed.  Experiments with other societal values have generally failed or underperformed compared to those of the American family.  Yet hastily, intellectuals desire to cast off such pointless values because they do not fall within their science.

It is not unreasonable to believe that religion and its morals are the best values a society should pursue.  Whether a person is agnostic or religious, the evolution of ideas has proven the value of morality.