Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

The contribution to the idea of God from within, from the mind of man himself, is its form; and this form is the outcome of a process of mental organization every bit as real as the physical organization occurring in the unborn embryo.

The essential thing about both is, as we have indicated, that unity should arise in spite of diversity, and the resulting entity—organism in the one case, organized idea in the other—should thus be able to act as a single whole.

The system of ideas which man holds concerning external powers may be thus organized by thinking of it in terms of magic, of “influence,” manifesting itself in different ways in different operations of Nature; or in terms of personality, the manifestations of power being supposed to result from the activities of a being or beings more or less similar to ourselves; or it may be organized, as we shall see, on more scientific lines, by carefully pruning away all parts of it which are either definitely the mere product of our own imaginations, or else are not proven.

Thus what we have called the raw material of Divinity is given in the outer forces of nature, which not only act upon man as they act upon all organisms, but are by him perceived so to act in a way special and peculiar to man alone.

But, being so perceived, they are inevitably taken up into his mental life and made part of his mental organization. They are often perceived emotionally—to take the simplest examples, pestilence with horror, storm with fear, the growing of crops with gratitude. They are bound to enter into relation with his emotions, with his ideals and hopes; bound also to be in some degree generalized intellectually. When thus emotionally and intellectually built up so as to form a coherent and unitary idea, then only do they deserve the name of a God.

In parenthesis, let us make it quite clear that we are speaking of God and Gods as they operate in human affairs, as they can be classified by the anthropologist, analysed by the philosopher, experienced by the mystic. These have always been constituted as we have described—as a particular idea of the powers of nature, the cosmic forces taking shape through the moulding and organizing capacity of human thought, or, if you prefer it, as an interpretation and unification of outer and inner reality. The Absolute God, on the other hand, may be one—may, in fact, operate as a unitary whole in the same sense as this extraordinary product of the evolutionary process, this anthropological God; but we can never know it as such in the same sense as we know a person to be one.

This may be illustrated by a common fallacy—the ascription of personality to God on the ground that a purpose exists in the universe. Paley saw proof of this purpose in adaptations among organisms. Modern theologians, driven from this position by Darwin, take refuge with Bergson in the fact of biological progress. But this, too, can be shown to be as natural and inevitable a product of the struggle for existence as is adaptation, and to be no more mysterious than, for instance, the increase in effectiveness both of armour-piercing projectile and armour-plate during the last century. The time has gone by when a Paley could advance his “carpenter” view of God; when a Fellow of the Royal Society could be sure of general approval, as could D. Pront in his Bridgewater Treatise, with a work entitled Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion, considered with reference to Natural Theology, or when a distinguished geologist like Buckland (almost foreshadowing later writers of a certain type on labour questions) could ascribe to a Beneficent Designer the existence of Carnivora, as a means to the increase of the “Aggregate of Animal Enjoyment,” and solemnly open a sentence such as “while each suffering individual is soon relieved from pain, it contributes its enfeebled carcass to the support of its carnivorous benefactors.”

No—purpose is a psychological term; and to ascribe purpose to a process merely because its results are somewhat similar to those of a true purposeful process, is completely unjustified, and a mere projection of our own ideas into the economy of nature. Where we experience only phenomena of one order we cannot hope to reach behind them to phenomena of another order, or to the Absolute.

The ground is now cleared for our real investigation—our inquiry into the task which Rationalism has before it in finding how best what we have called the raw material of Divinity may be organized by the mind’s activity, how best clothed with word or symbol to make it more the common property of mankind as a whole.