I'm sick of radical skepticism
I'm also sick of people's obsession with philosophical certainty.

Up until the last couple of years, my impression of agnostics was that they were usually pretty unassuming and nonjudgmental. Then I kept seeing various versions of the following statement on the internet*:This is either a straw man (i.e. agnostics are trying to claim that atheists claim absolute certainty about God's nonexistence when they do not) or an insistence that other people phrase any statement about the existence of God(s) in a way that's compatible with radical skepticism. I have met (or seen commenting on the internet) few, if any, atheists who claim that one can be completely certain of whether God exists. But they do believe that there is no greater evidence for God's existence than for that of invisible pink unicorns, or Santa Claus, or of Bigfoot, UFOs or ghosts. And they see "I am an atheist" as a statement of what they believe to be the truth--defining "believe" in more or less the same sense as "I believe that the sun will come up tomorrow", i.e. I can't be any more certain of that than of any other fact about our world, but I have good reason to think it's the case. If anyone mentions that they're an atheist in the comments on some website, almost invariably someone else brings up the above agnostic argument and says that you can't prove a negative. But where are those same agnostics when someone says that there's no such thing as ghosts, or for that matter, that there are no WMDs in Iraq? And I don't see them rushing to the defense of Ahmedinejad when he says that the existence of the Holocaust is subject to doubt just like anything else. (It has been argued that any historical fact cannot be known, since we must rely on the word of others.) Since I was not a witness to the Holocaust, I can't prove that it happened. But the same agnostics who glorify their philosophical position with arguments borrowed from radical skepticism don't insist that I always express doubt when discussing the Holocaust. Basically, anyone who insists that you can never get off the fence about whether or not you believe in God(s) simply because you can never completely prove it is at best fixating on a technicality, in my opinion. In science, it's accepted that you can never prove anything with absolute certainty--you can only either provide supporting evidence for it, or disprove it. And yet agnostics don't freak out about people believing in Newton's Laws or the Theory of Relativity, or the fact that elephant seals are polygynous.

I've also noticed that agnostics tend to argue as though there's a complete vacuum of evidence about God(s)'s existence. There isn't. There is some evidence both ways and it takes various forms. I use the word "evidence" loosely, to include logical arguments as well as historical, scientific, anthropological, etc. evidence. No single piece of evidence conclusively shows that God(s) does or does not exist, but I believe that the balance of evidence overwhelming is against God(s)'s existence. Perhaps the most compelling evidence to me, and certainly the one that is closest to my heart, was first stated as the Riddle of Epicurus. (One can refute the Riddle of Epicurus by arguing that one need not assume that God is universally good, but since that rules out most religions' conception of God, that also negates much of the evidence that people cite for the existence of God.) I don't want to get into every single argument for or against here, since I'm sure that has been done more thoroughly elsewhere. The point is, there are many arguments for and against God(s)'s existence, and I accept that different people find the different arguments more or less compelling. And I have no problem with an agnostic saying that (s)he thinks that one side is not overwhelmingly convincing enough that people should be taking sides. What I do have a problem with is when agnostics say that atheists are making their decisions "on faith" and are being "irrational" because those statements are more difficult to refute. (I assume that most theists do not have a problem with having faith attributing to them, but do have a problem with their beliefs being described as "irrational". I think that the theists' arguments are wrong, but I acknowledge that I cannot prove that to be the case, and I would not simply dismiss them as irrational.)

How in the world can using logical arguments (like "the Christian God has logically  inconsistent qualities attributed to Him") to make your decision be described as "irrational"? Not agreeing with something doesn't make it irrational. In fact, being wrong doesn't make you irrational. It's definitely a stretch to say that anyone who is not a radical skeptic is irrational. Not only is it a stretch, in fact, but it is a violation of radical skepticism itself--for if you cannot be certain of anything, how can you be certain that radical skepticism itself is correct? And if you are not certain that radical skepticism is correct, how can you be certain that people who do not follow the radical skeptic philosophy are behaving irrationally? To tell other people how they've arrived at their decisions, and to be so sure of your explanation as to insist on it after these same people have told you that you're wrong, hardly seems consistent with radical skepticism to me.

I'm not saying that the agnostic position on God's existence is illogical or irrational, just that they shouldn't insist that anyone who has an opinion different from theirs is automatically "dishonest" or "irrational" or that others' opinions require "a leap of faith". They should be honest and acknowledge that their disagreement is on how convincing the evidence for and against God's existence is. They should not use a radical skeptic argument--one that they do not consistently apply--just because it is easier to claim that someone is irrational than to dispute particular pieces of evidence.

Frankly, I'm not sure why people are so obsessed with certainty. I admit that the radical skeptics have a point, that it's impossible to know anything with certainty. I'll admit that I don't know anything with certainty. But why is certainty so important? I long ago accepted that you cannot know anything with absolute certainty, but is there really any practical different between certainty and million-to-one odds? Let alone billion-to-one odds? Not that we can accurately calculate the odds of something being true anyway. (Richard Dawkins, who for better or worse now represents atheism to many people**, admits that he can't prove that we're not all living in a computer simulation and feels that when using belief in God(s) to categorize people it would be better to categorize them based on the probability they assign to God's existence. Yet agnostics will point to Richard Dawkins and say that his position requires just as much faith as any religious person's beliefs, and that agnosticism is obviously the best and most honest philosophical position. Sorry, agnostic-supremacists, but you're distorting Dawkins' statements and creating a straw man.)

I'm willing to recognize that whether God exists or not, absent conclusive proof, is an opinion or belief rather than a completely provable fact. But belief that God does not exist, as far as evidence goes, is more along the lines of belief that my dog loves me, or that animals feel pain, for example--unable to be truly proven, yet far from without basis in evidence. I'm wiling to recognize that one can't prove that animals feel pain, just as I'm willing to recognize that one can't prove that God exists, but do I spend a lot of time accounting for that possibility in my day-to-day life? And do I recognize that possibility on an emotional or "gut" level? The answer to both questions is No, and so I consider myself an atheist even though I recognize that I can't be absolutely certain that God doesn't exist. Besides, what difference does it make if God exists if the whole world appears exactly same as if He did not?

* Admittedly, the most vocal people on the internet also tend to be the most strident.

**At least he's better than Madalyn Murray O'Hair.