In the most general use of the term, "agnosticism" is the view that we do not know whether there is a God or not. Although the history of agnosticism, in this general sense, is continuous with that of skepticism (thus reaching back to the ancients), the term itself was coined by T. H. Huxley and its distinctive philosophical bearings emerged in the course of the nineteenth-century debate on religious belief. Participants in that debate often used the word in a strong and specific sense: To be an agnostic was to hold that knowledge of God is impossible because of the inherent, insuperable limitations of the human mind. To assert confidently either the existence or the nonexistence of a deity with definite and intelligible attributes was to transgress these limits.

This consciousness of limitation is classically expressed in the "Transcendental Dialectic" of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781). There...