Search pages, essays, world views, libraries, and topics. Type at least two characters.
CCWV.LIFE
Support This Site
Accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist? The Worldview Tree Browse All Entities The Schism RegisterThe Agnosticism stream of the Secular Worldviews timeline.
Streams: All of Secular Worldviews Freethought Agnosticism Secularism Spiritual But Not Religious Atheism Humanism
Sextus Empiricus compiles the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, the surviving handbook of Greek skepticism: on every dogmatic claim, judgment is suspended. Printed in Latin in 1562, his arguments about God, causation, and proof become the armory of later agnosticism.
David Hume publishes A Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 and 1740, when he is not yet thirty. Its skeptical empiricism, that reason is the slave of the passions and that belief in miracles and design outruns the evidence, sets the terms on which modern agnosticism still argues.
Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species on 24 November 1859, twenty years after forming its theory. Natural selection dissolves the argument from design that natural theology rested on, and Darwin's own settled word for his position, in his letters, is agnostic.
Thomas Henry Huxley coins the word agnosticism in 1869, at the founding of the Metaphysical Society, for the position that conclusions must follow evidence and that what cannot be demonstrated should not be pretended. The name gives the skeptical stream its standing label.
