Jun
11
Huxley vs. Wilberforce: What You Don’t Know
“Reports from the time suggest that everybody enjoyed themselves immensely, and all went cheerfully off to dinner together afterwards.” — Michael Ruse, philosopher of science, commenting on the Huxley vs. Wilberforce debate
As regular readers will remember, roughly a month ago I did a post about the infamous “conflict thesis” of science vs. religion. The bulk of the post was an excerpt from God’s Undertaker by Oxford mathematician John C. Lennox, and that will be the case this week, as well.
Last time, the focus was on Galileo’s battle with the Roman Catholic Church and the way that the tale is typically — either through ignorance or not — framed in a misleading way and without pertinent details that don’t fit the desired narrative. This time, as you may have guessed, I will reproduce Lennox’s argument that something similar happens when certain scientists and others in the pro-Darwin crowd relate the story of the Huxley-Wilberforce Debate of 1860.
Incidentally, this Wilberforce is not the slave-trade abolitionist William Wilberforce but rather one of his sons, Samuel, an Anglican clergyman and public speaker of note.
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“… We conclude that the ‘Galileo affair’ really does nothing to confirm a simplistic conflict view of the relationship of science to religion.
Nor in fact does that other frequently-cited incident, the debate on 30 June 1860 at the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in Oxford’s Natural History Museum, which took place between T.H. Huxley (Darwin’s bulldog) and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (Soapy Sam). The debate was occasioned by a lecture delivered by John Draper on Darwin’s theory of evolution — The Origin of Species having been published seven months earlier. This encounter is often portrayed as a simple clash between science and religion, where the competent scientist convincingly triumphed over the ignorant churchman. Yet historians of science have shown that this account is also very far from the truth.
In the first place, Wilberforce was no ignoramus. A month after the historic meeting in question, he published a 50-page review of Darwin’s work (in the Quarterly Review), which Darwin regarded as ‘uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties. It quizzes me most splendidly.’
Secondly, Wilberforce was no obscurantist. He was determined that the debate should not be between science and religion, but a scientific debate — scientist versus scientist on scientific grounds — an intention which figures significantly in his summary of the review: ‘We have objected to the views with which we are dealing, solely on scientific grounds. We have done so from the fixed conviction that it is thus that the truth or falsehood of such arguments should be tried. We have no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them is taught by revelation. We think that all such objections savour of a timidity which is really inconsistent with a firm and well-intrusted faith.’ The robustness of this statement might come as a surprise to many people who have simply swallowed the legendary view of the encounter. One might even be excused for detecting in Wilberforce a kindred spirit to that of Galileo.
Nor was it the case that the only objections to Darwin’s theory came from the side of the church. Sir Richard Owen, the leading anatomist of the day (who, incidentally, had been consulted by Wilberforce), was opposed to Darwin’s theory; as was the eminent scientist Lord Kelvin.
As to contemporary accounts of the debate, John Brooke points out that initially the event seemed to cause little or no stir: ‘It is a significant fact that the famous clash between Huxley and the Bishop was not reported by a single London newspaper at the time. Indeed, there are no official records of the meeting; and most of the reports came from Huxley’s friends. Huxley himself wrote that there was “inextinguishable laughter among the people” at his wit and “I believe that I was the most popular man in Oxford for full four and twenty hours afterwards.”‘
However, the evidence is that the debate was far from one-sided. One newspaper later recorded that one previous convert to Darwin’s theory was de-converted as he witnessed the debate. The botanist Joseph Hooker grumbled that Huxley didn’t ‘put the matter in a form or way that carried the audience’ so he had had to do it himself. Wilberforce wrote three days later to archaeologist Charles Taylor: ‘I think I thoroughly beat him.’ The Athenaeum‘s report gives the impression that honours were about even, saying that Huxley and Wilberforce ‘have each found foemen worthy of their steel’.
Frank James, historian at the Royal Institution in London, makes the suggestion that the widespread impression that Huxley was victorious may well have arisen because Wilberforce was not well-liked, a fact that is missing from most of the accounts: ‘Had Wilberforce not been so unpopular in Oxford, he would have carried the day and not Huxley.’ Shades of Galileo!
On careful analysis, then, two of the main props commonly used to support the conflict thesis crumble. Indeed research has undermined that thesis to such an extent that historian of science Colin Russell can come to the following general conclusion: ‘The common belief that… the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility… is not only historically inaccurate, but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability.’
It is clear, therefore, that powerful forces must have been at play, in order to account for the depth to which the conflict myth has become embedded in the popular mind. And indeed there were. As in the case of Galileo, the real issue at stake was not simply a question of the intellectual merits of a scientific theory. Once more, institutional power played a key role. Huxley was on a crusade to ensure the supremacy of the emerging new class of professional scientists against the privileged position of clerics, however intellectually gifted. He wanted to make sure that it was the scientists who wielded the levers of power. The legend of a conquered bishop slain by a professional scientist suited that crusade, and it was exploited to the full.
However, it is apparent that even more was involved. A central element in Huxley’s crusade is highlighted by Michael Poole. He writes, ‘In this struggle, the concept of “Nature” was spelt with a capital N and reified. Huxley vested “Dame Nature”, as he called her, with attributes hitherto ascribed to God, a tactic eagerly copied by others since. The logical oddity of crediting nature (every physical thing there is) with planning and creating every physical thing there is, passed unnoticed. “Dame Nature”, like some ancient fertility goddess, had taken up residence, her maternal arms encompassing Victorian scientific naturalism.’ Thus a mythical conflict was (and still often is) hyped up and shamelessly used as a weapon in another battle, the real one this time, that is, that between naturalism and theism.”
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Five observations: 1) Wilberforce was apparently quite well-informed and a careful thinker on the scientific matters in question, as Darwin himself indicated. 2) The two debaters were fairly evenly matched. 3) Huxley and friends were not above using fabrication in service to the “naturalist agenda” (for lack of a better term). 4) Legends and myths have surprising power when repeated often enough and by those whom society allows to speak authoritatively on said subjects, as long as no one looks behind the curtain. 5) Thank God for men like Galileo, Wilberforce, and Lennox! (I guess that’s more of a declaration than an observation.)
