Agnosticism and other related labels (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Monday, April 28, 2014, 20:50 (3862 days ago) @ romansh

dhw: Romansh wrote that "agnosticism is not about belief in gods....It is about how we handle such knowledge." The definitions you referred me to are quite explicit in their references to belief in gods. 
-ROMANSH: From the opening line of Wikipedia 
"Agnosticism is the view that the truth values of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, as well as other religious and metaphysical claims—are unknown or unknowable."-I take "claims about the existence etc." to mean the same as beliefs here, and as you know, the next sentence uses believe/disbelieve. However, it's "unknowable" I'd like to follow up in a moment.-ROMANSH: If you recall I mentioned I extended this to other non metaphysical concepts ... I also noted this could be quite contentious.-This is an important point, which ties in with your question whether an intrinsically correct definition is a metaphysical proposition. Agnosticism is essentially a reference to knowledge (gnostikos = relating to knowledge), whereas atheism is specifically related to god(s) (theos = god). I don't think it's at all contentious to relate agnosticism to other concepts. The contentiousness arises when you try to relate atheism / atheistic to other concepts! However, in a religious context, the word "agnosticism" does cause problems if people define it as the impossibility of knowing (as above) whether there is a god or gods. This is where epistemology raises its head: can we "know" anything? On a certain philosophical (metaphysical?) level the answer has to be no. And so we are ALL agnostics in that sense. Perhaps this is why Dawkins can claim to be an agnostic, because 6.9 out of 7 allows for the fact that nobody can "know" anything for certain. And this is also why some of us opt for a less rigid definition: we neither believe nor disbelieve in the existence of a god or gods. What exactly is your objection to this definition of agnosticism in its religious context?