Agnostic

Thomas Huxley

The term "agnostic" . . . was coined only in the late 1880s, by the biologist Thomas Huxley—and as a joke. Huxley belonged to a small philosophical circle in London in which he increasingly felt out of place. Everyone else in the group could identify as a Christian, or a Rationalist, or a Schopenhaurian, or whatever, but no such term seemed applicable to him. So he decided to call himself an "agnostic" in order that he too could "have a tail like all the other foxes."

Huxley began to develop the idea. He saw agnosticism as being as demanding as any moral, philosophical, or religious creed. Yet for him it was more of a method than a creed. The method he had in mind is broadly that which underpins scientific inquiry. It means, on one hand, taking one's reason as far as it will go and, on the other, not accepting anything as true unless it is somehow demonstrable. Here there are very clear parallels with the Buddhist tradition. Although we may not find it so much in Zen, in the Indo-Tibetan tradition there is a strong emphasis on rational inquiry.

~Stephen Batchelor, in Secular Buddhism