Nowadays it is fashionable to classify ourselves as agnostics. At the same time, only half of the newly-minted agnostics have any idea what it is. Many people confuse agnostics with atheists, which is fundamentally wrong.
The emergence of the term "agnostic"
The term itself appeared in the late nineteenth century, thanks to Professor Thomas Henry Huxley. It is a British naturalist and Darwinist who used the word in 1876 during a meeting of the Metaphysical Society. In those days, the word "agnostic" had an extremely negative connotation and meant a person who abandoned the traditional belief in God and the church, an agnostic, at the same time, was convinced that the beginning of all things is unknown, since it cannot be cognized.
Today, an agnostic is a person who doubts religion, for whom the explanations of the very essence of God that religious teachings provide him are unconvincing. At the same time, the modern agnostic does not deny the possibility of the existence of the divine principle, he simply does not accept it as an unconditional concrete reality due to lack of evidence. For an agnostic, the question of what the divine principle is remains completely open, while he believes that this knowledge will appear in the future.
How atheists differ from agnostics
There is a fundamental difference between an atheist and an agnostic. An atheist is a believer, he just believes in the absence of God and in the materiality of the world around him. The share of atheists in the world is not very large, in most countries their number does not exceed seven to ten percent of the population, but agnostics are gradually spreading throughout the world.
There are two main directions in agnosticism. Theological agnosticism separates the mystical component of any faith or religion from the cultural and ethical one. The latter is significant from the point of view of theological agnosticism, since it acts as a secular scale of moral behavior in society. It is customary to neglect the mystical side of faith. It should be noted that there is a whole line of agnostic Christians who abandoned the mystical component of the Christian faith, but adopted a Christian morality.
Scientific agnosticism assumes that any experience gained in the process of cognition is distorted by the consciousness of the subject, then the subject himself, in principle, cannot comprehend and compose a complete picture of the world. Scientific agnosticism indicates the impossibility of complete knowledge of the world and the subjectivity of any knowledge. Agnostics believe that, in principle, there is no subject that can be fully understood, since the process of cognition is associated with subjective personal experience.
