Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

The current Christian conception of God is of a person who is also the creator and the ruler of the universe. This person has certain attributes—is omnipotent, omniscient, and somehow, in spite of all the unhappiness and squalor and cruelty in the world, all-loving. He has personal qualities—he created the universe, and all that is in it; he takes pleasure in being worshipped; is displeased when men or women neglect him, or commit crimes or sins; takes pity on the follies and sufferings of man; and was so moved by them (albeit after a very considerable period had elapsed since man had first appeared upon the scene) that he sent his son into the world as a redeemer. (For simplicity’s sake, I omit all reference to the complexities of Trinitarian doctrine, which, however important in distinguishing Christianity from other religions envisaging an omnipotent personal God, do not affect the essential point at issue.) Further, he grants petitions, reveals himself to certain chosen persons, and is enthroned in a somewhat elusive heaven, where he is (or will be after the Day of Judgment—opinions seem to differ somewhat on the subject) surrounded by the immortal souls of the elect.

Now this view, or any view of God as a personal being, is becoming frankly untenable. The difficulty of understanding the functions of a personal ruler in a universe which the march of knowledge is showing us ever more clearly as self-ordered and self-ordering in every minutest detail is becoming more and more apparent. Either a personal God is a ruler without power, or he is the universe. In the former case he becomes a mere fly on the wheel; in the latter we revert to a frank pantheism, in which the idea of a personal Being can no longer properly be upheld. A personal creation of the world, in any reasonable sense of that term, is now meaningless except for a hypothetical creation of the original substance of the cosmos in the first instance. Creation of earth and stars, plants, animals, and man—Darwin swept the last vestiges of that into the waste-paper basket of outworn imaginations, already piled high with the debris of earlier ages. After the psychological insight which the last half-century has given us, miracles have ceased to be miracles, and have become either delusions, or, more frequently, unusual phenomena for which a cause has not yet been found. The immutability of the fundamental laws of matter and motion, more particularly the grand generalization of the conservation of energy and the substitution by science of an orderly for a disorderly conception of nature, make it impossible to think of occasional interference by God with this world’s affairs. Accordingly the value of petitionary prayer falls to the ground. Revelation and inspiration have resolved themselves into exceptional mental states, and are no longer looked upon as a sort of telepathy between divine and human minds. If we reflect, we see that all these intellectual difficulties in modern theology arise from the advance of scientific knowledge, which has shown that the older ideas of God were only symbolic, and therefore false when the attempt was made to give real value to them.

That being the quagmire in which traditional Christian theology is floundering, it behoves us to discuss the opposite side of the question, and to see whether the very advance of science which has seemed to exert only a destructive influence may not have made it possible to build up new and sounder conceptions of fundamental religious ideas.

We have already seen that the conception of God always represents man’s idea of the powers operating in the universe; that it has two components—the outer consisting of these powers so far as they are known to man, the inner consisting in the mode in which the conception is organized and the way it is related to the rest of the personality. It is obvious that both man’s knowledge of the cosmic powers as well as his method of organizing them in his mind can grow and change; and man’s Gods can—and do—grow and change accordingly.

The growth of science in the last few centuries has radically altered our knowledge of the outer world. It has shown us, in the first place, a fundamental unity of all phenomena, however apparently diverse. It has shown us the inorganic part of the cosmos pursuing a direction—the progressive degradation of energy—which, if it is carried to its limit, will result in the extinction not only of life, but of all activity. It has next shown us the organic part, sprung from the inorganic but running a different course, ascending during evolutionary time to increasing heights of complexity and to increasing control over its inorganic environment.

Finally, we have the psychozoic or human portion—that minute fraction of the cosmos which yet is of a preponderant importance, since it definitely represents the highest level yet reached by evolutionary progress. In this sphere mind is the dominant partner, biologically speaking, in the mind-matter partnership; evolution can begin to be conscious instead of fortuitous; and true values arise which, incorporated in ideals and purposes, exert an effect upon events.

As regards our own mental organization, psychological science has recently shown us the enormous importance of what we may call the extra-personal portion of our mind—all that which is normally subconscious, or has not been during our mental growth incorporated to form an integral part of our private personality. But this extra-personal part of the mind may from time to time irrupt into the personal, and does normally do so at some period of life. It is the merit of psychology to have shown the true nature of this relationship between personal and extra-personal, which was in the past a source of an infinity of mistaken ideas—revelation, inspiration, possession, direct communion with angels, saints, gods, or devils, and so forth.

Thus the powers operating in the cosmos are, though unitary, yet subdivisible; and, though subdivisible, yet related. There are the vast powers of inorganic nature, neutral or hostile to man. Yet they gave birth to evolving life, whose development, though blind and fortuitous, has tended in the same general direction as our own conscious desires and ideals, and so gives us an external sanction for our directional activities. This again gave birth to human mind, which, in the race, is changing the course of evolution by acceleration, by the substitution of new methods for old, and by introducing values which are ultimate for the human species; and, in the individual, provides, in the interplay of conscious and subconscious, unbounded possibilities of the invasion of the ordinary and humdrum personality of every day by ideas apparently infinite, emotions the most disinterested and overwhelming.

Still other light has of late years been thrown by psychology upon the inner component of the idea of God. Recent work has shown, for instance, that the mind, unless deliberately corrected and trained, tends to think in terms of symbols instead of along the more arduous paths of intellectual reasoning, tends to explain the unknown in terms of the known, tends accordingly to project the familiar ideas of its own personality as symbols for the explanation of the most varied phenomena. The science of comparative religion has shown us an early stage of religious belief in which but one idea held sway—the idea of a magical influence residing in all things potent for good or ill: the projection was so complete that no distinction whatever was made between the personal and the impersonal. Later, the idea of particular divine beings or Gods arose; and in early stages man still continued to project not only his own passions, but even his own form, into these divinities. The statement of Genesis that God made man in his own image is in reality an admission of the converse process. Still later, the divinity was purged of the grossness of human form and members, and, gradually, of characteristically human passions; but God remained personal, although the personality was now organized chiefly of ideals.