In practice, atheists are people who think they know there is no god. Agnostics are people who realize they don’t know much at all about anything related to the origins of things and realize they don’t want to hold unprovable dogmatic beliefs like the religious people do.

I considered myself an atheist for most of my life. As I got older and learned more, this shifted. These days I consider myself agnostic.

If atheism was defined as believing a specific kind of god (e.g. the “father god in the sky that created all things in 6 days”) does not exist, I’d still consider myself an atheist.

But my agnosticism comes from an acknowledgment of our fundamentally limited understanding of certain aspects of existence, and the implications of that specific lack of understanding.

It’s not as if I believe “well maybe the god of Abraham could be real after all but I don’t know” (it seems far more likely that if there’s a god, he/she/it/they are closer to being the stuff of existence than some standalone entity). It’s more that I withhold belief entirely and don’t make absolute claims that are philosophically untenable.

If we figure out how consciousness works or achieve breakthroughs in physics, I could imagine calling myself an atheist again. Until then, agnosticism seems like the most intellectually honest position.