Comments Elsewhere

One of the problems here is that “agnosticism” can be used to describe at least two quite distinct views:

1. Holding that, as a matter of fact, you do not know whether or not God exists.

2. Holding that, in principle, you cannot know whether or not God exists.

(1) is probably the more common usage but (2) seems to be closer to the philosophical position espoused by Huxley and other early self-identified “Agnostics.” It’s not so much that they entertained God’s existence as a non-negligible possibility, but rather that they had epistemological objections to the idea that you could even assess the possibility. In any case, I think the second usage is taxonomically more useful and more interesting, since it helps you to classify the position not only of agnostics like Huxley or Ingersoll who didn’t believe in God, but also the views of folks like Kant or Kierkegaard, who did believe in God but denied the possibility of theoretical knowledge as a basis for their faith.