This is something I’ve said before in presentations that felt right to me, but I wasn’t 100% sure – “Agnostics are a slimmed down version of atheists.”

Agnostics seem to be overlooked when it comes to talking about noes. I know that when I write about the extremes of American religion, I tend to focus the most on atheists. And, in evangelical media circles, there is never an agnostic philosophy professor – he is always an atheist.

So, are agnostics just a slightly more religious, slightly less liberal version of atheists? I’ve dug up some data and I think I can say the answer is pretty clear – “yes”.

A small aside on the theological differences between the two groups. Atheists, by definition, believe there is no higher power. They argue that everything in the world has scientific and not divine explanations.

Agnostics are a little more ambivalent about this. While atheists say, “There is no God,” agnostics would say they don’t know if God exists and there’s no way to prove it anyway. The term agnostic was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869, when he said “(agnostic) simply means that a man should not say he knows or believes what he has no scientific reason to claim. know or believe”.

Let us compare these two groups on religious issues that exist in the study of cooperative elections to get an idea of ​​their theological differences.