Who are agnostics and how do they differ from skeptics

In the nineteenth century, lived an English scientist named Thomas Huxley. His world view was contradictory.

On the one hand, he was a supporter of the theory of evolution, which in its essence is profoundly materialistic, and so fierce that it deserved the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog." He argued with the bishop of Oxford Wilberforce, he even noticed that he would rather be related to the primacy than with such a hollow chatterbox.

On the other hand, Geskli, being a person with a great life experience, understood that there are things and events in the world that no science can explain, never. No matter how hard the learned scholar tried, including well-deserved professors and academicians in robes and powdered wigs.

Such a contradiction. It, undoubtedly, does honor to the great researcher. After all, to recognize the limitations of human, and therefore of your own mind, you need to be a real sage. Only people do not think that they know everything, but if something is not comprehended, then it is not worth it.

Thomas Henry Huxley thought about his own convictions. He was not a religious person, but he could not even call himself an atheist. And he came up with a new term - agnosticism.

Defining who agnostics are, he meant thinking people who deny the possibility of full knowledge of the world around them and believing in the supernatural.

Giving name to a new philosophical direction, Huxley, however, was not the first thinker convinced of the existence of the unknowable. In the 18th century Hume defined life as a stream of environmental influences on consciousness and even expressed doubts about the existence of an objective world. Later on the same positions was Emmanuel Kant, who called life a complex of sensations. There were other philosophers, agnostics, whose views were criticized by materialistic scientists, especially Marxists. The latter did not doubt that you can study the entire material nature, and the other they did not know and did not want to know.

However, Hume, not knowing who agnostics are, because there was no such word then, was also not the first who doubted the knowledge of the world. In ancient Greece, in the fourth century before the birth of Christ, the philosopher Pyrrho considered life as biased, and therefore purely individual. It seems to one person that this object looks like this, but to another - quite differently. How, in this case, to understand how it really is? And what is good and what is evil? Such questions were worried by skeptical scholars and then, in the depths of centuries.

So, there is a certain similarity between the philosophy of Pyrrho and the views of Hesculi. What is the difference between agnostics and skeptics? After all, they are so similar. Both can not be called atheists, despite the occasional instances of the declaration of such views.

There is a difference. Who are agnostics and what are they convinced of? They deny the full cognizability of the world, but believe that it is still necessary to strive for this. Limitations will manifest themselves when the mind reaches the limits of the possible. Skeptics also call for a renunciation of the very process of cognition, considering it a completely useless case.

There is a significant difference between who is atheist and who is agnostic. The former deny the existence of the Creator. The second, that is, the agnostics, do not believe in the knowability of God. Perhaps they are right.