Why Agnostic?

[Tiberius]

I repeat, OK, fine ... since you want me to debate (I still don't want to) please post it again.

Kyu

Ok:

Well firstly I think you showed that piece to me before, and I corrected the origin of the word "atheist". The 'a' doesn't come from English grammar, but from Greek. ('a-theos' literally means "without god" in ancient greek).

Secondly, your argument that atheism and agnosticism are one and the same is invalid. As you quite rightly say, to be an agnostic is to say that the existence of a deity is unknown or unknowable, but this only covers knowledge. An person could claim that God is unknown or unknowable but still believe it exists. Indeed I find that most rational theists will admit this. A supernatural force that has no explanation is by definition unknown, and so people who claim their God is supernatural are agnostics and theists. Now the gnostic theists will claim that "supernatural" is simply a mocking word used by atheists, and that God is perfectly natural and has been proven through some argument or through nature.

In philosophy, knowledge is often described as a subset of belief, or as "true, justified belief". You can believe something and have no knowledge of it, but you cannot know something and have no belief of it, because this is a contradiction. Just to clarify, knowledge here is describing "absolute knowledge" rather than relative. You could argue that some people (like some creationists) "know" that fossils support evolution but simply do not believe it, but this is not the type of knowledge we are talking about. Knowledge in the agnosticism argument is all about the actual truth value of claims, not what people claim to know.

plus my further point:

Like "theism" & "atheism", "gnostic" mean knowledge (in this context "of god") in other words the gnostic "knows of god" or "has knowledge of god" and the agnostic "knows not of god" or "has no knowledge of god" and today that has changed slightly to mean that the agnostic "does not know if there is a god" or holds that "the existence of god is unknown or unknowable".

This is a gross misunderstanding of the origins of the word. Yes, theism is the opposite of atheism, but the word "agnosticism" was not originally meant as an opposite of gnosticism. Huxley coined the word to fit his definition of "the existence of god is unknown or unknowable". He used the word "agnosticism" because of the word "gnostic" meaning one who has spiritual knowledge. Huxley could have called his new definition anything, but he chose the word "agnostic" since the word "gnostic" commented on spiritual knowledge, and his word on knowledge being unknowable (chiefly in relation to god / spirituality).

It is in fact the word "gnostic" that has a rather modern meaning, stemming from the popularity of "agnostic", it has come to mean the polar opposite (which is why we used it in our scale). If the word agnostic meant "has no knowledge of god" then I would agree, atheists are inherently agnostic. However the word does not mean that, it never has. It has always meant "the existence of god is unknown or unknowable" (or derived versions of that), or the more modern (and in my opinion useless) definition of "I don't know what I believe".