“Strictly speaking,” Huxley wrote, “I am unaware of anything that has a right to the title of an ‘impossibility’ except a contradiction in terms.  There are impossibilities logical, but none natural.  A ‘round square,’ a ‘present past,’ ’two parallel lines that intersect,’ are impossibilities, because the ideas denoted by the predicates, round, present, intersect, are contradictory of the ideas denoted by the subjects, square, past, parallel.  But walking on water, or turning water into wine, or procreation without male intervention, or raising the dead, are plainly not impossibilities in this sense.”

The whole matter turns on the question of sufficient evidence.

“Hume’s arguments resolve themselves into a simple statement of the dictates of common sense which may be expressed in this canon:  the more a statement of fact conflicts with previous experience, the more complete must be the evidence which is to justify us in believing it.”

Again, expressing the same idea in different words, he wrote: 

“Nobody can presume to say what the order of nature must be; all that the widest experience (even if it extended over all past time and through all space) that events had happened in a certain way could justify, would be a proportionately strong expectation that events will go on so happening, and the demand for a proportional strength of evidence in favour of any assertion that they had happened otherwise.  It is this weighty consideration, the truth of which everyone who is capable of logical thought must surely admit, which knocks the bottom out of all a priori objections either to ordinary ‘miracles’ or to the efficacy of prayer, in so far as the latter implies the miraculous intervention of a higher power.  No one is entitled to say, a priori, that prayer for some change in the ordinary course of nature cannot possibly avail.”

It was a question of evidence, and not only did the evidence not convince Huxley, but the thaumaturgic nature of the Biblical miracles provided him with additional reason for refusing to attach any extrinsic value to the contents of the book.

On the other hand, although he declined to accept the Bible as a miraculous and authentic revelation, again and again he expressed himself in the strongest terms as to its value to mankind, and as to the impossibility of any scientific advance diminishing in any way whatsoever that value.

“The antagonism between religion and science, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious—­fabricated, on the one hand, by shortsighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally shortsighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance.”

And again;