Hobbes' Choice wrote:BUT AGNOSTICS LACK A BELIEF therefore they are atheists by your offered definition.
I've made the point before that, in my view, language is contextual; you can't really understand what someone means by a word in isolation. Agnosticism has come to mean something like indifference, or a lack of commitment to any particular view, but if we are to believe the guy who invented the word, it means this:
"Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe. Consequently, agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology."
Thomas Henry Huxley
Notice that it is a rebuke to both people who believe there is a god, and those who believe there isn't.
Victorian scientists were extremely confident that their work was almost done, so for example, Lord Kelvin, after whom the temperature scale was named could say this:
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
Or the American Albert Michelson:
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote."
Ironically, it was the null result in his search for luminferous aether that was instrumental in inspiring Albert Einstein to demolish the 19th century certainties.
Huxley himself was known as Darwin's bulldog, for his vociferous defence of evolution. Far from being indifferent, the original meaning of agnostic was a forthright belief that the only evidence worth a crap is empirical, and that anyone who expresses a belief based on anything else is an idiot.
As has been pointed out above, an atheist need not believe there is no god, she is not committed to "anti-theology" in Huxley's sense, it is quite enough to lack a belief in any god.