Atheist or Agnostic?
I recently read a blog article in which the author mistaken replaced “Atheist” with “Agnostic”. Thinking back on prior readings, I realized that many people make this same mistake. While I know that a few people know the difference between the two, I figure I’ll outline them just to make sure my readers are well educated. We can start with Atheism.
Atheism is used to describe someone who specifically believes that no God or gods exist. They cite lack of physical or observable evidence for the existence of the divine. There are two types of Atheism: implicit and explicit. Implicit Atheists are those who do not hold Theistic beliefs, but have not consciously rejected these beliefs either. An example would be a newborn baby, who neither believes in religion, nor has it consciously rejected religion. Another example would be someone who was born and raised in a remote village in which the divine had never been heard of. An explicit Atheist is one who has consciously rejected religion and the divine, and considers them to be non-existent. Atheists can still have morals that are comparable to those who are religious, they just do not accept them to have been set forth by a divine source.
Agnosticism, on the other hand, consists of people who have not yet decided if God exists or not. These people reason that God may exist, or he may not, but we will never be able to proove one or the other. Interestingly enough, there exists a middle ground between the Agnostic and those who believe in God. The “Agnostic Theist” is someone who does not know if God exists or not, but chooses to believe in that God anyway. This really interested me because it seems like quite a few people I know would fall under this category, despite the fact that they consider themselves to be Christians or Jews.
Though many people use Atheism and Agnosticism interchangeably and nobody stumbles over the point they are trying to make, there really is a fairly large difference.
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In my understanding of Christian doctrine, the choice is to seek God or to not seek God. It is not a choice between believing and not believing. God reveals Himself only to those who seek Him even while not knowing if He even exists or not.
From that point of view, there is little if any difference between the atheist and the agnostic.
I certainly agree that there are two ways of looking at this from: the religious view and how these people define themselves. I am a Christian myself so I understand where you are coming from completely. I chose to approach this from the angle I did because I think it is important to note that someone who is agnostic will not be trying to prove that religion doesn’t exist. We see so many people trying to prove that God doesn’t exist through science and reason, but an agnostic knows that there is no real way of proving that God does not exist.