What Is Agnosticism?

Some people think that there are no effective differences between religious agnosticism and atheism, but the two standpoints are distinct. Learn how both work in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,
Hey brain Stuff, Lauren fog obamb Here. It's called the
rise of the nuns, the rapid increase in the number
of Americans who claim to have no religious beliefs that
has taken place in the last decade or so. When
Pew's Religious Landscape study came out in it showed that
the percentage of atheists in America had doubled from one

(00:24):
point six in two thousand seven to three point one. Meanwhile,
the percentage of agnostics had just about doubled from two
point four to four point Oh but these terms agnostic
and atheists are often confused. Let's unpack them. People choose
to identify as religiously agnostic for a variety of personal reasons, philosophical, psychological, theological,

(00:47):
or even political. But it's not that agnostics are spiritual
fence sitters, unwilling to state whether they believe in God
or don't. A true agnosticism, it turns out, has nothing
to do with belief at all. The term agnosticism was
first coined by English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who lived
in the mid to late eighteen hundreds. He was a
fierce defender of Charles Darwin against religious critics who accused

(01:09):
him of denying God's role in creation. As a scientist,
Huxley didn't concern himself with beliefs. He sought after facts,
and the fact of any proposition, for example, that God
created the vast diversity of nature or that it evolved
from natural selection, could only be proven by the evidence.
Huxley stated that agnosticism itself wasn't a creed or a

(01:30):
set of beliefs, but a principle, namely quote that it
is wrong for a man to say he is certain
of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can
produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. The word itself
was a combination of the prefix a meaning against or opposite,
and gnosticism, which comes from a Greek word meaning knowledge.

(01:52):
Gnosticism was a religious movement that flourished in the first
and second centuries CE, and held that, among other things,
the spirit world was good and the material world was evil.
And although the principle of agnosticism doesn't exclusively apply to
the question of God's existence, you can be agnostic about
any proposition. It's been wrapped up in religion since the beginning.

(02:13):
Huxley wrote a friend in eighteen sixty, I neither affirm
nor deny the immortality of Man. I see no reason
for believing it. But on the other hand, I have
no means of disproving it. Give me such evidence as
would justify me in believing anything else, and I will
believe that. So that's agnosticism. But what about atheism. Atheism,

(02:33):
according to its classical definition, is the lack of belief
in God. Whether that God is the Biblical Judeo Christian
God or some other higher power is a separate issue.
The opposite of atheism is theism, the belief that God exists.
Atheism and theism are thus both metaphysical claims because they
as certain answer to a question about the nature of reality. Agnosticism,

(02:55):
on the other hand, doesn't take a position on whether
God exists. Instead, it takes a position on whether or
not we can know if God exists. This is thus
a physical or epistemological question, epistemology being the study of knowledge.
Agnosticism claims that we cannot know if God does or
does not exist because there's no compelling evidence that either
proposition is true, at least not yet. You might think

(03:19):
that agnosticism is nothing more than a handy way to
dodge the question of whether you believe in God. Instead
of saying yes or no, the agnostic chooses a third position, neither.
But this is where things can get Harry. We spoke
with Paul Draper, a professor at Purdue University who specializes
in the philosophy of religion. He's witnessed his fair share
of arguments between atheists and agnostics. He said, people get

(03:42):
so angry about this. The atheists will say, you call
yourself an agnostic, but you're really an atheist. And you
can see the atheists point at face value. It seems
there's a razor thin line between saying I don't see
any evidence that God exists and I don't believe that
God exists. But the friends is that you can be
an agnostic and an atheist, just as you can be

(04:03):
an agnostic and a believe in Christian or Buddhist or Muslim.
That's because agnosticism, at its core is separate and unrelated
to questions of faith. Let's explain, agnostics are nearly always
lumped together with atheists as a type of nonbeliever. The
Pew Research Center defined religious nuns as being either atheists, agnostics,
or not affiliated with any particular religion. But agnosticism isn't

(04:28):
itself a belief system. One could believe on faith that
God exists, but still ascribed to the agnostic position that
God's existence cannot be proven by physical evidence or rational arguments.
Such a person would be an agnostic theist. There's even
a school of theology called apophatic theology that claims that
God is inherently unknowable. Thomas A Queenas, the thirteenth century

(04:49):
philosopher and theologian, wrote, now we cannot know what God is,
but only what God is not. We must therefore consider
the ways in which God does not exist, rather than
the ways in which does. According to Pew, of religious nuns,
the group that does include atheists and agnostics do believe
in a higher power. However, while it's technically true that

(05:12):
you can be both an agnostic and a faithful believer,
it's perhaps more common for agnostics to doubt the existence
of God as such. Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and mathematician,
wrote a treatise on agnosticism in which he explained why
the agnostic and atheist positions often overlap. He said. The
agnostics suspends judgment, saying that they are not sufficient grounds

(05:32):
either for affirmation or for denial. At the same time,
an agnostic may hold the existence of God, though not impossible,
is very improbable. He may even hold it so improbable
that it's not worth considering in practice. In that case,
he is not far removed from atheism. His attitude maybe
that which a careful philosopher would have towards the gods
of ancient Greece. If I were asked to prove that

(05:55):
Zeus and Pside and Inhera and the rest of the
Olympians do not exist, I should be at a loss
to find conclude of arguments. An agnostic may think the
Christian God as improbable as the Olympians. In that case,
he is, for practical purposes, at one with the atheists.
As we said at the beginning, the reasons for identifying
as agnostic are myriad and different for every person. Draper,

(06:16):
who has participated in high profile debates with Christian philosophers,
calls himself a local atheist and global agnostic. He explained,
I'm an atheist about the all powerful, all knowing, all
good God, I'm agnostic about God in a broader sense.
Is there some being that qualifies for the title God?
There could be such a thing. Today's episode was written

(06:43):
by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff
is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more on this and lots of other philosophical topics,
visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And
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