The term "agnosticism" was first coined as a description of a religious stance in the English language in the work of Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869. He coined this term based on the Greek work "gnosis" meaning knowledge and the alpha privative prefix which indicates negation or absence (a- + gnosis). This means that the agnostic is not an atheist, or one "without god" (a- + theos), but rather one who claims to lack knowledge on the topic of either the existence of gods or their nature or both.
The actual philosophical position Huxley articulates is first found in the following fragment from the Greek sophist Protagoras:
Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be. Many things prevent knowledge including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life. (DK80b4)
The position of agnosticism could also be reasonably attributed to philosophers in the skeptical tradition including Pyrrho, Carneades (and other members of the skeptical phase of Middle Platonism), and Sextus Empiricus. The position of deism, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while acknowledging the existence of a Creator, was agnostic as to many of the Creator's qualities. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, with his emphasis on the unknowability of external reality, can be considered an agnostic in many respects.
From the time of Huxley on, agnosticism has become a major component of several philosophical systems. Unlike atheism, which asserts that one can have a certain knowledge that no form of god can possibly exist, agnostics take a more nuanced stance, ranging from a weak atheist position (i.e. that they think it improbable that any gods exist but cannot claim to be certain) to one that simply dismisses all metaphysical statements as essentially unprovable, as can be found in logical positivism and many forms of analytical philosophy; a distinguished proponent of this position would be Bertrand Russell.
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