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‘Agnostic’ literally means ‘without secret knowledge’.

The word is not normally used that hyper-literal of a sense. If you are referring to the etymology of the word, it was rather loosly made up by T.H. Huxley, around 1869, from the prefix a-, meaning "without, not," and the noun Gnostic, referring to the ancient Greek sect of Gnostics who claimed to possess a higher, esoteric spiritual knowledge. Huxley wrote:

"I ... invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic,' ... antithetic to the 'Gnostic' of Church history who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant." [T.H. Huxley, "Science and Christian Tradition," 1889]
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/agnostic

The problem with Huxley's definition is that if taken too literally in the sense of Gnostic claims of higher, esoteric spiritual knowledge, then the New Testament writers such as Paul and John, who opposed the Gnostics, would have to be considered as agnostics, which is absurd.

–noun

1.	a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.

2.	a person who denies or doubts the possibility of ultimate knowledge in some area of study.

–adjective

3.	of or pertaining to agnostics or agnosticism.

4.	asserting the uncertainty of all claims to knowledge.

[Origin: < Gk ágn?st(os), var. of ágn?tos not known, incapable of being known (a- a-⁶ + gn?tós known, adj. deriv. from base of gignskein to know) + -ic, after gnostic; said to have been coined by T.H. Huxley in 1869

]

—Related forms

ag·nos·ti·cal·ly, adverb

—Synonyms 1. See atheist.

A philosophical claim that "the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience", is every bit a belief about some state of affairs as a belief in the contrary.

Cordially,