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A lot of people seem to misunderstand the agnosticism vs atheism dynamic. Agnosticism comes from the Greek for "unknowable." A real agnostic believes that the ultimate truth CANNOT be known. Agnosticism is actually more dogmatic than atheism in that way.
A good way to understand this is to think first about the ancient gnostics. They believed that spiritual freedom could be attained through divine knowledge, or gnosis. An agnostic therefore is someone who believes that such knowledge is impossible or unattainable.
A Christian believes that such knowledge is possible, but that we are liberated through Christ's saving sacrifice rather than through our own personal enlightenment.
An atheist believes that knowledge of God is theoretically possible but he maintains that there is no sufficient basis to claim such knowledge at this point.
So it's an epistemological discussion, ultimately. An agnostic says we can't know God, a theist says we do know God, an atheist says we don't know God. That's basically how the three groups break down, with lots of subdivisions and levels of gradation within each of them.
