Religion Without Revelation

by Julian Huxley

Science and God

Here is a new edition of the classic statement of evolutionary humanism - a naturalistic faith based on the belief that man can alter his own future, for better or worse, if he will.

Julian Huxley, the distinguished biologist and philosopher, re-interprets traditional dogma in the light of a generation of unprecedented scientific discovery. Stressing the scientific method as the key to man's future religious development, he analyzes a wide range of human experience and concludes that religion without revelation can be a natural and vital part of human experience.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion

203 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1969

About the author

In 1887, Julian Huxley, the brother of novelist Aldous Huxley and the grandson of agnostic biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, was born in Great Britain. Educated as a biologist at Oxford, he taught at Rice Institute, Houston (1912-1916), Oxford (1919-25) and Kings College (1925-1935). An ant specialist (he wrote a book called Ants in 1930), Huxley became Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935-1942), and UNESCO's first general director (1946-1948). A strong secular humanist, Huxley called himself "not merely agnostic . . . I disbelieve in a personal God in any sense in which that phrase is ordinarily used. . . I disbelieve in the existence of Heaven or Hell in any conventional Christian sense." (Religion Without Revelation, 1927, revised 1956.) Huxley was an early evolutionary theorist, with versatile academic interests. Some of his many other books include: Essays of a Biologist (1923), Animal Biology (with J.B.S. Haldane, 1927), The Science of Life (with H.G. Wells, 1931), Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of the HMS Rattlesnake (editor, 1935), The Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939), Heredity, East & West (1949), Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957), Towards a New Humanism (1957), and Memories, a two-volume autobiography in the early 1970s. Huxley was knighted in 1958 and was also a founder of the World Wildlife Fund.

Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award of the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.

Huxley came from the distinguished Huxley family. His brother was the writer Aldous Huxley, and his half-brother a fellow biologist and Nobel laureate, Andrew Huxley; his father was writer and editor Leonard Huxley; and his paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution. His maternal grandfather was the academic Tom Arnold, his great-uncle was poet Matthew Arnold and his great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School.

More: http://philosopedia.org/index.php/Jul...

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Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE FAMED DARWINIAN SUGGESTS A NEW INTERPRETATION OF RELIGION

Julian Huxley (1887-1975) was a famous English evolutionary biologist and humanist. (He wrote books like 'Evolution: The Modern Synthesis,' as well as the foreword to Teilhard de Chardin's 'The Phenomenon of Man.')

He wrote in the Preface to this 1957 book, "God is one among several hypotheses to account for the phenomena of human destiny, and... is now proving to be an inadequate hypothesis. To a great many people, including myself, this realisation is a great relief, both intellectually and morally. It frees us to explore the real phenomena for which the God hypothesis seeks to account, to define them more accurately, and to work for a more satisfying set of concepts and symbols to represent them in our mental organisation. What the world needs is an essentially religious idea-system... charged with the total dynamic of knowledge old and new... scientific and spiritual." (Pg. 9)

He says that religion is "a way of life which follows necessarily from a man's holding certain things in reverence, from his feeling and believing them to be sacred." (Pg. 20) He adds, "I believe, then, that religion arose as a feeling of the sacred." (Pg. 21) He proposes to "interpret the religious view of God"; once this is done, "All the vital facts of religious life remain; they but want re-defining in new terms. The living reality will need to change its clothes---that is all." (Pg. 24)

He suggests that worship "will be seen to be not a bowing down before a spiritual idol with supernatural powers, nor a placation of a jealous God... It is an opportunity for a communal proclaiming of belief in certain spiritual values; for refreshment of the spirit..." (Pg. 34) He admits, "although I experienced a certain feeling of awe towards the uncomprehended idea of God, I never thought of God as personal." (Pg. 69)

He states that "a developed religion should definitely be a relation of the personality as a whole to the rest of the universe, one into which reference enters, and one in which the search for the ultimate satisfactions of discovering and knowing truth, experiencing and expressing beauty, and ensuring the good in righteous action, all have the freest possible play." (Pg. 177)

He summarizes that religion "must clearly be one centered on the idea of fulfillment. Man's most sacred duty... is to promote the maximum fulfillment of the evolutionary process on this earth; and this includes the fullest realisation of his own inherent possibilities." (Pg. 194) He adds, "Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply it as fully as possible." (Pg. 209)

While Huxley's vision will certainly not persuade everyone, it is of great interest for anyone interested in liberal/progressive forms of religion---particularly those with a scientific orientation.