Sir Julian Huxley

Biologist

Sir Julian Huxley was an evolutionary biologist, science educator, and internationalist. He was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, the first director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund. He was a major player in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis and was the most important biologist after August Weismann to insist on natural selection as the driving force of evolution, a view held by few biologists of the time, but now widely accepted. [1]
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Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;... I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern....Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place." - Huxley, Julian. 1969. The New Divinity in Essays of a Humanist'. Penguin, London. [2]
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"Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat." - From Huxley's Religion Without Revelation (1957) and referring to the disappearing Cheshire Cat, of whom none but the smile remains until it, too, vanishes after long last, as described in Lewis Carroll's children's novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. [3]