Ch. 1 - Agnosticism (1889)

[Chris OConnor]

by Thomas Henry Huxley Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 10/30/05 4:43 pm

[Jeremy1952]

Yesterday I read the abridged T. Huxley, Agnosticism in Joshi. I found this fabulous essay so inspiring that I located and read the complete text -- Agnosticism (Unabridged) It turns out, I may be an agnostic after all! As Huxley explains it, agnosticism is a general tool, a methodology, not necessarily a point of view on the god thingy. I have railed against agnosticism, on the wrong impression that it involves "special pleading" for the god fantasy: "One cannot know whether there is or is not a god"; to which Jeremy self-righteously answers, "but why pick that unlikely, implausible human construct to be 'agnostic' about?"What Huxley is actually proposing is that all the myriad things that we don't know or can't know, we simply leave as unknown. His argument (as I understand it) isn't that, "I don't know if there is a god or not, and neither do you", but rather that religion does not answer the questions which it claims to answer. "God created the universe" "You don't know how the universe came to be, and neither do I; however your specific hypothesis, that there is a god and that it created something, is implausible to the extent that I reject it"So