Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

Actually, agnosticism is more of a definite and positive position than Huxley makes it sound. His contemporary Richard Bithell stressed in a book titled The Creed of a Modern Agnostic that it did not mean floating off into a mystical cloud of unknowing. For him, agnostics do think that humans can have definite moral principles. They also believe that they can learn things about the world, by trusting the scientific method of advancing hypotheses and testing them against evidence. It is just that they retain more modesty than usual about the results. More recently, another agnostic, the philosopher and broadcaster Bryan Magee, wrote in his short final testament, Ultimate Questions, that the word meant to him “an openness to the fact that we do not know, followed by intellectually honest enquiry in full receptivity of mind.”