Lecture contents

The following lecture was delivered in the Queen's Lecture Theatre, Emmanuel College, Cambridge on Monday, 26th February 2001.

John Hedley Brooke is the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science & Religion in the University of Oxford, Fellow of Harris Manchester College and Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre. Until recently, he was President of the British Society for the History of Science and of the Historical Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. His research interests include the use of historical analysis to construct critical perspectives for the discussion of sciences as they bear on religious beliefs and beliefs as they bear on sciences. Professor Brooke has written widely on this subject and his books include 'Science and Religion - Some Historical Perspectives' (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and 'Reconstructing Nature - the Engagement of Science and Religion',

Introduction

It has to be one of the great stories of the history of science. The event we remember happened in Oxford on 30 June 1860 when the British Association for the Advancement of Science was in town. Seeking to score a point against Darwin's disciples, the Bishop of Oxford unwisely baited Thomas Henry Huxley by enquiring whether he would prefer to

think of himself descended from an ape on his grandfather's or grandmother's side. According to legend he quickly had his comeuppance. Huxley whispered to a neighbour: "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands". And replying to the provocation he said that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop - or words to that effect. It was rumoured that Huxley said he would rather be an ape than a bishop; but Huxley denied ever saying such a thing. What he had said was bruising enough. He was not ashamed of a simian ancestry but "he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth." Writing in Macmillan's Magazine many years later, Isabel Sidgwick recalled that "no one doubted [Huxley's] meaning, and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one, jumped out of my seat."

It was, it seems, a tremendous occasion. According to another report, "the room was crowded to suffocation long before the protagonists appeared on the scene, 700 persons or more managing to find places." And the report continues: "the very windows by which the room was lighted down the length of its west side were packed with ladies, whose white handkerchiefs, waving and fluttering in the air at the end of the Bishop's speech, were an unforgettable factor in the acclamation of the crowd." In yet another report Soapy

Sam got what he deserved; for he had spoken for no less than half an hour with "inimitable spirit, emptiness and unfairness." Huxley's riposte was a victory for scientific professionalism over clerical interference. Or was it?

A legend in need of revision?

It is the kind of story that would have to be invented were it not true. Actually, it probably was invented –at least in part. One answer to the question why this celebrated exchange occurred at all is that it didn't – or at least that the legend is deeply misleading. Scholars who have tried to piece together what really happened have been frustrated by the paucity of contemporary comment and its lack of unanimity.

For example, on one account the Bishop's question had been rather different: it had been a joke to be sure and one that misfired, but the issue had been how far back one would have to go to trace one's animal ancestry. The image of a head-on conflict between science and the Anglican Church also turns out to be simplistic. How, for example do we account for the following fact recorded in Leonard Huxley's Life of his father? Close to a group of Huxley's sympathisers had been "one of the few men among the audience already in Holy orders, who joined in – and indeed led – the cheers for the Darwinians." At least some clerics were on Huxley's side.

One of the most distinguished of the Darwinians was Joseph Hooker, Assistant Director of Kew gardens. But to read his account of the proceedings is to meet the view that Huxley had caused hardly a stir. He had not even had the strength of voice for his stinging reply to carry. According to Hooker the person who really won the day for the Darwinians was ... Hooker! In fact, the more closely we look at the legend the more suspect it becomes. The idea that Huxley won a famous victory was not even countenanced in Leonard Huxley's heroic Life. The result of the encounter, though a check to the anti-Darwinian sceptics, could not be represented as an "immediate and complete triumph for evolutionary doctrine". This was precluded by the "character and temper of the audience, most of whom were less capable of being convinced by the arguments than shocked by the boldness of the retort." One of Huxey's most recent and empathetic biographers, Adrian Desmond, agrees that talk of a victor is ridiculous. The Athenaeum put it rather well: the Bishop and Huxley "have each found foemen worthy of their steel, and made their charges and countercharges very much to their own satisfaction and the delight of their respective friends."

There is an additional, perhaps surprising, reason why we should not speak of victors. Instead of anti-Darwinians being converted by either Huxley or Hooker, we know that at least one Darwinian was de-converted in the debate. This was Henry Baker Tristram, one of the first to apply Darwin's principle of natural selection. Tristram had been fascinated by the phenomenon of camouflage – how the desert larks of North Africa, for example, were of a darker hue than those of more favoured districts. Competition between lighter and darker birds gave him the answer, as the darker would be less visible to desert predators. Tristram had been converted by another naturalist, Alfred Newton, whose own conversion to Darwinism reminds us that conversion is not an experience confined to the religious. Newton recalled that "it came to me like the direct revelation of a higher power; and I awoke next morning with the consciousness that there was an end of all the mystery in the simple phrase 'Natural Selection'." But Newton also tells us that his one convert , Tristram, soon sank into apostasy. The occasion was the Wilberforce-Huxley debate. Apparently Tristram "waxed exceedingly wroth as the discussion went on and declared himself more

and more anti-Darwinian." So much for Huxley's victory. Far from any lasting significance, the event almost completely disappeared from public awareness until it was resurrected in the 1890s as an appropriate tribute to a recently deceased hero of scientific education. That delicious remark, "the Lord hath delivered him into mine hands", was probably a retrospective invention of that decade. There is, to my knowledge, no reference to it in the few contemporary reports. Once the story began to gather momentum as a result of the Life and Letters (of Darwin and

Hooker as well as Huxley) it took on the aspect of a foundation myth – one of the defining moments of an emerging scientific professionalism.

The question of speaking out

Does this mean we are dealing with a damp squib? Not exactly because, whatever the precise terms of the debate, there were serious issues involved. There were questions of cultural authority and questions of etiquette. There were questions about the autonomy of the sciences and about the freedom to speak one's mind. Leonard Huxley denied that his father had scored a victory, but he concluded his account with an up-beat message:The importance of the Oxford meeting lay in the open resistance that was made to authority, at a moment when even a drawn battle was hardly less effectual than acknowledged victory. Instead of being crushed under ridicule, the new theories secured a hearing, all the wider, indeed, for the startling nature of their defence.

Consider for a moment this business of speaking out. There is reference to it in a letter Darwin wrote to Huxley some three weeks after the event. "From all that I hear from several quarters, it seems that Oxford did the subject great good. It is of enormous importance, the showing the world that a few first-rate men are not afraid of expressing their opinion." There is a certain poignancy in that remark given Darwin's own reluctance to go public. In their absorbing biography, Adrian Desmond and James Moore point out that much of Darwin's illness may have stemmed from the psychological burden of harbouring a theory he could not release. To have published during the early 1840s, when a draft of the theory had already been written, would have been painful to members of his family. It might have tainted a growing scientific reputation with materialism and political radicalism. By the Summer of 1860 he had, of course, gone public, but he was to remain grateful when others fought his battles for him. Darwin to Huxley 3 July 1860: "I honour your pluck; I would as soon have died as tried to answer the bishop in such an assembly". Darwin would as soon have died many times before he eventually did.

We do sometimes forget the social pressures that could lead to repression. It was not merely that to speak out on matters of religion was to risk ostracism. It was part of the culture of a scientific gentleman – certainly earlier in the century – that one would not press one's heterodoxy if by so doing one injured the faith of more sensitive brethren. The risks were still real in 1860. Here is Hooker writing to Darwin in 1865: "It is all very well for Wallace to wonder at scientific men being afraid of saying what they think… Had he as many kind and good relations as I have, who would be grieved and pained to hear me say what I think, and had he children who would be placed in predicaments most detrimental to children's minds…he would not wonder so much." On the subject of human antiquity the balance was still so delicate in the early 1860s that Hugh Falconer could find relief in the reflection that it was he, and not the likes of Soapy Sam who had exposed the modernity of an Abbeville jaw: "had the exposé been made by the enemy", Falconer wrote, "the whole subject would have been put back quarter of a century."

Huxley himself was not insensitive to the subject of what it was appropriate to say in public. There was part of him which cautioned restraint. On June 28, two days before his encounter with Wilberforce, Huxley had been present at another session of the "British Asses" as they were affectionately called. He had heard Oxford's Professor of Chemistry, Charles Daubeny, deliver a paper on "the final causes of the sexuality of plants, with particular reference to Mr. Darwin's work on the Origin of Species." Huxley had been invited to enter the discussion but had shown no enthusiasm to do so on the ground "that a general audience, in which sentiment would unduly interfere with intellect, was not the public before which such a discussion should be carried on." But there was also a part of Huxley that could not be suppressed – especially when provoked by Richard Owen. More on Owen later, but at that Thursday meeting he had expressed his view that the brain of a gorilla was so different from the brain of a man that a continuity premised on the action of natural selection had to be suspect. Not so for Huxley whose brain had been making a special study of brains. He had found himself, after all, on his feet, flatly contradicting the superintendent of the natural history departments at the British Museum. This battle over brains was to become fiercely acrimonious over the next couple of years. Perceptions of what happened on the Saturday meeting of the British Association cannot be detached from what had occurred on the Thursday. Among the inner circle of Darwinians, it was supposed that Owen and Wilberforce were in league and that the bishop had been coached by England's Cuvier. "Hooker tells me", Darwin wrote to Huxley, "Hooker tells me you fought nobly with Owen ... and that you answered the B. of O. capitally." Note that Huxley had answered the bishop but that his fight had been with Owen. We shall see later that the confrontation between Huxley and Wilberforce cannot be reduced to a simple clash between science and religion. The bishop enrolled eminent scientists of the day in his critique of Darwin's theory. He was talking to the scientists and listening to them. Darwin's mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell, reported that he had had "a good half hour's argument with the Bishop of Oxford" who thought Darwin's book "the most unphilosophical he had ever read."

One thing does emerge from these primary sources. Whatever construction we place on the event there was clearly a commotion of a kind. Let us look at some deeper reasons for it.

Tensions and trends in the background

To understand the events of the foreground, it is usually necessary to go behind the scenes. There were trends and developments in early Victorian society that make the whole affair more comprehensible. Five of these deserve special note. Each in a different way illuminates the story:

The formation of science as a profession

The Yale historian Frank Turner pointed out some years ago that the Victorian conflict between science and religion was in an important respect an epiphenomenon. It reflected a social transformation in the organisation and practice of the sciences. Whereas natural history and the life sciences had often been a favourite study of the English clergy, their essentially amateur approach was being overtaken by new standards of professionalism. In the eyes of the young professionalisers, the Oxbridge clerical scientists epitomised the old guard, whose science was coloured by a natural theology in which nature was redolent of divine design. One of Wilberforce's tutors in Oxford had been William Buckland, who had fought bravely to secure a place for geology in the curriculum. This was the Buckland

who littered his lodgings at Christ Church with dusty fossils, who carried a blue bag to dinner parties in order to take home his fish-bones, whose empiricism extended to thrusting strange meats before his own guests, hedgehog and crocodile to name but two. It is the same Buckland who

explored a hyena den in Yorkshire and found in it proof of a universal flood: the absence of hyena bones he ascribed to the fact that the hyenas had been out hunting when the flood waters rose and were cut off from their retreat. Actually, Buckland's geology should not be derided. Having given a diluvial account of the smooth U- shaped valleys we now ascribe to glaciation, he was in fact one of the first to accept Agassiz's glacial hypothesis. Nevertheless, his science had an explicit Christian tone. In Oxford's Holywell Music Room, he once kept his audience almost to midnight as he expatiated on the wonderful design of the giant sloth - a creature whose grotesque forelimbs one might think did not show the Creator at His best!

The problem with being a clerical scientist was pointed out by another of Buckland's students, Charles Lyell. It was simply too much to expect that one could combine two demanding loyalties. As the sciences moved rapidly towards specialisation it was too much to expect that an enthusiast, whose primary responsibilities lay elsewhere, could find time to keep up to speed. There is a sense in which Wilberforce himself fell into this long established but now threatened category of the clerical naturalist. He was emphatically not a scientific ignoramus. Ten years before his faux pas he had been attending Richard Owen's celebrated Hunterian Lectures, Owen himself noting his assiduity: "I could give the Bishop of Oxford a certificate for the most regular attendance", Owen had written in 1850.

The person who perhaps best epitomises the arrival of a younger generation of professional scientists was Thomas Henry Huxley - and professional in the sense of aspiring towards earning a living from science as well as seeking to ring-fence new standards of rigour that the clergy would soon be unable to meet. There was no privilege in Huxley's background and he was so impecunious that he had to defer his marriage for five years. In a much quoted lament he had protested that "I can get honour in Science, but it doesn't pay." He had got honour: a FRS before the age of 26, recognition for his papers and a Royal Medal in 1852. But it had all been a dreadful struggle. It was when seeking funds to promote his research that we get a glimpse of an early encounter with Owen. He had asked Owen for a reference, which had not shown up; so he had pestered him further. Then they had met in the street. "I was going to walk past, but he stopped me, and in the blandest and most gracious manner said, 'I have received your note. I shall grant it'." The phrase and the implied condescension were quite "touching". So much so that "if I stopped a moment longer I must knock him into the gutter." Owen's scientific and political ascendancy on the one hand and Oxbridge privilege on the other were twin irritants. In retrospect we can see that the trend was indeed towards the exclusion of clerics from the sciences. In the period 1831-65 no fewer than forty-one Anglican clergy had presided over the various sections of the British Association. Wilberforce himself had been a Vice- President of the organisation. Between 1866 and 1900 the number fell to three. In the collision between Wilberforce and Huxley we see a collision not so much between science & religion as polarised entities as between two styles of science. One of the reasons why Darwin's theory was so attractive to Huxley is that it could be adduced in support of a naturalistic worldview that would make a clerical natural theology obsolete.

An uphill struggle in Oxford

We should not lose sight of the fact that the collision did occur in Oxford. To some extent Huxley's irritation may reflect an awareness of the uphill struggle the scientific fraternity had experienced in gaining a hearing within the University. 1860 was not the first time the British Association had been to Oxford. It had first come in June 1832, just after the Third Reform Bill had become law. And its machinations had been viewed with suspicion, not least because Cambridge men were among its luminaries. This invasion from Cambridge coincided with the University's decision to award Doctor of Civil Law degrees to four dissenters, among them the Quaker John Dalton. John Henry Newman, never sympathetic to the physico-theology of the Association's apologists, would look back on that 1832 meeting with regret: "it seems to me ominous, that Meeting of the British Association in Oxford; it took place before, just before the Whig attempt to throw open the University to Dissenters, and was in part the cause of it." The evangelical Frederick Nolan had accused the Association of encouraging a preoccupation with the study of secondary causes in nature, thereby fostering materialism and atheism. "My poor husband", wrote Mary Buckland, "could he be carried back half a century, fire and faggot would have been his fate, and I daresay our Bampton Lecturer would have thought it his duty to assist at such an Auto da Fé." John Keble, in a letter to Edward Pusey, complained of a "bowing of the knee to Baal" and declared that Buckland "ought really to be shown up publicly" for speeches that were "plain idolatry."

The Association had come again in 1847 to lesser hostility, despite Roderick Murchison's fear that Oxford was "lost in her tracts". At that meeting, Henry Acland with his plans for a museum was disappointed to find that Buckland would not give his support, now believing that the cause of science in Oxford was utterly hopeless. Two years later the plan did get off the ground. Among its supporters in 1849 was Samuel Wilberforce. Another was the Professor of Geometry, Baden Powell. I introduce Baden Powell because his advocacy of the sciences in Oxford has been told in fine detail by Pietro Corsi. His uphill struggle and the personal animosity he experienced led him to a high degree of disillusionment with Oxford theology. It drove him to the radical position that the natural scientists should have complete freedom and autonomy in exploring the causes of natural phenomena; but with the proviso that the moral sphere should remain the preserve of the theologian. It was an elegant way of avoiding further retrenchment in territorial squabbles. But there was irony in his religious odyssey because his ultra-liberal theology came to resemble the Unitarianism he had vigorously contested in his youth. Powell, like Huxley, was censured by Wilberforce for views the bishop described as "scarcely-veiled atheism". This was Wilberforce's response to an essay by Powell in Essays and Reviews - that volume which rocked the Church in 1860 more than Darwin's Origin. There is a much more complex story to be told about the gains by men of science in Oxford, but their uphill struggle is part of the background to that other controversy of 1860 that we are considering. There had been reactionary voices in Oxford, all too familiar to the scientific savants. Edward Pusey stands out among them - to such an extent that when Richard Owen was vilified for advocating the creation of new species through secondary causes he would refer to "Puseyite reptiles" who kept crossing his path. And that was Owen, let alone Huxley. There was a point to be made in Oxford.

The challenges of infidelity and popular science

To understand Wilberforce's concern we need to be sensitive to a range of problems the established Church was facing - challenges to its authority coming from both without and

within. In readjusting to an industrial age, it recognised that an increasingly literate public was exposed to organs of secular knowledge that would threaten their sense of the sacred. Writing on Infidelity in 1853, the Revd. Thomas Pearson observed that "if the press be a powerful agency for good, it is unquestionably a powerful agency for evil also ... We can very well hold that the press does more good than evil, and yet maintain that the evil is fearfully great. [It] is powerfully employed on the side of infidelity". Pearson actually did the calculation. Of religious publications he counted 24.5 million a year. From the atheistic and corrupting presses the total was 28.5 million. The devil was winning.

An interesting strategy for dealing with the threat was developed by one of the evangelical publishing houses, the Religious Tract Society. Its aim was to reach the working classes with the gospel. But during the 1840s and 1850s it began to publish secular material framed by the gospel of salvation. The idea was to minimise the damage inflicted by the secular periodicals by presenting edifying knowledge in a Christian tone. The author of a recent Cambridge doctoral thesis, Aileen Fyfe, has shown that this edifying knowledge included astronomy and natural history - disproving the cliché that evangelicals in general were opposed to the sciences. The challenge of an expanding secularism was not, however, easily met. The more one attacked a subversive text the more one drew attention to it.

This applied to one of the most notorious works of popular science to appear before Darwin's Origin. In 1844 there had appeared an anonymous book arguing for the development of organic forms through natural causes. Its title was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Its author (though this was a tantalising secret) was the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers. It was widely perceived as damaging to faith because of the continuity it proposed between animals and humans. So incensed was Darwin's old Cambridge tutor, the Revd. Adam Sedgwick that he devoted some ninety pages to a thrashing review. Sedgwick complained of "base materialism", "rank infidelity"; if this book be true "religion is a lie"; morality is "moonshine". In desperation and resorting to Shakespeare's Lear, he cried out for "an ounce of civet good apothecary to sweeten my imagination." He didn't like it. Half-baked science in the wrong hands could be part of the secular challenge. Wilberforce knew that. Less obviously perhaps, it could be a challenge to serious science. It was not only the clerical scientists who had let fly at Vestiges. It had been rubbished by none other than Huxley himself. This is important. There had been a precedent set in the 1840s for using serious science to attack "science falsely so called". We shall find Wilberforce adopting that strategy in 1860, as he appealed to his scientific allies.

The force of Darwin's theory as a challenge to Christian belief hardly needs spelling out. This is how Wilberforce himself perceived it:

Man's derived supremacy over the earth; man's power of absolute speech; man's gift of reason; man's free will and responsibility; man's fall and man's redemption; the incarnation of the Eternal Son; the indwelling of the Eternal Spirit, - all are equally and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God, and redeemed by the Eternal Son.

As the Bishop of Oxford on his home turf he doubtless felt a heavy responsibility to defend the faith as he understood it.

Divisions within the Church

There were internal as well as external threats to the unity of the established Church that also placed it on the defence. I referred earlier to Baden Powell's contribution to Essays and Reviews published in 1860, the year we are remembering. We remember Essays and Reviews because it contained divisive essays from Oxford divines among others on how the scriptures should be read. They were divisive because they reflected advances made in the contextualisation and historical criticism of the sacred text. A presupposition common to most if not all of the contributors was that the Bible had been written by ordinary men whose beliefs reflected the age in which they had lived and who were fallible in their understanding of nature. Wilberforce was to be angered and saddened in almost equal measure because one of his own ordinands, Frederick Temple, now headmaster of Rugby school, was a contributor. When Wilberforce wrote his review of the book, he could not contain himself: "that men holding such posts should advocate such doctrines; that the clerical head of one of our great schools, ... two professors in our famous University of Oxford, one of whom is also tutor of one of our most distinguished colleges, ... that such as these should be the putters forth of doctrines which seem at least to be altogether incompatible with the Bible and the Christian Faith as the Church of England has hitherto received it" - this was all too much to swallow. It was a paradox, "rare and startling"; it was not Anglicanism but capitulation to German metaphysics. "The English church", he continued, "needs in her posts of trust such men as his past carer has made us believe Dr. Temple to be. We lament with the deepest sorrow the presence of his name among these essayists". Wilberforce even pleaded with Temple to renounce the association. His review was published in January 1861, after his skirmish with Huxley; but it exposes a deep division between conservative forms of Anglicanism and the liberalising trends that Temple now personified. This division is also part of the context, part of the background tension against which the Darwinian debates were played out. It is often said that Darwin called into question the historicity of the Adam and Eve narrative. The truth, as Wilberforce knew, is that the biblical critics had got there first. He wanted Essays and Reviews condemned in the Convocation of Canterbury.

We can perhaps begin to see how in the battle of wits between Wilberforce and Huxley there might be churchmen happy to see the bishop put down. We have already heard reference to one person in Holy orders rooting for the Darwinians. The Vice-Chancellor of the University certainly took the view that the bishop got no more than he deserved. When Joseph Hooker claimed that he had been more effective than Huxley he said that he had been "congratulated and thanked by the blackest coats and whitest stocks in Oxford."

New scientific methodologies

Before leaving the background tensions, we need to note one trend within the sciences themselves. In England especially, the rhetoric of Francis Bacon had informed many accounts of scientific method. Dispensing with preconceived ideas, it was the glory of science to start with the facts and, by a process of induction, ascend to an explanation. Originally directed against the arrogance of scholastic philosophy Bacon's empiricism had been given a Christian gloss. An experimental philosophy would foster the virtue of humility. By the middle of the nineteenth century, new theoretical structures were appearing within the sciences. In atomic theories of matter, in the wave theory of light, in the kinetic theory of gases, in Darwin's theory of evolution, the methodology was not so much inductivist as hypothetico-deductive. On the hypothesis of atomic combination one could explain the laws of chemical composition. On the hypothesis of molecular motions

one could explain the behaviour of gases. On the hypothesis of natural selection one could unify a range of biological phenomena that had previously been disparate: the fossil record, the phenomenon of extinction, the geographical distribution of species, and (by treating varieties as incipient species) the difficulties of classification.

These hypothetico-deductive structures were very effective, but they transgressed a popular perception of Baconian science. It meant that Darwin's theory would be attacked, and not just by clergymen, for its philosophical licence. This is a vital point because Wilberforce undoubtedly felt that he had sound philosophy on his side. In his Origin of Species, Darwin repeatedly wrote that natural selection "could explain", "might explain" phenomena previously inscrutable. This laid him open to the objection that he was launching a speculative programme rather than providing rigorous science. Less sympathetic than John Henry Newman to Darwin's theory, Edward Pusey had a neat way of dealing with science and religion. The scientist should not deal with the unprovable. That was an issue. Huxley himself once conceded that if there were a weak point in Darwin's armour it was that the transformation of one species into another could not be directly observed. For Wilberforce there were many weak points. Darwin had introduced his assertions with statements like "I do not doubt", "it is not incredible", "it is conceivable". "What new words are these", Wilberforce asked, "for a loyal disciple of the true Baconian philosophy?" When dealing with difficulties, such as the elaborate structure of the human eye, Darwin had chosen his words carefully: "if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." Wilberforce was not impressed. What kind of logic was it that asked leave to advance "as true any theory which cannot be demonstrated to be actually impossible"? This was why Wilberforce could say to Lyell that he found Darwin's book so unphilosophical. It contained what he described as a "new wantonness of conjecture".

Wilberforce on Darwin

The Huxley-Wilberforce debate: why did it happen? There is another respect in which it didn't - or rather nearly didn't! Huxley had planned to return to his wife on the Saturday, having little appetite for what was on the British Association menu. He had got wind of the bishop's intention to use the occasion. He also knew that Wilberforce "had the reputation of being a first-class controversialist." Consequently, "I was quite aware", he later told Francis Darwin, "that if he played his cards properly, we should have little chance, with such an audience, of making an efficient defence". It had been a chance meeting with Robert Chambers that had kept him in Oxford, Chambers remonstrating with him that he must not desert the cause. The immediate trigger on the day was of course the bishop's jibe, whatever precisely that was. And that, too, reminds us of the contingency of the event. Like many off-the- cuff jokes this one misfired. But, as Adrian Desmond has insisted, it was just a bit of ad-libbing to try to brighten two hours in a stuffy room.

What is clear is that the bishop's main speech, and intention to make it, had been premeditated. This brings us, at last, to the heart of the matter. Wilberforce was confident that the best science and the best philosophy were on his side. And we can see this in one of the most revealing texts of the day: his formal review of Darwin's Origin for the Quarterly Review. This was published a matter of days after the debate, so when he spoke he had all the resources of that review on which to draw. It makes interesting reading. It contains that succinct account of Darwin's threat to Christianity that we heard earlier. Towards the end he does go over the top, making the kind of extravagant remark that has allowed

scientific rationalists to caricature him. He does say or at least imply that there is something flimsy and fanciful about the Darwinian hypothesis, as if it were "the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas." That line is good for a laugh; but there is much more to the review. The first forty pages contain no theologising, admittedly as part of a deliberate strategy. What do they contain?

Initially at least, a courteous and pretty fair exposition of Darwin's main contentions. Darwin is not set up for ridicule. His writings are said to be "unusually attractive"; the book is "most readable", its language so "perspicuous" that it sparkles. He is evidently impressed by the interdependence of all of nature as Darwin has described it. Indeed it is a wonder Wilberforce has not been hailed as a new age prophet! He speaks of the "golden chain of unsuspected relations which bind together all the mighty web which stretches from end to end of this full and most diversified earth." Darwin's argument is then contested; but to be fair the bishop identified moves made by Darwin that could easily produce incredulity. It was one thing to argue that all living things might have descended from a few original forms; but Darwin had been lured further by the quest for unity: "Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype." For Wilberforce that extra step would strain credulity even if no other did.

We might expect him to cavil at Darwin's references to self-acting powers in nature. They could surely be taken to imply the autonomy of a natural order? But no: Wilberforce is content to say that there is a self-acting power in nature, continuously working in all creation. What is this power? Surprisingly perhaps, it turns out to be natural selection. Darwin is even said to have established the law of natural selection. To be sure the bishop assigned limits to its action; but he did not deny there were real effects of a struggle for life. Such a struggle, he wrote, "actually exists, and that it tends continually to lead the strong to exterminate the weak we readily admit." But then we detect the limits of his tolerance. It is in this law of natural selection that we see a "merciful provision against the deterioration, in a world apt to deteriorate, of the works of the Creator's hands." Natural selection prevents the deterioration of existing species rather than effecting new ones.

Two critical difficulties were often raised in discussions of Darwin's theory. Wilberforce was too clever to miss them. One concerned the analogy Darwin had drawn between the selective breeding of domesticated species and what nature could ostensibly do over extensive periods of time. The problem was that, although the domestic breeder could accentuate and accumulate variation to produce fancy pigeons and the like, the evidence suggested that, once released into the wild, their progeny would soon return to the original type. This was not a ridiculous objection. It had been used by Charles Lyell against the evolutionary hypothesis of Lamarck. A second difficulty was the seeming absence of transitional forms in the fossil record. To deal with that, Darwin had appealed to Lyell's principle that the fossil record was necessarily incomplete. He had also suggested that transitional forms, precisely because they were transitional, were less likely to leave a record than stabilised species. But was that not a bit like using the theory to explain why there was no direct evidence for the theory? One adjective might describe such logic and Wilberforce used it: "unsatisfactory". We should also note that Darwin himself had been worried about the degree to which he was exploiting the imperfection of the fossil record, seeking reassurance from Lyell on that very point.

There are, then, surprises in this clerical review, especially if one is expecting an ignorant riposte. There is even one delicious moment when Wilberforce becomes almost more Darwinian than Darwin. The context is Darwin's discussion of the blackbird and why its young, like the young of other birds, were spotted. No-one, Darwin had written, would suppose that the stripes on the whelp of a lion or the spots on the young blackbird "are of any use to these animals, or are related to the

conditions to which they are exposed." Their prevalence and their very lack of utility were an indication of common descent. But not for Wilberforce, who chose to give Darwin instruction in natural history. Every observant field naturalist knew that this alleged uselessness of colouring was "one of the greatest protections to the young bird, imperfect in its flight, ... sitting unwarily on every bush through which the rays of sunshine dapple every bough to the colour of its own plumage." In his book Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief (1957), David Lack also noted this intervention. Well known for his work on Darwin's finches, Lack was not generally impressed by Wilberforce's scientific grasp. But on this particular issue of the young blackbird's spots, he conceded that Wilberforce's remark was the shrewder. The belief that every feature of an organ or organism had to have some use was more strongly held within a Christian natural theology than by Darwin. In his Descent of Man Darwin said as much, explaining the difficulty he had experienced in emancipating himself from that presupposition.

Darwin's own reaction to Wilberforce's review is worth recording: "it is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the

difficulties. It quizzes me quite splendidly." Darwin told Hooker that he detected Owen's hand in it, leaving Owen's name as a derisive blank. Now, I do not wish to be misunderstood. It is not my brief to defend Wilberforce, or to suggest that he was more sympathetic to Darwin than he was. His review was, and was meant to be, scathing. He refers to an "utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation". But it does have another feature that undercuts the crude polarities between science and religion that are so often invoked. This is his appeal to eminent scientists of the day to buttress his attack: Charles Lyell on the limits of organic variability; Roderick Murchison on evidence that was missing for the Silurian life Darwin was assuming; Richard Owen on the caution that should be exercised before

admitting any possible mechanism for the transformation of species. It was precisely that caution that allowed Wilberforce to upset Darwin by upholding Owen as "a far greater philosopher".

Polarities and their complexity

In conclusion I should like to give three examples to underline the complexity of the polarities. Each marks a different way of saying that there were middle positions. Popular anecdotes about apes and angels play on the polarity but rarely do justice to figures such as Richard Owen or Frederick Temple who saw in the evolutionary process the unfolding of a divine plan. Owen is my first example because, more than Wilberforce, he was willing to see secondary causes at work in the production of new species. He even sought approbation for having been in the vanguard of that openness. But for Owen it did not follow that one had to subscribe to Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection. His refusal to

commit himself to any one mechanism cost him dearly when Darwin's theory began winning converts; but it is important to recognise that he had a philosophical position from which he could argue for theistic evolution. This relied on the conception of continuous creation. There had been a skeletal archetype in the mind of the Creator whose work in creation consisted in the instantiation of that archetypal structure in as many and diverse forms as possible.

For my second example, I return to Frederick Temple who caused Wilberforce so much heartache. During the Oxford meeting of the British Association, the sermon preached in the University Church on the first of July was given not by the Bishop but by Temple. It had a topical theme: the present relations of religion and science. In contrast to Wilberforce, Temple created space for Darwin. He criticised churchmen of the past for their god-of-the-gaps. Too often they had found refuge in what the sciences could not explain. But this had been a serious mistake. The expansion of the domain of natural law was rather to be welcomed. Why? Because it increased the plausibility of the belief that were also moral laws governing the universe. One of Darwin's earliest converts was the clergyman and Christian socialist Charles Kingsley. Temple shared Kingsley's view that a God who could make all things make themselves was so much wiser than one who simply made things.

My third example may seem paradoxical because it is Huxley himself. He was not a liberal in every respect. On women's rights Lyell thought he looked embarrassingly like the Bishop of Oxford. True he coined the word "agnostic" in reaction to the presumption of those churchmen who behaved like gnostics, arrogantly claiming a privileged knowledge. True, it can be said of him that he was looking for a new Protestant reformation in which science would be venerated and Britain prosper; true, perhaps, in one biographer's words, that "he oozed Puritan self-righteousness" in making the scientific man seem "more principled, more earnest". And yet, on the touchy subject of design in nature, which Darwin's theory had placed in the limelight, Huxley had something surprising to say. When he wrote on the reception of Darwin's theory, he felt that there had been far too much song and dance about design and its supposed dissolution. "It is necessary", he wrote, "to remember that there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of Evolution. This proposition is that that the whole world ... is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed. If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay potentially in the cosmic vapour, and that a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say the state of the fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapour of the breath on a cold winter's day." What was his conclusion? Simply that the doctrine of evolution "does not even come into contact with Theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine."

The lecture ended here - continue for the bibliography and the subsequent discussion

Bibliography

John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

I. Bernard Cohen, 'Three notes on the reception of Darwin's ideas on natural selection (Henry Baker Tristram, Alfred Newton, Samuel Wilberforce)', in The Darwinian Heritage (ed. David Kohn), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, pp.589-607.

Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800- 1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Tess Cosslett (ed.), Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Francis Darwin (ed.), Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 3 vols., London 1887, vol.2.

Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850-1875, London: Blond & Briggs, 1982.

Adrian Desmond, Huxley: The Devil's Disciple, London, 1994, Penguin.

Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin, London: Michael Joseph, 1991.

Gregory P. Elder, Chronic Vigor: Darwin, Anglicans, Catholics, and the Development of a Doctrine of Providential Evolution, Lanham: University Press of America, 1996.

Aileen K. Fyfe, 'Industrialised conversion: the Religious Tract Society and popular science publishing in Victorian Britain', Cambridge University PhD dissertation, 2000.

Sheridan Gilley, 'The Huxley-Wilberforce debate: a reconstruction', in Religion and Humanism: Studies in Church History vol.17 (ed. Keith Robbins), Oxford: Blackwell, 1981, pp.325-340.

Leonard Huxley (ed.), Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 vols., London, 1900.

J. Vernon Jensen, 'Return to the Wilberforce-Huxley debate', British Journal for the History of Science, 21 (1988), 161-79.

David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds.), God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, Berkeley and San Francisco: University of California Press, 1986.

John R. Lucas, 'Wilberforce and Huxley: a legendary encounter', The Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 313-30.

James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870-1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Nicolaas Rupke, The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology 1814-1849, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Nicolaas Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian be a Christian? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Keith S. Thomson, 'Huxley, Wilberforce and the Oxford Museum', American Scientist, 88 (2000), 210-13.

Frank M. Turner, 'The Victorian conflict between science and religion: a professional dimension', Isis, 69 (1978), 356-76.

Samuel Wilberforce, Essays Contributed to the Quarterly Review, 2 vols., London 1874, vol.1.

The Discussion

The following discussion took place on the evening of the lecture, after dinner in St Edmund's College.

Brian Stanley: Response to Professor Brooke's paper

Professor Brooke's highly illuminating lecture raises two general issues of interest to me as an historian of Christianity.

1. The boundaries of 'Science' and the scientific community

In 1860 the scientific and Christian communities in Britain overlapped extensively. Many 'scientists' (the term was still a novelty) were also clergymen; many more were practising Christians. The scientific community was itself divided over Darwin's theories, and, as Huxley himself later conceded, any 'general Council of the Church scientific' that had been convened in 1860 would have condemned the theory of natural selection by 'an overwhelming majority'. The arguments advanced by Bishop Wilberforce were, by the standards of the day, thoroughly scientific ones, conforming to Baconian inductivism though also influenced by natural theology. Equally they were assessed on the basis of current scientific criteria. Wilberforce's review of The Origin of Species in The Quarterly Review was at pains to point out that his criticisms of the book were on scientific rather than a priori theological grounds, and it seems clear that Wilberforce's contribution to the debate took the same line.

The substantial retrospective re-interpretation and indeed distortion of the Wilberforce-Huxley exchange that took place in the 1890s is evidence that within 30- 40 years, all this had changed. The scientific and clerical communities had pulled apart into their respective professional spheres. Natural theology had been vanquished and expelled from scientific discourse. Evolution had triumphed in the scientific community (though at this stage, more in a Lamarckian than a Darwinian form), and had also gained a large measure of acceptance in the Protestant Christian community. Arguments against Darwin which had in 1860 appeared indubitably 'scientific' were no longer regarded as such. The shift in

scientific framework or paradigm that was just getting under way in 1860 was nearly complete by the 1890s. What had once been 'science' was now 'non-science' or 'non-sense' for the great majority of those in the scientific community. In more recent times, defenders of so- called 'creation science' have sought to argue that their reading of natural history is at least as scientific as the tenets of evolution. Whether that claim is sustainable has been the key legal issue at stake in those southern American states where evangelical Christians have sought to secure for 'creation science' a guaranteed place in a public education system which forbids the teaching of 'religion'. The scientific community remains generally unpersuaded that creation science is in any genuine sense science.

Whatever view may be taken of these more recent American debates, the undeniable inference to be drawn from the historiography of the Huxley-Wilberforce encounter is that what is, or is not, regarded as 'science' is to a significant degree historically and culturally contingent. This is not to espouse a destructive relativism. The stuff of material reality operates on the basis of certain principles of order and mathematical logic which are universal and entirely independent of cultural context. Nevertheless, the questions which human beings pose to this material reality, and the interpretative frameworks which we adopt in our attempts to understand it, are influenced very substantially by factors extraneous to science as narrowly defined. The boundary between 'scientific' and 'non-scientific' ways of understanding the world is not a fixed one, and the very notion that there is such a boundary is a recent invention. It is characteristic of human nature, and especially of human thinking in the post- Enlightenment West, to imagine that our present framework for understanding the world, unlike all previous frameworks, possesses finality. Historians tend to find such confidence unpersuasive. This is not to impugn the validity of the present Darwinian framework, but simply to appeal for an intellectual humility that recognises that this framework may yet undergo quite significant re-shaping.

2. Science and human values

The second broader issue raised by the 1860 debate relates to the interface between scientific 'truth' and the basis of human morality. Samuel Wilberforce was the third son of the anti-slavery pioneer, William Wilberforce. He remained throughout his life passionately committed to the continuing campaign against forms of commerce in the human species that were predicated on the assumption that some human beings were of less intrinsic worth than others on the basis of their skin colour or hereditary make- up. Prior to his encounter with Huxley, Samuel had addressed the geographical section of the British Association, contending for the fact that Africans, pace the contentions of contemporary racist theory, were just as capable as Europeans of participating in the benefits of both the Christian religion and 'legitimate' commerce. The Christian campaign against slavery was founded on an understanding of the unity and hence the distinctiveness of the human race. What worried Bishop Wilberforce most about Darwin's theory was its apparent undermining of that foundation for Christian morality. Although he did not base his arguments against natural selection on such moral concerns, but rather on scientific 'fact', he was greatly reassured that 'facts' appeared to invalidate claims that Christian theology and morality then felt to be objectionable.

Clearly it is possible to reconcile an acceptance of natural selection with a belief in the unique status and moral capacity of the human species. Nevertheless, there are questions here which to my mind deserve more careful exploration than they have generally been given. Science cannot simply pursue its quest for empirical truth without some consideration of the ultimate human values which undergird and protect the free pursuit of

scientific inquiry as of all forms of inquiry after truth. In our own day, issues such as the psychology of 'race', cloning, or GM technology have forced onto the public agenda with new urgency the question of the social and ethical responsibilities of science. Serious dialogue between scientists, theologians, and others concerned with ultimate human values, is not a dispensable luxury in the modern world.

Further comments on Professor Brooke's paper

David Thompson: I would like to make two related points about religion and the professionalisation of academic life. First, it is important to remember that in 1860 Oxford (like Cambridge) was in a process of transition from being essentially an institution of the Church of England to being essentially an academic institution, with a new, secular understanding of what that meant. Only in 1854 had nonconformists been permitted to matriculate and graduate at Oxford, with the end of the requirement to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles; the opening of College Fellowships to non- Anglicans by the University Tests Act of 1871 was still a decade away. Hence in appraising what is meant by the 'religion' side of the debate, it is necessary to distinguish between particular theological views (which varied) and the institutional fact that a majority of senior members of the University were ordained clergymen of the Church of England. Huxley was very clearly identified with those who wished to open Oxford more widely; the tractarians, with whom Wilberforce had been identified, had been to the fore in resisting that development. This has absolutely nothing to do with Darwin and the theory of evolution by natural selection, but it gives an added edge to the conflict between the two men. (In Cambridge at the same time Henry Sidgwick felt he could no longer subscribe to the Articles, and this influenced J. B. Lightfoot to support university reform.)

Secondly, the professionalisation of academic study was not confined to what we now call science. Many years ago Professor Owen Chadwick described Charles Kingsley as the last Regius Professor of Modern History not to be a serious historian. As it happens, Kingsley was very interested in natural science in the characteristically amateur way Professor Brooke describes: though perhaps the assumptions behind the distinction between amateur and professional in that context are worth examining - is it simply the fact that the persons concerned did not earn their living by science, or does it refer to a significant difference in the quality of their work? What is new, in other words, is the emphasis on sustained research to solve problems - a procedure which presumes that evidence, rather than authority, will determine the outcome. But not evidence alone: as Professor Brooke points out, one of the issues in the reception of evolution was the question of method, what he calls the hypothetico-deductive rather than the inductive. This method was to be much more characteristic of humanities disciplines like history, and eventually theology itself, than it had been hitherto. Indeed one might say that the development of this more speculative approach to explanation was the crucial change. As such it had implications which went far beyond the realm of natural science.

Finally, I agree with Dr Stanley that there were underlying and largely unspoken reasons for anxiety on Wilberforce's part, related to a perceived threat to the coherence of a Christian world-view. Ultimately those anxieties could not be satisfied by a purely scientific discussion; they required the theological issues to be addressed as well. This explains the difference between the excitement of a Baden Powell (or Hort at Cambridge) about the possibilities of a new understanding of God and the worries of those like Pusey who felt the ground shaking under their feet. In that discussion the scientific data or theories were on the edge rather than at the centre.

Wanjiru Njoya: The issue of how we define science is of particular interest, and brings to mind the wider issue of how we define both 'science' and 'religion' when thinking about the interaction between the two. This issue is dealt with by Professor Brooke in greater depth in his previous work where he poses the questions, 'Whose Science? Whose Religion?' (Brooke, J. and Cantor, G. Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion, The University of Glasgow, 1998). As was pointed out at dinner, our definitional starting point is important, and often problematic, since perceptions of what constitutes science have changed considerably over time. What I would like to highlight is the influence of the wider social and cultural environment on the way we characterise both science and religion. It is interesting to think about how these definitional issues, and the parameters of our discussion, might change if we extended the debate beyond the boundaries of western culture. For instance, Prof. Brooke (in his book cited above) mentions the case of the African diviner (or 'medicine-man') to whose mind there is no distinction between science and religion, and to whom the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, had he been present at their 1860 confrontation, would therefore have been quite incomprehensible.

The historical analysis of the Lecture, and the subsequent discussion, elucidated the way the interaction between science and religion has changed over time; similar insights might emerge if we look at how our definitions, and hence our debate, would change in the context of an entirely different culture.

Sujit Sivasundaram: Prof. Brooke persuasively argued that the encounter between Wilberforce and Huxley cannot be interpreted in terms of a crude clash between science and religion, but that historians should pay more attention to such themes as professionalisation. I asked Prof. Brooke why this argument was a necessary one for historians of science. This seems particularly relevant in the light of some remarks in a forthcoming paper by James Moore (James Moore, `Religion and Science,' in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds, The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 6, Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, ed.Peter J. Bowler and John V. Pickstone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press), suggesting that the phrase 'Science and Religion' is itself a historical construct, which has arisen out of institutional formations. Speaking of 'Science and Religion' implies a dichotomy, and this dichotomy makes the argument that there wasn't a crude clash a necessary one. So why do we speak of 'Science and Religion' at all?

Robert S. White: The Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, Richard Dawkins, announced recently that Government plans to expand the number of Church secondary schools are evil. Given his very public anti-religion stance there is nothing particularly surprising about that, although his use of the term 'evil' in the context of religious schools was guaranteed to catch the attention of the media.

Perhaps more interesting was the front-page article in The Independent on 24th February 2001 which reported these views by "the eminent scientist Richard Dawkins" and went on to say that he was "leading a growing intellectual revolt" against single-religion schools. The clear subtext of the article reinforces the old stereotype that clear-thinking intellectuals are pitted against obscurantist clerics and religious people.

In the light of the lecture we have heard today which demonstrated the powerful misconceptions about the Wilberforce-Huxley debate that have become ingrained in the public consciousness, what can we learn from history about how we might seek to counter

some of the unhelpful views that are commonly expressed in the media suggesting that science and religion are not only in conflict, but that the way forward by thinking individuals lies with science rather than religion?

David Clifford: Prof. Brooke's input into the subject area of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate - which as was noted after dinner, has been discussed by historians for some time - was particularly fresh and welcome, in the context of these earlier studies. The mythology of a Huxley 'victory' over Wilberforce seems to me to arise from the fact that the debate in 1860 has mostly been of interest to pro-Darwinian historians of science. Huxley-Wilberforce therefore has a symbolic value which exceeds its historical importance: here indeed was a scientist and a theologian in direct opposition; ergo, there was a science/religion divide. History has tended to favour the conclusions of Darwinists, like Huxley, against the clerics who stubbornly resisted any shift in their pre-existing ideas about creation, like Wilberforce. One hundred and forty years of hindsight is projected back onto one afternoon's discussion in Oxford, as if the shift in ideology that followed was all foretold in Huxley's reply to his tormentor.

My own understanding of the historiography of Huxley-Wilberforce, however, is that the idea of any crushing victory/defeat has been long since dismissed. This is not to say that Prof Brooke's contribution was not new, because it was from a quite different perspective; only that even atheistic historians nowadays recognize that Wilberforce was a highly intelligent and compassionate man who has been badly treated by historians since Oxford (to say nothing of Huxley's own re-evaluation). The lack of contemporary accounts of the debate is as well-known as the ambiguity of what exactly was said by either side. What is (or should be) of most interest about this event to historians is not whether there was some titanic struggle between opposing giants, but how it came to be so mythologized. Pro-Darwinian (and often atheistic) historians of science might not sympathize much with Bishop Wilberforce, but few of them will tolerate bad history as a means of gaining a political advantage. I don't think history has quite finished re-evaluating the importance of this debate yet; but perhaps it's a good sign that it has recently been considerably downplayed, in relation to the rise of Darwinism generally.

This isn't to say that Prof. Brooke's lecture escaped any taint of ideology in its attempt to present a revisionist account of the debate. (Us relativistic Humanities scholars all take this for granted, of course!) I was a little disappointed that Huxley's reply was given as "I would rather have an ape for a grandfather than a Bishop" after so much care was given to account for the doubtful accuracy of what Wilberforce is supposed to have said. Like Wilberforce's remark, no-one has recorded accurately what Huxley said in reply, but this is the first time I have heard it condensed into such an unequivocally anti-clerical swipe. My understanding of what he said, from the various accounts given, has always been along the lines of "I would rather have an ape for a relative than a man who uses his considerable intellect to mock his opponent in a serious discussion". This (and its manifold variants) were summed up in the words "or something to that effect" in the lecture. This is unfair to Huxley, and the distinction is important. Representing Huxley as a man who regards the word 'Bishop' as insult enough for his purposes is to portray him as merely childish. From what little is known of the exchange, it's hard to see either Wilberforce's joke as other than a very poor joke, or Huxley's reply as other than a somewhat lame (and rather more pompous) retort.

What historians have little grounds for saying of either man was that they did not think about their subject seriously. If they do, then the Oxford debate might as well be seen as

the equivalent of a mid-nineteenth century wrestling match, in which we are called upon to take sides. We all set out to investigate historical events as free from personal bias as possible, however hard that might be. I wonder if I should mention that I am most definitely either a Christian or an atheist. But I hope I've done my best, in what I've said above (whether I've succeeded or not is another matter), to make it difficult for those who do not know me to tell.

Stephen M. Walley: I am particularly interested in the (mis)use made of evolutionary theory by various political and social movements (e.g. eugenicists, nazis, communists etc.). This relates to the confusion about the true nature of Darwinism, shared even by Charles Darwin himself due to the lack of understanding of heredity at the time. It has been said, for example, that conservative Americans are social Darwinists who don't believe Darwinian evolution. However, many fundamentalist Christians in America (those anyway at the bottom of the society) lump corporate capitalism as one of the evils unleashed on the world by evolution.

I wonder how far we can go in addressing some of these concerns by presenting the is/ought distinction to people? That just because something 'is' says nothing about whether it 'ought' to be. Question: what is the status of the 'is/ought' distinction in present day philosophy? Does it have anything helpful to say about evolution and its links or otherwise with social and political matters?

Derek Burke: Surely Darwins' original formulation of the origin of species went way ahead of what the facts demanded at the time, and it was, in that sense, inspired 'guesswork'. We have now had over 100 years to challenge the theory and all the cumulative evidence has been in support of the theory. However, that was not the inevitable outcome.

Denis Alexander: I found the various nuances and complexities of the Wilberforce- Huxley debate that you described quite fascinating. It is intriguing that all the really great scientific theories have been used for ideological purposes to various degrees, and evolutionary theory seems to have suffered particularly badly in this respect. Over the years evolution has been used to support racism, capitalism and communism, to name but a few. I know it is not supposed to be the role of historians to attempt to draw lessons from history, but one cannot help thinking that the attempt by a small subset of scientists in our own day to use evolution to support their commitment to atheism represents yet another example of misusing the prestige of a great scientific theory to support personal ideology. My own view would be that evolution is a brilliant theory to explain the origins of biological diversity, but to try and extract from it answers to questions about the existence of God or the ultimate meaning of the universe is simply to lay upon the theory a burden that it is quite unable to bear. This represents an abuse of science.

Historically what I find really surprising, given the genuinely novel aspects of the theory, is that Darwinian evolution, albeit in the more Lamarckian form in which it was generally presented in the late 19th century, was accepted so widely and so quickly within academic circles in general, and by the churches in particular. The British historian James Moore has written that 'With but few exceptions the leading Christian thinkers in Great Britain and America came to terms quite readily with Darwinism and evolution' and the American sociologist George Marsden reports that '...with the exception of Harvard's Louis Agassiz, virtually every American Protestant zoologist and botanist accepted some form of evolution by the early 1870's'. So within only 20 years of the publication of the 'Origin of Species' Darwin's theory had been broadly accepted by the mainstream churches.

In light of these observations it does seem really surprising that the reception of Darwinism in the 19th century is today often presented as if it were a historical precursor of the recent creationist campaigns in the USA and the conflicts that they have generated between certain segments of the Church and the American scientific community. Do you think that in this case scientists have been so eager to defend evolutionary theory that they have unwittingly bent the historical data to make it appear more supportive to their cause ("we scientists will triumph today just as scientists did over the stupid religious protagonists in Darwin's day")? Or do you think that the historical accounts that have been widely read until now misrepresent the reception of Darwinism in the 19th century and have tended to gloss over the fact that the churches in most places had baptised the theory in to their Christian worldview well before the end of the 19th century? Perhaps both types of explanation have some bearing on the issue?

Brian Heap: Professor Hedley Brooke has clarified the underlying tensions that underpinned the Hilberforce-Huxley debate. Recognition of their existence reminds us of the danger of reliance on a God who is seen to answer the unknowns - the God of the gaps. In today's world, neurobiologists have turned to explore the human mind with the tools of molecular biology and genome research and once again threaten to shift the boundaries.

The domain of the mind has long been seen as the preserve of the philosopher, poet and psychoanalyst but it is now investigated increasingly by 'hard' science. It remains to be seen how successful that will prove. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writing from a Nazi prison said that 'we should find God in what we do know, not in what we don't: not in problems still outstanding but in those we have already solved. God cannot be used as a stop-gap. We must not wait until we are at the end of our tether. He must be found at the centre of life. The ground for this lies in the revelation of God in Christ. Christ must be in the centre of life, and in no sense did He come to answer our unsolved problems' (Letters and Papers from Prison, 1953; letters of 30 April 1944 and 25 May 1944, shortly before his execution).

We are greatly indebted to Professor Hedley Brooke for his enlightening analysis of a fractious nineteenth century debate that still reverberates and threatens our understanding of the relation between science and religion.

John Brooke responds I am grateful to all those present who helped to generate such a lively discussion and especially for the responses that have been recorded above. These raise far more issues than can be properly explored in a brief compass but I welcome the opportunity to comment on the main points.

The question of boundaries, raised by Brian Stanley, is indeed of fundamental importance for the reason he gives – that they have changed with time. In the seventeenth century when what we discern as the modern scientific movement first gathered momentum, the study of nature was usually categorised as a branch of philosophy. Isaac Newton's great book that we know as the Principia (1687) was entitled the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Those who adopted experimental methods were often said to be following Francis Bacon's 'experimental philosophy'. Those, such as Descartes and Boyle, who likened the universe to an elaborate piece of clockwork, were said to be proponents of a 'mechanical philosophy'. This makes it inappropriate to ask how such figures reconciled or harmonised their 'science' with their 'religion', as if our modern categories can be imposed on earlier debates. Certainly, each of these thinkers would have resisted any

suggestion that the study of nature should be conflated with the study of scripture, but the boundaries that we take for granted were certainly not yet in place. The word 'science' had often meant knowledge that could be definitively established through rational demonstration. This helps us to understand John Locke's remark that he could not see how 'natural philosophy' could ever become a science. For Isaac Newton, natural philosophy included discourse about the deity. This is why a question such as 'how did Newton reconcile his science with his religion?' is the wrong one.

It may also be helpful to point out that popular literature on 'science and religion' is often too generalised to be incisive. Boundaries between the sciences have also changed with time, especially when new sciences have been launched. As long ago as the 1830s when William Whewell first coined the word 'scientist' he found it necessary to distinguish clearly between sciences such as chemistry, physiology, crystallography and paleontology, not just in terms of their subject matter but also in the light of their different methods. In his view, the practice of each of these sciences depended on different fundamental ideas, as he called them. In the life sciences, for example, he attached great significance to questions about the function or purpose of an organ that would be of out of place in the study of, say, crystal form. In studying crystals, however, an idea such as symmetry would play a prominent role; and in chemistry the idea of electrical polarity. In a historical science, it was obvious that in order to reconstruct the past one needed special assumptions that one might not need in a purely descriptive science. I believe it follows from such considerations that the word 'scientific' is not always conducive to clarity of thought. Like the word 'unscientific' (often a term of abuse) it tends to be used in polemical exchanges when questions of authority and belief are at stake.

There are of course strong drives for unification in our scientific theories. It would be uncomfortable if the different sciences gave us conflicting views about the structure of the natural world. In discussion it was said that currently there is a remarkable unity in what the sciences contribute to our understanding of the earth and its history – notwithstanding well known difficulties in integrating quantum mechanics with Einstein's general theory of relativity. There was also the suggestion that evidence for such unity could be particularly satisfying to a Christian theist (and to other proponents of monotheistic faiths) because it would be consonant with the belief that the universe is the product of a single mind. This prompts the further question as to whether the drive for unification in our theorising about the world has itself been driven, at least in part, by theological presuppositions and their secular legacy. A good case can be made for the claim that Newton's understanding of space as homogeneous and absolute reflected his belief in the one God who had made the world. Questions about boundaries and about unification are, however, currently under intense philosophical scrutiny. Two recent books that discuss them at a sophisticated level are Nancy Cartwright's The Dappled World and Margaret Morrison's Unifying Scientific Theories.

In some ways the most challenging point raised by Dr Stanley concerns the finality of our present frameworks and boundaries. I agree with him that historians tend to be suspicious of claims that we have finally got the right ones after centuries of error. Nor is it just historians who have been sensitive to the issues. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once asked the rhetorical question whether we should not mistrust the 'jaunty assurance' with which each age believes it has at last got the concepts with which to understand the world.

In his comments about 'science and human values', Dr. Stanley suggests that what worried Wilberforce about Darwin's theory was its apparent undermining of a foundation for Christian morality that lay in the unity and distinctiveness of the human race. If the emphasis is placed on the word 'distinctiveness', I would entirely agree. Wilberforce was one of many who recoiled at the thought that our moral sense might have no transcendental significance, as appeared to be the case if Darwin's account of its emergence and development were correct. Darwin's wife Emma was one who found her husband's views painful in this respect, ensuring that at least one contentious passage in his Autobiography was excised before publication. Darwin developed his ideas on how the moral sense had evolved in his later book The Descent of Man (1871), so neither Wilberforce nor Huxley could have known his considered views when they had their encounter. In fact Darwin's own views on morality were not as relativistic as was often supposed. He regarded the principle that we should treat others as we would wish them to treat us as an expression of the highest form of morality. His purpose was not to attack it but to explain how it had evolved. If in Dr. Stanley's sentence the emphasis is placed on the 'unity' of the human race, the story becomes more absorbing because Darwin was himself vehemently opposed to slavery. In his persistent opposition residual Christian convictions have been discerned. While it is true that his theory was used to countenance discrimination between different human races, both he and especially Alfred Russel Wallace were sympathetic to the broader view that all human races were bound by a common unity in that they had all ultimately descended from the same ancestral forms.

In responding to Dr. Stanley I have agreed that the word 'science' covers many ideas, methods and practices that have changed with time. I am grateful to Wanjiru Njoya for reminding us that the same is true for the word 'religion'. The challenging question concerning how the debate would look from the standpoint of another cultural tradition is extremely important. Such comparative studies are badly needed but remain relatively rare because few of us have the necessary skills and familiarity with other cultures to achieve a rigorous analysis. There are hidden problems, too, which one example might illustrate. Historians of science have sometimes asked why an abstract science of physics, in which the 'ideal case' was modelled mathematically, developed in the West but not in China. One, albeit partial, answer that has been given is that in China the crucial concept of a 'law of nature', understood to be imposed on nature from outside, was missing as a consequence of the absence of the theological conception of a Sovereign legislator. It can therefore be tempting to ask the question, 'What was missing in Chinese culture that prevented the development of an abstract theoretical science?' And it can be tempting to give the answer in theological terms: what was missing was a particularly propitious understanding of the relation between science and religion whereby the search for mathematically expressible laws of nature was a search for the laws impressed by the deity on the world. This may indeed have been a propitious formula in the West but to raise the question in the form 'What was missing in China?' may already betray a degree of cultural chauvinism. The hidden complication is that in another culture neither 'science' nor 'religion', as we have come to use those words, may have had anything like the same prominence that they have had in ours. In which case it may not help us in understanding that other culture to suppose that they did (though differently) or that they should have done.

This takes us to the striking question of Sujit Sivasundaram: why do we speak of 'science and religion' at all? I have a lot of sympathy with the views of Jim Moore that the conjunction that creates the composite does itself need scrutiny. One of his essays on this theme is already in print in the journal History of Science vol. 30 (1992), pp. 311-23. One

point he makes with which I unreservedly agree is that in many of the disputes that have been conventionally analysed in terms of some notional relation between science and religion the underlying issues were principally about neither science nor religion, nor the relationship between them, but were matters of social, ethical or political concern in which the authority of either science, religion or both was invoked (often on both sides) to defend a view held on other grounds. Wilberforce would provide an engaging example, if Brian Stanley is correct in suggesting that his ultimate concerns were moral. Put another way: if we wish to understand the deepest concerns of past, or present, scientists or religious thinkers, to ask how they conceived the relation between science and religion can be a way of missing the point. Anyone who is troubled by this thought should read the essay by David Wilson in volume 1 of Facets of Faith and Science, a four volume collection of essays edited by Jitse Van der Meer and published by the University Press of America. If there is a 'field' of study designated by 'Science and Religion' it has surely come about in large measure by the efforts of scientists who happen to have a strong religious commitment and therefore an interest in seeking to relate their respective loyalties. To a lesser extent it is a field constituted by theologians and religious thinkers who have a genuine interest in the sciences and who might wish to appropriate their methods or to re-evaluate the threat that they might be thought to pose. Because I am privileged to hold a Chair in 'Science and Religion' I might be thought to have a vested interest in putting a boundary around the field to protect it. On the contrary, I believe that it does not stand as an autonomous discipline but requires inter-disciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches.

Robert White's question concerning lessons that might be learnt from history in order to counter anti-religious views often expressed in the media is important but difficult. It is difficult because reference to the genuine religious beliefs of eminent scientists can itself be countered in at least two ways. There could be the riposte that when the scientists of the past uttered religious opinions they were merely placatory remarks: they would say that, wouldn't they, given the religious pressures of the day? There could also be the riposte that, even if their religious affirmations were genuine, they were misguided, given the subsequent advances in the sciences and in critical philosophy. Richard Dawkins has no trouble with the claim that the sciences were supportive of religious belief – until Darwin pulled the rug from under the design argument. There are replies to these rejoinders but they require us to do serious work and (here's the catch) the replies may become too sophisticated to permit sound bites. In our book Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Edinburgh, 1998), to which Wanjiru Njoya kindly referred, Geoffrey Cantor and I did include an example (pp.233-5) to show how an historically informed account could be used to critique the kind of aggression to which Professor White refers. I believe it helps greatly when the religious authorities invoked by the media show themselves to be supportive of scientific research, even if they may harbour misgivings about aspects of its application. The current Bishop of Oxford is very good in this respect and it helps to break the popular stereotyping of religion versus science. As I indicated in the lecture itself, it can also be useful to emphasise the mediators, the conciliators – in order to avoid the habitual polarities between extremes. Richard Dawkins' anger over single-religion schools is no doubt compounded by their singleness, but there is an interesting cultural question here on which an appeal to history might be useful. Are there differences between religious traditions concerning the way they envisage the relationship between education and the sustenance of their distinctive faith? Might Richard Dawkins' fears be legitimate in some cases more than others?

I entirely agree with David Clifford's remark that we need to know how the myths surrounding historical episodes arose and, just as importantly, what needs they met and

often continue to meet. There are constituencies who want there to be a conflict between 'science' and 'religion'. For them the anecdotal accounts can be positively attractive. Moreover, as I indicated in the lecture, there is a sense in which Huxley's alleged victory became a kind of foundation myth for professionalised science in its emancipation from the clerical-amateur tradition. I take his point, incidentally, that in deliberately setting up the debate in its popular form before proceeding to my revision, I may have caricatured Huxley more than I should. I think it is clear, however, that he had one bishop in mind! In one of the reports I cited there was the statement that from his remark there was no mistaking his meaning. Huxley was opposed to the link between Church and State that privileged the Anglican clergy. This means that some of his seemingly anti-religious remarks were not so much directed against religious sensibilities per se as against a political system by which dissenting religious traditions had been disadvantaged. David Thompson makes a similar point in his contribution: Huxley's concern that Oxford should be open to dissenters.

Stephen Walley's comments on the (mis)use of evolutionary theory to support any number of political positions are very apt. As he indicates with his reference to Darwin himself, there is a problem in knowing how best to discuss this. He speaks of confusion about the 'true nature of Darwinism'. I have a problem with this because I am not sure one can speak of a 'true nature' in this way. As with the words 'science' and 'religion', it can be unhelpful to assume an essentialist, timeless, definition. The extent to which Darwin himself, either wittingly or unwittingly, gave social meanings to his theory has been discussed in a useful article by John C. Greene, 'Darwin as a Social Evolutionist', Journal of the History of Biology vol.10 (1977), pp. 1-27, which is also accessible in his Science, Ideology and Worldview (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 95- 127. I think it is helpful to stress the 'is/ought' distinction because it is clear that card-carrying Darwinians have had to do so themselves. In his famous Romanes Lecture 'Evolution and Ethics', which Huxley gave at the end of his life, he insisted that the 'is' of naturalistic evolution had to be qualified, even resisted, in the interests of higher ethical imperatives. Richard Dawkins has, in fact, said something rather similar. On this point the recent discussion by Holmes Rolston III, in his Gifford Lectures, Genes, Genesis and God (Cambridge University Press) is helpful because he presses Dawkins on the question where his over-riding 'ought' comes from.

Derek Burke makes the pertinent point that an evaluation of Darwin's theory in 1860 would necessarily look different from one given from our retrospective standpoint when far more supportive evidence has accumulated. A similar point can be made in the context of Galileo's defence of Copernicanism and his trial in 1633. It is easy to blame the Catholic Church for condemning a theory we know to be substantially correct. Galileo's arguments were, however, less decisive at the time and, in particular, he found it difficult to disprove the earth-centred model of Tycho Brahe, who had proposed that all the planets (with the exception of the earth) revolved around the sun, which in turn revolved about the earth carrying the planets with it. It would, however, be going too far to suggest that Darwin (or Galileo) was merely speculating. A principal reason for the success of Darwin's theory was that he had spent twenty years and more collecting supporting evidence. What he did say, to Joseph Hooker in 1855, was that all he expected to be able to show was that there were 'two sides' to the species question – not that he would be able to establish the supremacy of his 'side' beyond doubt.

With Denis Alexander, I agree that evolutionary theory is often made to carry a burden it is unable to bear. This observation also relates to Stephen Walley's concerns. I would always be suspicious of claims to the effect that some particular scientific theory entails a specific metaphysical conclusion. But religious apologists have had to learn the same

lesson. Much of the natural theology literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries exuded the confidence that the latest science demonstrated the truth of Christian propositions about the attributes of God. This was also to place too great a burden on the sciences and helps us to understand why the Darwinian challenge was so poignant. It did not so much challenge a neutral position on the mutual bearings of 'science' and 'religion' as a position in which the sciences had been on the side of the gods. On the receptivity of scientific communities and the various churches to Darwin's theory, the story is inevitably messy and complicated. One finds widely disparate reactions within the same religious traditions. Even among the scientists there were eminent physicists who were not so quickly converted. It is therefore very easy to distort a complex picture as both evolutionary scientists and religious conservatives are inclined to do in the interests of a streamlined history that supports their cause. This is another reason why revisionist histories are so necessary. There are more of them now and one hopes that they will be more widely read. An obvious example is David Livingstone's Darwin's Forgotten Defenders (Edinburgh, 1987), which set out to expose the receptivity of major Presbyterian thinkers to certain elements, at least, of evolutionary theory. Jim Moore's early book The Post-Darwinian Controversies was a sustained critique of the 'conflict' model as applied to the Darwinian debates. Books by Jon Roberts and Ronald Numbers have also showed us the diversity of responses to the Darwinian theory, both in Europe and America.

The contrast between the professional scientist and the clerical amateur, on which my argument in part rested, is open to qualification and further analysis as David Thompson rightly observes. The term 'professional' can be ambiguous for exactly the reason he gives. I think, however, that Huxley would have regarded himself as professional in both senses mentioned: in seeking to establish rigorous standards for scientific research and in drawing an income from it. A qualification worth mentioning is that one could be a rigorous 'professional scientist' and yet still be sympathetic to the continuation of a natural theology. This would be true of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) who complained that the argument for design was being too much 'lost sight of' in the life sciences. One could be a rigorous physical scientist such as the Cambridge Lucasian Professor, George Stokes, and still be an evangelical Christian. Conversely, an amateur interest in natural history did not have to be combined with strong religious faith. Another complication would be that one could be up to 'professional' standards in one branch of the sciences but an amateur in others – a situation we know only too well today. Dr. Thompson's thesis that what was really new in the professionalisation of the disciplines was a commitment to sustained research in order to solve problems fits the case very well. Huxley would undoubtedly have felt secure on this score and his attitude survives to this day in the minds of scientists who sometimes imply that no-one has a right to be heard on questions about the nature of science unless they have done research themselves. Once again, however, the picture is not black and white. When membership criteria had been discussed in the early 1830s for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it was the supposedly 'clerical amateur' William Whewell who had proposed research-based publication as a desideratum. The fact that the history is always so much richer than our categories assume is one of the reasons why it is enriching and endlessly fascinating.

In conclusion I should like to thank Brian Heap for having hosted such an enjoyable discussion and for his own concluding remarks, which remind us that the reasons why many come to a religious faith in the first place usually have very little to do with the supposition that there are things science cannot explain. This is immensely important because scientific materialists and atheists, when attacking religious belief, often operate with the mistaken assumption that to demonstrate the possibility of a naturalistic

explanation for every phenomenon is all that is required to render a deity redundant. From Bonhoeffer's enlightened position, even a demonstration that such an explanation had been given for every phenomenon would not vitiate a religious response to such an explained world.

Discussion participants

Dr Denis Alexander is Chairman of the Programme of Molecular Immunology at The Babraham Institute, a Fellow of St. Edmund's College, Cambridge, and Editor of the journal Science & Christian Belief.

Professor Derek Burke is former Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia and President of Christians in Science.

Dr David Clifford works on nineteenth-century literature, science and religion. In particular he is interested in the relationship between ideas on transformism before Darwin and their cultural crossover into mid-19th century reformist political movements.

Professor Brian Heap is Master of St. Edmund's College, Cambridge and Vice-President and Foreign Secretary of The Royal Society, the UK's Academy of Science. He is an endocrine physiologist.

Mr Wanjiru Njoya is an Advocate at the High Court Bar, Nairobi, Kenya, doing research for a PhD at St Edmund's College, Cambridge.

Mr Sujit Sivasundaram is currently completing his doctoral thesis, tentatively titled, 'God, Man and Nature: Evangelical Explorations of the Pacific, 1795-1850', in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge.

Dr Brian Stanley is a Fellow of St Edmund's College and Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. He is an historian of Christian missions and Christianity in the non-western world.

Dr David Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Modern Church History and Director of the Centre for Advanced Religious and Theological Studies, University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

Dr Stephen M. Walley is a Research Associate at the Cavendish Laboratory (Department of Physics), University of Cambridge, with research interests in Impact Mechanics. He is International Secretary of 'Christians in Science', and has an ongoing interest in the history and philosophy of the theory of evolution.

Professor Robert (Bob) S. White is Professor of Geophysics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. Edmund's College, Cambridge. He studies volcanoes and earthquakes, and the structure of the earth resulting from plate tectonic motions.