Justified True Belief

(●) The biologist who fought Darwin’s public battles, taught science to working men, and coined the word agnostic for himself. + If you have ever reached the question about religion on a form, looked at the boxes, and written "agnostic" because none of the others would have been honest, you were borrowing a word that one man invented for exactly that difficulty. Thomas Henry Huxley was a biologist, not a theologian. In 1869 he found himself among the founding members of a London discussion club where everyone argued about God, and he noticed that every other man there had a label to wear and he had none. So he made one. He matters on a Christian site for three reasons. He is the man who took Darwin’s theory out of the specialist journals and made it a public argument, which is why ordinary people in 1865 had opinions about it at all. He is a large part of the reason that "science against religion" became a phrase in English. And he pressed harder than almost anyone in his century on a question that never goes away: what are you entitled to say you know, and on what evidence. The signature fact is his schooling. He had two years of it, between the ages of eight and ten, and never sat in a classroom again as a pupil. He ended as President of the Royal Society, a Privy Councillor, and one of the handful of men who put natural science into English elementary education. He also kept, all his life, an affection for the Bible he had read alone as a small boy out of his grandmother’s copy, and when the chance came to keep it out of the new state schools he argued the other way.

(●) 1825 AD: Born at Ealing with two years of schooling ahead of him, he taught himself the rest. + He was born on 4 May 1825 at Ealing, then a quiet village west of London, the seventh and youngest surviving child of George Huxley, senior assistant master at the local school, and Rachel Withers. His father gave him a hot temper and a gift for drawing. His mother gave him the one trait he said had passed to him in full strength: "rapidity of thought." She could not explain how she reached her conclusions so fast. If anyone suggested she had not taken much time about it, she would say, "I cannot help it, things flash across me." The schooling lasted from eight to ten and then stopped, because the Ealing school collapsed after its headmaster died and the family moved back to Coventry. What he remembered of it was not lessons. "The society I fell into at school was the worst I have ever known," he wrote later, and added that the masters cared as much for the boys’ minds as if they had been baby-farmers. After that he read his father’s books. At twelve he was lighting a candle before dawn, pinning a blanket round his shoulders, and sitting up in bed with Hutton’s Geology. He taught himself German so that he could get at the philosophers Carlyle kept quoting, and a family friend remembered him years afterward as a thin, ill-looking lad pretending to make hay with one hand while he held a German book in the other. In January 1841 he went as assistant to a doctor at Rotherhithe, in the dockland parishes of east London, and the poverty there marked him permanently. He never forgot one visit to a sick girl in a garret, where two or three women sat shirt-making. His small medical knowledge was enough to tell him the patient was simply starving, and he said so as gently as he could. The girl’s sister pulled a few pence and halfpence out of her pocket and held them out to him. "That is all I get for six and thirty hours’ work, and you talk about giving her proper food." He moved on to the north London practice of his brother-in-law John Godwin Scott, won a free scholarship to Charing Cross Hospital in 1842, published his first paper at twenty on a layer in the sheath of a human hair that still carries his name, and took the gold medal in anatomy and physiology in the London University examination of 1845. Then he ran out of money, and he was too young to be licensed anyway, so he joined the Navy.

(●) 1846 AD: Four years as an assistant ship’s surgeon in barely charted water turned a medical student into a naturalist. + HMS Rattlesnake sailed on 3 December 1846 to survey the waters between Australia and New Guinea, and Huxley, aged twenty-one, went as assistant surgeon. The ship was cramped, damp and slow. He had almost no equipment beyond a microscope and a towing net, and he used them on the things nobody else wanted: jellyfish, siphonophores, the transparent floating animals that came up in the net and fell apart before they could be preserved. A siphonophore is the oddest of them. The Portuguese man-of-war is one, and what looks like a single drifting creature is really a colony of small animals joined together, each of them doing one job for the whole. What he found there made his career. Dissecting the medusae, which is what the books call the jellyfish, he showed that the jellyfish body is built of two membranes, and that those two layers answer to the two foundational layers of the developing vertebrate embryo, the sheets of cells out of which the organs of a body are later built. It was a claim about deep structural kinship across the animal world, made in a cabin at sea, and when the paper reached London in 1849 the Royal Society read it and printed it. He came home on 23 October 1850 to find himself, at twenty-five, already known. The Royal Society elected him a Fellow the next year and gave him its Royal Medal the year after that. The voyage gave him something else. In Sydney in 1847 he met Henrietta Anne Heathorn, whom he called Nettie, and they were engaged within months. Then he sailed away for three years, came home, and could not afford to marry. The Admiralty refused to pay for the publication of his research and eventually struck him off the Navy list. For four years he lived on examining fees and reviews, writing to Sydney, and wondering whether a man could make a living in England by science at all.

(●) 1854 AD: He gave up the Navy for a lectureship in London, and began teaching working men on Friday nights. + In the spring of 1854 his friend Edward Forbes was called to a chair in Edinburgh at a week’s notice and left his natural history lectures at the Government School of Mines in Jermyn Street unfinished. Huxley was asked to take them up in the same sudden way, and the post became permanent at two hundred pounds a year. He added the naturalist’s post at the Geological Survey the following year. Nettie came over from Australia, and on 21 July 1855, after eight years engaged and nearly five of them apart, they married. They had eight children. Almost the first thing he did with the lectureship was give it away. Beginning in 1855 he ran a course of evening lectures at Jermyn Street for working men only, six in a series, each professor taking a turn, and he prepared them as carefully as anything he wrote. "I am sick of the dilettante middle class," he wrote to his friend Frederick Dyster in February 1855, "and mean to try what I can do with these hard-headed fellows who live among facts." The theatre at Jermyn Street held as many as six hundred, and it was crammed. He kept it up for decades, and there is a note to his wife in 1861, while he was lecturing on man and the apes, that catches his tone exactly: "My working men stick by me wonderfully, the house being fuller than ever last night. By next Friday evening they will all be convinced that they are monkeys." He was not a kind reviewer in these years, and he knew it perfectly well. Demolition was a gift of his, he enjoyed using it, and colleagues learned to be careful with him. Within a few years the habit would find a target very much larger than a colleague.

(●) 1859 AD: Darwin’s book appeared, and Huxley made himself its public defender. + Huxley finished On the Origin of Species in November 1859 and wrote to Darwin at once. He set out his reservations first, and he had real ones, but he ended the letter with a sentence that decided the next ten years of his life: "I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness." Looking back nearly thirty years later he described his first reaction to the central idea as "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" The claws went to work immediately. The Times had sent the book to a journalist who knew no science and was in despair about it; the man asked Huxley for help, and on 26 December 1859 a long, anonymous, thoroughly favourable review appeared in the most widely read paper in England. Only the first quarter of the first column was the journalist’s, Huxley told Hooker; the rest was his own, written faster than he had ever written anything in his life. He kept the secret for years and enjoyed hearing friends insist they had known it was his from the first line. Then came Oxford. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, which brought British scientists together once a year in a different town to report their work in sessions the public could buy a ticket for, met there that summer, and on Saturday 30 June 1860 the crowd outgrew its room and moved into the library of the new University Museum. Joseph Hooker, writing to Darwin two days later, put the press of people at between seven hundred and a thousand, with ladies packed into the window seats. Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, spoke against the theory for half an hour and finished by asking Huxley whether he claimed his descent from a monkey through his grandfather or his grandmother. Huxley told the story himself, thirty years afterwards: he turned to the man beside him, Sir Benjamin Brodie, and murmured, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands." No account written at the time carries the remark, and it may be a flourish of the retelling. What he said out loud is genuinely uncertain. The accounts mostly went on paper decades later and do not agree, and one of them, from a woman who had been in the room, says nobody seemed sure of the words afterwards and that they could not have been repeated just after they were spoken. The sense everyone recalled was this: he was not ashamed to have an ape for an ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. Lady Brewster fainted, and that detail at least is in Hooker’s letter. Both sides claimed the day, and the encounter has been retold ever since with a confidence the evidence does not support. What is certain is the effect on his life: from that day he was a public man.

(●) 1860 AD: His eldest son died at three, and in answering a clergyman he wrote out exactly what he did and did not believe. + Noel Huxley was born five minutes before midnight on the last night of 1856, the first of the children, and by every account the light of that house. On Saturday 15 September 1860 he died of scarlet fever. It took forty-eight hours. "This day week he and I had a great romp together," his father wrote in the journal where he had once set out his professional plans. "On Saturday night the fifteenth, I carried him here into my study, and laid his cold still body here where I write." The boy would have been four at the New Year. Charles Kingsley, the Anglican clergyman and novelist, wrote to him. The two men barely knew each other, but Kingsley sent a long letter setting out his own grounds for hoping the dead are not simply gone, and on 23 September Huxley sat down and answered it at length. That letter is the nearest thing he ever wrote to a confession of faith, and it is not what a caricature would predict. He does not deny immortality; he says he can neither prove nor disprove it, and has no objection in principle to the doctrine, only to believing it because he would like it to be true. He says that the most sacred act of a man’s life is to say "I believe such and such to be true," and that he will not spend that act cheaply. He tells Kingsley that a devil might have scoffed at him in his grief and asked what profit there was in stripping himself of the consolations of the mass of mankind, and that his only reply was and is: "Oh devil! truth is better than much profit." Then comes the sentence that has puzzled his admirers ever since. Science, he wrote, "seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God." He meant it as a description of method, not a creed. But he used the Christian words because he could not find better ones, and he was not a man who used words carelessly.

(●) 1869 AD: He invented a word for his own position and spent twenty-five years defending it against bishops and prime ministers. + The Metaphysical Society brought together, from 1869, believers and doubters of every stripe to argue in the same room: Anglican clergy, Roman Catholics, Unitarians, positivists, Tennyson and Gladstone among them. A positivist, in that room, was a follower of the Frenchman Auguste Comte, who held that science is the only real knowledge and wanted a religion of humanity put in the old one’s place, with its own calendar of saints. Huxley described his discomfort there in a joke. Most of his colleagues were "-ists of one sort or another," and he was "the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with," like the fox in the fable who had left his tail in the trap and had to face the other foxes. So he made a label. He took the "gnostic" of church history, the ancient teachers who had claimed secret knowledge of exactly the things he did not know, and put the Greek negative on the front of it. To his great satisfaction, he wrote, the term took. He never gave the christening a date. R. H. Hutton, who heard him do it, put it in 1869, and the word reached print that May, in a note in The Spectator of the twenty-ninth. He was busy in those years with work that had nothing to do with controversy. The boy who had two years of school stood for the newly created London School Board in 1870, came second on the poll in Marylebone, and pushed through a curriculum of physical drill, domestic training and elementary science. He served as President of the Royal Society from 1883 to 1885, and in 1892 he was made a Privy Councillor, one of the sovereign’s formal advisers, which is about as far inside the British establishment as a man could get. He also gave English two more words that stuck. "Biogenesis" is life coming from life that is already there, a fly from a fly’s egg rather than from the meat it was laid on; "abiogenesis" is life arising from lifeless matter, which is what people had believed about the maggots for centuries. He coined both in an 1870 address in which he set down a line that every working scientist has since quoted: the great tragedy of science is "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." The controversies, though, are what he is remembered for. In 1885 and again from 1890 he fought a long public duel with W. E. Gladstone, four times Prime Minister, first over the order of creation in Genesis and then over the Gadarene swine of the Gospels. A critic remarked that two men of their age might be better occupied than fighting over pigs, and Huxley agreed the rebuke would be just if the pigs were the point; the real question, he said, was whether the men of the nineteenth century were to take the demonology of the first century as revealed truth. In 1889 he answered Henry Wace, Principal of King’s College London, who had told the Church Congress that an agnostic’s "real name is an older one; he is an infidel." Huxley’s reply, the essay "Agnosticism," is the clearest statement of what he thought he was doing, and it contains a line his opponents did not expect: "I was brought up in the strictest school of evangelical orthodoxy."

(●) 1895 AD: He died at Eastbourne and was buried beside the son he had lost thirty-five years before. + His last great public act was an invitation he could not resist. On the afternoon of 18 May 1893 he stood in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford to give the Romanes Lecture, an annual Oxford lecture delivered by one invited speaker and then in only its second year, following Gladstone, who had given the first. He was sixty-eight, in poor health, and had lost most of his voice. "Who would have thought thirty-three years ago, when the great ‘Sammy’ fight came off," he wrote to John Tyndall three days before, "that the next time I should speak at Oxford would be in succession to Gladstone, on ‘Evolution and Ethics’ as an invited lecturer?" The lecture was Evolution and Ethics, and it surprised everybody (T5). He had retired to a house called Hodeslea at Eastbourne, on the Sussex coast, where he gardened badly against the wind, wrote his last essays, and doted on his grandchildren. Influenza turned to bronchitis and then to kidney failure in the summer of 1895, and he died quietly at half past three in the afternoon of 29 June. He was buried at Finchley on 4 July, in a private funeral read by an old friend who was a clergyman, beside his brother George and his son Noel, under the oak that had been a sapling when the boy’s grave was dug beneath it. He left instructions about the stone. Three lines were to be cut on it, from a poem his wife Henrietta had written, and they turn on a phrase from Psalm 127:2: "Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep; / For still He giveth His beloved sleep, / And if an endless sleep He wills, so best." It is the exact shape of the man. He would not claim the hope, and he would not sneer at it either, and he asked to be buried under words that borrow from Scripture and leave the question open.

What He Taught

(T1) Man belongs anatomically among the apes, and facing that does not lower him. + Put three skulls on a table: a man’s, a gorilla’s, and a baboon’s. The usual assumption in 1860 was that the first stood apart and the other two together. Huxley spent three years measuring, and reported that the arrangement is the other way round. Bone for bone, limb for limb, brain for brain, the gap between a man and a gorilla is smaller than the gap between a gorilla and the monkeys below it. He published the finding in 1863 in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, a small book that put humanity into the evolutionary story eight years before Darwin was willing to do it himself. The claim had a specific opponent. Richard Owen, the most powerful anatomist in Britain, had argued that a structure in the brain called the hippocampus minor was found in man alone and marked him off as a separate order of creation. Huxley showed it in apes. The row ran for years, was fought in journals and at public meetings, and was settled in 1862 when a colleague dissected the structures in front of the British Association. Charles Kingsley put the whole quarrel into The Water-Babies the following year, with Huxley in it by name and the disputed organ renamed the "hippopotamus major," which is probably the only time an anatomical quarrel has been laughed to a close in a children’s book. Huxley was careful about what the finding did and did not show, and his readers were often less careful than he was. He insisted, in the same book, that no one was more convinced than he of the distance between civilised man and the animals. His point was that the distance is not a matter of bones, and that resting human dignity on a bone is a bad bet, because bones can be measured and the measurement might go against you. Christian readers who had already located the image of God in something other than anatomy found this easier to hear than he expected.

(Q) "No one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain that whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them." + Source: Thomas Henry Huxley, "On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals," in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863); Collected Essays volume 7 (Huxley’s own text, spelling as printed there). He is answering readers who accused him of degrading humanity. His reply is that he has done the opposite: he has swept away the vanity of resting human worth on a toe or a fold of brain tissue, and he is not the one who put it there (T1).

(T2) Saying "I believe this is true" is the most serious act of a life, and it must not be done cheaply. + This is the engine under everything else he wrote, and it did not come out of a debate. He set it out in September 1860, a week after carrying his dead son into his study, in a private letter to a clergyman who had written to comfort him. Whatever a man says in that particular week, he means. The argument runs like this. In his laboratory work, the one condition of ever getting anything right is that he refuses to put faith in what does not rest on sufficient evidence. The universe, he says, is one and the same throughout. So he cannot believe that the great questions will be opened to him on easier terms than the small ones. He knows what he means when he says he believes in the law of the inverse squares, the rule that gravity falls off with the square of the distance, and he will not rest his life and his hopes on weaker convictions than that. Notice what he is not saying. He is not saying the doctrine of immortality is absurd; he calls it no more wonderful than the indestructibility of matter, and says he has no objection to it in principle. He is not saying that evidence is unavailable in principle. He is saying: give me evidence of the kind that would justify believing anything else, and I will believe it. Why should I not? The complaint Christians have made ever since is not that the demand is too strict but that he applied it unevenly, taking on trust a great deal about the physical world that he could not himself demonstrate, while requiring demonstration of the one question where testimony is the natural kind of evidence.

(Q) "Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." + Source: Huxley to Charles Kingsley, 23 September 1860, in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, edited by his son Leonard Huxley (1900), volume 1. The letter was written eight days after the death of his three-year-old son, in reply to Kingsley’s letter of sympathy. The next line is the one he wanted Kingsley to hear: "I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this" (T2).

(T3) Agnosticism is a method, not a creed, and he made up the name because he could not honestly wear anybody else’s. + The word is built from two Greek pieces. Gnosis means knowledge, and the gnostics of the early Christian centuries were teachers who claimed to possess a secret knowledge of God, the soul and the origin of the world. Huxley put the negative prefix a- in front of it: an agnostic is a person who does not have that knowledge and will not pretend to. He said so in as many words, and the sting was aimed squarely at people on both sides of him who were claiming more than they could show. Two things about his own account are regularly missed. The first is that he insisted agnosticism has no doctrines. It is not the belief that God is unknowable, which would itself be a large claim about God; it is a rule for handling evidence, which can in principle deliver a yes as readily as a no. The second is where he thought the rule came from. He gives it a pedigree: as old as Socrates, at work in the Reformation, the great principle of Descartes, the founding axiom of modern science. Two entries on that list are worth stopping over. In the middle of it, without comment, he quotes a text of the New Testament as an illustration of his own principle, "Try all things, hold fast by that which is good." In the very next clause he credits the Reformation with an axiom that is Peter’s in very nearly Peter’s words, that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him. It is worth being honest about where the rule is strongest. Against a lazy believer who has never asked why he believes, and equally against a confident atheist who has never asked how he could possibly know, it is a clean and useful blade. Where Christians have pushed back is on the standard it sets. "Demonstrated or demonstrable" is the language of geometry. Almost nothing anyone acts on, including the existence of other minds, the trustworthiness of memory, and the whole content of history, meets it.

(Q) "Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable." + Source: Thomas Henry Huxley, "Agnosticism" (1889); Collected Essays volume 5. He has just been asked what the agnostic creed is, and has answered that there is none: "Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle." This is that principle (T3). He calls it, with a deliberate borrowing, "the agnostic faith."

(T4) Every child should be taught the rules of the game nature is playing, because everyone is already playing it. + In 1868 he stood up in front of an audience of working men in south London and told them that a liberal education has nothing to do with Latin verse. It is knowing the rules of a game you were entered in at birth and cannot resign from. He then drew out the comparison so carefully that the passage has never stopped being quoted (see the quotation below). Out of that conviction came thirty years of committee work that is less famous than the Oxford row and did far more good. He sat on ten Royal Commissions. He served on the first London School Board and fought for a programme of physical drill, domestic training and elementary science for children who had never had any schooling at all. He wrote textbooks: a physiology for schools in 1866, a Physiography in 1877 that taught geography by starting with the reader’s own river valley, and a book on the crayfish in 1879 that begins with an animal you can buy at a market and ends with the classification of the whole group. The habit of teaching working men on Friday evenings, which he began in 1855 and kept up for decades, was the same conviction in a lecture theatre. There is an assumption underneath it that most Christians will recognise as an ally rather than an opponent: that the world is orderly, that its order is discoverable by ordinary people, and that knowing it is a duty rather than a luxury. Huxley thought the fair, patient, unforgiving player on the other side of the board was nature itself. The believer reading the same passage has usually noticed how hard it is to describe a set of laws without eventually describing a lawgiver.

(Q) "The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance." + Source: Thomas Henry Huxley, "A Liberal Education; and Where to Find It" (1868); Collected Essays volume 3. Delivered to the working men of the South London Working Men’s College. He has just said that the life, the fortune and the happiness of every one of us depend on knowing something of the rules of a game far harder than chess, which has been played for untold ages, and in which every man and woman is one of the two players (T4).

(T5) Moral progress means fighting the process that produced us, not copying it. + By 1893 a large industry had grown up around the idea that if nature advances by the survival of the fittest, then human society should be arranged the same way. Herbert Spencer, Huxley’s old friend and fellow founder of their dining club, had built a whole ethical system on it. Huxley went to Oxford and took it apart, in public, using his own science to do it. His image is a garden. A gardener takes a patch of ground where the strongest weeds have won for ten thousand years, walls it, weeds it, waters what would not survive on its own, and keeps out the animals that would eat it. Everything he does runs against what the ground was doing before he came. That, Huxley said, is what civilisation is, and what morality is: not an extension of the struggle for existence but a standing revolt against it. The fittest in nature are not the best; they are only the ones that fit the conditions, and if the climate turned cold again the fittest organisms on earth would be lichens. This left him with a problem he did not pretend to solve. If the cosmic process produced us, and the ethical process is in revolt against it, then where did the gardener get his plan, and what makes the garden better than the jungle rather than merely different? He appealed to what he called "the ethical nature of man," and hoped that a few thousand years of effort might hold the ground. It is the most honest ending in his work and the least satisfying, and both his admirers and his critics have said so.

(Q) "Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it." + Source: Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, the Romanes Lecture delivered at Oxford on 18 May 1893; Collected Essays volume 9. The closing movement of the lecture. He goes on to grant that it may seem audacious to pit the microcosm against the macrocosm, and to set man to subdue nature to his higher ends (T5).

(Q) "I have always been strongly in favour of secular education, in the sense of education without theology; but I must confess I have been no less seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion on these matters, without the use of the Bible." + Source: Thomas Henry Huxley, "The School Boards: What They Can Do, and What They May Do" (1870); Collected Essays volume 3. Written while he was standing for the first London School Board, at the moment when it was open to him to keep the Bible out of the new schools entirely. He argued the other way, calling the book "the national epic of Britain" and saying that a child left alone with it draws sound moral sustenance from it, as he had (T4). The paragraph goes on to remember his own childhood reading of his grandmother’s Bible, his delight in Joseph and David, and his scorn for Jacob’s treatment of Esau.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) A good many Christians took the biology in stride, and some of them said so before he did. + The picture of a Victorian church united against evolution and routed by Huxley is tidy, and it is not what happened. Charles Kingsley, an Anglican clergyman and chaplain to the Queen, had read the Origin before most scientists and written to Darwin that it was just as noble a conception of God to have made things able to make themselves as to have made them outright. Kingsley and Huxley became lasting friends; it was Kingsley who wrote the letter that drew out Huxley’s confession of faith after Noel’s death (T2), and Kingsley who turned the ape-brain quarrel into comedy in The Water-Babies. Frederick Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, gave the Bampton Lectures at Oxford in 1884, the endowed series in which a divine defends the Christian faith before the whole university, and argued there that evolution leaves the case for an intelligent Creator stronger than it was before, since it means more divine foresight and less divine interposition. Aubrey Moore, a tutor at Keble College, put the same point more sharply in the collection Lux Mundi in 1889. Christians, he said, had let God drift into the position of an occasional visitor to his own creation, which is next door to the God of the deists, a maker who builds the world, winds it up, and leaves it to run without him, and evolution had shut that door for good. "Science had pushed the deist’s God farther and farther away," he wrote, "and at the moment when it seemed as if He would be thrust out altogether, Darwinism appeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend." That does not mean the arguments were easy or that everyone agreed. The Catholic biologist St George Mivart accepted evolution and attacked natural selection as an insufficient cause, and Huxley answered him at length in 1871. James Orr in Scotland and B. B. Warfield in Princeton, both firmly orthodox, worked through the question at length, Orr in The Christian View of God and the World of 1893 and Warfield across thirty years of lectures and reviews, and neither of them concluded that Genesis and descent were at war. The genuine quarrel with Huxley was never about fossils. It was about what a man may say he knows.

(†) He gave the language a word for honest doubt, and the church has had to answer him in his own terms ever since. + The word took, as Huxley said with satisfaction that it had. Before 1869 an Englishman who could not say the creed and would not say there was no God had no name for his condition except one of the hostile ones. After 1869 he had a respectable one, and the dictionaries, the dinner tables and eventually the philosophy departments all made room for it. Churchmen answered in two ways, and the difference between them still matters. Henry Wace, Principal of King’s College London, took the short road at the Church Congress of 1888: the man’s "real name is an older one; he is an infidel," and calling it agnosticism was a way of dodging an unpleasant word. Huxley demolished that in the essays of 1889, and fairly, because Wace had answered a question about evidence with a question about labels. The longer road was to take Huxley’s principle seriously and show that Christianity had been walking it first. That is what Arthur Balfour did in The Foundations of Belief in 1895, the last book Huxley ever reviewed: Balfour granted the demand for reasons and then asked what reasons naturalism itself could give for trusting human minds that had been produced by an unreasoning process. The deeper point is one Huxley made himself without seeming to notice its weight. When he listed the pedigree of his own principle, two of the entries were apostolic. "Try all things, hold fast by that which is good" he quoted outright, and it is Paul to the Thessalonians; the axiom he handed to the Reformation, that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him, is Peter in very nearly Peter’s words. The ESV renders them "but test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21) and "always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15). Huxley took his rule to be the rule of modern science. It is also the instruction the New Testament gives its own readers.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the standard he set, the evidence he would not weigh, and the goodness he could not ground. + He deserves the argument at full strength, since he never asked for less. Four places where Christian thought answers him. - The rule cannot meet its own test. "Do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable" is itself not demonstrable, and Huxley lived every day on things that are not: that his memory was reliable, that the Rattlesnake’s log was honest, that other minds existed behind the faces in his lecture theatre. Scripture does not ask for credulity; it asks for the same thing a jury gives. "The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps" (Proverbs 14:15). And what it calls faith is not a guess: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1), a settled confidence resting on testimony, which is how almost everything anyone knows is in fact held. - The evidence he set aside is of the kind he spent his life weighing. He stopped at the authorship of the Gospels and treated the question as closed because it was hard. But the claim in them is public and datable: an execution under a named Roman governor, and a resurrection reported by named witnesses and by more than five hundred people at once, "most of whom are still alive" when Paul wrote it down (1 Corinthians 15:6). Paul told a king to his face that "this has not been done in a corner" (Acts 26:26). Historical testimony is not geometry, and it was never meant to be, but it is evidence, and sifting testimony is exactly the work Huxley did on every fossil he ever identified. - A person has to speak before he is known. Huxley’s silence concerned what unaided reason can reach on its own. Scripture grants that reason reaches something real: God’s "invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:19-20). But it says the decisive move is God’s. No amount of measuring gets a man inside another person’s inner life; he has to be told. Knowing God is of that kind, which is why eternal life is defined as an acquaintance rather than a proof: "And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (John 17:3). - The garden needs a gardener with a plan. Evolution and Ethics is where his own road ran out (T5). He saw, more clearly than the social Darwinists he was answering, that goodness is not what the cosmic process produces, and he had nothing to appeal to beyond the stubbornness of human beings. Christian thought answers that the gardener did not invent the garden’s plan and is not the first to hold it, and that the reason the jungle feels like an enemy is that people were made for something else. He ended his life demanding that men be honest about what they actually know. That demand is not the church’s enemy, and it never was; it is the reason apologetics exists. Huxley traced the rule to Socrates and to the laboratory. In the same breath he traced it to a letter Paul wrote to a church in Thessalonica, and then walked past what that might mean.