Word: huxleyism
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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...
...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...
Soapy Sam Was a Cad. Most educated Englishmen were scientific illiterates, but Huxley greatly helped change that situation. He had speculated about evolution some years before Origin of Species was published, and in the five years after it exploded on the world (in 1859), Huxley exploded with it by issuing 46 major publications on subjects ranging from the fishes of the Devonian epoch to the New Labyrinthodonts from the Edinburgh coalfield. With a "basilisk artistry" on the lecture platform and "a certain ruthlessness," Huxley loved to bandy texts and split hairs with the theologians. He signed letters in mock church...
...Huxley, the issues of science and religion were not nearly so clear as they are taken to be by some of his latter-day admirers, and his own high wire between faith and honest doubt sometimes trembled under him. He became bad-tempered every time his devoted Australian wife took another of his brood off to be baptized, but toward the end of his life took great stock in the Old Testament. He was no scientific bigot and mocked his materialist friend John Tyndall by asking how he could deduce Hamlet from the molecular structure of a mutton chop...