Science versus religion – the antithesis conjures two hypostatized entities of the later nineteenth century; Huxley St George slaying Samuel smoothest of dragons; a mysterious undefined ghost called Science against a mysterious indefinable ghost called Religion; until by 1900 schoolboys decided not to have faith because Science, whatever that was, disproved Religion, whatever that was.
Owen Chadwick taking a rise out of the conflict thesis of science and religion.
Huxley; Darwin’s bulldog
The response to Darwin in 1859 was very varied and not restricted to the conventional conflict of science and religion. Christian responses varied from the acceptance of Kingsley and Gray and the rejection by Wilberforce and others. There was no literalist reaction and thus the response was not over the text of Genesis. Many Christians were concerned over the threat to design, teleology, the Fall and ethics. Initially Darwin was opposed by most geologists – Sedgwick, Phillips, Murchison and for a time Lyell – and physicists – Kelvin, Joule, Tait. To some evolution was still tainted with political radicalism. Thus the response to Darwin in the 1860s was complex and cannot be caricatured as Science vs Religion. Despite initial opposition evolution, in a non-Darwinian form was widely accepted in two decades.
This paper is a sequel to my blog on Genesis and geology https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2017/07/19/geology-and-genesis-unearthed/
Keywords; Darwin, Kelvin, Wilberforce, evolution, Genesis, teleology, ethics.
At the first Charles Darwin Memorial Lecture in Shrewsbury in February 1997, David Bellamy emphasised that evolution was in harmony with his Christian faith. He was considering both the contemporary scene where many think Darwin and God to be incompatible, and also that there was a great furore in 1859 when Darwin published The Origin of Species. The latter forms in a major theme a recent biography of Darwin by John Gribbin and Michael White, which has the virtues of being cheap and readable. Its vices are legion as it contains several major chronological errors, completely misunderstands Darwin’s work as a geologist, and fails to use the recently published Correspondence of Charles Darwin. A chapter on the controversy with religion is entitled Battles with Bigotry (1), focusing on Samuel Wilberforce who is presented as scientifically ignorant and, of course, was defeated by the noble Huxley in 1860 at Oxford, as Chadwick mockingly put it “Huxley St George slaying Samuel smoothest of dragons”(2). White and Gribbin strongly criticised those who challenge the popular story of Huxley and Wilberforce, stating “This does not fit the facts.” Without getting into a discussion of what a “fact” is, this paper is an attempt to get at the “facts”.
Wilberforce has been denigrated for a century for hindering the advancement of science, because of his literalist views. Whatever else Wilberforce was, he was no literalist, and had considerable scientific knowledge. He was at various times on the committees of the Geological Society and the Linnaean Society and had attended Buckland’s lectures in geology at Oxford in the 1820s(3). He regularly went to scientific meetings in London and often attended the British Society for the Advancement of Science, where he took an active but supporting role. He made an impact at the 1848 Meeting of the British Association at Birmingham when, on a field trip, he used his episcopal clout to make the assembly shout “Hail, King of Siluria” to Roderick Murchison in recognition of his work on the geology of Wales and the Marches (4). Sir Roderick, King of Siluria, was one of Britain’s foremost geologists in the early Victorian era. Like all his contemporaries: de la Beche, Sedgwick, Buckland, Lyell and a host of others,
Sedgwick, Darwin’s geology teacher
Murchison argued for a geologically ancient earth, and clergy like Wilberforce were equally convinced of geology’s vast ages and extinct fauna. Whatever uneducated Christians thought, few educated Christians were literalists in early Victorian times, and virtually none by 1860.
This can be seen by considering the most well-known theological work of the 1860s and its myriad responses, Essays and Reviews. Goodwin’s essay on the Mosaic Cosmogony is often regarded as the first time the church faced the discoveries of geologists. In fact Goodwin was criticising how most Christian writers interpreted Genesis in the light of geology. Goodwin chose Buckland and Miller as typical representatives. Buckland was professor of geology at Oxford and was the first to identify a Jurassic mammal and to accept Ice Ages in Britain. Hugh Miller was a superb amateur who combined Evangelical and Presbyterian convictions with geology, whose Old Red Sandstone is a geological classic and The Testimony of the Rocks the finest work on geology and Genesis (5). Goodwin did not, and could not, criticise them for their geology but only for harmonising Geology and Genesis, which he considered futile. Along with Temple’s insipid introductory essay, Goodwin’s essay was the least controversial, as most criticisms were aimed at those by Wilson, Williams, Jowett and Baden Powell. Many orthodox Christians, from the Archbishop of Canterbury downward, responded angrily to Essays and Reviews. Samuel Wilberforce quickly brought out Replies to Essays and Reviews including an essay by Gilbert Rorison on the poetic nature of Genesis and a long appendix by John Phillips, professor of geology at Oxford. Of the many other “answers” none were literalist, except the Plymouth Brother B.W.Newton. I cannot give one Anglican counter-example.
The clergy who accepted vast geological ages and thus a non-literal Genesis, are innumerable. Focusing on Anglicans, there are the six clerical contributors to Essays and Reviews and those who wrote against Essays and Reviews, of which I have read about thirty. A selection of strong conservatives should suffice; S.Wilberforce, Henry Moule, R.W.Church, Dean Burgon, E.B.Pusey, J.C.Ryle, A Olivant, G.Rorison, J.B.Sumner, C.R.Sumner, F.Close, C.G.Gorham, T.R.Birks, C.Wordsworth, J.Pratt, J.Baylee, H.Tristram, H.G.C.Moule, H.B.Liddon, E.A.Litton, W.Lee to which may be added most commentators of Genesis. As is clear in this game of prosopography. The “score” is Literalists – Nil; Non-literalists – 21 and 6 essayists plus Colenso, Stanley, Westcott, Hort, Lightfoot, Tait, Henslow, Sedgwick, Kingsley etc., etc., giving 36 for starters. The pattern is clear: the vast majority of churchmen in the 1860s were not literalists and accepted geology. Such a revelation comes as a surprise to many, including Bishops and Geology Professors! It also means that there must be something wrong with many interpretations of the “conflict” of science and religion.
Why is this so? In 1896 Andrew. D. White, the President of Cornell University, published the final edition of The Warfare of Science with Theology (6), which has set the scene on how people have perceived the incompatibility of science and religion for a hundred years. The book has had enormous influence, especially in giving credence to what Prof.Leslie Francis describes as “the Perception of Christianity as Creationist”(7) and is often the only work consulted on how religion has always opposed every advance of science. Its pervasive influence can be seen in Josef Altholz’s essay The Warfare of Conscience with Theology (8), which refers to White’s book as “the traditional approach to the subject”, and despite distancing himself from White’s historiography largely follows it. The basic theme of White is that there has been an on-going war from Copernicus to Darwin in which the Churches opposed every advance of science. As Owen Chadwick expressed it so memorably;
Science versus religion – the antithesis conjures two hypostatized entities of the later nineteenth century; Huxley St George slaying Samuel smoothest of dragons; a mysterious undefined ghost called Science against a mysterious indefinable ghost called Religion; until by 1900 schoolboys decided not to have faith because Science, whatever that was, disproved Religion, whatever that was.
Of course, that is true! That is the problem. White’s work was originally published in two volumes, each over 400 pages, covering a vast scope and supported by a vast array of references. There are sections on The war with Galilleo, From magic to Chemistry and Physics, and The Final Effort of Theology over Darwin, with the Final victory of Evolution. Many of White’s arguments have passed into the received wisdom of the twentieth century and are repeated ad nauseam by Christian and non-Christian alike. Thus G.D.Yarnold, a conservative physicist-priest wrote in 1958, “It is well known that Christian theologians at one time were somewhat reluctant to accept even the most certain conclusions of natural science into their thinking. However following a period of acute controversy ……”(9)
THE RISE OF EVOLUTION AND THE RESPONSE
Though the publication of The Origin of Species changed the way people saw the world, the idea of evolution was not new. Darwin prefaced The Origin of Species work with An Historical Sketch mentioning in particular Lamarck and Grant. What was new with Darwin was the principle of Natural Selection, an idea which has often been misunderstood and wrongly associated with the Survival of the Fittest. Previous attempts at Evolution had foundered on a mechanism and Natural Selection was presented as just that. Though to many, Evolution is synonymous with Darwinism, the latter is strictly speaking Evolution in which the mechanism is largely Natural Selection. As Bowler points out in The Non-Darwinian Revolution, much of 19th century evolution was non-Darwinian, with Darwin providing the catalyst to make evolution acceptable. Within a few years of 1859 Evolution was often seen in Non-Darwinian terms and the last decades of the century saw a revival of Lamarck’s ideas (10).
At times people have looked too hard for precursors of Darwin, even recruiting St Augustine who wrote in an apparently evolutionary manner. In the Enlightenment the ideas of a Great Chain of Being stressed a continuity between species and almost gave a ladder, or chain, reaching up to man, but these were based on speculation rather than science. However before the 1790s there were no concepts to determine either the order in which animals and plants appeared or their age as this had to await the relative age-dating of the geologists, especially by Smith and Cuvier. Even then throughout the nineteenth century there was a general idea of vast geological time, without any method of ascribing particular ages for any formation, which had to wait until the application of radioactivity to dating rocks in 1905.
At the end of the eighteenth century there were two important attempts in presenting evolution in England and France. The Englishman was none other than Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, who was a doctor in Lichfield and a member of the Lunar Society. His main works were the Botanic Garden (1791) and the Temple of Nature (1803) which stand unique among scientific works as they were written in couplets rather than prose. His Zoonomia (1794-1796) proposed a theory of evolution, but his transmutationist ideas were developed from David Hartley’s account (1749) of how the soul is affected by the habits of life rather than from natural history. Erasmus Darwin was largely ignored in his time receiving a mixed response from the scientific press. The most hostile reaction was from the chemist Richard Kirwan. With the threat of invasion and the fear of revolution the reactionary 1790s were not a good time to put forward theories which had such Gallic overtones. Both the geologists James Hutton in the 1790s and William Buckland in the 1820s were regarded by some as politically dangerous. Hutton was a member of the Scottish Enlightenment and a deist, but Buckland was orthodox with Evangelical leanings.
In France Buffon had offended the theologians at the Sorbonne with suggestions of a vast age based on cooling experiments on an iron globe. In contrast to Oxford, Cambridge and the Scottish Universities, the Sorbonne remained a bastion of biblical literalism until after 1850. Between 1845 and 1848 Canon Maupied gave his subsequently published Cours de physique sacree et de cosmogonie mosaique, in which he “optait pour la chronologie des Septante et situait la Creation cinq a six mille ans avant notre ere(11.). After the Revolution Jean Baptiste Lamarck first published on evolution during the month of Thermidor in Year 10 (August 1802) and developed this in his Philosophie Zoologique in 1809. Since 1794, Lamarck had been working on invertebrate taxonomy at the Museum d’histoire naturelle in Paris. Lamarck postulated an initial spontaneous generation of life and then development along a largely linear line (this is to be contrasted to Charles Darwin’s branching bush.) His ideas were revived when Natural Selection went into eclipse in the late 19th century and they are often regarded as the escalator theory of evolution.
Lamarck was strongly opposed by his colleague, Cuvier, who engineered his eclipse. Cuvier was a vertebrate anatomist and pioneered many of the methods on elucidating the skeletal structure of extinct creatures from a few bones. His natural history was more acceptable in England as he spoke of successive catastrophes but never supported those who saw the Noachian Deluge as the last catastrophe. In 1829 at the end of his career Cuvier was engaged in debate over evolution with Geoffroy Saint Hilaire. During the 1820s Robert Grant visited Paris regularly and was a convinced evolutionist teaching evolution in Edinburgh in the 1820s where he briefly had Charles Darwin as a student. How far Grant’s teaching actually made Darwin an evolutionist is open to question, but he was given anti-evolutionary teaching at Cambridge by Henslow and Sedgwick. In 1831 Richard Owen went to Paris with Grant and met Geoffroy but was not convinced. As Desmond expresses it “Edinburgh’s extramural schools were turned into Geoffroyian citadels” as Grant “imported the new philosophical anatomy lock stock and barrel, supporting even Geoffroy’s more controversial claims.”
In 1827 Grant left Edinburgh to take the chair of Zoology at the newly-founded University College in London and thus brought Geoffroy’s evolution to the capital. Until his decline in 1847, after which he lived in some poverty, he gave many lectures in London, often with Richard Owen opposing him. Their first run-in was in 1839 over the Stonesfield “opossum” a mammal-like creature from the Jurassic Strata (140 million years) which Buckland found near Charlbury. Buckland and Owen sought to show it to be a mammal; Grant disagreed, as a Jurassic mammal would have undermined his “ultraserialist” evolutionism. As well as scientific differences between Owen and Grant there were political and religious ones as well. Owen was an Anglican (and friend of Bishop Wilberforce) and a Peelite Tory, whereas Grant was Radical both in religion and politics. As Desmond points out, and is implicit in his book’s title The Politics of Evolution, there are political as well as religious and scientific dimensions to the controversy over evolution during the decades of Chartism. Thus in the 1830s evolutionary ideas in science were often held by those who were also politically and religiously Radical in the strongest sense. Some of the Anti-Geologists of the 1830s were also politically motivated, and considered that Radicalism was behind infidel Geology. An example of this was an anonymous letter which Buckland received in 1824 “from An enemy of Radicalism”. As a Canon of Christchurch, Buckland was hardly a Radical. The more orthodox (religiously) scientists tended to concur with Buckland and Sedgwick and adopt a Progressive Creationism which accepted an old earth but maintained that Creation rather than taking place in six days had been progressive over many millions of years.
In 1844 the anonymous publication of The Vestiges of Natural History of Creation created a storm and much speculation on the identity of the author. The volume was a synthesis of the Laplacean Development Hypothesis, contemporary ideas of evolution and other sciences. The main theme was a gradual evolutionary ascent to man. However it was seen as deistic rather than theistic and implicitly anti-miraculous. Many reviews were hostile. Sedgwick in the Edinburgh Review commented “I believe some woman is the author…partly from the utter ignorance the book displays of all sound physical logic.” But, then, Darwin’s sister Susan had taken considerable interest in him! The Scot Hugh Miller, responded with The Footsteps of the Creator and criticised it largely on scientific grounds. Don Cupitt, in one of his worse moments, completely misunderstood the book describing it as “a veritable dinosaur of a book”. Cupitt was right – it was a Velociraptor in its day! (12) There was much speculation on the identity of the author and Darwin was a prime suspect. However in a letter to the Revd W.D.Fox he said, “at which I ought to be much flattered and unflattered!”(24/4/1845). Fox was one of the first people to know of Darwin’s essay in 1842. By 1848 Darwin was convinced that Chambers was the author writing to Lyell on 16th June, “If he be, as I believe, the Author of the Vestiges, this book for poverty for intellect is a literary curiosity.” The secret was kept until 1884.
The reaction to The Vestiges probably persuaded Darwin not to publish his 1844 draft on Natural Selection. He continued his work on barnacles and wrote in his Transmutation notebooks. However despite scientific shortcomings Vestiges did make the whole concept of evolution more widely known and despite Miller’s strictures did present evolution as an idea which did not necessarily have Radical implications, whether those of Grant or Geoffroy
Darwin came to scientific maturity in this milieu. He was born in 1809 to a deistic doctor in Shrewsbury who had him baptised at St Chad’s Church at six months of age, then sent him to a Unitarian church and school and finally to an Anglican public school. As his sisters worshipped at first at St Chad’s and later at St George’s and sought to influence his religious development, Darwin had a hybrid background from the day of his birth, with roots both in the Radical Science of the Lunar Society and Grant and in the Anglican Oxbridge tradition. The Radical evolutionary side was epitomised by his Edinburgh teacher Robert Grant, and the shadow of his grandfather. The other was the Establishment Anglican Progressive Creationism of the Rev Professors John Henslow and Adam Sedgwick who between them had the greatest early influence on Darwin. Henslow, twelve years Darwin’s senior, as Professor of Botany informally taught Darwin at Cambridge, and thus Darwin was known as “the man who walked with Henslow”. When Darwin left Cambridge for Shrewsbury in June 1831 he was planning an expedition to the Canaries and in July attempted some field geology without success. Fortunately for Darwin, Henslow asked Sedgwick to take him on a field trip to North Wales, so that when he was invited to travel on The Beagle he was a competent geologist. His 1831 field notes reveal how rapidly he became competent under the tutelage of Sedgwick, who thereafter became a regular visitor at The Mount, the Darwin home in Shrewsbury(13). During his voyage Darwin changed his geological ideas from Catastrophism after Fitzroy gave him a copy of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, but Henslow had already warned against its Uniformitarianism. Despite the warning Darwin became even more uniformitarian than Lyell did. After his return in 1836 Darwin wrote up his geological findings himself and enlisted the support of other scientists for his biology. He achieved scientific recognition first as a geologist, and carried out his last geological fieldwork on Welsh glaciation in 1842. His change from geology to biology may have been due to his illness, as on his 1842 field trip at the age of thirty-three he never walked more than four miles in a day compared to twenty-five four years earlier. This may indicate that his illness was physical rather than psychological (14). He made early drafts of his evolutionary ideas in 1842 and 1844, but the hostile response to The Vestiges warned him off publication. From 1838, made several Transformationist notebooks, most of which are extant (15). Darwin moved from geology to biology with an interest in the origin of species and then in the nature of man, which reached book form in the Descent of Man in 1871. In 1855 he finished his work on Barnacles, which took much longer than anticipated after he discovered the fascinating sex-life of some barnacles! He then set to on his Big Book on Natural Selection, but after receiving Wallace’s paper in 1858, he presented a précis of his ideas in a short paper along with Wallace’s paper to the Linnean Society, and then shortened the Big Book for publication. It was published in November 1859 as The Origin of Species (16). Very soon over a thousand copies were sold, and were it published today it would have been in the best-sellers’ list for some time.
THE RESPONSES TO THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
Huxley St George slaying Samuel smoothest of dragons
The simplistic answer is to follow Andrew White and to say that Darwin was supported by scientists and attacked by churchmen with Huxley and Wilberforce epitomising the two positions. This obscures the diversity of responses which involved both science and religion and also ideology and politics and even personalities. The slick presentation of Wilberforce as a bigoted buffoon and Huxley as an enlightened and impartial scientist is a distortion verging on dishonesty. Much writing on the response to The Origin relies on secondary sources often going back to the 1890s and no further when the warfare historiography crystallised in Huxley’s memoirs and Andrew White’s The Warfare of Science with Christianity. Owen Chadwick’s quotation sums up White’s treatment of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who was supposed to be humiliated by Thomas Huxley over evolution at the British Association meeting at Oxford in 1860. In his section on Attacks on Darwin and his theories in England (vol i p 70ff.) White claimed that the “keynote was struck at once in (a review of Darwin in) the Quarterly Review by Wilberforce”. It is illuminating to check out what “the utterances of this most brilliant prelate of the Anglican Church” said about Darwin. White refers seven times to Wilberforce’s Review of “The Origin” and succeeds in misquoting Wilberforce on six occasions! One is given the impression that Wilberforce was a scientifically incompetent bigot. White gave the Received Version of Wilberforce on Darwin, which has been repeated ad nauseam for a century. One of the most widely read is Vidler who plagiarises White’s inaccuracies on Wilberforce! (17) In fact, Wilberforce was a competent geologist, having learned geology from Buckland at Oxford and served on the councils of both the Geological and Zoological Society. His review, though anti-evolutionary, deals mostly with scientific and geological objections and judged by the canons of 1860s science, is very competent. It was also well-written and amusing, referring to “our unsuspected cousinship with mushrooms” and “our fungular descent”. Only in the last few pages of a forty-page review does Wilberforce give theological objections to Darwin (18). His expertise is not surprising as Soapy Sam’s scientific adviser was the anatomist Richard Owen and their friendship had gone back 20 years when Owen was doing battle with the evolutionist Prof Robert Grant. Darwin’s copy of Wilberforce’s review carries the annotation “aided by Owen and Murchison”(20 July 1860), an admission of the quality of Sam’s advisors. Wilberforce’s objections were very similar to Prof Adam Sedgwick’s who wrote to Darwin in 1859 after reading the copy which Darwin had sent him. Sedgwick regretted that his friend, pupil, and almost brother-in-law, had “deserted — after a start in that tram-road of solid physical truth – ….induction …. and started up a machinery as wild as .. Bishop Wilkin’s locomotive that was to sail with us to the Moon.” Despite that he signed himself as “a son of a monkey & an old friend of yours.”.(24 November 1859)
The story of the Huxley-Wilberforce confrontation is frequently repeated and in it much is made of a Lady (Brewster) fainting – which was not surprising in an overcrowded room – and various comments about simian grandparents. However contemporary reports do not support the usual story. At the Oxford meeting of the British Association on Saturday 30th June 1860, the “confrontation” occurred after ‘A paper of a yankee donkey called Draper on “civilisation according to the Darwinian hypothesis”‘ as described in a letter from Hooker to Darwin (2nd July 1860). Hooker called it “flatulent stuff” and related how Soapy Sam “spouted for half an hour…coached up by Owen”. Huxley answered well but could not be heard, thus Hooker waded in to “smite that Amalekite Sam” as the President – his father -in-law Henslow – let him speak. At the end of the letter Hooker said he was thanked by many Oxford clergy, who like most Anglican clergy enjoyed seeing their Bishop deflated! The Athenaeum (14 July 1860) gave a report of the proceedings in which Wilberforce’s reply was scientific and not religious: “the Darwinian theory, when tested by the principles of inductive science, broke down.”(19) What did happen is difficult to work out, but one thing is clear, Wilberforce and Fitzroy did not throw a religious wobbler! There is no contemporary report that Fitzroy waved a Bible in the air. They were allowed to speak as the chairman Henslow considered them competent scientifically and gave scientific objections. On about 20th July Darwin wrote back to Hooker referring to Wilberforce’s review, “I have just read Quarterly R. It is uncommonly clever; picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, & brings forward well all difficulties.-…..I can plainly see here & there Owen’s hand. – The concluding pages will make Lyell shake in his shoes.” A few days later he wrote to his son William “The Review by Bishop of Oxford + Owen in last Quarterly is worth looking at”. Many more references to Wilberforce can be found in letters to and from Darwin during July and August 1860, mostly amicably critical, almost flippant and often amusing. However all primary sources demonstrate that Soapy Sam was no fool, although he may have been scientifically wrong. In my opinion he was wrong, but that is a judgement of an evolutionary geologist writing in 1997. In 1860 Wilberforce had the support of many great scientists – Owen, Murchison and the geology professors of Oxford and Cambridge, (Phillips, whom Wilberforce recruited to write in his Answers to Essays and Reviews and Sedgwick). Jonathan Miller’s statement “Puffed up with stupidity and self-satisfaction, Bishop Wilberforce ….made a British ass of himself” is simply ill-informed prejudice (20). It is reasonable to conclude that the Wilberforce affair was well known by leading scientists and others, including many clergy and an allusion to it even makes its way into The Water Babies where Kingsley mocks his friend Huxley by basing Prof Ptthmllnsprts on him. This is clear as Ptthmllnsprts told the British Association that apes had “hippopotamus majors” in their brains, alluding to Huxley’s demonstration that apes have hippocampus majors thus contradicting Richard Owen. In the story Ptthmllnsprts told the British Association at Melbourne in 1999 that “nymphs, satryrs, fauns, inui etc. etc. were nothing at all, and pure bosh and wind…..Whereupon a certain great divine …called him a regular Sadducee….Whereupon the professor, in return, called him a regular Pharisee…But they did not quarrel in the least…So the professor and the divine met at dinner that evening…and each vowed that the other was the best company he ever met in his life.”(21) This is probably a truer representation of the “Huxley-Wilberforce Confrontation” than any popular account! The sources for this may well be personal conversations as Kingsley had excellent relations with both Wilberforce and Huxley and had met both after 1860.
The Huxley-Wilberforce episode has been reassessed by several scholars in the last two decades, and the most accessible reassessment is the essay Knight takes Bishop (22) by Stephen Gould, which shows that the received version is based on reminiscences thirty years on and is not supported by contemporary reports, or by the reminiscences by others including Dean Farrar. Elsewhere Colin Russell locates the social origins of the conflict metaphor with Thomas Huxley and the X-Club (23). Desmond in his recent biography Huxley demonstrates how “Huxley made straw men of the ‘Creationists'”, by asking “Who…imagined elephants flashing into being from their component atoms?” As Desmond said “His atomic elephant was a clever caricature. Yet many who were branded ‘Creationists’ never thought in those terms.” This would include Sedgwick and Wilberforce. Huxley had distilled his professional dissenting strategy against the privileged Anglican Church into a Manichean Evolutionist Vs Creationist slogan, us-vs-them. Having been so perceptive here, he later refers to Wilberforce needing coaxing “beyond the Six Days to a more informed opposition”, overlooking the fact that Wilberforce needed no coaxing to accept geological ages (24). (The term Creationist must be interpreted carefully, and not to imply belief in a young earth.)
Well, then, what did happen in those years after 1859? With such highly coloured stories often presented in a highly ideological way, it is difficult to be impartial and not to bring one’s own Weltblick into the discussion. In recent years there has been a vast output of books and papers, most notably by Jim Moore, A.Desmond, P.Bowler, O.Chadwick, D.Livingstone among others (25). Invaluable has been the publication of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin (26) which provides invaluable material for the years 1858 -1861 in particular. It would be convenient if one could simply analyse first the response of scientists and then of churchmen, lay or ordained, but the two categories overlap. However, despite the dangers of doing this, it does clarify both scientific and religious questions.
Over the previous ten years Darwin had aired his views privately to his friends almost “as if confessing a murder”. Thus Lyell, Huxley, Hooker, Gray and others knew the substance of The Origin before publication, but their response varied; Lyell had great difficulty in accepting evolution and it took him years before he grudgingly accepted Evolution; Huxley jumped at evolution, becoming Darwin’s Bulldog (Desmond’s epithet Rotweiler is better!), but never accepted Natural Selection; Hooker accepted both evolution and natural selection, and Asa Gray, a devout Christian who ran a Sunday School for Negroes in Boston and was in opposition to Agassiz both on slavery and evolution, accepted evolution but insisted on Supernatural guidance of the process. Richard Owen equivocally rejected it but wanted ultimately to defend his own version of divinely guided evolution. The astronomer John Herschel rejected Natural Selection as the “law of higgeldy-piggeldy” yet reckoned that the universe was 50 billion years old (slightly longer than today’s estimates of 10 to 15 billion.). The Unitarian Louis Agassiz, Swiss born and by 1850 a professor at Harvard and a supporter of slavery, who was one of the first to recognise Ice-Ages in the 1830s, rejected Darwin outright, as did the geologist Rev Adam Sedgwick. Darwin’s other teacher John Henslow (Hooker’s father-in-law) was sympathetic but ultimately could not accept Darwin. The interchange of letters between Darwin and Henslow demonstrate both their disagreement and their friendship. Darwin respected Henslow both as scientist and parish priest and was upset by Henslow’s death in 1861. Sedgwick wrote Darwin a friendly letter on why he objected to The Origin, but their friendship cooled off after his review in The Spectator for March 24th 1860. Physical scientists in particular objected to Darwin, notably William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), Clerk Maxwell, Fleeming Jenkin and P.G.Tait (27). Thomson had particular doubts over geological Uniformitarianism and regarded geologists’ estimates for the age of the earth to be close to a billion years as ridiculous and contrary to physics. In the 1860s he favoured a maximum of 100 million years and later downsized it to 24 million. That meant that the Laws of Physics allowed no time for Evolution (28).
Now for churchmen: Baden Powell had accepted evolution in 1855 probably as result of Vestiges, and endorsed this in Essays and Reviews. Charles Kingsley, who was sent a copy of the Origin of Species, immediately accepted evolution writing back to Darwin on 18th November 1859 that “it is just as noble a concept of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development”. William Whewell likewise received a copy but was unconvinced. Less well known is Frederick Temple who indicated his acceptance of evolution in the sermon at the 1860 British Association Meeting. The evangelical Canon Tristram of Durham and no mean ornithologist went to that famous meeting an evolutionist and was persuaded against it by Wilberforce. However he soon recanted and his granddaughter reported him as saying, “When the world was evolved, oh! created.”(29). The High Churchman R.W.Church published a favourable review in the Guardian in February 1860. The biblical Scholar F.J.A.Hort tried to allay the fears of his colleague B.F.Westcott. Bishop Tait, soon to move to Canterbury, was undecided and was advised by Lyell in 1861 to read Gray rather than Wilberforce. The Scottish Presbyterian James Duns published a hostile review, but according to Livingstone was almost unique among the Scots for rejecting evolution. The American botanist, Asa Gray,
was quick to accept evolution but gave it a theistic interpretation. Gray and Darwin had a lengthy correspondence, which led up to Darwin publishing Gray’s review of the Origin in which it was interpreted theistically. Gray may be considered Darwin’s Retriever in contrast to Huxley as his Rotweiler! In 1873 Charles Hodge, a conservative Presbyterian, wrote a fine, but very fair, hostile critique What is Darwinism, concluding that Darwinism was atheism. However Hodge could, but did not accept Evolution and wrote, “If God made them, it makes no difference, how he made them: whether at once or by a process of evolution.” His theological sucessors, his son A.A. Hodge and B.B.Warfield, were totally convinced of evolution – and wrote the definitive statements of Biblical Inerrancy, which most today would consider to be inimicable with evolution (30).
Moving well into the 1860s Archdeacon Pratt of Calcutta revised his Science and Scripture not at Variance to take into account both the Origin and Essays and Reviews and by 1871 The Descent of Man, which he regarded as “a bad thing”. Also in 1871 the conservative High Churchman H.P.Liddon indicated his approval of evolution, as did E.B.Pusey with the rider that it did not involve “belief in our apedom.” In 1865 The Victoria Institute was founded to combat the effects of Darwin and Essays and Reviews but by 1867 George Warrington presented a paper entitled On the Credulity of Darwin and was rounded on by a James Reddie, who was always ready to oppose such wayward views. The Journal of the Victoria Institute gives a good record of the attitudes of British Evangelicals to evolution over the next hundred years, which may be summarised as the majority being cautiously in favour, with some strongly opposed and the very occasional young earther. More outright opposition came from the Revd F.O.Morris who wrote Difficulties of Darwinism (1869) and All the Articles of the Darwinian Faith (1875), which is “Dedicated by permission to the Right Honourable The Common Sense of the People of England”.
Reverting to a scoring system (remembering that the umpire is only able to see part of the field and thus numbers give only a rough idea), the score is for the early 1860s (so far) Biblical Literalists, Nil; Anti-Evolutionists, 6 and still counting; Pro-Evolutionists, 9; undecided, 4 and still counting. To continue this for the 1860s would give a balance in favour of Anti-Evolutionists, but this changed over the next two decades as more and more began to accept evolution. However most Christians followed A.R.Wallace, accepting evolution for the “brute” creation, but not for humanity.
The accepted picture that there was controversy verging on warfare is simply unsupported. However, at times, the conflict went further than words, as in the example of Prof James Buckman who was dismissed from his post at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, by the Anglican Governing Body, allegedly for his commercial interests but more clearly for his evolutionary views. This seems to have been a rare occurrence, but there is little research on this aspect. Against that several Oxbridge academics were evolutionists – Church, Kingsley and Hort- and in the late sixties two sympathetic to evolution were preferred to bishoprics; Temple to Exeter and Tait to Canterbury. After that it was a landslide. As Jim Moore states, “With but few exceptions the leading Christian thinkers in Great Britain and America came to terms quite readily with Darwinism and evolution.”(31). Despite the work of the early Moore, Livingstone and others on whose work much of this is based there is a marked reluctance for scholars to reject the conflict thesis as the recent works of Cashdollar and Ward show (32).
This is very much a catalogue of responses and without some interpretation only demonstrates the variety of response and not the reason.
It is not easy to separate religious objections from scientific and political as they were often fused together. Before considering what the objections were it is essential to know what the objections were not. In the 1860s (to my knowledge) not one Christian objector to Darwin did so on the grounds of Biblical Literalism or the Genesis account, except the Confederate D.L.Dabney. (My evidence for this is combing libraries and trying to find Biblical Literalists. However a long search into the stacks of the Bodlean in Oxford would produce some literalists – and many more non-literalists. ) Where Darwin’s critics objected on the basis of Genesis, it was in a general way as all took Genesis non-literally. It is remarkable and a cause for concern that so many “standard works” on the nineteenth century argue, without a shred of evidence, that “there is a clear conflict between a literal interpretation of the words of Genesis concerning creation and the theory of evolution”. Though historians, such as Worrall or Vidler, cite this as a self-evident fact, not one literalist opponent to Darwin is ever named (33). Where Christians objected on Biblical grounds this was more on the grounds of materialism (i.e. atheism), design and the moral status of man. Along with a series of scientific objections Sedgwick concluded his criticisms of The Origin by expressing his deep aversion, “because of its unflinching materialism” and thus its rejection of God. Ten years later Hodge in What is Darwinism? makes this clear in his answer; “Darwinism is ATHEISM”, because the random process of Natural Selection does not require God. Darwin had (deliberately?) avoided any mention of human origins beyond his elusive comment “More light will be shed on the origin of man”, but that did not stop readers realising the implication. The humorist Wilberforce recognised this by references to “our fungular descent” and “our unsuspected cousinship with mushrooms”. Our simian ancestry soon became a favourite topic for cartoons and Darwin made the evolutionary origin of man clear ten years later in The Descent of Man. This was a step too far for some, as to exclude a creative act to make a human was seen to exclude the Creator. Ironically, one who insisted on a discontinuity was the co-discoverer of Natural Selection, A.R.Wallace. Thus in the late 19th century many accepted evolution, but only up to and excluding man, for example the conservative Scottish theologian James Orr, who expounded this forcibly in the eponymous Fundamentals (34). Even more ironically this was the view of Jennings Bryan who fought for the prosecution at the Scopes trial in Dayton, Ohio in 1925. Several Christians today hold similar views and their motivation is to protect first the perceived moral nature of man and secondly to eschew reductionism. These two points go a long way in understanding why many thinkers, and not necessarily religious ones, have acute problems with evolution. One has only to cite Arthur Koestler, Bernard Levin, R.S Thomas, Bishop Montefiore of today.
The other main religious objection to Darwin was the issue of design. The dominant British and especially Anglican tradition of science was to see life forms as designed by a Creator. This is especially manifest in the works of Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises. In a different way both Cuvier and Richard Owen based their science on Design, but not in a simplistic manner. The whole concept of Natural Selection was seen to undermine design as it depends on random variations some of which are more successful at surviving to reproduce (i.e. the Darwinian definition of Fitness). This randomness called forth Herschel’s epithet of “the law of higgeldy-piggeldy” and is why Asa Gray among others wanted to accept Evolution by Natural Selection up to a point but insisted that God had guided evolution “along certain beneficial lines”(35). Darwin could not accept that and criticised Gray at the end of Variations of Animals and Plants (36).
Though Christians of a more liberal persuasion often accepted Evolution more easily and rapidly than conservatives, one cannot maintain that a Liberal Theology was necessary to accept Evolution. Yes, Baden Powell was strongly liberal, but Kingsley, a moderate liberal whose works were not approved by the Christian Observer, who accepted evolution so quickly in 1859, totally opposed Essays and Reviews. During 1860 the conservatives Church and Tristram accepted evolution. For Tristram it was the second time as he had first accepted evolution in 1858 after reading Darwin’s Linnaen Society paper and then perverted in 1860 after hearing Wilberforce only to re-convert shortly afterwards. Within a matter of years and at the most within two decades Evolution had become acceptable to most conservative and evangelical Christians as Livingstone has forcibly argued for Scottish and American evangelicals. A similar case can be made for Anglicans. This conclusion is embarrassing to both evolutionary atheists and young earth creationists, but the evidence is irrefutable.
Mixed in with religious objections were scientific and unspoken political objections. Darwin was cut to the quick by Sedgwick who in his review argued that Darwin had departed from the principles of inductive science and was too fanciful in his theorising with insufficient evidence. Darwin drew a contemporary parallel: in 1861 the physicist James Clerk Maxwell developed the wave theory of electro-magnetism and postulated that waves passed through an aether in space. As Darwin pointed out the “aether” was pure theory, but Maxwell’s equations for electro-magnetism were accepted far more readily than Natural Selection (37). Probably the reason for this was that quantitative “mathematical” science was (and is!) seen to have a stronger basis than the qualitative arguments found in The Origin. Historically Darwin chose the right example as the “aether” was later found to be non-existent. Darwin’s “Blending Inheritance” was also found to be a chimera. There was and is a perceived hierarchy of the different sciences in which the more Mathematical ones, e.g. physics, are precise compared to the vagueness of biology and, before radiometric age-dating, geology. (Many, especially physical scientists, do not appreciate the difference between experimental physical science and the observational and palaeoaetiological (historical) sciences of biology and geology, and are disparaging of the latter for being little more than stamp-collecting, as my physicist uncle Yarnold quoted above twigged me with once.) Thus Kelvin’s estimate of 100 million years for the age of the earth was seen as precise, compared to geologists who spoke vaguely of hundreds of millions, with no evidence other than hundreds of layers of rocks! Kelvin’s estimates were too low for evolution to have occurred, particularly for Darwin’s very slow gradualism. Thus in the second half of the 19th Century some of the strongest objections to Evolution, especially by Natural Selection, without a directing shove from God, came not from the Church but from physicists. Hence Darwin was criticised for making the suggestion that the Cretaceous Wealden strata were laid down 306,662,400 years ago. Later editions of the Origin of Species omitted this section which was censured by most geologists and Bishop Wilberforce as well as the physicists (38). Actual dating of rocks had to wait until Boltwood started to use radiometric methods on Uranium-rich minerals in about 1905. These were later refined and perfected by Arthur Holmes and others and give us our familiar ages in millions of years. Darwin was not so far off in his estimate as the Wealden rocks have been shown to be about 100,000,000 years old from radiometric dating. Since 1950 the many different radiometric methods all show the earth to be about four and a half billion years old. Darwin now has sufficient time! Or does he?
Many geologists objected to Darwin’s claims of vast gaps in the geological record. Wilberforce took him strongly to task (Quarterly Review 1860, p242) and was echoed by many geologists of his day. Geikie wrote; “Geologists in this country were perhaps somewhat slow in appreciating the bearings of this remarkable treatise on their own branch of science.”(39) Geikie refers to the conviction of geologists that there were no vast gaps. However further work by geologists before 1900 convinced them that Darwin was right in his argument for great gaps.
Ironically, though James Moore has given the standard study on The Post-Darwinian Controversies, which is often cited as giving a definitive rejection of the Conflict of Science and Christianity, his more recent work and his Darwin biography co-authored with Desmond seem to have more sympathy for “Conflict”. However to these authors the conflict is not only between Christians and scientists, but is more political and is between the Anglican/Tory Establishment alliance of scientists like Richard Owen and Lyell, Oxbridge clerical scientists such as Sedgwick and Buckland, supported by Tories like Peel and Bishops e.g. Samuel Wilberforce, against the scientific and political radicals like Wikely and Grant of the 30s and 40s with Huxley and Tyndall as natural successors. Thus the conflict over Darwin may be seen as continuation of the Grant-Owen controversies of two decades earlier. A weakness is that the leading characters are categorised too neatly into those supporting the Tory/Anglican alliance or their Radical opponents. As Desmond states, both Lyell and Adam Sedgwick were Whigs and one of Grant’s ‘patrons’ was John Fleming, a Scottish Evangelical Minister. Though there was a political and religious Radicalism behind the controversies, there is more of a muddied continuum of viewpoints rather than simply than a warfare between dissenting Radical and Anglican/Tory Establishment. Probably Huxley and Wilberforce can be placed at the extremes of the spectrum, but, most, whether, Lyell, Temple, Kingsley or Herschel lie somewhere in-between. The question of political attitudes moulding scientific perspectives demonstrates the danger of attempting a purely religious or scientific analysis of the controversies without taking into account the wider social, political and cultural background. Some of the personality issues have been alluded to, the most notorious being the continued strife between Owen and Huxley. Concerning Huxley, he loved to take a pot-shot at Bishops.
Closely related to this is the issue of the rising scientific professionalism, with particularly Huxley and other non-Oxbridge and non-clerical scientists. This is developed at length by Frank Turner (40) but he overstates his case. To contrast the late 19th Century professionals like Huxley with the “amateur clerical scientists” does not do justice to the latter’s achievements. The contributions to geology by Buckland and Sedgwick, or of Whewell in the philosophy of science, were as professional as anything before or since. The achievements of Sedgwick’s visit to North Wales in August 1831 with his delineation of the Cambrian System and the complicated geology of Snowdonia and elucidation of slaty cleavage were nothing short of phenomenal, and he managed to train up Darwin at the same time. And that was only one year’s work! To dismiss the Victoria Institute “as a conclave of amateurs” may be just to their amateur members, for example Rev Henry Moule, the inventor of the Dry-Earth Closet, and James Reddie, but a perusal of their journal shows that many of the contributors were professional scientists of the highest rank: the Physicist G.G.Stokes and the geologist J.W.Dawson. Undoubtedly scientific Christians were swayed in their science by their theology, but so were agnostic scientists by their naturalism. If early Christian geologists can be censured for their Diluvialism with links to the Noachian Deluge, so can Huxley be criticised for his “inchoate jelly-creature” Bathybius Haeckelii which he “discovered” in sea-floor dredgings from the Atlantic in 1868, when as Gould expresses it “his hopes and expectations guided his Expectations” and thus he found a pulsating primitive form of life from which all life must have evolved. In the 1870s Bathybius turned out to be a colloidal precipitate of calcium sulphate, which pulsated in the presence of alcohol! (41) Scientists are as prone to being guided by an ideology as anyone else, and as Anglican Evidential Science was dominant at the beginning of the era, so Scientific Naturalism grew in strength after 1850, and fuelled a rising sense of professionalism among scientists. After 1850 or so the sheer weight of clerical duties prevented a parson-naturalist making any significant scientific contribution, and the increasing technicality and specialism of science also prevented any but a professional adding to the store of science. In the 1820s Henslow could move easily from Mineralogy to Geology and then to Botany, and an amateur could have an extensive grasp of a science, and thus Ruskin could expect artists to know their geology. After mid-century this was no longer possible.
David Livingstone in Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders and other studies has dealt with Evangelical attitudes to evolution and comes out with the conclusion that from the mid-1860s until the First World War many Evangelicals were also evolutionists and those who were not evolutionists were old earthers. This comes as a surprise to many who think Evangelicals were and are Young Earth Creationist. More recently Livingstone has compared the attitudes to evolution of three groups of orthodox Calvinist Presbyterians in the 1880s. Not only were their theologies similar, they also had very close links, with interchange of academics. One group from the north of Ireland were to a man anti-evolutionary, but old earthers; the second from Princeton, including such ultra-conservatives as B.B.Warfield and A.A.Hodge, were mostly evolutionists. That really muddies the water! The reasons for this anomaly are fairly simple; the Americans were advised by Christian friends, Asa Gray and James Dana, who were the leading American botanist and geologist respectively, and the Ulstermen were reacting against John Tyndall’s British Association lecture given in Belfast in 1874. Among Scottish Presbyterians, who formed the third group, only James Duns of the Free Church writing before 1882 rejected evolution but Principal Rainy of New College declared himself an evolutionist in his inaugural lecture of 1874. In 1894 the Free Church James Iverach wholeheartedly embraced evolution, but a little cautiously for man, and Henry Drummond in Natural Law in the Spiritual World waxed lyrical about Christianity AND Evolution. It is almost paradoxical that Scottish Presbyterians of all shades were more open to Evolution than their English counterparts. Conversely Anti-geology and Anti-evolution were more popular among the English than the more conservative Scottish Calvinists. That is probably due to the influence of Chalmers, John Fleming and Hugh Miller (42). There was a fourth group of Presbyterians, this time from the Confederate states. Their leading theologians, R.L.Dabney and J.H.Thornwell were not only anti-evolutionary, but also anti-geology regarding geological methods as circular reasoning and thus fallacious (43). They also used their theology, and especially their understanding of Genesis, to support slavery, in marked contrast to the evolutionist Asa Gray.
As the Victorian era continued more and more educated Christians accepted some kind of evolution. When Frederick Temple gave his Bampton lectures on The Relations between Religion and Science in 1884, the issue was not strongly controversial. Ultra-conservatives like Dean Burgon still rejected evolution but, despite posturing as a biblical literalist, he was a confirmed old earther. Among Anglican Evangelicals Bishop J.C.Ryle of Liverpool directed his clergy to the Bucklands and Sedgwicks to help their grasp of science in the 1880s, E.A.Litton in An Introduction to Dogmatic Theology (1882) regarded the antiquity of man as of no consequence but rejected evolution, and Bishop Moule of Durham writing in 1889 accepted Genesis as poetic, and seemed to accept evolution, but drew the line at the creation of man. Among Baptists John Clifford welcomed evolution and regarded Darwin as a fine Christian and was on the opposite side of the Downgrade controversy to Spurgeon (44).
To summarise for the late nineteenth century from 1880 to 1900, Biblical Literalists among mainstream Christians are virtually non-existent and I am unable to provide one example from Britain or America. Apart from Ellen White, McCready Price, the younger Kellogg (of Corn Flakes fame) and others of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, Literalists are extreme rarities, though a few literalists contributed to the Fundamentals. Evangelicals mostly either followed some kind of Progressive Creationism, e.g. the geologist J.W.Dawson, Bishop J.C.Ryle, or Evolution as confined to the non-human sphere, notably James Orr, Bishop Handley Moule and W.H.Griffith Thomas in The Thirty-Nine Articles. However Numbers reported that Thomas had become a literalist creationist after 1918(45). Some evangelicals adopted evolution from monad to man, notably B.B.Warfield. Non-evangelicals adopted some kind of evolution, frequently, as was normal at that time, a non-Darwinian guided evolution. As Darwinism, with its chancy random process based on Natural Selection, went into eclipse in this period to be replaced by a “guided” evolution, in which direction or orthogenesis operated, Evolution was susceptible to a theistic interpretation, as a guiding hand was apparent. This may explain why evolution was more acceptable a century ago than it is today. As Bowler points out in The Non-Darwinian Revolution, evolution was rapidly accepted in the 1860s and 1870s but Darwinism was not. In Britain a theistic, and divinely guided form of evolution was put forward by the anatomist Richard Owen and the Roman Catholic zoologist Mivart and this fitted into the temper of the late nineteenth century. Thus began the “eclipse of Darwinism” which lasted into the 1930s. This outlook is typified by the (dinosaur) palaeontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Alpheus Hyatt, who held to a directed evolution, Cope accepted that the pattern of evolution was “conceived by the Creator, according to a plan of His own”(46). His private life was not so overtly Christian and he died of syphilis in 1897 at the age of 47.
Despite the apparent dominance of Scientific Naturalists such as Huxley and Hooker, several leading scientists were devout Christians and keen to lecture and write on the compatibility of Evolution and Christianity. Sir Gabriel Stokes, recently retired President of the Royal Society, gave the Gifford Lectures for 1891 and 1893 on Natural Theology. Stokes was a physicist and younger colleague of Lord Kelvin, and like him stopped short of a thoroughly naturalistic evolution, and argued for an evolution in which God had intervened to create life and then man. Similar was the Californian geologist Joseph Le Conte whose popular lectures had considerable influence both home and abroad. As with so much of the relationship of evolution and Christianity one suspects that scientists like Le Conte, Stokes and many others are conveniently forgotten because they do not support the warfare of science and religion. If they are mentioned it is in a patronising and dismissive way as if Christians cannot adopt “a critical approach to scientific research”(47.).
Evolution had ceased to be an issue for most educated Christians by the time Queen Victoria passed on, except for a few ultra-conservatives. As a result of Andrew White and Huxley’s Memoirs the conflict thesis took root, and guided the perception of many for a whole century. It possibly guided the perception of some Christians by reacting against an anti-Christian viewpoint. Few, if any, studies have been carried out on less educated Christians, the members and leaders of Evangelical mission halls, or the men and women in the pew. Cartoons of the day on popular ideas of evolution show that many perceived there to be conflict, despite Frederick Temple’s Bampton Lectures. Conflict crept into popular novels as in Maria Corelli’s The Mighty Atom of 1896. There seems to be a popular assumption that Evolution is contrary to Christianity which surfaced in America in the Scopes trial of 1925. Even today there is a folk fundamentalism of many church members of non-evangelical churches, where there is a perception that the right way to take Genesis is literally. Again this would be another fruitful area for research. In the absence of research, I can only provide anecdotal comments on this from my experience. I find that many church members, whether Anglican or Methodist, born between 1890 and 1930, are convinced that there is a conflict of science and religion, finding another example the day before writing this. To me this is an indication that many church members were brought up to think there was conflict, more likely through Sunday school, with teachers born in the Victorian era, than through their ministers. The use of the first personal pronoun in this section indicates the tentative nature of my argument. It also indicates some fruitful lines for research.
Ironically the Fundamentalist Christian opposition to Evolution began with the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Ohio in 1925 (The old black and white film with Spencer Tracy is far better that the 80s remake in colour which is full of historical howlers. The remake portrays Jennings Bryan as a young earth creationist whereas he accepted evolution of animals, but not humans)(47.). Bryan, in fact, took a similar lie to A.R.Wallace, G.G.Stokes, James Orr and others. The Scientific and Biblical Creationism which has flowered in America and then Britain after the publication of The Genesis Flood by Morris and Whitcomb in 1961 had its roots not with Christians like Samuel Wilberforce but with the visions of the Seventh Day Adventist Mary Ellen White who in Patriarchs and Prophets (1890) argued as early as 1864 for the infidel nature of Geology and insisted on a literal interpretation of Genesis. This became official Seventh Day Adventist doctrine and was taken up by George McCready Price at the beginning of this century who claimed the falsity not only of evolution but also geology in such works as Illogical Geology. But that is another story (49.).
But to return to the 19th century. In 1897 a statue of Charles Darwin sitting in studious pose was placed outside Darwin’s school in Shrewsbury. Several bishops were invited to the unveiling. One was Frederick Temple, the enfant terrible of Essays and Reviews and since 1896 Archbishop of Canterbury. He was one of the first Anglican clergy to accept evolution and preached to that effect at the British Association in 1860, a fact usually overlooked. Another was William Walsham How, the aged Bishop of Wakefield who at that very moment was joining all the saints who were resting from their labours. He is now known as a hymn writer but in his day was known as a botanist and scientist, albeit an amateur. While Rector of Whittington he wrote his most well-known hymns and made a close study of the calcicole flora of the Breidden Hills. Foremost at the proceedings was Dr Stamer, Bishop of Shrewsbury, who replied to a toast to the Bishop and clergy. In his reply Stamer referred to how Wilberforce “one of the most brilliant, if not always most careful, Bishops of the day” had ridiculed Darwin, but to applause stressed how most churchmen now accepted evolution, regarding Darwin as “one of the doorkeepers in the vast temple of the universe.” The audience, including Hooker and several sons of Darwin, replied “Hear, hear!”(50.)
CONCLUSION
Charles Raven described the conflict of science and religion in the Victorian era as “a storm in a tea cup”, and that is a fair description. There was no simple conflict, but rather a series of new scientific ideas bearing down on a dynamic society, which was changing in so many ways, especially religiously. Some Christians did oppose science, like the clergyman who believed that God had created dead mammoth carcasses under the ice in the Arctic. Many scientists were Christians of varying orthodoxy and many were not. There was conflict and there was harmony between “Religion” and “Science”, but the whole idea of a conflict between Orthodoxy and Science as developed by Andrew White and Huxley is ultimately a myth, which survives today and is propagated by some with an atheist axe to grind, and by some Christians, whether a John Hick or Don Cupitt, who use it to justify an intellectual rejection of “old-fashioned” Orthodoxy, or Fundamentalists who reverse the roles of “goodies” and “baddies” so that the scientists epitomised by Darwin are the “injuns” who tried to destroy Christianity. Here History has turned into Ideology. Unravelling the Myth and the Ideology may shed light on science and religion both in the 19th and 20th centuries. Probably the issue and the conflict is no more resolved than when Darwin wrote to Asa Gray in 1860: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designed the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars..I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details….left to….chance. But the more I think the more bewildered I become.”(51.) Darwin put his finger on the ultimate issue, if God exists, does He create all the suffering?
References and notes;
1) White, M & Gribbin, J, Darwin, London, Simon & Schuster, 1995, Chap 11 “Battles with Bigotry”.
2) Chadwick, O, The Secularisation of the European Mind, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ Press, 1975, p161.
3) Register of William Buckland’s geological lectures in 1820s, Buckland Papers, Oxford University Museum.
4) Woodward, H.B., The History of the Geological Society of London, London: Geological society, 1907 p169.
5) Miller, Hugh The Testimony of the Rocks, Edinburgh, W.P.Nimmo, 1856.
6) White, A.D., A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, London, Arco 1955 (orig 1896)
7) Francis, L.J, Gibson, H.M.& Fulljames,P, “Attitude to Christianity, Creationism, scientism and interest in science among 11-15 year olds”, British Journal of Religious Education, 1990, Vol 13 (1), p4.
8) Altholz, J.L., “The Warfare of Conscience with Theology”, from Altholz, J.L. (ed) The Mind and Art of Victorian England, Univ of Minnesota Press, 1976. (also in Parsons, G, (ed) Religion in Victorian Britain Vol IV , Manchester, Manchester Univ Press, 1989.
9) Yarnold, G.D. The Spiritual Crisis of the Scientific Age, London, George, Allen & Unwin, 1959 p46.
10) Particularly useful are Bowler, P.J. EVOLUTION; the History of an Idea, London, Univ of California Press, 1984.and Desmond, A. The Politics of Evolution London, Univ of Chicago Press, 1989.
11) Tassot, D, La Bible au Risque de la Science, Paris, F -X. de Guibert, 1997, p263.
12) Cuppitt, D, The Sea of Faith, London, SCM Press, 1993, pp69-71.
13) Browne, J. Charles Darwin; Voyaging London, Cape 1995.
Desmond, A & Moore, J. Darwin, London, Michael Joseph, 1991
On Darwin’s earliest geology; Roberts, MB “Darwin at Llanymynech”, British Journal for the History of Science, 1996, Vol 29 (4) pp469-78 and “Darwin’s Dog-leg”, Archives of Natural History 1998, vol 25, 59-73, “I coloured a map”Archives of Natural History, forthcoming, 1999/2000.
14) There have been many suggestions as to Darwin’s illness; depression due to guilt over the atheistic nature of his theory, a Psychosomatic problem (see Bowlby’s biography), a tropical illness (especially by P. Medawar) or multiple allergies. The first appeals to those who subscribe to the idea of warfare of science and theology. I find the idea of the tropical illness most satisfactory as it explains why in 1842, at the age of 33, Darwin could not walk more than a few miles, whether in Shrewsbury or Snowdonia, whereas from 1826 to 1838 he was walking 20 miles in the hills of Wales, Patagonia or Scotland. Something caused a dramatic physical but not mental or psychological decline between July 1838 and March 1842. This has been overlooked by all who have considered Darwin’s illness.
15) Barrett, P.H., Gautrey, P.J., Herbert, S., Kohn, D. & Smith, S, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844 Cambridge, Cambridge Univ Press, 1987.
16) Browne, J. op cit p 471.
17) White, A.D. op cit p70; Vidler, A.R. ,The Church in an age of revolution, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961 p117.
18) (Wilberforce, S. ) “The Origin of Species” Quarterly Review, 1860, Vol 102, pp225-64.
19) Burkhardt, F. (ed) The correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol 8; 1860, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ Press, 1993, pp590-7.
20) Miller, J & van Loon, B, Darwin for Beginners, Cambridge, Icon Books1992, p127.
21) Kingsley, C., The Water Babies 1863, various editions chap 4.
22) Gould, S.J., Bully for Brontosaurus, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992, p385.
23) Russell, C.A., “The Conflict Metaphor and its social origins.”, Science and Christian Belief, 1989, Vol 1 (1) pp3-26
24) Desmond, A. ,Huxley, The Devil’s Disciple, London, Michael Joseph, 1994, pp256 & 281.
25) Livingstone, D. Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1987.
Moore, J., The Post Darwinian Controversies, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ Press, 1979.
26) Burkhardt, F. & Smith, S., The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ Press, 1985 –
27) Smith, Crosbie & Norton Wise, M, Energy and Empire; A biographical study of Lord Kelvin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Morris, S.W. “Fleeming Jenkin and the Origin of Species: a reassessment.”, British Journal for the History of Science, 1994, Vol 27 (3), pp313-44.
28) Burchfield, J.D., Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth, Los Angeles, Univ of California Press, 1990.
29) Fleming, E.M. Recollections of my Grandparents; Canon and Mrs Tristram n.d. privately printed. Quoted by courtesy of Rt Rev R. Bowlby.
30) Roberts, M.B. “Darwin’s Doubts about Design”, Science and Christian Belief, 1997 10,p Also Moore (1979) and Livingstone (1987).
31) Moore, op cit p92.
32) Ward, K., God, Chance and Necessity Oxford, One World, 1996, p63
Cashdollar, C.D., The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890, Princeton, Princeton Univ Press, 1989.
33) Roberts, M.B., “Unearthing Genesis”, Churchman, 1998, ii2, 225-255.
34) Orr, J., “Science and Christian Faith” The Fundamentals, Chicago, Testimony Publishing Company, n.d., vol iv, p102-4.
also, Orr, J., The Christian View of God and the World, Edinburgh, Andrew Eliot, 1897, lecture IV.
35) Gray, A, Darwiniana, Cambridge, Mass, Belnap Press, 1963 (rpr), pp121-2.
36) Darwin, C. ,The Variation of Plants and Animals, London, John Murray, 1868 (1905ed), Vol ii, pp524-5.
37) Burkhardt & Smith, op cit
38) Burchfield, J. “Darwin and the Dilemmas of Geological Time”, Isis 65, 1974, 301-321.
39) Giekie, A. A Life’s Long Work, London, MacMillan, 1924, p72.
40) Turner, F.M. “The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: a professional dimension”, Isis, vol 69. 1978, pp356-76. (also in Parsons, G, (ed) Religion in Victorian Britain Vol IV , Manchester, Manchester Univ Press, 1989.)
41) Gould, S.J., The Panda’s Thumb, Harmondsworth. Penguin, 1983, pp196-203.
42) Livingstone, D.N., “Situating Evangelical responses to Evolution”, paper presented at ISAE Conference, Wheaton College, 30 March – 1 April 1995. and Roberts, M.B., “Unearthing Genesis”, Churchman 1998, 112, p225-57.
43) Dabney, R.L., Lectures in Systematic Theology, 1878, pp247ff
44) Temple, F., The Relations between Religion and Science, London, MacMillan, 1884,: Moule, H.G.C., Outlines of Christian doctrine, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1889, ;Litton, E.A., Introduction to Dogmatic Theology, rpr London, James Clark, 1960 (1882 & 1892), Ryle, J.C. Charges and Addresses, London 1890s, Principles for Churchmen, London, 1889.
45) Griffith Thomas, W.H., The Principles of Theology, London, Church Book Room Press, 1945, Numbers, R.L., The Creationists, New York, Knopf, 1992, p97.
46) Bowler, P.J. The Non-Darwinian Revolution, London, John Hopkins, 1988, p99.
47) Stokes, G.G., Natural Theology, Gifford Lectures 1893, London, A &C Black, 1893; Le Conte, J., Evolution, its nature, its evidences, and its relation to religious thought, New York, Appleton, 1899. Cp, Turner op cit 39, p188.
48) Numbers, R.L., The Creationists, New York, Knopf, 1992, pp43-44.
49) See Numbers op cit 44, and Roberts, M.B., “The Roots of Creationism”, Faith and Thought vol 112, 1986, pp21-36.
50) Shrewsbury Chronicle Fri 13 August 1897.
51) op cit 18, p224.
