word | agnostic |
---|---|
definition | A person who believes that whether God exists is not known and probably cannot be known. |
eg_sentence | Both of them were always agnostics, but after they had children they started attending church again. |
explanation | The words agnostic and agnosticism were coined around 1870 by the great English biologist T. H. Huxley, who had just spent a decade defending the works of Charles Darwin against the attacks of the church. Scientists often put a high value on evidence when arguing about religion, and many agnostic thinkers believe that human minds simply aren't equipped to grasp the nature of God. But agnostics differ from atheists, who actually claim that no God exists and may even think they can prove it. You may have seen the similar word gnostic, the name for followers of certain religious sects from around the time of Christ that sought spiritual knowledge and rejected the material world. An increasing interest in gnosticism today can be seen in the popular novels of Philip Pullman, Dan Brown, and Neil Gaiman. |
IPA | ægˈnɑstɪk |
Tags: mwvb::unit:13, mwvb::unit:13:word, mwvb::word, mwvb::word-cloze, mwvb::word-reverse, obsidian_to_anki
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