From New World Encyclopedia

Agnosticism is the philosophical or religious view that the truth value of certain claims particularly claims regarding the existence of God, gods, deities, ultimate reality or afterlife is unknown or, depending on the form of agnosticism, inherently unknowable due to the subjective nature of experience.

Agnostics claim either that it is not possible to have absolute or certain knowledge of the existence or nonexistence of God or gods; or, alternatively, posit that while certainty may be possible for some, they personally have not come into possession of this knowledge. Agnosticism in both cases involves some form of skepticism.

Agnosticism is not necessarily without a belief in God or gods. Rather, its belief is that the existence of God or gods is unknowable. It is important to note that, contrary to the more popular understanding of agnosticism merely as an agnostic attitude towards the divine, agnosticism is in fact quite a constructive project in two ways. First, as understood originally by Thomas Huxley who coined the term, it involves a serious philosophical process for approaching the question of the existence of God. Second, agnosticism can religiously issue in awareness of one's ignorance, which in turn can lead to a profound experience of the divine.

The term agnosticism comes from a conjunction of the Greek prefix "a," meaning "without," and gnosis, meaning "knowledge." Thus, the term refers quite explicitly to the agnostic's deficit in knowledge regarding the divine. The term "agnostic" is relatively new, having been introduced by Thomas Huxley in 1869 to describe his personal philosophy that rejected gnosticism, by which he meant all claims to occult or mystical knowledge[1] such as that spoken of by early Christian church leaders, who used the Greek word gnosis to describe "spiritual knowledge." Agnosticism is not to be confused, however, with religious views opposing the Gnostic movement, that is, the early proto-Christian religious sects extant during the early first millennium.

In recent years, use of the word agnosticism to refer to that which is not knowable or certain is apparent in scientific literature in psychology and neuroscience.[2] Furthermore, the term is sometimes used with a meaning resembling that of "independent," particularly in technical and marketing literature, which may make reference to a "hardware agnostic"[3] or "platform agnostic."[4]

The Sophist philosopher Protagoras (485-420 B.C.E.) seems to have been the first among many thinkers throughout history who suggested that the question of God's existence was unknowable.[5] However, it was Enlightenment philosopher David Hume who laid the foundations for modern agnosticism when he asserted that any meaningful statement about the universe is always qualified by some degree of doubt.

Building on Hume, we see that the fallibility of human reasoning means that a person cannot obtain absolute certainty in any matter save for trivial cases where a statement is true by definition (as in, "all bachelors are unmarried" or "all triangles have three angles"). All rational statements that assert a factual claim about the universe which begin with the statement "I believe that..." are simply shorthand for the statement "based on my knowledge, understanding, and interpretation of the prevailing evidence, I tentatively believe that..." For instance, when one says, "I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy," said person is not asserting an absolute truth but rather a tentative belief based on an interpretation of the evidence assembled before him or her. Even though one may set an alarm clock at night, fully believing that the sun will rise the next day, that belief is tentative, tempered by a small but finite degree of doubt, since there is always some infinetesmal measure of possibility that the sun might explode or that that person might die, and so on.

What sets apart agnosticism from the general skepticism that permeates much of modern Western philosophy is that the nature of God is the crux of the issue, not whether or not God merely exists. Thus, the nature and attributes of God are of foremost concern. Agnosticism maintains as a fundamental principle that the nature and attributes of God are beyond the grasp of humanity's finite and limited mind, since those divine attributes transcend human comprehension. The concept of God is quite simply too immense a concept for a mere human being to wrap her or his mind around. Humans might apply terms such as "omnipotent," "omniprescent," "infinite" and "eternal," to attempt to characterize God, but, the agnostic would assert, these highly obsfucatory terms only underscore the inadequacy of our mental equipment to understand a concept so vast, ephemeral and elusive.

Agnostic views may be as old as philosophical skepticism, but the terms "agnostic" and "agnosticism" were created by Thomas Huxley to place his beliefs alongside those of the other dominant philosophical and religious creeds of his time. Huxley perceived his beliefs to be fundamentally different in one important way from all these other positions, whether they were theist, pantheist, deist, idealist or Christian. In his words:

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Agnosticism - New World Encyclopedia