Agnosticism (from Greek a-, “without,” and gnôsis, “knowledge”) — The position that the existence of God, or of the divine and transcendent in general, cannot be known, and that judgment should therefore be suspended. The term was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, the biologist and defender of Darwin, in 1869, in the context of the Metaphysical Society of London. Huxley created it as a label for his own position, in contrast to the “gnostics” of Church history, who claimed to possess knowledge of the transcendent; Huxley himself explained the episode in the essay “Agnosticism” (1889), although accounts differ on the exact circumstances of its first utterance. For Huxley, agnosticism is not a creed but a principle of method: not to affirm as certain what cannot be supported by evidence. It differs from atheism, which denies God’s existence, and from theism, which affirms it; strictly, agnosticism concerns knowledge, while theism and atheism concern belief, so these categories cross-cut one another. Antecedents of the attitude appear in Protagoras, for whom it was not possible to know whether the gods exist or not (fragment DK 80 B4), in the ancient Skeptics (see skepticism), in Hume, and above all in Kant, who limits theoretical knowledge to possible experience. Herbert Spencer (First Principles, 1862) speaks of the “Unknowable” as the limit of knowledge. Bertrand Russell discusses the relation between the two positions in the essay “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?” (1947). It should not be confused with gnosis, in opposition to which Huxley formed the word. See Protagoras, Hume, Kant, and Russell.
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