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rationalist and enlightened thinker, who embraced the faith of “to see is to believe.”
To the contrary, a religious man was usually assumed intuitional and superstitious, not able to judge by reason but by instinct. To state more plainly, among the
twentieth-century minds, concepts of science and the scientist signified cleverness and rationality while those of religion and the religionist denoted ignorance and
muddlehead. The famous incident of the 1860 encounter between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley is one of the most persuasive examples to portray the idée fixes of a scientist and a religionist. This dramatic incident not only indicates the victories of science and reason over religion and superstition but also marks the ultimate break of science from religion and the scientist from the yoke of the Church.
I. The Huxley-Wilberforce Encounter in 1860
During the warring quarrels over Darwinism in the mid nineteenth century, a representative science-religion warfare opened fire between Wilberforce the Bishop and Huxley the scientist at a meeting of the British Association in Oxford on June 30, 1860. Soon after Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species (1859), Wilberforce and Huxley debated on the issue of evolutionism: Wilberforce poured scorn on Darwin’s evolution theory, while Huxley, the mouthpiece of the autonomy of science, bearded Wilberforce and defeated the “prelatical insolence and clerical obscurantism” (Lucas 1996). Since this dramatic event, Wilberforce then was illustrated as an emblem of the stubborn, banal, and irrational Church, and Huxley was as that of the clever, vital, and reasonable science. Not merely popular in the late nineteenth century, this historical event of the Wilberforce-Huxley encounter was prevalent during the early and mid
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twentieth century as well.1 William Irvine, for instance, once adopted this dramatic encounter to caricature the ignorant and muddleheaded bishop and to glorify the intelligent and rational scientist in his 1955 book, Apes, Angels and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution.
Even if popular, the 1860 Huxley-Wilberforce encounter however should not be considered a reality. In “Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter,” J. R.
Lucas states that even if “[t]he legend of the encounter between Wilberforce and Huxley is well established,” the account yet “must be a largely legendary creation of a later date” (1996). In Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: the Encounter between
Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Though, D. N. Livingstone also argues that the 1860 encounter should be more fictional than actual (Livingstone 33-35) because there was never the first-hand reference recording the contents of the belligerent repartee between the two representative men.2
The two studies above share a common ground: the “history” of the 1860 religion-science encounter should be a legend, not a reality; it is more of a fiction fabricated by the later-day intellectuals. Lucas opines that this encounter is of
significance because it denotes the divergence of disciplines. Before 1860, “a largely amateur and unprofessional public” could easily get on science (Lucas 1996).
However, after 1860, science gradually became “more of a closed shop…from which amateurs [were] more and more excluded” (Lucas 1996). For Locus, the importance
1 According to Colin Gauld’s research, “References to the Wilberforce-Huxley encounter were found in 63 books. The earliest report was dated 1896 (republished in 1960) while the latest was 1991.” In Gauld’s research, it shows that among the 63 references about the meeting, the major emphasis of the encounter is not the substance of the speeches of the two significant men but the impressions of the two:
the ignorant and conservative Wilberforce defeating the clever and rational Huxley. Cauld intends to prove from the references that, Wilberforce-Huxley encounter, whether a reality or not, is of powerful influence to strengthen the impression of a warfare relation between science and religion with the circulation of scientific knowledge (Gauld 2007).
2 J. R. Lucas. “Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter”
(http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/legend.html) Originally published in The Historical Journal, 22, 2 (1979), pp. 313-330, This page was revised on May 31st, 1996, and most recently revised on August 17th, 2008. 2008 08 23. D. N. Livingstone. Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.
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of the encounter consists not in proving the conflict between two systems of thoughts but in signifying a cultural phenomenon; that is, during the end of the nineteenth century, science was no longer a study tolerating the participation of any
unprofessional man, such as Wilberforce the Bishop. Around the 1860s, science should have already turned to be a “specialty in which non-professionals [were]
disfranchised from the right to express an opinion” (Lucas 1996).
Livingstone brings up a similar opinion in his study as well, pointing out that the 1860 encounter might be an imagined legend popularly existing among the
intellectuals of the 1890s. Similar to Lucas, Livingstone considers that, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a rise of new scientists who intended to distinguish themselves from the influence of the Church and to strike out a new field of their own.
Livingstone analyzes further that, inasmuch as scientists’ consciousness of a necessary separation from the influence of the Church appeared in the 1890s, there would not have been vehement hostility between the bishop and the scientist during the 1860s, the age of Darwin’s Origin being published. If the concept of warfare between science and religion was not yet concretized during the 1860s, among the amateurs or laymen in the years while Thomas Carlyle composed Sartor Resartus (1830-31), there should not have been thoughts of religious and scientific animosities against each other. Carlyle’s criticism thus should not be targeted at science per se.
Supposedly there might have been a more precise object that Carlyle intended to attack.
Though seeming not a reality, the imagination of a combative relation between science and religion in the past centuries was popularly circulated in every field of the studies in the twentieth century. Many disciplines in the academic studies had the concept of a warfare theory rooted. In the literary field, too, the ideology of a science-religion war, whether in an implicit or explicit way, dominated scholars’
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analyses in the twentieth century. In the analyses of the early nineteenth-century writer like Carlyle, hostilities between science and religion as well as matter and spirit were usually supposed truths and hardly questioned.