The Unknown and Perhaps Unknowable

Agnosticism affirms that whether any god exists is not known, and may be unknowable. The agnostic neither asserts nor denies the existence of a deity, holding that the available evidence and human reason are insufficient to settle the question. The term was coined by T. H. Huxley in the nineteenth century to name the principle that one should not claim to know what cannot be demonstrated. In its stronger form agnosticism holds the question to be permanently beyond the reach of knowledge; in its weaker form, merely unresolved at present. T. H. Huxley coined the term in 1869, in the context of debates at the Metaphysical Society in London, deliberately setting it against the "gnostics," those early Christian sects and, by extension, any believers claiming certain, revealed knowledge of the divine.

Huxley elaborated the position at length in his 1889 essay simply titled Agnosticism, insisting there that agnosticism "is not a creed but a method," the consistent application to religious questions of the same evidentiary standard science demands elsewhere, so that the label named an epistemic discipline rather than a specific doctrine about what is or is not true. Huxley intended the term partly as a personal declaration of intellectual honesty, remarking that he had simply found a name for a state of mind he had held for as long as he could remember, one that took no comfort in either confident belief or confident denial.