What’s the difference between an agnostic and an atheist?

Gosh, I have been asked this before, and my predecessor Tom Brown expounded on it all in his very first post here (which means some out there aren’t looking through the archive first to allay their curiosity).

But let’s give it another whack.  Because both atheism and agnosticism turn on not believing in supernatural entities, there is a different dynamic here than pertains to doctrinal faiths where acceptance of content constitutes the faith.  For example, if there are people who conceive of themselves as devout Roman Catholic Hindus, it is arguable that they have an idiosyncratic conception of one or the other or both of those belief systems.

But it is perfectly possible to be both an atheist and an agnostic, depending on how one defines the terms. Thomas Huxley (Chuck Darwin’s 19th century bulldog) coined the agnostic term in the 1860s to describe his own unbelief but “not sure” openness to new evidence.  As I don’t rule out the existence of supernatural entities in principle, I am a philosophical agnostic.

At the same time, there are no god(s) that I do believe in, and find the evidence for the known crop to be singularly unpersuasive.  Consequently I am a functional atheist.  Now there are ontological atheists who rule out god(s) in principle, meaning that no amount of evidence could persuade them otherwise.  For those people, atheism and agnosticism would be non-overlapping categories.

Since we’re bandying terminology here, I may remind everyone that all people are atheists regarding all the god(s) they don’t believe in.  Whether some believers in Zeus (or fill in the blank) remain agnostic over the existence of Marduk (or fill in the blank) is something for them to work out, but I’m not losing much sleep over it.

There, all done (at least until the next time someone asks the same question as though the answers are going to be any different).