The Problem with Love and Mercy

On April 30, 1863, Thomas Huxley wrote to his friend Charles Kingsley:

“Whether astronomy and geology can or cannot be made to agree with the statements as to the matters of fact laid down in Genesis–whether the Gospels are historically true or not–are matters of comparatively small moment in the face of the impassable gulf between the anthropomorphism (however refined) of theology and the passionless impersonality of the unknown and unknowable which science shows everywhere underlying the thin veil of phenomena.

Here seems to me to be the great gulf fixed between science and theology–beside which all Colenso controversies, reconcilements of Scripture à la Pye Smith, etc., cut a very small figure.”

Indeed, that is the great gulf: the seemingly unbridgeable abyss that lies between the idea that the cosmos is benevolent and the idea that the cosmos is indifferent.

On May 5, 1863, in another letter, Huxley wrote to Kingsley:

“I cannot see one shadow or tittle of evidence that the great unknown underlying the phenomena of the universe stands to us in the relation of a Father–loves us and cares for us as Christianity asserts.”

The ultimate stumbling block that the Bible presents to the modern mind is not found in Genesis 1, but in Psalm 23. It is not creation, but love and mercy.