Relevant question for modern Democrats: Are agnostics just 'light' versions of atheists?

It’s something that I’ve said before during presentations that felt right, but I wasn’t 100% sure — “Agnostics are a light version of atheists.”

Agnostics seem to get overlooked when it comes to talking about the nones. I know that when I’m writing about the extremes of American religion, I tend to focus on atheists the most. And, in evangelical media circles, there’s never an agnostic philosophy professor — it’s always an atheist.

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

A quick aside about the theological differences between the two groups. Atheists, by definition, believe that there is no Higher Power. They contend that everything in the world has scientific explanations and not Divine ones.

Agnostics are a bit more ambivalent about that. While atheists state, “There is no God,” agnostics would say that they don’t know if God exists and there’s no way to prove that either way. The term agnostic was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869, when he stated “(agnostic) simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe.”

Let’s compare those two groups on the religious questions that exist on the Cooperative Election Study to get a sense of their theological differences.

When asked how important religion is to their lives, 92% of atheists say “not at all” while another five percent say “not too.” Agnostics are a bit more ambivalent with 74% saying “not at all” and 20% saying “not too important.”

When it comes to church attendance, the same general pattern emerges — neither group goes to services that much but atheists are even less apt to admit to any church attendance (88% say that they never go vs. 72% of agnostics).

Finally, when it comes to prayer, the gap grows larger.

Define 'agnostic,' please; does it take faith to be one?

LISA’S QUESTION:

What does it mean to be agnostic? Are there people who actually consider it to be a religion?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

In Pew Research’s much-mulled 2014 religion poll of 35,000 U.S. adults, 3.1 percent defined themselves as “atheists” (compared with 1.6 percent in a similar 2007 survey) while a somewhat larger faction of 4 percent called themselves “agnostics” (versus 2.4 percent in 2007). Pew grabbed headlines by combining them with the far larger numbers who said their faith was “nothing in particular” and concluding that 22.8 percent of Americans are now religiously “unaffiliated” compared with only 16.1 percent seven years earlier.

The agnostic term was coined in 1869 by biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, a noted advocate of Darwin’s evolution theory, to distinguish his own doubts from outright atheism. Darwin soon embraced that label for himself. So did a popular U.S. performer of that era, the touring anti-religion lecturer Robert Ingersoll. However, the agnostic outlook was nothing new. This sort of skepticism was found among some thinkers in ancient Greece and India as far back as the centuries B.C.

No doubt (so to speak) the line between agnosticism and atheism can be confusing, but it was well and clearly defined by the great British mathematician Bertrand Russell, a critic of Christianity, in his essay “What Is An Agnostic?”:

“An agnostic thinks it impossible to know the truth in matters such as God and the future life with which Christianity and other religions are concerned. Or, if not impossible, at least impossible at the present time.

Are agnostics atheists? No.