Welcome to Breakpoint and daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

In 1869, at a meeting in the metaphysical society in London,

English biologists and anthropologist Thomas Huxley coined the term agnostic,

to describe those who, like himself, were neither theist nor atheist.

Claiming instead for himself, intellectual humility, Huxley claimed to know that anything,

unknowable to science, could not be real knowledge, since it could not be empirically verified.

That included the existence of God, the ultimate nature of reality, anything immaterial.

The word agnostic is constructed from Greek, beginning with the ah, which means without or not,

and Nostas, or Nosis, which refers to what is known or knowledge. Huxley contrasts it agnostic with Gnostic, a related word that means

secret, mystical, or spiritual knowledge. In other words, for the agnostic, truth about life,

God, and supernatural realities are simply unknowable. An assumption that's built into the word

agnostic is that the only way to know

is through empirical evidence. In other words, agnosticism is a kinder and gentler version of

positivism. That's the idea that only what is empirically verifiable or logically necessary can qualify

as knowledge. Anything not empirically verifiable or logically necessary can qualify as knowledge. Anything not empirically verifiable or logically

necessary is unknowable and according to Huxley, ultimately meaningless. Now, of course, the assumption

that science is the only route to real knowledge is a statement that itself cannot be proven

scientifically. So, by the agnostic's

own standards, science cannot be the only way to know things because science cannot prove that science

is the only way to know things. The Greeks might say, oh, the irony. In fact, the agnostic assumption

is not only incoherent, it's also false, because there are clearly

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