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Agnosticism: God
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Agnosticism is the philosophical position that it is impossible to know about the nature or existence of God. The term was coined in 1869 by Thomas H Huxley from the Greek agnostos ("unknowable") to refer to his own conviction that knowledge is impossible on many matters covered by religious doctrines. Agnosticism is therefore concerned with questions of Epistemology, the examination of human knowledge; it considers valid only knowledge that comes from ordinary and immediate experience. Agnosticism is distinct from Atheism on the one hand and Skepticism on the other. Atheists reject belief in the existence of God. Skeptics hold the strong suspicion or probabilistic estimate that God does not exist.
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Agnosticism may simply be the state of not knowing whether any gods exist or not, but people can take this position for different reasons and apply it in different ways. These differences then create variations in the ways in which one can be an agnostic. It is ... possible to separate agnostics in two groups, labeled strong agnosticism and weak agnosticism as analogs to strong atheism and weak atheism.
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Agnosticism describes the philosophical and theological view that the truth of the unexistence or existence of God, immortality, and the like are currently inherently unknowable. People can have scientific or real knowledge of phenomena, but when it comes to what lies behind phenomena there can be no evidence that entitles anyone either to deny or affirm anything.
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Agnosticism maintains that the nature and attributes of God are beyond the grasp of man's finite and limited mind; those divine attributes transcend human comprehension. The concept of God is just too big a subject for a person to wrap his or her mind around. Humans might apply terms such as those found in the Catholic Encyclopedia that attempt to characterize god, terms such as "infinitely perfect spiritual substance," "omnipotent," "eternal," "incomprehensible," "infinite in intellect and will and in every perfection"[5] but, the agnostic would assert, these terms only underscore the inadequacy of our mental equipment to understand so vast, ephemeral and elusive a concept.
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Agnosticism was entrenched in American culture by 1900, although the vast majority of Americans have continued to believe in God. Unbelief has probably remained chiefly an opinion of intellectual elites, especially academic ones. Unlike atheists, agnostics have rarely felt any need to institutionalize their views (the Ethical Culture movement was a rare exception, founded in 1876 by Felix Adler). To invent a structure to house a lack of beliefs perhaps seemed oxymoronic. Hence, agnosticism did not really evolve intellectually after establishing itself (except among academic philosophers) but rather in the twentieth century blended into low-key religious indifferentism.
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Agnosticism can be applied to either category, for example, you can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist. An agnotic theist believes in a God, but holds the opinion that the nature of God is unknowable to the human mind; where an agnostic atheist, as Smith puts it;
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