Not Believing in the absence of evidence

I think Andrew Sullivan got it right when he wrote, “wouldn’t that lead to mere agnosticism?”  However, I think Jillette is right about not filling in the gaps with faith if he means blind faith.

Penn Jillette, responding to Piers Morgan’s on-air badgering, thinks the two positions are connected in their Socratic acknowledgement of human ignorance:

What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist — I don’t know. If I don’t know, I don’t believe. I don’t know exactly how we got here, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. We have some of the pieces of the puzzle and we’ll get more, but I’m not going to use faith to fill in the gaps. I’m not going to believe things that TV hosts state without proof. I’ll wait for real evidence and then I’ll believe.

And I don’t think anyone really knows how to help everyone. I don’t even know what’s best for me. Take my uncertainty about what’s best for me and multiply that by every combination of the over 300 million people in the United States and I have no idea what the government should do.

But wouldn’t that lead to mere agnosticism? Or the conservatism of doubt?

On Libertarianism And Atheism – The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan – The Daily Beast