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Agnosticism
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Agnosticism was not so much a positive belief as a negative conclusion. Victorian agnostics wished to apply to all questions of knowledge what they took to be the criteria of the natural and human sciences. To decide matters of fact by any other standard they characteristically regarded as immoral—a credo classically articulated in the 1870s by the English mathematician William Clifford: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." That agnostics readily carried this principle into religious issues can be explained not only by widespread faith in science but more specifically by the fact that for two centuries theological writers had enlisted science to prove religious belief. That this hoary scientific apologetic foundered after 1860 owed much to contraction by scientists of what counted as scientific evidence, a restriction associated especially with Darwinism. In ensuing decades, a growing number of Americans weighed the evidence for the existence of God and concluded that nothing approaching scientific evidence existed to prove a God.
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Agnosticism is the position of believing that knowledge of the existence or non-existence of God is impossible. It is often put forth as a middle ground between theism and atheism. Understood this way, agnosticism is skepticism regarding all things theological. The agnostic holds that human knowledge is limited to the natural world, that the mind is incapable of knowledge of the supernatural. Understood this way, an agnostic could ... be a theist or an atheist. The former is called a fideist, one who believes in God purely on faith.
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Agnosticism has various forms: some agnostics see an objective existence of the material world (eg. the tree does make a sound if no one is there to hear it) but deny the possibility of knowing it for certain, others deny the existence of the material world because it cannot be known for certain.
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Agnosticism, denying that human beings can know if God exists, emerged in the 1860s and 1870s as the opinion of a small but influential minority of religiously serious, well-read Americans. Many belonged to the class of writers, academics, and scientists soon labeled "intellectuals." They commonly enjoyed relatively high economic and social status. The word "agnosticism" itself was coined in 1869 (from Greek roots denoting "un-known") by the English scientist Thomas Huxley, and American agnosticism closely tracked similar, somewhat earlier tendencies among British bourgeois intelligentsia. Several of the most prominent early American agnostics—such as the scholar and cultural critic Charles Eliot Norton, the journalist E. L. Godkin, the historian Henry Adams, and the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—were deeply entwined in transatlantic webs of friendships that linked the two countries' intellectual life. And as these names suggest, agnosticism first developed in the United States among urban northeasterners.
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Agnosticism retains an academic, half-familiar air. It is not often heard on television, and the pressures turned upon it have been less intense than those turned, say, on ‘liberal,’ or ‘fair and balanced,’ or ‘French fries.’ Still, if the shift in its meaning is as deep as I have suggested, the idea of agnosticism may have come to serve as a minor fulcrum, a point of balance in the wider debate between secular and religious America. It is worth recalling that the term was never intended as such. Huxley was an empiricist and a skeptic who took little interest in the nature of sin or the fate of his soul. Arguments were to be judged, in his view, on the basis of observation and experiment alone, and theism, by this reckoning, scarcely merited consideration. Atheism, meanwhile, remained a plausible but ultimately unprovable dogma.
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Agnosticism is ... related to philosophical skepticism, logical positivism, and other matters of epistomology. It is also opposed, in varying degrees, to gnosticism, theism (sometimes), and spirituality (sometimes). It is also not nihilism.
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Agnosticism