What is Agnosticism?

Agnosticism, I suppose, has a few definitions, depending on your source. Just like any other belief system, or school of thought, you would probably be hard pressed to get all agnostics to agree on one specific set of beliefs, so let me just sum things up as best I can. Though I'm sure most people who read this blog know what agnosticism is, I feel that I should post this just in case.

The basic premise of agnosticism is that we agnostics admit that we don't know about the universe. We don't know if there's a god or not, we don't know if a higher power exists, we can't be sure if events are all random, predetermined, or structured, and we don't know if we even can know these things. I don't know if all agnostics would say this, but I am firmly of the belief that no on in the entire human race does really know (at this moment) the answer to any of what I just mentioned. Sure, any theist or atheist will say that they can be sure that there is or isn't a god, but I find that hard to believe. As of yet, no conclusive proof exists to confirm or refute the existence of a god, or anything of the sort.

So the reason I, at least, turned to agnosticism was because I found it the most rational thing to do. I find that atheists even possess a small amount of faith, just like theists, in that they stick to their belief (or disbelief) despite the fact that they can't be certain about it. I do, however, hold them much more highly than theists, and in no kind of contempt for their beliefs, because they are at least far more likely to be correct than theists are. Well, that is, they are as far as we know.

Another thing about agnostics is the notion of defining what a god is. Again, for all I know I'm only speaking for very few agnostics here, but this is what I think about things. Since science and common reasoning can easily disprove the validity of all of earth's religions, or at the very least they can fail to support them, we cannot assume that any of them are true. Fir this reason, we can't assume that their ideas of a god are true. This being the case, if there is a god of any kind, who's to say what he would be like? Would he really be omnipotent, omniscient, or even benevolent? This we cannot know. Another question is what exactly would we define a god as? Would he have to rule over us? Would he have to be one of those omni-somethings listed above? Would he have to have created the world or anything? I find this the most troubling question of all, because it also leads me to wonder if it would be watching us, controlling us, or affecting us at all if there were a god out there. In such a large, large universe, with human knowledge understanding only the tiniest fraction of it, who's to say that we would have any idea of what god would look like? It seems ridiculous to me.

The last thing I'll cover in this article is the difference between empirical and positive agnosticism. Basically, an empirical agnostic believes only that humans simply aren't able to tell if there's a god yet, while a positive agnostic will tell you that humans never can become able to tell if there's a god. I myself am an empirical agnostic, and I think that the validity of this claim could depend heavily on how "god" is defined, so I won't go into the topic too deeply, for the moment. Empirical agnosticism, by the way, you may hear called "weak" agnosticism, a term that I don't agree with. The while idea of agnosticism is that we don't know if there's a god, so doesn't it seem more strongly adherent to this principle to not know whether we can know, rather than to firmly say that we can't? I find that so-called "weak" agnostics are far more firmly held to their beliefs and to rationality than any other belief system. Empirical agnostics simply acknowledge that until proof exists for something, we cannot be certain of it, and therefore will not assert that it is true. Though they are often called "fence sitters", I am of the belief that there is no shame in adhering to logic strictly and exclusively, and making no leaps of faith.

If you want to know more about agnosticism, you could learn all about spiritual agnostics, and agnostic theists, and all sorts of other fancy terms, but these are at least the basics. As a quick recap, agnosticism is only the belief that the existence of god is uncertain due to lack of evidence. As for my particular beliefs on agnosticism, I would go as far as to define it as a strict adherence to the belief of only what can be proven conclusively by science or philosophy, and nothing else. In this way, empirical agnosticism isn't incompatible with atheism or theism, as empirical agnostics would acknowledge either belief to be true, were there sufficient proof to support it. Thank you for taking the time to read this post, as it is a topic I find especially interesting, and I hope that I have been able to help everyone who read this to better understand agnosticism.

Sincerely,

The Ellipsis