In Defense of Agnosticism
When evidence fail to prove God’s existence, and those who seek to deny it are deemed as inadequate, would you really blame an individual for opting for the Agnostic’s stand? Caught between the battle of the atheist’s lack of assurance and theist’s utter assurance, Agnosticism offers the relieving possibility of an ‘I don’t know’, one that had been the subject of controversies for many years.
Skepticism and doubt existed long before the word ‘agnostic’ was created, and it can traced all the way back to Ancient Greece. In his work, entitled ‘On the Gods’, Protagoras provocatively states the he is not able to know whether the Gods exist or not, mainly for “the obscurity and the brevity of the human mind”. Ancient
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However, an actual term for the third stance was not created until 1869, by Professor Thomas Henry Huxley, and thus official discussions about Agnosticism has only started then. Huxley derived it from the Greek word for ‘unknown’ ((a-), meaning "without", and gnosis, meaning "knowledge"), and used the term to distinguish himself in a society where everyone is a ‘-thiest’. In 1889, Huxley published a trilogy which he dubbed ‘The Nineteenth Century’, a series of essays on his agnosticism. Soon after its issuance, John Tyndall and T.A. Hirst, members of Huxley’s inner circles and close friends, were quick to criticize, mentioning that the essays themselves lacked any depth. Following Huxley’s example, Robert G. Ingersoll releases his work ‘Why Am I Agnostic?’ in 1889 in two parts. In the first, he states that no human being is obliged to believe in anything that does not have enough evidence, and thus, no man is forced to state whether God exists or not. Nonetheless, in 2006, atheist Richard