"Nobody can presume to say what the order of nature must be; all that the widest experience (even if it extended over all past time and through all space) that events had happened in a certain way could justify, would be a proportionately strong expectation that events will go on so happening, and the demand for a proportional strength of evidence in favour of any assertion that they had happened otherwise. It is this weighty consideration, the truth of which everyone who is capable of logical thought must surely admit, which knocks the bottom out of all a priori objections either to ordinary 'miracles' or to the efficacy of prayer, in so far as the latter implies the miraculous intervention of a higher power. No one is entitled to say, a priori, that prayer for some change in the ordinary course of nature cannot possibly avail."
It was a question of evidence, and not only did the evidence not convince Huxley, but the thaumaturgic nature of the Biblical miracles provided him with additional reason for refusing to attach any extrinsic value to the contents of the book.
On the other hand, although he declined to accept the Bible as a miraculous and authentic revelation, again and again he expressed himself in the strongest terms as to its value to mankind, and as to the impossibility of any scientific advance diminishing in any way whatsoever that value.
"The antagonism between religion and science, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious—fabricated, on the one hand, by shortsighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally shortsighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance."
And again;
"In the eighth century B.C., in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to me to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. 'And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?' If any so-called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I think it wantonly mutilates, while if it adds thereto, I think it obscures, the perfect ideal of religion."
