Agnosticism

Philosophical theory that denies the possibility of human knowledge of the world or the possibility of a consistent knowledge of the world. The term “agnosticism” goes back to Aldous Huxley, a British philosopher and scientist. In 1869, he expressed a skeptical standpoint and attitude towards Christian theology with the term “agnosticism”: neither to believe in the existence nor the non-existence of God, and to deny that one can have any knowledge of the nature of God. Later, the term “agnosticism” was used beyond such scope.

The philosophy of ancient skeptics already contained the idea of agnosticism. The chief representatives of agnosticism in modern philosophy were the British philosopher Hume and the German philosopher Kant. Hume held that human knowledge cannot go beyond the scope of sense experience, and that it is unknowable whether there were material and spiritual substances (including God) beyond sense experience. Kant acknowledged the existence of the “thing-in-itself” beyond our sensations, and that man’s sensations and ideas are caused by the stimulation of our senses by the “thing-in-itself”, and that one can know things within the scope of empirical phenomena but can never know the “thing-in-itself” as being (onto), because it is beyond the limits of our capacity for rational knowledge.

The question concerning the relation of thinking and being is the basic question of philosophy. Agnostics have given a negative answer to the second side of this question, i.e., the identity of thinking and being, and set up an insurmountable gap between thinking and being, matter and consciousness. Lenin pointed out: “The essence of the agnostic’s line” “is that agnostic does not go beyond sensations, that agnostic stops on this side of phenomena, refusing to see anything ‘certain’ beyond the boundary of sensations.”

Some materialists (such as Feuerbach) and idealists (such as Hegel) throughout history have criticized the errors of agnosticism from their respective standpoints. But they discussed the question of whether man can know the world apart from practice and merely limited to the scope of theoretical thinking and were not able to consistently refute agnosticism, for man’s social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world. Marxism introduced practice into epistemology and strongly refuted agnosticism. Marx said: “The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.” Engels pointed out: “The most convincing refutation [of agnosticism] as of all other philosophical fancies, is practice, viz., experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable ‘thing-in-itself’.” Agnosticism denied that men can correctly know the objective world, and had a negative influence on the development of science and knowledge.