Of Ploughs and Anthills and Modern Mythologies
Introduction
Andrew Dickson White said of publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of
Species in 1859 that it had entered the theological arena “like a plough into an
ant-hill”1
Andrew Dickson White was an American historian, diplomat and New York state
senator. He was born in 1832 and died in 1918. As a New York senator, it fell to
him to guide how the state spent its Higher Education budget. The senate agreed
to the founding of a new university. Up until this point in American history, the
private universities had all been of religious foundation. White was determined
that Cornell, the new university would be:
“…an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not
stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion2"
It is to White that the world largely owes the thesis of the conflict between
science and religion. He delivered a lecture in 1869 entitled The Battle Fields of
Science and over the course of the next thirty years he developed this lecture in
to a mammoth two-volume book The Influence of the Warfare of Science with
Theology in Christendom published in 1896.
Three landmark episodes in the history of the debate between science and
religion are often cited as support for the conflict thesis. These three events are:
1 Cited in John H Roberts Religious Reactions to Darwin in The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion ed Peter
Harrison p80
2 Lindberg, David C.; Numbers, Ronald L. (1986). "Introduction". In Lindberg and Numbers. God and nature: historical
essays on the encounter between Christianity and science. University of California Press. pp2-3
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1. The trial of Galileo in 1633 when he recanted his belief that the earth
orbited the sun.
2. The 1860 Oxford debate between Thomas Henry Huxley and Samuel
Wilberforce about Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
3. The Scopes Trial of 1925 in Dayton Tennessee for teaching evolution in a
state funded school
The reality in each of these debates is much more complex and subtle than the
conflict thesis allows. So what I’ll do in this lecture is look briefly at what was
really going on in each of these historical incidents. Then I’ll offer some
suggestions about how we should view the relationship between science and
religion today.
Three Paradigmatic Events
Let us begin with Galileo then.
The Trial of Galileo
In 1633, Galileo was forced to recant his teaching that the earth orbited the sun.
The modern myth is that Galileo, the rational, gifted scientist was persecuted and
forced to recant his empirical beliefs in fear of his life.
Fundamentalist of both sides of the science religion debate demand that truth
claims be submitted to their criteria for determining what is actually true.
Christian fundamentalists insist that the bible- as they read it- is the ultimate
arbiter of truth. Whilst scientific fundamentalists insist that only empirical
science can be the arbiter of truth. If it can’t be verified experimentally, it can’t be
true.
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Moderates, whether religious or scientific seek a more nuanced approach and
look for ways of combining the two authorities. Galileo fell into this camp. He
was a religious and scientific moderate.
For Galileo the Bible is about how to go to heaven and not how the heavens go. In
other words if you want to know about salvation, the Bible is the place to go, but
if you want to know about the physical universe, science or in Galileo’s day,
Natural Philosophy is the place to go.
This was not a particularly contentious or unorthodox view in the midseventeenth century, but Galileo failed to convince the church authorities that it
was a principle that could be applied in his case.
Galileo used the newly invented telescope to investigate the skies and came to
the conclusion that the prevailing model that put the earth at the centre of the
universe was wrong. He tried to forestall the argument that the idea that the
earth moved was unbiblical by appeal to the principle of accommodation.
This is the idea that the bible is written at a particular moment in history to
communicate in a society with particular assumptions and limitations and that
as such it accommodates itself to these limitations. If the popular belief is that
the sun goes round the earth you tell your story on this assumption because to
do otherwise would mean that no one would understand you.
Galileo drew on the church fathers, and especially Augustine in developing his
argument. His problem was not so much theological or scientific as political. He
was writing in the early seventeenth century when conservative views were in
the ascendency in the Catholic Church thanks to the crisis of the Protestant
Reformation. Being a moderate in this climate was a dangerous thing.
One of the central tenets of the Reformation was the importance of Scripture and
the need for believers to be able to read the Scriptures for themselves in their
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own language and thus to access directly the true teaching of the bible as
opposed to a teaching mediated through the Church. One of the views about the
causes of the Reformation thus is that it was about who had the authority to read
and interpret the Bible.
In the context of the Reformation and Counterreformation, for Galileo to write
about the need for mother Church to reinterpret parts of Scripture was
tantamount to siding with the Reformation. The fact that he published his work
in Italian rather than in scholarly Latin merely added to this perception. As far as
the Church was concerned here was a dangerous heretic within its own ranks
who had to be dealt with.
By 1624, Pope Urban 8th, who had been an admirer of Galileo’s work whilst still a
cardinal, needed to keep the conservative wing of the church on board and so
was in no mood for leniency with Galileo. Galileo had made a huge political
misjudgement and overestimated the extent of his relationship with Urban.
So what is remembered as a clash between science and religion was in reality a a
political dispute within the church about the enduring political question of who
has the authority to produce and disseminate knowledge.
The 1860 Oxford Debate
The popular myth surrounding the debate on the Origin of Species is probably
well known to everyone here this evening. The debate pitched Darwin’s bulldog,
Thomas Henry Huxley against the then bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce.
The generally accepted view is that Huxley routed Wilberforce and his religious
arguments and won the decisive victory for science. Wilberforce’s infamous
remark to Huxley towards the end of the debate and Huxley’s response have
become part of our cultural history.
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Wilberforce inquired “would Mr Huxley prefer to be descended from a monkey
on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side”
To which Huxley responded that he “would not be ashamed to have a monkey for
his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his
great gifts to obscure the truth.”
Contemporary accounts of the debate suggest that it was a rather dull affair,
certainly according to the newspapers of the time it seems to have been an
inconclusive debate. Both Wilberforce and Huxley thought they had done rather
well out of the exchange.
The general view is that Wilberforce was present at the debate as a
representative of the Church and as a defender of faith. But what is often ignored
is the fact that Wilberforce was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was debating
The Origin not as a bishop, but as a scientist.
When the book was first published, Wilberforce published a review of it that won
Darwin’s admiration.
Wilberforce wrote in his review:
“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”
Wilberforce was not criticizing Darwin’s work from a religious point of view at
all, but from a scientific perspective. Darwin himself in a letter to Huxley
expressed his delight and admiration for the review. He wrote:
“It is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts,
and brings forward well all the difficulties”
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Looking back on the debate years later, Huxley remarked that:
“If a general council of the church scientific had been held at the time, we should
have been condemned by the overwhelming majority”
In recent years there has been a resurgence of historical interest in Darwin and
The Origin and the wider motivations Darwin may have had in writing his book.
He was forced into an early publication because Alfred Russell Wallace had
written to Darwin from the Caribbean outlining a theory very like Darwin’s own.
Had he not been bounced into this, Darwin would almost certainly have tried to
publish a single volume combining the two books that we know today as On The
Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Two English academics, Adrian
Desmond and James Moore, who have spent their academic careers researching
the nineteenth century debates about evolution, recently published a book called
Darwin’s Scared Cause3. They argue from a painstaking research into Darwin’s
letters and notebooks that one of the chief motivations for Darwin’s work was as
a scientific contribution to the anti-slavery debate. Darwin’s wife Emma was by
birth a Wedgewood. Both the Wedgewoods and the Darwins were active
abolitionists, and Emma was still active in the cause.
Taken together, Darwin’s two books offer a scientific thesis for the unity of
humanity. They argue for a common origin of the human species. At the time
such a view was going firmly against the prevailing scientific orthodoxy, which
argued for the superiority of White Europeans over all other races. Science at the
time was thus being used to support the subjugation & enslavement of “inferior
races.”
Darwin’s view is thus very much in harmony with the book of Genesis, which
sees all humanity as a single race, with a common origin.
3 Adrian Desmond & James Moore Darwin’s Sacred Cause London Penguin 2009
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Samuel Wilberforce being the son of William Wilberforce also came from good
anti-slavery stock. Indeed his concern about the Origin of Species was primarily
ethical. For Wilberforce Darwin’s biggest mistake was his use of the metaphor of
the “survival of the fittest” which he borrowed from the work of another
clergyman, Thomas Malthus. This was a work of economic theory. The work so
outraged Charles Dickens that he satirized Malthus in A Christmas Carol.
Scrooge’s remark to the charity collectors on Christmas Eve that the poor have
prisons and workhouses to resort to is almost a direct quote from Malthus.
Wilberforce was worried about the ethical consequences of Darwin’s work and
what sort of society it might foster, if society adopted the idea of the “survival of
the fittest.”
The myth of the debate arose largely from the work of Huxley and his
supporters. Huxley valued the “survival of the fittest” metaphor because it
supported the idea of a meritocracy rather than a society based on class and
social privilege.
Huxley was the son of a provincial school maths teacher. His father lost his job
when the school he taught at closed down. Thrown into crippling poverty by this
disaster, Huxley was forced to leave school aged around about 12 and from that
age was almost entirely self-taught. For the adult Huxley, Darwin’s ideas
provided a model for a fairer organization of society.
In contrast Samuel Wilberforce, like Darwin himself, was the very embodiment
of class privilege. In Huxley’s reconstruction of the debate, what was going on
was the toppling of the English class system in favour of a new order of society
based on merit. It is no coincidence that Huxley was instrumental in the founding
of science education in England and a significant force in the establishment of
state schooling.
So, what is now presented as a debate between religion and science was in fact a
debate about the way that English society should be structured. The construct of
a science-religion war effectively hides a debate about social class and order.
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The Scopes Trial
In America, Darwin’s Origin of Species, was published in 1860, just a few months
before the outbreak of the civil war. This had the effect of delaying the public
debate about evolution in America. Evolutionary ideas quietly slipped into the
curriculum of the new state funded schools and universities that were beginning
to appear in the early twentieth century. The Scopes Trial took place in the small
town of Dayton Tennessee in July 1925. In May 1925, the Governor of Tennessee
signed into law a statute that prohibited the teaching of the any theory of the
origins of humanity that contradict the account of their divine origins in Genesis.
Again, the popular myth is that this was a straight clash between science and
religion in which religion was decisively defeated and science emerged
victorious. The myth is perfectly illustrated in the 1960 Film Inherit the Wind
starring Spencer Tracey. It is a fantastically entertaining film, but as a piece of
history, it says more about the McCarthy era in America than it does about the
Scopes Trial.
In 1925 in America, there was a huge contrast between the North and the South.
Whilst in the North the Charleston was all the rage, along with jazz. F Scott
Fitzgerald had just published The Great Gatsby. Meanwhile in the South there
was already ample evidence of economic depression and early signs of the 1929
stock market crash that signalled the start of the Great Depression.
The little town of Dayton had seen its population fall from 3000 in 1890 to 1800
in 1925. More disastrously the economy had shifted from being based on the coal
industry in the 1890s to a farming economy that was almost subsistence.
When the New York based American Civil Liberties Union heard of the
Tennessee law banning the teaching of evolution, they took out an advert
seeking for a teacher willing to be the plaintiff in a test case of the law’s
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constitutionality. Remember in America it is forbidden to make any laws for the
establishment of religion. The ACLU wanted to test whether the Butler act broke
the constitution.
Three residents of Dayton spotted the advert and saw a chance to generate some
publicity for their ailing town and boost its economy. The three were George
Rappleya, originally from New York and managing Dayton’s one remaining coal
mine, Frank Robison, owner of the town drug store and chair of the Dayton
School Board and Walter White, the principal of Dayton School. John Scopes was
the School football coach and stand in science teacher. He had stood in for the
regular science teacher and taught a lesson on evolutionary biology, from the
official state school biology textbook, Hunter’s Civic Biology. The drugstore
conspirators invited Scopes to offer himself for trial for breaking the new law
and he agreed.
The trial attracted two of the most colourful public figures of 1920s America. For
the prosecution was William Jennings Bryan. Three times Democratic candidate
for the presidency, and for the defence Clarence Darrow, probably the most
famous criminal lawyer of his day. He had successfully defended a number of
high profile cases and his defence often went strongly against public opinion at
the time.
Bryan was very much a champion of the people. His nickname was “The
Commoner”. For Bryan the will of the people was supreme and he spent much
energy defending this cause and earned a huge following. Though Bryan was
well known as a Christian fundamentalist he saw the trial as a test of the right of
the people to decide what was taught in the schools their taxes were paying for.
In a letter to fellow defence lawyer Sue Hicks (a man) in the run up to the trial,
he wrote:
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“I have been explaining this case to audiences. It is the easiest case to explain I
have ever found…the right of the people, speaking through the legislature, to
control the schools which they create and support is the real issue as I see it”
So there you have the two opposing views of the case. The defence sought to
defend academic freedom against an unconstitutional law whilst the prosecution
sought to guarantee the right of the people to decide what was taught in their
schools.
An interesting question is why the law came to be passed in the first place. The
beginning of the twentieth century in America saw the rise of Christian
fundamentalism. One of its principal leaders was a man called William B Riley. As
well as being a biblical literalist, Riley was a social activist and his religion had a
sharp practical social responsibility. As a result Christian fundamentalism
established itself as a huge movement amongst the rural poor who were not
benefitting from the progressive modernism being experienced in the North. The
height of Riley’s social influence came in 1919 when the prohibition act that he
had spearheaded came into force. Riley then turned his attention to the church
where he sought to root out the scourge of modernism and liberalism. By the
early 1920’s he had pretty much succeeded and the fundamentalists were by and
large in power in the American churches.
One of the major theological issues for Riley was how the Bible should be read.
He was deeply suspicious of the critical methods favoured by the modernists.
Apart from anything else these methods originated in German Theology and
Riley had campaigned long and hard to keep America out of World War 1 on the
grounds that it had nothing to do with America. He was deeply fearful of the
effects the war could have on the American rural poor. Critical methods of
biblical interpretation come to stand for un-American ways in Riley’s view and
must therefore be opposed in order to protect the American people.
Since modernists in the church also embraced evolution, seeing it as perfectly
compatible with their new critical reading of the bible, for Riley evolution too
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had to be opposed as un-American and unchristian. Evolution comes to stand
everything that is seen to be wrong with 1920s America.
At the trial, Scopes is found guilty and given a $100 fine. The defence admitted
that scopes had taught evolution and asked for a guilty verdict so that the
constitutionality of the law could be tested in the court of appeal.
More than anything else, what contributed to the mythology of the trial was the
fact that on day 7 of the eight-day trial, Darrow, the defence lawyer, puts Bryan,
the prosecution lawyer, in the witness box. Frustrated by the judge’s refusal to
allow expert testimony in the case Darrow seeks to expose the inadequacies of
Bryan’s faith and by extension the whole basis of the law.
The guilty verdict means that the defence can appeal the decision. But instead of
a careful examination of the arguments, the appeal court, under intense political
pressure to close the whole case down dismissed the verdict on a legal
technicality because the judge rather than the jury set the fine which was
contrary to Tennessee state law.
The antievolution law remained in force until 1967 and the last such law was not
repealed until 1982. For all that time there were special editions of biology
textbooks for the south, which omitted any reference to evolution.
Even today evolution continues to be a difficult issue for Americans with
attempts to give so called creation science equal space in the curriculum
alongside evolution and more conventional science. A survey of Americans in
2009, on the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species showed
that 25% of Americans reject belief in evolution outright whilst another 36% are
not sure what to believe. A similar survey in the UK found that 25% of people
definitely believed that the theory of evolution by natural selection is true, but
50% of those questioned were either confused by the idea or strongly opposed
to it.
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Hardly the triumph for science that is claimed by the myth of the Scopes Trial.
So to sum up these three paradigm cases. What I hope I’ve shown is that debates
between science and religion take place in particular and complex social
contexts. They are symptoms of times of great social and intellectual change.
Accounts of the debates that come to be written after the events are written from
the context of the results of that change, and it is in the interests of the writers to
present a narrative, which shows the new paradigm as the inevitable victor in a
violent cultural clash. It’s better from the point of view of the unity and
coherence of the new order if that clash can be portrayed as something that is a
spent force. So in each of our paradigm cases the eventual winner is the
modernist approach. It becomes very easy to portray science as being on the side
of modernism and progress against a resisting and out-dated religious order. The
reality though is that religion continues alongside science in society and many of
the social and intellectual changes fought over in the debates come to be
embraced by religion. Like science, religion adapts itself. Religion too evolves.
The Place of Science and Theology Today
But what of today? Debates between science and religion are once again very
prominent in or society. If, as I have been suggesting, there is no real
fundamental clash between the two, what is going on?
Last year the 1860 Oxford debate was recreated this time between Richard
Dawkins and Rowan Williams. So can we see behind this debate to something
deeper going on?
I’d like to make a suggestion. Since the close of World War Two, the
philosophical underpinning of our western way of thinking and gaining
knowledge has been increasingly weakened. Whereas the Enlightenment
promised true and universal knowledge and understanding based on the
application of pure reason, we have come to realise that we can never break out
of our cultural context. We have come to recognise that the way we think and
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reason in deeply influenced by the society that we grew up in and live in. We are
coming to terms with the fact that there may be no such thing as universal
knowledge, but only at most approximations to the truth.
In the academic world, the humanities, the social sciences and the arts are way
ahead of the game on this. Much intellectual work is done by academics in
attempting to expose the cultural assumptions at work in thinking and
organising social practices. Scientists by and large have yet to make the leap. For
the vast majority of practicing scientists, the way we get knowledge is really very
simple. There is an objective world out there and scientific method gives us
direct access to that world and a true picture of that real world. It’s true that we
only have a partial picture of the world, but science is constantly building up a
bigger and better and more accurate picture. All we need is patience, and dare I
say faith, in science’s ability to deliver. We do have an instinctive confidence in
science to deliver technological solutions to our problems. So all seems well.
Philosophers of science by and large don’t go along with this simple picture of
science. For them scientific knowledge is also conditioned by culture. The
experiments that scientists design and the way that the data is interpreted are
not pure things, but are affected by expectations and assumptions.
This stress on the importance of context is one of the basic ideas of that slippery
contemporary phenomenon postmodernism. Post modernism rejects the idea of
universal knowledge founded on indisputable assumptions.
In 1979 the Canadian government commissioned a French philosopher, Jean
Francois Lyotard to write a report on the foundations of knowledge. Science is a
major focus of criticism by Lyotard because he claims that it demands that all
claims to knowledge be judged by the criteria of science. The problem is, says
Lyotard if you try to submit Science itself to such criteria it also fails. Lyotard
says that all we have is story or narrative.
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This sounds a little strange I know, but I think we can get at what Lyotard means.
Science insists that all claims to truth be verified scientifically, that is using
recognised scientific methods. The problem is says Lyotard that when you turn
this demand onto Science itself, it is powerless. All it can do is tell its story.
Asked to prove itself, there is no experiment that science can perform to prove
its worth. All it can do is tell its story. All it can do is give an account of its
successes. Of course science is true, it has put men on the moon and brought
them back again, it has found cures for many human afflictions. It has improved
the life of people on the planet. All of this is true of course. But the point is that in
trying to justify itself, Science is in precisely the same position as geography,
history, philosophy sociology, theology and any other form of knowledge.
It is not science per se that Lyotard is attacking, but its claim to be the ultimate
arbitrator of truth. For Lyotard, there is no universal ultimate arbitrator of truth.
When Richard Dawkins takes to the arena on behalf of science what he is really
doing is defending the claim of science to be the sole source of knowledge or of
truth. In philosophical terms he is a modernist, a child of the Enlightenment, a
naïve realist. In focusing his attacks on religion, he is trading on public myths
about science and religion. He creates a straw target that is easily knocked down.
Not that religion has yet come to terms with postmodern ways of knowing and
understanding reality. There are still internal conflicts within the church, the
root of which is I suspect this very issue of how we know God and God’s call. The
Church of England’s debates about woman bishops and gay clergy and gay
marriage spring readily to mind. For those who oppose all of these, at stake is a
particular theological method or way of reading the Bible. The public focus is on
the issues themselves, mainly because it’s easier to grasp than abstract ideas
about how we might or might not know something. Those who oppose woman
bishops let us say, do so because they believe it to be in direct contradiction of
the bible and the Christian use of tradition and ecclesiastical authority. At stake
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is the disappearance of a particular hermeneutic from mainstream Christianity, a
way of understanding God in other words.
For those outside the church who don’t worry about how we might know God,
the issues that the Church is fighting about seem unimportant, in the sense that
society has already moved beyond them, intellectually at least if not in actual fact
and practice.
Post modernism is a problem for the Church as well as for ultra-modernists like
Richard Dawkins in the science camp.
There is a level at which I think the new debate about science and religion
spearheaded by Dawkins is just a sideshow or a smokescreen. What is really
going on is a fundamental shift in the way western society actually thinks and
knows.
Perhaps the rise of new fundamentalist forms of religion in our own day should
alert us to this fact of fundamental change. Time no doubt will reveal all and
when history comes to write up the story of the early twenty-first century debate
between science and religion we’ll find out who the winners were.
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