No reason justifies disbelief.

[bennyboy]

Still, I doubt that bickering over the minutiae is going to approach the point of contention between empiricism and other-than-empiricism or physics and metaphysics.  Let's just assume that your cants are in effect, and that no hypothesis will ever yield a theory.  Would the unsuitability or even failure of one tool suggest or imply that there was some other tool, that we possessed it, or that the set of things this tool was unsuitable for was actually populated?

I'm not a declared agnostic because I believe there's a better tool for investigating metaphysical questions than science. I'm a declared agnostic because I don't think we have access to answers about some questions. That being said, it is clear to me that there are some limitations specific to the scientific method which would suggest that either philosophical speculation or rational inference would be better tries at understanding those questions than science could be.

Here's the state of things as I see them: there are some things in existence, namely the Universe in general and the property of mind specifically, which science has proven a very poor tool in explaining. Anyone claiming that science provides a good working model of reality is, in my view, in error, because a good working model of reality must include both of those-- i.e. it must adequately answer the questions of cosmogony and psychogony.

Furthermore, since science has not demonstrated its ability to answer those very important questions, insistence either that it CAN or HAS answered them, or assertions that it is likely to answer them in the future, are statements of faith. I see assertions along those lines as a tribal response of anti-religion or anti-spiritualism, i.e. as so-called Scientism rather than as sincere statements of a good understanding of modern scientific principles or conclusions.

In other words, as an agnostic, I see an insistence in claiming knowledge where there really is none as a form of dogma-- and I hold dogmatic positions in low regard, whether they are religious in nature or materialistic.