agnostic [M19th] This word was coined by the Victorian biologist Thomas Huxley (1825–95) to describe his own beliefs: he did not believe in God but did not think one could say for sure that God did not exist. Before Huxley devised agnostic there was no word for such a religious position. He is said to have first used it in 1869 at a party held in Clapham, London, prior to the formation of the Metaphysical Society. Huxley formed the word from the Greek a- ‘not’ and gnostos ‘known’.