---
title: What is an agnostic?
description: >-
pubDate: 2026-03-04
---

I learned today that the first agnostic was 'Darwin's Bulldog', Thomas Henry
Huxley. He attended the Metaphysical Society, an extremely broad selection of
England's foremost thinkers who gathered in London nine times a year throughout
the 1870s to discuss the ultimate questions. He tried all the usual
appellations: atheist, theist, pantheist, materialist, idealist, Christian. He
found all of them wanting. All the various '-ists', he felt, 'were quite sure
they had attained a certain "gnosis,"-had, more or less successfully, solved the
problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong
conviction that the problem was insolube.' Thus, negating the term 'gnostic', he
coined 'agnostic'.

Thus for Huxley, as with all the first agnostics, the term did not intend the
metaphysical neutrality it's often taken to mean today. For Huxley, it's a
positive epistemological assertion: sure, I don't know, but neither do you: the
matter is in principle unknowable. 'Agnostic' is not a way for Huxley to
diplomatically sidestep metaphysical debates without having to take a side, it's
a confrontational view which contradicts the theist, the atheist, and all the
rest.

I wonder what people in my life think of this, who have described themselves as
'agnostic'. Did they mean what Huxley meant, or did they mean something more
irenic? Does Huxley's approach challenge them? Is neutrality really an adequate
stance?
