New-Time Religion?

British Biologist Sir Julian Huxley is an atheist, but he concedes that "religion of some sort is probably a necessity." In an address to the Darwin Centennial Celebration at the University of Chicago last week, the grandson of Darwin's friend and defender, Biologist Thomas Huxley, went on to describe what he called a "religion" of the future--although it sounded a lot like the old humanist faith of the past. This "belief-system, framework of values, ideology, call it what you will," said Huxley, will have "no need or room for the supernatural." It will be evolutionary, because "the earth was not created, it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul as well as brain and body."

Refuge & Umbrella. Religions, said Scientist Huxley, are "organs of psychosocial man, concerned with human destiny and with experiences of sacredness and transcendence." They are "organizations of human thought" for coping with the difficult world, serving as a refuge from loneliness or an "umbrella of divine authority" against the responsibility of personal decisions. But "religion is not necessarily a good thing. It was not a good thing when the Hindu I read about this spring killed his son as a religious sacrifice. It is not a good thing that religious pressure has made it illegal to teach evolution in Tennessee, because it conflicts with fundamentalist beliefs.

"It is not a good thing that in Connecticut and Massachusetts women should be subject to grievous suffering because Roman Catholic pressure refuses to allow even doctors to give information on birth control even to non-Catholics.* It was not a good thing for Christians to persecute and even burn heretics; it is not a good thing when Communism, in its dogmatic-religious aspect, persecutes and even executes deviationists."

Facts & Faith. By contrast, the new religion, said Sir Julian, "could be a good thing. It will believe in knowledge. It will be able to take advantage of the vast amount of new knowledge produced by the knowledge explosion of the last few centuries in constructing what we may call its theology--the framework of facts and ideas which provide it with intellectual support.

"It should be able to define our sense of right and wrong more clearly, so as to provide a better moral support, and to focus the feeling of sacredness on fitter objects, instead of worshiping supernatural rulers. It will sanctify the higher manifestations of human nature in art and love, in intellectual comprehension and aspiring adoration, and will emphasize the fuller realization of life's possibilities as a sacred trust."

* For other views of the birth-control problem, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS.

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