GOD even conjecture; of great and perhaps unlimited intelligence, but perhaps also more narrowly limited power than this, who desires, and pays some regard to, the happiness of his creatures, but who seems to have other motives of action which he cares more for, and who can hardly be supposed to have created the universe for that purpose alone Such is the deity whom natural religion points to, and any idea of God more captivating than this comes only from human wishes, or from the teaching of either real or imaginary revelation (3E 94) If that is the case, what can be said about the desirability or otherwise of religious belief ? It cannot be disputed, Mill says, that religion has value to individuals as a source of personal satisfaction and elevated feelings Some religions hold out the prospect of immortality as an incentive to virtuous behaviour But this expectation rests on tenuous grounds; and as humanity makes progress it may come to seem a much less flattering prospect It is not only possible but probable that in a higher, and above all, a happier condition of human life, not annihilation but immortality may be the burdensome idea; and that human nature, though pleased with the present, and by no means impatient to quit it, would find comfort and not sadness in the thought that it is not chained through eternity to a conscious existence which it cannot be assured that it will always wish to preserve (3E 122) Creation and Evolution By the time Mill’s Essays were published in 1887, religious believers felt under threat more from evolutionary biology than from empiricist philosophy On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man were greeted with horror in some Christian circles At the meeting of the British Association in 1860, the evolutionist T H Huxley, so he reported, had been asked by the Bishop of Oxford whether he claimed descent from an ape on his father’s or his mother’s side Huxley—according to his own account—replied that he would rather have an ape for a grandfather than a man who misused his gifts to obstruct science by rhetoric The quarrel between Darwinian evolutionists and Christian fundamentalists continues today Darwin’s theory obviously clashes with a literal acceptance of the Bible account of the creation of the world in seven days Moreover, the length of time that would be necessary for evolution to take place would be immensely longer than the 6,000 years that Christian 299