When in 1863 Thomas Henry Huxley, the great nineteenth century biologist and defender of the theory of evolution, coined the phrase "Man's Place in Nature," it was to be the title of a short collection of his essays applying Darwin's theory of evolution to humans. The Origin of Species had been published only four years before, and the idea that man was literally a part of nature, rather than an "image of God," was so novel and, at the same time, so offensive to theologians that it required the most vigorous defense. It was to this defense that Huxley was destined to devote the rest of his life.

Huxley liked to tell how once when setting in a meeting of the Royal Metaphysical Society with men who could identify themselves as Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians and the like, and feeling rather like "a fox without a tail," jovially dubbed himself an "agnostic" - one who has no preconceived faith. The word quickly caught on, much to the consternation of the religious establishment of that day.

Dr. Henry Wase, Principal of King's College at Manchester, proceeded to attack Huxley personally. "He may prefer to call himself an agnostic," said Wase, "but he is in reality an infidel." Wase went on to say, "It is an unpleasant thing for a man to say publicly that he does not believe in Jesus Christ." Bishop Magee of Peterborough expressed his full agreement with Wase, and added that to his mind the intellectual unrest of the time all came down to "cowardly agnosticism."

Huxley, more irritated by the charge of cowardice than of infidelity, attacked. He concentrated on a point which Wase had emphasized, namely the value of Christian authority. He took as an example of this authority the miracle at Gadara (Mark 5:1-13), wherein Jesus exorcised evil spirits from a man and sent them into a herd of about 2000 swine which thereupon ran violently down a steep bank into the sea and drowned. As his opening volley Huxley asked Wase and Magee to employ Christian authority to prove the existence of evil spirits which could be exorcised from a man and then driven into swine. Huxley noted that either Jesus said what was attributed to him with regard to evil spirits, in which case his authority on matters of the "unseen world" was fatally shaken; or he did not say what was attributed to him, in which case the authority of the Bible was shaken. As to Magee's charge of cowardice, and Wase's assertion that to openly state disbelief in Jesus amounts to an unpleasant thing, he replied: "I don't see why it should be considered unpleasant and cowardly for a non-Christian to say so. But to characterize as cowardly any open expression of that which a person sincerely, and after due deliberation, believes is, to my mind, profoundly immoral." Needless to say, Huxley won the debate.

Other thorny problems arise from this story in addition to the one revealed by Huxley. Leviticus 24:18 says, "He that killeth a beast shall make it good; beast for beast." In that regard, we are never told whether or not the swine herder was justly compensated for his loss? If not, it in all probably resulted in his financial ruin. In addition to breaking one of God's laws, this was highly irresponsible considering that neither the swine herder nor the swine were in any way responsible for the alleged demon possession. Also, it was an act of wanton cruelty to dumb animals. Such action is certainly unbecoming to one claimed to be dedicated to universal love and compassion. Here it should also be noted that the writer of Mark, who ever that was, displayed appalling ignorance of the geography of Palestine. Gerasa, the country of the Gerasenes, lies 37 miles southwest of the Sea of Galilee. Therefore the 2000 demon-possessed swine would have had to run for 37 miles down an incredibly long "steep slope" in order to drown themselves in the sea as we are told in the story.

The case for the Bible being the divinely inspired word of God becomes highly questionable here. The claim is made that mental illness, from which the man obviously suffered, was caused by demon possession. In that regard, can the "word of God" be bound to levels of knowledge that were transcended centuries ago? Yet once again in a variety of biblical passages Jesus makes this specific claim (see Mark 1:23-26; Matt. 8:28-32 and Luke 8: 26-33, 9:38-42).