Thomas Henry Huxley: The War between Science and Religion

Abstract

Viewers of the recent BBC television series, Voyage of Charles Darwin,1 must have been amused at the portrayal of Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, at the famous meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1860, where Wilberforce condemned the evolutionary doctrine of Darwin's Origin of Species. This Wilberforce is the vaudeville villain of the Victorian stage, saturnine and leering in his initial triumph, and with more than the suggestion of horns and tail as he stalks off scowling darkly after his discomfiture by Thomas Henry Huxley. In the vulgar mythology of the television screen, Huxley and Wilberforce are not so much personalities as the warring embodiments of rival moralities: Huxley, the archangel Michael of enlightenment, knowledge, and the disinterested pursuit of truth; Wilberforce, the dark defender of the failing forces of authority, bigotry, and superstition. The picture has the stark contrast and attractive simplicity of traditional legend. As a debate, it dramatizes a great conflict of principle. With its Victorian setting, only the stock conventions of melodrama can do it justice, and so it lives on in the popular mind as the best-known symbol of the nineteenth-century conflict of science and religion. It is now of course widely acknowledged that, as a symbol, the Oxford confrontation is totally misleading; indeed, the so-called conflict of religion and science has largely disappeared under the searching microscopes of the historical revisionists. Nearly thirty years ago, C. C. Gillispie2 pointed out that this notion of controversy is wrong before 1850, even in the most implicitly dangerous of