Agnosticism
Join now to read essay Agnosticism
“Agnosticism is the philosophical position that it is impossible to know about the nature or existence of God.” The term was invented in 1869 by Thomas H Huxley from the Greek “agnostos”. So one can define the difference between an Atheist and an Agnostic is simply as the Atheist emphasizes that there is no God, whereas the Agnostic maintains only that he does not know. Agnosticism is not a position one can take like theism or atheism, rather its more like an rational process.
But when we consider ignorance along with agnosticism which is a mode of the intellective process, there is an obvious contradiction. Because ignorance is not just mere lack of a knowing, conversely, every ignorance is always a process of being ignorant of something quite precise. In other words, one who ignores knows in a particular form what it is that he ignores. For example, a person who has no knowledge on economics is not ignorant of what a Cobb-Douglas equation is, because he lacks information to such equations. Only the man who is told about Cobb-Douglas equations, and does not know what we are talking about because he does not understand the meaning of the words, only then is this man ignorant of what a Cobb-Douglas equation is.
Thus when one takes agnosticism into account when trying to conquer ignorant, inconsistency will arise. Agnosticism that deteriorates into an “I am ignorant about religion” statement is not agnosticism at all because it has already made a decision, that there can be no decision to the subject and that such a decision is not important. A statement like this is not agnostic, but assured of its ignorance and thus not