Well, everyone has their own opinion on what the differences are, but essentially Agnostics claim that they do not know or cannot know about the exsistence of God. Atheists, on the other hand, deny the exsistence of God. That is, they claim that a God is not possible.
That is just a very, VERY bare-bones basic outline of the difference between them. Like organised religions, these two 'philiophies' (or whatever you want to call them) are interpreted differently by different people.
Great question, by the way. Lots of people are confused by what these words mean. I don't always see a distinction, whereas sometimes the distinctions are obvious.
What I thought it was was that Atheists do not in any way believe in any god, but that Agnostics just aren't sure and don't really care whether there is or not.
Now what I'm told is that Atheists (^ see above), but Agnostics believe there is a god, but don't know who he is and don't really care.
Agnostic: They believe that there might be a god or a higher being but it can not be decided nor defined as something like christianity, but a god is possible.
As Richard Dawnkins puts it, an atheist thinks something along the lines of "the existence of God is hightly improbable and I live my life on the assumption that he doesn't exist" whereas an agnostic "concedes that there is an equal proabability of God existing or not existing."
Or as my friend Trix eloquently puts it, atheists don't believe, agnostics don't care.
I've actually heard agnostics being described a few different ways.
I've always thought of agnostics as people who aren't sure whether god exists or not. Not necessarily not caring, as the other people have said, but as just unsure, basically they don't have any proof to go either way.
I've also heard them described as being equally accepting of there being a god as there not being a god. Fairly similar to what I've described above, but the same person also described atheists as being completely certain that there is NOT a god.
I disagree with that description of an atheist and an agnostic though, since everyone else i've talked to has said atheists just don't believe in god, not necessarily being 100% sure there isn't one.
I've also heard it said that agnostics are polite atheists, which doesn't seem necessarily true.
posted over a year ago
I was raised agnostic, and I agree that agnostics aren't sure. However, the majority of atheists don't KNOW that there isn't a God, they suspect and live on the assumption that he doesn't exist.
Gnostic/agnostic and theist/atheist are different facets of the religious/spiritual spectrum. However, gnostic/agnostic and theist/atheist are not mutually exclusive.
Gnosticism means that, whether you are theist or atheist, you believe that you know what you believe is true. Agnostic means you believe that you don't know what you believe is true.
Theism is the belief in a deity or deities of some kind, and atheism is technically anything that is not an express belief in any deities, though it generally refers to having an express disbelief in any deities.
That means that people who say they do not know if they believe in god or not are technically atheists, and they would have to believe that they couldn't know if there is a god, whether or not they could decide what they believed, to be agnostic.
As Richard Dawkins said, there's more than one type of agnostics.
But it's mainly just someone who doesn't know (believe) whether there is a God or not. Some don't care, others just don't know. Some guess, and others rely on 50/50 probability.
While an Atheist is someone who simply does not believe in God.
