AGNOSTICISM

(from Greek agnostos, unknowable), strictly speaking, the doctrine that humans cannot know of the existence of anything beyond the phenomena of their experience. The term has come to be equated in popular parlance with skepticism about religious questions in general and in particular with the rejection of traditional Christian beliefs under the impact of modern scientific thought. The word agnosticism was first publicly coined in 1869 at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in London by T.H. Huxley, a British biologist and champion of the Darwinian theory of evolution. He coined it as a suitable label for his own position. It came into my head as suggestively antithetical to the Gnostic' of Church history who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. (from Greek agnostos, unknowable), strictly speaking, the doctrine that man cannot know the existence of anything beyond the phenomena of his experience. The term has come to be equated in popular parlance with skepticism (q.v.) about religious questions in general, and in particular with the rejection of traditional Christian beliefs under the impact of modern scientific thought. Agnosticism both as a term and as a philosophical position gained currency through its espousal by Thomas Huxley, who seems to have coined the word agnostic (as opposed to gnostic) in 1869 to designate one who repudiated traditional Judeo-Christian theism and yet disclaimed doctrinaire atheism, transcending both in order to leave such questions as the existence of God in abeyance. From this definition and from the way the word has been used in ordinary speech it is evident that there are two related but nevertheless distinct viewpoints suggested by the term agnosticism. It may mean no more than the suspension of judgment on ultimate questions because not all the evidence has come in or because not all the evidence can ever come in. As doubt has been a path to faith in the thought of men such as St. Augustine, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, so agnosticism in this sense may be applied to the biblical interpretation of man's relation to God. But Huxley's own elaboration on the term makes clear that this very biblical interpretation of man's relation to God was the intended polemic target of agnosticism. The suspension of judgment on ultimate questions for which it called was thought to invalidate Christian beliefs about things hoped for and things not seen. Huxley's role in the struggle over the teachings of Charles Darwin helped to establish this connotation as the primary one in the definition of agnosticism. When such prominent defenders of the Darwinian hypothesis as Clarence Darrow likewise labelled themselves as agnostics, the writers of popular apologetic pamphlets found it easy to equate agnosticism with hostility to conventional Christian tenets. By the second half of the 20th century, however, the field of the battle had shifted. Not the question of Christian evidences but the problem of evidence and verification as such had become the central issue among philosophers. Thus logical positivism, which bore certain resemblances to agnosticism in its refusal to speculate about ultimate and unknowable questions, also went beyond the agnosticism of Huxley. Additional reading The fundamental primary sources on agnosticism are T.H. Huxley, Agnosticism and Agnosticism and Christianity in his Collected Essays, vol. 5 (1894). Other basic sources are W.K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief, and Other Essays (1876, reprinted 1947); and Leslie Stephen, An Agnostic's Apology, and Other Essays (1893), which first appeared as an essay in 1876. An important classical antecedent is David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), of which the best modern edition is that of C.W. Hendel (1955). For a study of this, which was Hume's first Enquiry, see Antony Flew, Hume's Philosophy of Belief (1961), which devotes special attention to its implications for religion. Religious agnosticism is treated in Henry Mansel, The Limits of Religious Thought Examined in Eight Lectures (1858). Notable secondary sources include Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vol. (1876), the best analytical study done at the time of Huxley and one that still deserves this high rating; R.F. Flint, Agnosticism (1903); and R.A. Armstrong, Agnosticism and Theism in the Nineteenth Century (1905); for a modern sympathetic biography, see Cyril Bibby, T.H. Huxley: Scientist, Humanist, and Educator (1959). Classic rejections of agnosticism include Blaise Pascal, Penses (1960), posthumous fragments given their definitive arrangement by L. Lafuma; and William James, The Will to Believe, in The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897).