Aldous Huxley was appalled at the arrogance of many scientists, who made sweeping judgements on matters of value, aesthetics and meaning, when their natural sciences were basically quantitative. They also dodged responsibility for their research (which ultimately produced the atom bomb):

“They retire to their cloistered laboratories, and there amuse themselves by performing delightfully interesting researches. Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one id leading the ‘higher life’ ” [Ends and Means, 1937.]

Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, etc) admired the astonishing achievements of science (which he had studied assiduously) but emphasised its limits:

“The success was intoxicating and … many scientists and philosophers came to imagine that this useful abstraction from reality was reality itself. Reality as actually experienced contains intuitions of values and significance, contains love, beauty, mystical ecstasy, intimations of godhead. Science did not and still does not possess intellectual instruments with which to deal with these aspects of reality”

[End and Means, 1937.]

Good news! A copy edited proof of my book Intellectuals and the Decline of Religion has gone to Boolarong Press.

It is a collection’s of Paul’s essays and reviews, dealing with a range of intellectuals in Britain in the period from roughly 1918 to the 1960s. They include G. K Chesterton, J. B. Priestley, Arnold Toynbee, Malcolm Muggeridge, Alec Vidler, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis and Joseph Needham.

The great biologist and public intellectual Julian Huxley insisted that human learning was of cosmic significance:

“It is thus part of man’s destiny to be the necessary agent of the cosmos in understanding more of itself, in bearing witness to its wonder, beauty, and interest, in creating new aids to and mechanisms for existence, in experiencing itself, and so introducing the cosmos to more new and more valuable experiences”

New Bottles for New Wine (1957).

Aldous Huxley wrote in 1956:

“Applied science is a conjurer, whose bottomless hat yields the softest Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas…. But I am still optimist enough.. to bet that the non-human otherness at the root of man’s being will ultimately triumph over the all too human selves who frame the ideologies and engineer the collective suicides.” (“The Desert”).

Aldous was fond of phrases such as “non-human otherness” and “transcendent consciousness”. His later romantic, spiritual and environmentalist ideas are expressed in his books such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945).

Julian Huxley, the famous biologist, and his brother Aldous Huxley, the famous novelist, were both deeply interested in the relation between science and religion. Like many other thinkers of the twentieth century (such as Tawney, Vidler, Needham, T. S. Eliot), they predicted the emergence of a flood of pseudo-religions.

“As they watched the influence of traditional religion declining in the world around them, they both agreed that the void left by religion in the modern psyche would not remain empty for long; ideologies of the Left and Right, cults of nature, aesthetics, youth, or ethnic identity would rush in to fill the emptiness”:

R. S. Deese, We Are Amphibians (2015), p.90.

Julian even invented his own secular religion that he called “Religion Without Revelation”. Needless to say it never caught on.

According to Christopher Dawson civilisation should not exist for its own sake but “ought to be a sacred order which rests not on the will of man but on the Law of God. When a civilisation has entirely abandoned this belief, when it makes itself its own law and its own end and cuts itself off from its roots in the spiritual order, its days are numbered … That is the fate that threatens Western culture to-day”:

Religion and the Modern State (1935).

“If religion loses its hold on social life, it eventually loses its hold on life altogether. And this is what has happened in the case of modern Europe. The new secularized civilization is not content to dominate the outer world and to leave man’s inner life to religion; it claims the whole person. Once more Christianity is faced, as it was at the beginning, with the challenge of a world which will accept no appeal from its judgment, and which recognizes no higher power than its own will”:

Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Modern State (1935).