In 1957 Julian Huxley supported conservationism in these words: “The enjoyment of the beauty and strange variety of the natural world …is one of the indispensable modes of human fulfillment …involving something essentially religious or sacred…To exterminate a living species, be it lion or lammergeier, to desecrate the landscape, to wipe out wildflowers or birds over great tracts of country, is to diminish the wonder, the interest, and the beauty of nature”:

New Bottles for New Wine

In the current debate over the federal government’s proposed freedom of religion bill, people have been asking “how do you even define religion?”.

Here is Julian Huxley’s definition, proposed in 1924:

“Religion is the response of human personality to the outer universe of experience”.

Observers at the time liked this definition. The “Dismal Dean”of St Pauls, W. R. Inge, pronounced it to be one of the best he knew. It may be too wise and inclusive for lawyers and politicians!

In 1923 the famous biologist Julian Huxley wrote of humans and their hopes that they did not stand isolated, “a feeble candle flickering with pathetic bravado in the midst of an appalling and alien universe, but are the culmination and condensation of a long age of travail that has gone before. Here biology becomes of profound importance to religion, for here it gives to man firm ground for his faith, and tangible assurance that the belief which is in him is not in vain, not mere delusion”

“The Outlook in Biology”, 1923.

“Mysticism stands for that type of religion in which there is an immediate apprehension of and communion with the ultimate reality, or God… in its purest form it involves an  intense and vivid appreciation of the unseen world, and an absorption of the self into it. This carries with it a special form of consciousness in which the usual object-subject distinction is obliterated and all is resolved into a oneness. This self, thus identified with its object, is capable of a vast range of vision and can become acquainted with ineffable things”:

W. B. Selbie, The Psychology of Religion (1924), p. 245.

“There have been religious geniuses in all ages and in all countries who have had experiences of spiritual expansion. They have been made aware of a Realm of Reality on a higher level than that revealed through their senses. They have sometimes felt invaded by the inrush of larger Life: sometimes they have seemed to,push a door inward into a larger range of being with vastly heightened energy. The experience is … always one of joy and rapture: in fact it is probably the highest joy a mortal ever feels”:

Rufus Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion

Commenting on the importance of human consciousness, Pascal said:

“The Universe may crush them, but they are greater than the Universe because they know they are being crushed”.

“We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with individual life, but short indeed, compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish”:

Arthur Balfour, Foundations of Belief (1894)

Humans “very existence is an accident, their story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of planets [comment Brian Cox?]… famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant”:

Arthur J Balfour, Foundations of Belief (1895)

One possibility: “Disease and hunger will be conquered by science…Hatred and internecine struggles will have disappeared in the ever-warming radiance of Omega… The final convergence will take place in peace”.

Another possibility: “Obeying a law from which nothing in the past has ever been exempt, evil may go on growing alongside good… There are no summits without abysses”:

The Phenomenon of Man [1959]

Teilhard de Chardin was well aware of the cataclysmic possibilities lying in wait for Planet Earth: “With age and increasing complication, we are ever more threatened by internal dangers at the core of both the biosphere and the noosphere. Onslaughts of microbes, organic counter-evolutions, sterility, war, revolution – there are so many ways of coming to an end”. But he was no pessimist: “However possible [these cataclysms] may be in theory, we have higher reasons for being sure that they will not happen“: See next blog….

The Phenomenon of Man (1959)