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Religion without Revelation (The New Thinker's Library)

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Huxley in his opening chapter presents the reader with his basic ideas and conclusions. The rest of the work is their detailed explication. Huxley unlike the present generation of anti- religious evolutionary scientists of the Dawkins Dennett school has a real understanding and appreciation of various aspects of the religious life. As he sees human life and development it is an overall evolutionary process. This is one reason why he could be a champion of the works of the Christian thinker Teillhard de Chardin who saw the whole development of mankind as motion towards higher and higher complexity, greater and greater spiritual development.
Huxley's opposition is to a key element at the heart of the great monotheistic religions. He is opposed to the idea of a Supernatural Personal Being as Ruler and Guide of the Universe. He argues that there is no need for such a Diety as the method of natural science has given us a way of understanding the world without reference to such a Being. Yet Huxley does not classify himself as an ' atheist' but rather as an agnostic who is undecided on a matter he does not have enough evidence for.
I should not mislead here. Huxley is an opponent of the religions of Revelation.
However what I find interesting and even exciting in his work is not this but with his vision of Religion as ' an activity of man which suffers change like all other human activities: ... that as it grows it cannot avoid coming into contact both with intellectual and with moral or ethical problems and with the development and broadening of human experience and tradition.'
As Huxley understands it the development of the human involves involves the development of what he calls the 'emotional side of the religious life' that aims at a ' communion with the divine'.
For Huxley the scientific method is the method which yields truth . And if it does not yield certainty, it by its openness and being subject to endless questioning and re- testing is essential to bringing mankind to greater completion and knowledge.
In other words it is almost as if Huxley sees Mankind as being able by itself to so transform its situation and reality as to move to greater and greater progress in religion.
I think that even for a traditional religious believer like myself there is much to be learned from this modest, scholarly , learned and rich- in- ideas work and thinker.