Vamos ouvir o inventor do termo
antes: para mim, é uma postura de não fechar portas e esperar por provas. De entender que todas as interpretações espíritas, deístas, budistas e outros istas são extremamente antropomórficas. E simplesmente ter percebido que depois de milhares de anos não há a menor possibilidade de sair algo por aí.
Não acredito em deus. não tenho nenhuma evidência da vida após a morte. Agnóstico para mim é algo como: Ok, mostre-me.
http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/guide13.htmlOf the hundreds of words T. H. Huxley invented, the most familiar and most important is "agnostic." The complex term "agnosticism" was variously defined, by him and by others, sometimes as a synonym for skepticism, at other times as equivalent to the scientific method, and often given a tint of ethics, agnostics being more ethical than pious people, who base their fatih on what authority dictates. Many people thought "agnosticism" a cover for materialism, and Huxley was thus provoked to attack materialism as a philosophy both in essays, such as On the Physical Basis of Life (1868), and in letters, such as that of January 6, 1861; see § 8. Matter of Life: Protoplasm.
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His Rattlesnake diary contains few reflections on skepticism; it concludes with a phrase from Goethe, a phrase he would often repeat: Active Skepticism Thatige skepsis, "An Active Skepticism is that which unceasingly strives to overcome itself and by well directed Research to attain to a kind of Conditional Certainty." To Henrietta Heathorn, he described the state of doubt as a disease from which he suffered. "Depend upon it," he wrote, in language that Thomas Carlyle and Cardinal Newman would have employed, "man was not made for doubt but for belief. ... Doubt leads to little better than moral paralysis"– October 1847. In an 1854 contribution to "Science" for the Westminster Review, Huxley noted that "Mosaic geology" was "fairly dead and buried"–see Murchison, et al.
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Invention of "Agnostic"At an early meeting of the Society, each member identified his religious or political position as Anglican, Roman Catholic, Positivist, and so on.
Having no label, and feeling like the fabled fox without a tail, Huxley coined a word for his position: "agnostic." Although this word is sometimes defined (as in the Oxford English Dictionary ) as relating to the Unknowable, Huxley denied having that as source of the word. Having referred to the Unknowable earlier, he subsequently apologized for having wasted a capital U. "
Agnostic" was coined in 1869 as an antithesis to "gnostic," one who knows the meaning of mysteries such as God. It seems to have first appeared in print in a May 29, 1869 Spectator note ("The Theological Statute at Oxford").
