The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge

Bernard Lightman is a historian of Victorian science and religion, and this Johns Hopkins University Press book is his scholarly history of agnosticism as it emerged in Victorian Britain, including Thomas Henry Huxley's 1869 coinage of the term itself and the evidentialist ethic of belief that accompanied it. Its strength is that it situates agnosticism within its actual nineteenth century intellectual and scientific context rather than treating it as a timeless philosophical position, tracing how a specific historical moment produced the concept. Its limit is that it is a history of the term's Victorian origin and early development, so a claim about how agnosticism is used or argued philosophically today needs a more contemporary source.