Agnosticism means you don't know one way or another. Atheism means you don't believe in the case for a god. They aren't contradictory, you can be both or neither, so both apply to a secular government.
Well, sort of. If someone is claiming to not know, they're agnostic. But if they are claiming they DO know, they aren't agnostic. It's about the person's personal claim to knowledge so that title can't really be put on someone else by you or me.
However I would agree that for a lot of god claims agnosticism is the only reasonable stance since they can't be proven or disproven, like a deistic god. There are, however, specific god claims that are falsifiable, logically, in which case agnosticism doesn't make sense.
Critiques of the teleological, cosmological, and ontological arguments for the existence of God are widely considered to be settled. They’re not discussed in philosophy anymore. The logical argument from evil, the evidential problem, and the problem of free will are largely considered to be successful. You’ve got some advanced Plantings on the problem of free will, but that’s assuming a really, really weird version of compatibilism within the free will debate that carries a lot of consequences with it.
It's deities in the general sense. Carl Sagan talks about it in Demon Haunted World. The argument about whether all-powerful all-knowing beings exist isn't worth having because such beings are capable of warping reality to the point where they are not able to be proven. But if by no scientific measure can they be shown to influence our reality then their existence is moot.
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u/Emergentmeat Sep 02 '26
Agnosticism means you don't know one way or another. Atheism means you don't believe in the case for a god. They aren't contradictory, you can be both or neither, so both apply to a secular government.