An English scientist named Thomas Huxley lived in the nineteenth century. His worldview was controversial.
On the one hand, he was a supporter of the theory of evolution, which in essence is deeply materialistic, and so fierce that it earned the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog." Arguing with the bishop of Oxford Wilberforce, he even noticed that he would rather be related to the primacy than with such an empty talker.
On the other hand, Geskli, being a person with great life experience, understood that there are things and events in the world that no science can explain, and never. No matter how hard the whole scientific fraternity tries, including honored professors and academicians in robes and powdered wigs.
Such a contradiction. It undoubtedly honors the great explorer. Indeed, in order to recognize the limitations of the human, and, therefore, one's own mind, one must be a real sage. Only the near-minded people think that they know everything, and if something is not comprehended, then it is not worth it.
Thomas Henry Huxley thought about his own beliefs. He was not a religious person, but he also could not call himself an atheist. And he coined a new term - agnosticism.
Determining who such agnostics, he had in mind thinking people who deny the possibility of full knowledge of the world and believe in the supernatural.
Giving a name to a new philosophical trend, Huxley, however, was not the first thinker convinced of the existence of the unknowable. In the XVIII century, Hume defined life as a stream of environmental influences on consciousness and even expressed doubts about the existence of an objective world. Later, Emmanuel Kant, who called life a complex of sensations, also stood in the same position. There were other agnostic philosophers whose views were criticized by materialist scientists, especially Marxists. The latter did not doubt that one could study the whole material nature, and they did not know the other and did not want to know.
However, Hume, not knowing who the agnostics were, because there was no such word then, was also not the first to doubt the knowledge of the world. In ancient Greece, in the fourth century BC, the philosopher Pirron considered life as biased, and therefore purely individual. It seems to one person that this object looks like this, and to another it looks completely different. How then to figure out how it really is? And what is considered good and what is evil? Such questions excited skeptic scientists even then, in the depths of centuries.
So, there is a certain similarity between the philosophy of Pirron and the views of Geskli. What is the difference between agnostics and skeptics? After all, they are so similar. Both cannot be called atheists, despite isolated cases 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, however, are calling for a rejection of the process of cognition, considering it to be absolutely useless.
There is a significant difference between who are atheists and who are agnostics. The first deny the existence of the Creator. The second, that is, the agnostics, do not believe in the knowability of God. Perhaps they are right.
