No reason justifies disbelief.

[Belacqua]

''I'm not sure yet'' in fact if you are not sure it's the only honest thing to say.

It occurs to me, on reflection, that Mrs. Camus and I are at odds here at least in part about something that has long been identified as a trait common in the American character. 

In Hofstadter's classic book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, he makes a distinction between intelligent people and intellectual people. A person can be both, or only one, or neither. He points out that America has long valued intelligent people, and he gives Edison as an example of such a person. Americans like him because he was practical, applied his intelligence to concrete immediate solutions, and made money. In contrast, he describes the intellectual as someone who loves and works on ideas. Americans tend to be skeptical of such people, seeing them as "eggheads," and using that most damning of Internet judgments: "mental masturbation." 

Mrs. Camus reeks of this American attitude. When I asked her if her screen name referred to the philosopher Camus, she neglected to answer me, but she may have read some existentialism at some time. When I asked her where she had mastered every single serious argument for the existence of God (an amazing achievement!) she declined to answer. Still, we can see from her responses here that she expects me not to contemplate things in a mental masturbatory way, but to say now, clearly, what I need. 

Hofstadter gives two qualities that he uses to define the values of an intellectual. One he calls piety. And before people flip out over the religious-sounding term, it just means here a respect for ideas, even if they are not immediately practical. The other he calls playfulness. This is an intellectual's pleasure in working with ideas. It looks to me to come ultimately from Aristotle, who said, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Here is some of what he says about playfulness:

Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being exercised
in an excessively rigid way; and this it has, in most intellectual temperaments,
in the quality I would call playfulness. We speak of the play of the mind; and
certainly the intellectual relishes the play of the mind for its own sake, and finds
in it one of the major values in life. What one thinks of here is the element of
sheer delight in intellectual activity. Seen in this guise, intellect may be taken as
the healthy animal spirits of the mind, which come into exercise when the
surplus of mental energies is released from the tasks required for utility and mere
survival. "Man is perfectly human," said Schiller, "only when he plays." And it
is this awareness of an available surplus beyond the requirements of mere
existence that his maxim conveys to us. Veblen spoke often of the intellectual
faculty as "idle curiosity"- but this is a misnomer in so far as the curiosity of the
playful mind is inordinately restless and active. This very restlessness and
activity gives a distinctive cast to its view of truth and its discontent with
dogmas. Ideally, the pursuit of truth is said to be at the heart of the intellectual's
business, but this credits his business too much and not quite enough. As with
the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the
consummation often turns out to be elusive. Truth captured loses its glamor;
truths long known and widely believed have a way of turning false with time;
easy truths are a bore, and too many of them become half-truths. Whatever the
intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find
unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of
truth but in the quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this
side of the life of the mind supremely well when he said that the intellectual is
one who turns answers into questions. This element of playfulness infuses
products of mind as diverse as Abelard's Sic et Non and a dadaist poem. But in
using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of
seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at
play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and seriousness,
and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave concentration not so
readily called forth by work. And playfulness does not imply the absence of
practicality. In American public discussion one of the tests to which intellect is
constantly submitted when it is, so to speak, on trial is this criterion of
practicality. But in principle intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is
extra-practical.

I am not claiming to be an intellectual in any successful way. I just see some of the friction on this forum as relating to this distinction.