Word: huxley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There need be no conflict between science and religion, says British Biologist Julian Huxley, but there is a sharp conflict between science and Christian theology. "One is destined to replace the other," he argues, a century after the famed Darwinian tussle with religion in which his grandfather. Scientist T. H. Huxley, battled conspicuously on the opposite side of the angels...
...Grandson Huxley (outspoken former Director-General of UNESCO, brother of Novelist Aldous) was invited by the London Observer to update the issue in a debate with the Rev. Dr. Eric Lionel Mascall of Christ Church, Oxford, a cleric who holds a bachelor of science degree along with his doctorate of divinity. Huxley insists that the argument is all over, and science...
Theology is based, Huxley writes, on "a combination of an elaborate god-theory with a subsidiary but equally elaborate soul-theory," and is limited in applicability and the power of self-correction. Humanism, on the other hand, "is acquiring a well-organized theoretical basis in the form of a comprehensive theory of evolution as a whole"; it is capable of unlimited development, and "its reliance on scientific method" instead of divine intervention and revelation "makes it automatically self-correcting...
...idea that the universe must have been created, hence have a Creator, is scientifically old hat. Dr. Mascall, Huxley says, dealt with this question in his book, Christian Theology and Natural Science, by identifying creation "not with an act in the past by which the world was originated, but with an incessant activity [of God] by which it is conserved in existence . . . Preservation and creation are really identical." This, to Huxley, is nothing but "doubletalk. The whole range of physicochemical and biological phenomena can now be accounted for in principle in naturalistic terms: to invoke the operation...
...Huxley died in 1895, at 70, and was buried without official benefit of clergy. Throughout his life he had been a model of Victorian rectitude, partly to prove that a man could be moral without fearing Hell -although he said if the climate and company were right he preferred Hell to annihilation. To his scientific allies who made a fetish of X, the unknown, he had written: "If I am to talk about that of which I have no knowledge at all, I prefer the good old word God, about which there is no scientific pretence...