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Thomas Henry Huxley

Modern European · Europe · 1825 to 1895

English biologist who defended Darwin and made up the word agnostic. He used it for people who would not claim to know what cannot be shown.

What it is

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 to 1895) was an English biologist and educator, and the person who coined the word agnostic. He was also known as "Darwin's bulldog" because of the force with which he defended Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in public.

He was born in Ealing, near London, and died in Eastbourne. His parents belonged to the Church of England, but he sympathised with nonconformists. His fame rests partly on his science and partly on a simple rule about belief, which he named agnosticism.

The main ideas

  • A word for not knowing. He invented the word agnostic for people who admit they do not know things that others claim to know. The question of whether God exists is the best-known of these.
  • A rule about evidence. He used the word for a principle about knowing. It says that you should not pretend a conclusion is certain unless it has been shown to be so.
  • Applied to God. If neither belief in God nor disbelief is backed by good enough evidence, then the honest course is to suspend judgement. This is a sense in which the word is widely used today.
  • Not simply an atheist. He called himself an agnostic. An atheist holds that there is no God, while the agnostic in his sense holds back from both claims, because neither is backed by enough evidence.
  • Science for everyone. He thought science belonged in schools and in public life. He gave lectures for working people and worked to make science a profession.
  • Evolution and people. He wrote about where humans come from, and made the question of human ancestry a public one.

What it looks like in practice

Picture someone who is asked whether there is life after death, or whether a rumour about a friend is true. Instead of answering yes or no to please the room, they ask what they actually have to go on, and when the answer is very little, they say so. That is Huxley's rule at work, applied to a small case. The example is an illustration, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • HMS Rattlesnake. From 1846 to 1850 he served as assistant surgeon on this ship, which surveyed waters off Australia and New Guinea, and he studied sea animals.
  • The Royal Medal of the Royal Society came in 1852, and the Copley Medal followed in 1888.
  • School of Mines. From 1854 he taught natural history at the School of Mines in London.
  • Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863) put the question of human descent in front of the public.
  • The word agnostic was his, and he came back to the idea in 1889 to spell out what it meant.

Questions and criticism

  • Slow with Darwin. Although he became Darwin's public champion, he was at first undecided about natural selection and slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas. It is fair to ask how far a champion should have doubts of his own.
  • Is it a fence-sitting position? Some find suspending judgement a way of avoiding a question. Others say it is the only honest answer when evidence is thin. The disagreement is still live.
  • One word, two meanings. Today the word is often used for a state of mind (not believing either way), while he used it for a principle about evidence. Philosophers still ask which meaning should win.

Close neighbours

The school of agnosticism on this site is the closest neighbour, and the schools of atheism and theism sit on either side of it, since all three answer the question he said evidence could not settle.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

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