Thomas Henry Huxley

Background

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) — "Darwin's bulldog" — was the most forceful Victorian public advocate of evolution and the coiner of the word "agnostic." A largely self-taught comparative anatomist who rose to prominence at the Royal School of Mines, Huxley made the case for Darwinism a broader campaign against clerical authority over questions of natural knowledge, and in doing so gave the naturalistic method of inquiry its most eloquent nineteenth-century statement.

Huxley's style was combative, epigrammatic, and evidentialist. He treated evolution not as speculation but as "a generalisation of certain facts" from embryology and palaeontology, and he pressed the corollary that the Genesis creation narrative, read in "the natural sense of the words," could not survive the fossil record — a conclusion Darwin himself had declined to draw in print.

Positions held in this wiki

• Biological Evolution and Christian Thought — draws the sharp anti-orthodox inference: evolution is "hopelessly discordant" with the Genesis account, and manipulating a "non-natural sense" into noncontradiction is the "merest ostrich policy" (see article, Prologue to Science and Christian Tradition).
• Intelligent Design as a Scientific Program — the rhetorical ancestor of today's evolution-education debates; needled anti-evolutionists that demanding to see one species become another "comes oddly from those who believe that mankind are all descended from Adam."
• Methodological Naturalism — Scope and Limits — his account of the agnostic method grounds the exclusion of supernatural explanation not in a definition but in an ethics of evidence, anticipating Robert T. Pennock's constitutive reading of MN.

Key works in our corpus

• Science and Christian Tradition (Collected Essays, Vol. V) (1894) — in corpus (Huxley, Collected Essays V). Here he defines his coinage against Dr. Wace: the agnostic is one who holds "he has no means of attaining a scientific knowledge of the unseen world," so that "agnostic" is "the mere Greek equivalent" of an admission of ignorance where evidence fails (Huxley, Collected Essays V).
• On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals (1863) — in corpus (Huxley 1863); the comparative-anatomy case for human descent.

Principal critics

• James Orr — the contemporary conservative theologian who accepted evolution's facts while rejecting Huxley's inference that they falsify theism.
• Alvin Plantinga — later critic of the claim that methodological naturalism is constitutive of, or neutral toward, religious belief.

See also

• Charles Darwin — whose theory Huxley championed and radicalized.
• Robert T. Pennock — the contemporary heir to Huxley's constitutive-naturalism method.