I suspect that this is, in part, an aspect of temperament—I’ve always been fine being alone and unusual—but I really don’t get the argument for agnosticism from lack of popularity. It’s usually a gussied up version of “people don’t all agree and there’s no way to check.” This is, of course, only ever selectively applied.

No one ever says, “there are different ideas of the shape of the world. Some people believe it’s a globe, some that it’s flat, and some that it’s shaped like a velociraptor. The only way to know for sure is to go to space and look, and no one’s flying into space right now and I couldn’t afford the tickets even if they were.”

There are proofs that the earth is a globe available to us here on earth, of course, but there are proofs for God available to us here on earth. The people who apply this kind of argument reject the idea of following arguments because not everyone does, which, if applied consistently, would eliminate quite a lot of knowledge.

Do you believe vaccines work? Guess what, there are people who don’t. Do you think that astrology is bogus? There are people who believe in it. Do you think that the earth orbits the sun? There are people who don’t.

I think that the real answer to this lies in who the person considers part of his society and who he rejects; the people to whom this argument appeals cannot bear of the idea of standing apart from his society, so he falls back on only believing whatever is common to everyone that he considers part of his society.

Which brings me back to temperament; I just don’t get the appeal of that.