Thoughts on Agnosticism

Agastya a seer from India of Mahaabhaarat period, from 400 bc to about 150 bc, founded the concept of agnosticism to save human thought energy from wasting in things which matter little to overall human welfare on earth. In his opinion, there are few things which are and shall always be unknowable to humanity - like the creator of this universe and the purpose of its creation. The idea is to look forward for progress and be on the march of a better human civilization where all humans shall be healthy and happy and put all our energies to attain this goal. In achieving this goal, questions such as when the universe was created and who created it matter little and we should not waste our precious energies on such trivial issues.


History is not all that useless to our progress. It teaches us where did the past humanity erred to avoid such instances in future, and where it fared well to keep them going on. But these historical information must be relevant to our present and near-future contexts. If the information from the past is irrelevant now and for near-future, it need not be looked into to conserve our energies. The questions about the creation are such matters irrelevant to our present and near-future, these being from extremely far off in the past. So, Agastya marked such issues as unknowable and this philosophy came to be known as agnosticism in honor of its proposer.


Issues of creation are from our real world. But with passage of time, some cunning fellows conceptualized an imaginary God as the creator of our universe, against the philosophy of agnosticism which prohibits thinking over the creation or its creator. Thus, existence of God or its non-existence also came within the purview of agnosticism, or in other words - whether God exists or not, is unknowable.


Thus, the concept of God is philosophically irrelevant to humanity and its onward march for a better world tomorrow. scientifically also, it has no foundation. Science has been trying to deal with the issue of creation, form, etc. of the Universe. Since science does not deal with any issue in philosophical terms, and agnosticism is a philosophical issue, these two ways of gaining knowledge are unrelated to each other, so do not interfere mutually.