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Agnosticism

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The word agnostic was coined by the English biologist and anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 – 1895) in 1869. Huxley recounts the story in his 1889 essay Agnosticism:

This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a place among the members of that remarkable confraternity of antagonists, long since deceased, but of green and pious memory, the Metaphysical Society. Every variety of philosophical and theological opinion was represented there, and expressed itself with entire openness; most of my colleagues were -ists of one sort or another; and, however kind and friendly they might be, I, the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with, could not fail to have some of the uneasy feelings which must have beset the historical fox when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes. To my great satisfaction, the term took; and when the Spectator had stood godfather to it, any suspicion in the minds of respectable people, that a knowledge of its parentage might have awakened was, of course, completely lulled.

In the same essay, Huxley describes agnosticism like so:

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, Try all things, hold fast by that which is good; it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him; it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.

Commenting on the story where Jesus casts demons out of a man and permits them to enter some pigs (Mark 5.1-20), Huxley said:

I utterly disbelieve in the existence of "unclean spirits," and, consequently, in the possibility of their "coming forth" out of a man....

And:

The favourite "earth," in which the hard-pressed reconciler takes refuge, that the Bible does not profess to teach science, is stopped in this instance. For the question of the existence of demons and of possession by them, though it lies strictly within the province of science, is also of the deepest moral and religious significance.

In an 1859 letter, the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875) reported that Huxley encouraged him to read The Limits of Religious Thought by Henry Longueville Mansel:

A friend of mine, Huxley, who will soon take rank as one of the first naturalists we have ever produced, begged me to read these sermons as first rate, although, regarding the author as a Churchman, you will probably compare him, as I did, to the drunken fellow in Hogarth's Contested Election, who is sawing through the signpost of the other party's public-house, forgetting that he is sitting at the outer end of it. But read them as a piece of clear and unanswerable reasoning. (Lightman 2019, 7)

What did Huxley think about the difference between what is unknown and what is unknowable?

After Huxley coined the word, the word grew in popularity.

In 1876, Leslie Stephen, a friend of Huxley and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, published An Agnostic's Apology.

Before 1889, the Oxford English Dictionary defined the noun agnostic as One who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable, and especially that a First Cause and an unseen world are subjects of which we know nothing. (Le Poidevin 2010).

Le Poidevin (2010) describes agnosticism as a position one may take on a given question, where a weak agnostic suspends judgment on the question and a strong agnostic judges that it is impossible for us to know the answer. He also describes evidential agnosticism as the position that there isn't enough evidence to confirm or disconfirm the statement. He claims that you could be an evidential agnostic without being a weak agnostic. You could think that the evidence doesn’t settle the matter of God’s existence one way or another, but still not be in any doubt as to God’s existence. This is, ironically, almost exactly the opposite of Huxley's principle.

To do: Look into Robert Ingersoll, read the SEP entry.

In his entry on Atheism and Agnosticism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Draper distinguishes two senses of agnosticism:

1. The psychological state of suspending judgment on the existence of God.
2. The judgment that no one knows if God exists or that belief in God is not justified, rational, and so on.

Although Draper acknowledges that the psychological sense is common, he argues that the definition as a position is more useful for philosophical debate because it can be true or false. Philosophers can then evaluate arguments for or against the position. On the other hand, a psychological state cannot be true or false, and an argument can't have a psychological state as its conclusion.

But to suspend judgment on a proposition is an attitude toward a proposition one may take, and that attitude may be more or less justified, just as belief or disbelief may be more or less justified. If we define agnosticism as the suspension of judgment on the existence of God, then we may easily shift to asking whether agnosticism is justified, and for whom.

Draper's propositional sense of agnosticism contains a lot of variation. Is it claiming that no one knows whether God exists? Is it claiming that God's existence is unknowable, or merely not yet known? Or what if one claims that it is unknown or unknowable whether God's existence is unknowable? There are so many options here that I think it is hardly worthwhile to debate the best use of the word agnosticism. The reality is that any concrete argument for agnosticism will have to define what agnosticism means for that argument, and then the debate about what the assumed meaning should be is useless.

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