A Kernel of Doubt

Abstract

Huxley introduced the term agnosticism to describe his own sceptical attitude towards religious matters. Others have used the term more generally with regard to secular knowledge. Many European commentators have seen this attitude as having developed in the Enlightenment, or during the Renaissance; others trace it back to Greek rationalism. This article suggests that explicit forms of scepticism and agnosticism (even atheism) were much more widely distributed, not only in the Near East but in India and the Far East where counter-cultural traditions often arose in opposition to the hegemonic religious ideologies. Simpler societies, too, display a kernel of doubt. These attitudes emerge from the cognitive contradictions which characterize beliefs and practices about the supernatural and which are embedded in the use of language itself. We recall today the name of T.H. Huxley, son of an unsuccessful schoolmaster who was the progenitor of a line of intellectuals. We do this partly because of his support of Charles Darwin on the occasion of the debate with Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford in 1860 (a year after the appearance of On the origin of species). The occasion represented a major public assertion of the independence of science from theology, a breach that had been in the making since Galileo and long before. Indeed, I want to argue that doubts and ambivalences about the role of God and divinity in human affairs (as well as doubts about secular matters) have a very long history. This history relates not so much to science or even naturalism in the restricted sense, as to a transversal1 scepticism about issues such as the role of deity, a scepticism which arises from the human situation itself Huxley had himself played an important part in scientific biology when he