Augustine Pamplany CST
Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) was a very famous English biologist and evolutionary scientist of the 19th century. He is nicknamed and Darwin’s bulldog for his powerful and sustained advocacy of the evolutionary theory of Darwin. His debate with Bishop Samul Wilberforce on evolution in Oxford in 1860 is very famous in history. Despite some of his initial reservations against Darwin’s idea of natural selection, he was a strong defender of Darwinism in the public. He was mostly self-taught and was considered as one of the best comparative anatomist of the time.
Huxley considered himself to be an agnostic – someone who thinks we cannot know if there is God or not. He is said to have coined the term agnostic, and he had a preference for rational evidence or belief system. However, he advocated reading of Bible in schools as the Bible contains rich moral teachings. He opposed organized religions and began to form new spiritual convictions.
There is much more to his spiritual convictions. In 1886, Huxley wrote in an article, titled, Science and Morals: “The student of nature, who starts from the axiom of the universality of the law of causation, cannot refuse to admit an eternal existence; if he admits the conservation of energy, he cannot deny the possibility of an eternal energy; if he admits the existence of immaterial phenomena in the form of consciousness, he must admit the possibility, at any rate, of an eternal series of such phenomena; and, if his studies have not been barren of the best fruit of the investigation of nature, he will have enough sense to see that when Spinoza says, . . . the God so conceived is one that only a very great fool would deny, even in his heart. Physical science is as little Atheistic as it is Materialistic.”
He strongly advocated the primacy of moral life. “The more I know intimately of the lives of other men . . . the more obvious it is to me that the wicked does not flourish nor is the righteous punished. But for this to be clear we must bear in mind what almost all forget, that the rewards of life are contingent upon obedience to the whole law – physical as well as moral – and that moral obedience will not atone for physical sin, or vice versa. The ledger of the Almighty is strictly kept, and every one of us has the balance of his operations paid over to him at the end of every minute of his existence.” He also referred to the ‘the Divine Government’ of the universe” in his letter to Kingsley.
As regards Providence, he wrote that if it is understood as “. . . the strong conviction that the cosmic process is rational; and the faith that, throughout all duration, unbroken order has reigned in the universe – I not only accept it, but I am disposed to think it the most important of all truths.”
