New Delhi, Aug. 17 -- "The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence." - Thomas Henry Huxley.

The quote above is attributed to Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), the English biologist often known as "Darwin's bulldog" for his defence of the theory of evolution. The line, appearing in his 1893 Romanes Lecture, Evolution and Ethics, was delivered at Oxford and followed by an observation that "science is simply common sense at best."

Here, Huxley elevates a familiar principle and transforms it into a moral one. He doesn't say that believing without evidence is a mistake; he further emphasises it by saying that it is a "sin", the "deepest" one against the human mind at that. For Huxley, the human mind's defining...