Gnosis means "knowledge" in Greek, and in essence the Gnostic religion is all about knowledge - secret knowledge. If you didn't read it yet, be sure to read the Page on Gnostic Religion. The opposite of gnostic is agnostic - i.e. someone who believes rationally that there is no divine. It's a fun topic of discussion, the difference between agnostic vs atheism. I feel these two words are pretty fine shavings of the same concept. Either you believe in God without needing proof - or you don't. Agnostic says "I don't believe in God and I don't have proof". Atheism says "I don't believe in God and I don't care about proof". But neither one believes in God. Those who believe in God say that you don't NEED proof, that's the whole point of belief.

Visitor Opinion -
Hi, many thanks for a very interesting site - I almost hestitate to argue a point since you're clearly better read than I, however, being a pedant, I can't just let it go :o) ; on the page Gnostic Gospels, you say that Atheism and Agnosticism are very similar. I always thought (and a quick trip to dictionary.com seems to support) that they are actually quite different; an Atheist disbelieves in any God (irrespective of proof) whereas an Agnostic relies on proof, and says that since there is no proof either way, (s)he neither believes, nor disbelives in God.

My Response -
OK this is in fact exactly the point I was trying to make above but obviously I didn't do a good enough job of it if you are writing in. Yes there are two words in the dictionary. But there is a word in the dictionary for "chimera" too and that doesn't mean one exists in reality :) It just means we have a word for that thing.

This is a philosophical issue, not a "what do we have words that we've made up definitions for" issue :) Remember, on one hand we have "a person who believes in God". We'll just call that person a "believer". Belief in God is based on faith. You simply believe, in your heart and mind, that God exists and that he is up there doing whatever he is doing. Different people have different shades of beliefs. Some believe God is up there controlling our daily lives. Others believe that God has given people free will and is simply where we go when we are done with our lives. They all believe there IS a God though.

Therefore on the other side of that equation are people who do not believe in God. It doesn't matter in the grand scheme if they do not believe because they just choose not to believe - or if they do not believe because they are waiting for some proof to appear. All of those people do not believe, for whatever reason.

Let's say someone is an Atheist. A is "anti/not" and theist is "God belief". So an Atheist is simply someone who does not believe in God. It's the whole root of the word. This person doesn't have to justify why they are not believing in God. It could be because no proof has changed their mind. It could be they are logical and feel logic demands proof. It could be that they don't care at all. Who knows. They just don't believe. It's like asking someone why he doesn't believe in marriage. Maybe he doesn't want to be tied down. Maybe he hasn't met the right woman yet. Maybe he just likes to be alone. We are all unique different individuals and I imagine every person's reason would be slightly different.

OK, on to agnostic. A - Anti. Gnostic - logical belief in God. This person claims to say "well I don't believe, but I don't disbelieve either. I don't have proof either way." But let's look at that logically. They do NOT believe. This isn't a Shroedinger's cat, hovering between two states. We are talking about a belief here. If you don't believe in God, then you don't believe in God. To say "well I'm waiting for proof" means that you do not believe in God but if proof appeared, you would. Heck, I have to think that any human being, if a flaming bush appeared before them, levitated them in the ground and let them have multi-day-long conversations with their dead loved ones, and then said "I am God", would probably have some sort of belief grow. To say that you will only believe or that you are "waiting to believe" when you have proof is meaningless. God is not about proof. God is about belief. That is the whole point of God. And to say "I might feel differently at some future point if certain things happened" is also meaningless. That would be true for any of us. Someone who is rabidly anti-abortion might suddenly feel differently if their wife was on the point of death and the only way to save her was to abort the fetus. A belief is only valid in the moment in which it is claimed. All beliefs are subject to future changes.

Any belief (or non-belief) is conditional. Your belief that you will never marry is conditional until you find a gorgeous, intelligent, wealthy, loving woman who falls completely in love with you and says she wants to marry you. Your belief that you will never be good at baseball is conditional until this wealthy woman hires you a personal set of baseball trainers and builds you your own field, and you are trained until you are minor-league quality and quite happy with your skills. Your belief that you are not a good cook is conditional until you go to cook school and learn all the techniques involved. And so on, and so on. Any belief you have is what you feel at the moment. None of these beliefs are necessarily what you will feel in 10 years with changed experiences, information, education and maturity.

So back to the issue at hand. If you believe in God, then you believe in God. If you do NOT believe in God, it doesn't matter if you claim it's because you simply don't (atheist) or that you might if you had proof (agnostic). In both cases you are still NOT saying "I believe in God, I am a believer". If you cannot stand up and say that, then you fall into the "non-believer" bucket. That's what believing in a God is all about, standing up and claiming your belief with a whole heart and whole mind.

Visitor Opinion -
After further reading your web site (very good actually), I stumbled into your discussion on atheism vs. agnosticism. Ethimologically, an atheist is someone who rejects gods and an agnostic is someone who rejects the gnosis (or the scriptures). Therefore, an agnostic may believe in God while not taking the scriptures for granted. Nowadays, agnosticism refers to people who more generally reject religion without necessarily rejecting God. You can put it this way: the fundamental question is not whether you believe in God or not, but whether God exists or not. If you believe God exists, you're a believer. If you believe God does not exist, you're an atheist. If you admit you don't know, you would be called an agnostic. Admitting you don't know indeed makes you a "non-believer" but certainly not an atheist. Believers and atheists share the same (while opposite) "burden of proof."

My Response -
OK yes many words we use nowadays have roots back in history with often different or even completely opposite meanings. So yes definitely the a-gnostic comes from against-gnostic, against the rational written documentation. But words change over time and "raining cats and dogs" no longer means animals are falling from our thatched roofed cottages.

I agree with you that in the general "non believer" bucket you will find both atheists and agnostics. They are in there for different shades of grey - but neither believes in God. I don't agree with you that in modern times agnostics reject religion without rejecting God. Agnostics in modern times are not sure about religion or God - they don't accept that either is real. It's not like agnostics are going around saying "I believe in a true God but the church is corrupt". That would be a reformer or puritain or other such faith. Agnostics say "I don't know if a God exists" independent of any religious trappings ... and to that end, both agnostics AND atheists have as part of their thought process, "If I had a solid bolt of proof, then I would believe." They both say things like "Let's see some miracles, if your God is real ..." I doubt you'll find any atheists who would really say "Even if I had overwhelming, undeniable proof in a series of documentable miracles performed for me daily, I would still not believe".

Visitor Opinion -
With reference to the aetheist/agnostic debate. I think alot of people argue over semantics and miss the wider picture.

Faith begins where Fact ends. It is inconceivable to me that we are ever going to prove the existence of God. If God were to arrive here "in-person" and state his claim, who would truly believe ? ... if anything things have gotten worse over the last 2,000 years rather than better.

To my mind, the biggest challenge facing those of us who would like to move humanity forward - and the Fact/Faith debate is part of this - relies upon us getting artists to think like scientists, and scientists to think like artists, at least for a while...

Then hopefully, like in that awful "War Games" movie, their left or right-sided brains will compute that arguments are futile, that we function best as a coherent whole and that everything comes down to faith in the end.

I wonder how many aetheists lying on their death-bed say a prayer... just in case. "Pascal's Wager" confirmed.

Thanks for access to a great site.

My Response -
I love this topic so I'll happily discuss it for years :) If we say there really is a God, and the Bible is true, then at some point his existence will definitely be proved, because he or his son will descend and talk to us all. The original Christians all thought that would happen in their lifetime. People in the year 1000 thought the world was about to end. People in the year 2000 thought the world was about to end. I am not one to believe in God just appearing and saying "OK the world is done, everything is shutting down." That seems silly to me - why bother to have babies born just at that instant, who will go straight to Hell for not being baptized? Or is he going to prevent all conceptions 9 months before this final day? If I were to believe in a God, it would be an eternal God, not one who had a set deadline for the earth and was going to just "stop everything" at that second. It wouldn't be fair in many, many ways. I think people in purgatory sit there until the final judgement right? So people who went to purgatory in the year 1 get much more time suffering than people who go to purgatory in the final seconds, even though the crimes of the later people could be far worse.

If fully repenting on your deathbed gives you a free pass to everlasting glory, that doesn't seem fair to me either. What if you were bad all your life but are truly sorry at the end - you're now given a clean slate? What if you were really good all your life but near the end you do a "bad" deed (say kill off the person who raped and murdered your daughter) and you are NOT repentant about it. Now you go to Hell because of that? Why should feeling a certain way in your last 5 minutes change the results of your life?

Visitor Opinion -
I’ve enjoyed looking over your pages and I’d like to make a contribution to the atheist / agnostic debate, if I may.

When you say an agnostic "does not believe in God," I assume you are holding this as distinct from "believes there is no God" but it's quite easy to assume (incorrectly, I think) that the first implies the second and I wonder if this is the source of some of the confusion in the discussion on these words. Having said this, you do actually define an agnostic as "someone who believes rationally that there is no divine" and I wouldn't agree with this - this to me is a description of a particular type of atheist

An agnostic, as far as my understanding goes, professes neither belief nor active disbelief (literally, "without knowledge", although I concede that the etymology is slightly more complicated), while an atheist does have a belief - that there is no god, whatever the reasoning behind this. You can lump agnostics together with atheists in a "don’t actively believe in God" bucket if you wish, but it is no more logical than grouping agnostics and believers because neither believe that there is definitely no god. Similarly, atheists and theists alike have reached positive conclusions on the topic and therefore form a group distinct from agnostics who have yet to make up their minds.

I agree (how could one believe otherwise?), that your statement about incontrovertible proof swaying a person of any belief must be correct, but without this evidence people have to have a mechanism for arriving at their beliefs.

Many people use the word "faith" in terms of a belief in God - it is a point of pride amongst many religious people that they don't need proof because they have their faith. I think this is a red herring. People essentially make all decisions on a rational basis. Sure, they make irrational decisions, but that is based on bad use of data, not a fundamentally illogical decision making mechanism. What I mean by this is that people male up their minds about any topic based on a summing up of all the evidence available to them. In this case, that might be the existence of misery and cruelty, a feeling down the spine when hearing a gospel choir or by reading a set of documents. Some find they believe that there is a god, some that there isn't and some find that they're really not sure either way.

In terms of this decision making process, incidentally, I think it is incorrect (as many do) to use the word "choose" in connection with "believe". I do not choose to believe anything; I can't, much as I'd like to. The beliefs I have are inescapable conclusions, reached after consideration (careful or otherwise) of all the evidence I have. I have slightly different evidence available to me as a result of my life experience than anyone else and I certainly attach different weightings to each aspect than anyone else - and this "evidence" also includes hormones, Machiavellian factors and whether I’ve had a bad day at the office. When I talk of this "consideration", I am, of course, not talking about any conscious process; I’m suggesting that there is unconscious (and almost certainly inaccurate) processing that underlies all the things we experience as beliefs or feelings.

Great site - I read The Da Vinci Code and found your site like probably most other people - trying to find out how much of it was true. It’s a great resource for just that question.

My Response -
If you don't believe in God, then you lack belief in a God. That is what that phrase means. To believe in a God is to have a conscious faith that he exists. So while you might not be willing to put into words what the first phrase means, to say "I do not believe a God exists" means that you lack the faith that he exists. I think it is a sign of how powerful the church is and how powerful, even in modern times, the blasphemous weight of being a "heretic" is that people who feel strongly that they do not believe in a God are still timid when it comes to saying it out loud.

You say that agnostics claim not to believe either way. But if you don't believe in God, then you don't. Whatever else you believe in the world, you have already said you don't believe in God, for whatever reason. You may say it's because you don't know what to do. You can say it's because you actively choose not to believe in him. But you have chosen to NOT believe in God. As Rush says, "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice".

That is an interesting point on all choices you make in life having some sort of basis. This goes back to the determinism philosophy that I was talking with someone else about on this site, in the handicapped area. All of us are a sum of our past and our experiences. We then make decisions based on those experiences and situations. Believing in something or having faith or feeling we have "proven" it is all based on that past. It could be that we saw a light in a dream, or read a book on the topic, or talked to someone. Someone may believe in God based on "theoretical proof" gained by talking to various priests over the years. A scientist may believe in black holes based on "theoretical proof" provided by instruments over the years. So we all choose the things we believe in based on what we have seen in life. Proof is always relative. We can "prove" someone murdered someone else based on DNA, or we can "prove" it because we were standing there when the trigger was pulled.

I have to disagree with you on choosing and beliefs. Again it's the deterministic vs free will argument. You feel you can't help it, a stepped series of events led you do that point. But I really have to say that I know people who have gone through harsh backgrounds and ended up being good people - and I know people who went through great childhoods and became awful people. What you CHOOSE to be is your own brain making that decision. If you choose to be swayed by certain facts, that is you. But other people in that exact same situation may (and often will) make quite different choices. Twins with the exact same basis in life can end up to be quite different.