Bully for Brontosaurus (42 page)

Janet Browne has traced the construction of the official version in Francis Darwin’s biography of his father. The story is told through an anonymous eyewitness, but Browne proves that Hooker himself wrote the account, volunteering for the task with direct purpose (writing to Francis): “Have you any account of the Oxford meeting? If not, I will, if you like, see what I can do towards vivifying it (and vivisecting the Bishop) for you.” Hooker dredged his memory with pain and uncertainty. He had forgotten his letter to Darwin and admitted, “It is impossible to be sure of what one heard, or of impressions formed, after nearly thirty years of active life.” And further, “I have been driven wild formulating it from memory.” Huxley then vetted Hooker’s account and the official story was set.

The tale was then twice embellished—first, in 1892, when Francis published a shorter biography of Charles Darwin, and Huxley contributed a letter, now remembering for the first time (more than thirty years later) his
sotto voce
crack, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands” second, in 1900, when Leonard Huxley wrote the life of his father. Thus, dutiful sons presented the official version as constructed by a committee of two—the chief participants Huxley and Hooker—from memories colored by thirty years of battle. We can only agree with Sheridan Gilley, who writes:

So much for correcting a moment of history. But why should we care today? Does the heroic version do any harm? And does its rectification have any meaning beyond our general preference for accuracy? Stories do not become primary legends simply because they tell rip-roaring narratives; they must stand as exemplars, particular representations of something deeper and far more general. The official version of Huxley versus Wilberforce is an archetype for a common belief about the nature of science and its history. The fame and meaning of the official version lie in this wider context. Yet this common belief is not only wrong (or at least seriously oversimplified) but ultimately harmful to science. Thus, in debunking the official version of Huxley versus Wilberforce, we might make a helpful correction for science itself.

Ruth Moore captured the general theme in her version of the standard account: “From that hour on, the quarrel over the elemental issue that the world believed was involved, science versus religion, was to rage unabated.” The story has archetypal power because Huxley and Wilberforce, in the official version, are not mere men but symbols, or synecdoches, for a primal struggle: religion versus science, reaction versus enlightenment, dogma versus truth, darkness versus light.

All men have blind spots, however broad their vision. Thomas Henry Huxley was the most eloquent spokesman that evolution has ever known. But his extreme anticlericalism led him to an uncompromising view of organized religion as the enemy of science. Huxley could envision no allies among the official clergy. Conservatives like Wilberforce were enemies pure and simple; liberals lacked the guts to renounce what fact and logic had falsified, as they struggled to marry the irreconcilable findings of science with their supernatural vision. He wrote in 1887 of those “whose business seems to be to mix the black of dogma and the white of science into the neutral tint of what they call liberal theology.” Huxley did view his century as a battleground between science and organized religion—and he took great pride in the many notches on his own gun.

This cardboard dichotomy seems favorable for science at first (and superficial) glance. It enshrines science as something pure and apart from the little quirks and dogmas of daily life. It exalts science as a disembodied method for discovering truth at all costs, while social institutions—religion in particular—hold fast to antiquated superstition. Comfort and social stability resist truth, and science must therefore fight a lonely battle for enlightenment. Its heroes, in bad times, are true martyrs—Bruno at the stake, Galileo before the Inquisition—or, in better times, merely irritated, as Huxley was, by ecclesiastical stupidity.

But no battle exists between science and religion—the two most separate spheres of human need. A titanic struggle occurs, always has, always will, between questioning and authority, free inquiry and frozen dogma—but the institutions representing these poles are not science and religion. These struggles occur
within
each field, not primarily across disciplines. The general ethic of science leads to greater openness, but we have our fossils, often in positions of great power. Organized religion, as an arm of state power so frequently in history, has tended to rigidity—but theologies have also spearheaded social revolution. Official religion has not opposed evolution as a monolith. Many prominent evolutionists have been devout, and many churchmen have placed evolution at the center of their personal theologies. Henry Ward Beecher, America’s premier pulpiteer during Darwin’s century, defended evolution as God’s way in a striking commercial metaphor: “Design by wholesale is grander than design by retail”—better, that is, to ordain general laws of change than to make each species by separate fiat.

The struggle of free inquiry against authority is so central, so pervasive that we need all the help we can get from every side. Inquiring scientists must join hands with questioning theologians if we wish to preserve that most fragile of all reeds, liberty itself. If scientists lose their natural allies by casting entire institutions as enemies, and not seeking bonds with soul mates on other paths, then we only make a difficult struggle that much harder.

Huxley had not planned to enter that famous Oxford meeting. He was still inexperienced in public debate, not yet Darwin’s bulldog. He wrote: “I did not mean to attend it—did not see the good of giving up peace and quietness to be episcopally pounded.” But his friends prevailed upon him, and Huxley, savoring victory, left the meeting with pleasure and resolution:

So Huxley became the greatest popular spokesman for science in his century—as a direct result of his famous encounter with Wilberforce. He waded into the public arena and struggled for three decades to breach the boundaries between science and the daily life of ordinary people. And yet, ironically, his Manichean view of science and religion—abetted so strongly by the official version, his own construction in part, of the debate with Wilberforce—harmed his greatest hope by establishing boundaries to exclude natural allies and, ultimately, by encircling science as something apart from other human passions. We may, perhaps, read one last document of the great Oxford debate in a larger metaphorical context as a plea, above all, for solidarity among people of like minds and institutions of like purposes. Darwin to Hooker upon receiving his account of the debate: “Talk of fame, honor, pleasure, wealth, all are dirt compared with affection.”

HERBERT HOOVER
produced a fine translation, still in use, of Agricola’s sixteenth-century Latin treatise on mining and geology. In the midst of his last presidential campaign, Teddy Roosevelt published a major monograph on the evolutionary significance of animal coloration (see Essay 14). Woodrow Wilson was no intellectual slouch, and John F. Kennedy did aptly remark to a group of Nobel laureates assembled at the White House that the building then contained more intellectual power than at any moment since the last time Thomas Jefferson dined there alone.

Still, when we seek a political past of intellectual eminence in the midst of current emptiness, we cannot do better than the helm of Victorian Britain. High ability may not have prevailed generally, as the wise Private Willis, guard to the House of Commons, reminds us in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Iolanthe:

But the men at the top—the Tory leader Benjamin Disraeli and his Liberal counterpart W. E. Gladstone—were formidable in many various ways. Disraeli maintained an active career as a respected romantic novelist, publishing the three-volume
Endymion
in 1880, at the height of his prestige and just a year before his death. Gladstone, a distinguished Greek scholar, wrote his three-volume
Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age
(1858) while temporarily out of office.

In 1885, following a series of setbacks including the death of General Gordon at Khartoum, Gladstone’s government fell, and he resigned as prime minister. He did not immediately proceed to unwind with his generation’s rum swizzle on a Caribbean beach (Chivas Regal on the links of Saint Andrews, perhaps). Instead, he occupied his enforced leisure by writing an article on the scientific truth of the book of Genesis—“Dawn of Creation and of Worship,” published in
The Nineteenth Century
, in November 1885. Thomas Henry Huxley, who invented the word
agnostic
to describe his own feelings, read Gladstone’s effort with disgust and wrote a response to initiate one of the most raucous, if forgotten, free-for-alls of late nineteenth century rhetoric. (Huxley disliked Gladstone and once described him as suffering from “severely copious chronic glossorrhoea.”)

But why bring up a forgotten and musty argument, even if the protagonists were two of the most colorful and brilliant men of the nineteenth century? I do so because current events have brought their old subject—the correlation of Genesis with geology—to renewed attention.

Our legislative victory over “creation science” (Supreme Court in
Edwards
v.
Aguillard
, June 1987) ended an important chapter in American social history, one that stretched back to the Scopes trial of 1925. (Biblical literalism will never go away, so long as cash flows and unreason retains its popularity, but the legislative strategy of passing off dogma as creation science and forcing its instruction in classrooms has been defeated.) In this happy light, we are now free to ask the right question once again: In what
helpful
ways may science and religion coexist?

Ever since the Edwards decision, I have received a rash of well-meaning letters suggesting a resolution very much like Gladstone’s. These letters begin by professing pleasure at the defeat of fundamentalism. Obviously, six days of creation and circa 6,000 years of biblical chronology will not encompass the earth’s history. But, they continue, once we get past the nonsense of literalism, are we not now free to read Genesis 1 as factual in a more general sense? Of course the days of creation can’t be twenty-four hours long. Of course the origin of light three days before the creation of the sun poses problems. But aren’t the general order and story consistent with modern science, from the big bang to Darwinian theory? After all, plants come first in Genesis, then creatures of the sea, then land animals, and finally humans. Well, isn’t this right? And, if so, then isn’t Genesis true in the broad sense? And if true, especially since the scribes of Genesis could not have understood the geological evidence, must not the words be divinely inspired? This sequence of claims forms the core of Gladstone’s article. Huxley’s words therefore deserve a resurrection.

Huxley’s rebuttal follows the argument that most intellectuals—scientists and theologians alike—make today. First, while the broadest brush of the Genesis sequence might be correct—plants first, people last—many details are dead wrong by the testimony of geological evidence from the fossil record. Second, this lack of correlation does not compromise the power and purpose of religion or its relationship with the sciences. Genesis is not a treatise on natural history.

Gladstone wrote his original article as a response to a book by Professor Alfred Réville of the Collège de France
—Prolegomena to the History of Religions
(1884). Gladstone fancied himself an expert on Homer, and he had labored for thirty years to show that common themes of the Bible and the most ancient Greek texts could be harmonized to expose the divine plan revealed by the earliest historical records of different cultures. Gladstone was most offended by Réville’s dismissal of his Homeric claims, but his article focuses on the veracity of Genesis.

Gladstone did not advocate the literal truth of Genesis; science had foreclosed this possibility to any Victorian intellectual. He accepted, for example, the standard argument that the “days” of creation are metaphors for periods of undetermined length separating the major acts of a coherent sequence. But Gladstone then insisted that these major acts conform precisely to the order best specified by modern science—the cosmological events of the first four days (Genesis 1:1–19) to Laplace’s “nebular hypothesis” for the origin of the sun and planets, and the biological events of “days” five and six (Genesis 1:20–31) to the geological record of fossils and Darwin’s theory of evolution. He placed special emphasis on a fourfold sequence in the appearance of animals: the “water population” followed by the “air population” on the fifth day, and the “land population” and its “consummation in man” on the sixth day:

Gladstone then caps his argument with the claim still echoed by modern reconcilers: This order, too good to be guessed by writers ignorant of geological evidence, must have been revealed by God to the scribes of Genesis:

In a closing flourish, Gladstone enlarged his critique in a manner sure to inspire Huxley’s wrath. He professed himself satisfied as to the possibility of physical evolution, even by Darwin’s mechanism. But the spirit, the soul, the “mind of man” must be divine in origin, thereby dwarfing to insignificance anything in the merely material world. Gladstone chided Darwin for reaching too far, for trying to render the ethereal realm by his crass and heartless mechanism. He ridiculed the idea “that natural selection and the survival of the fittest, all in the physical order, exhibit to us the great
arcanum
of creation, the sun and center of life, so that mind and spirit are dethroned from their old supremacy, are no longer sovereign by right, but may find somewhere by charity a place assigned them, as appendages, perhaps only as excrescences, of the material creation.”

Ending on a note of deep sadness, Gladstone feared for our equanimity, our happiness, our political stability, our hopes for a moral order, should the festering sore of agnosticism undermine our assurance of God’s existence and benevolence—“this belief, which has satisfied the doubts and wiped away the tears, and found guidance for the footsteps of so many a weary wanderer on earth, which among the best and greatest of our race has been so cherished by those who had it, and so longed and sought for by those who had it not.” If science could now illustrate God by proving that he knew his stuff when he whispered into Moses’ ear, then surely that sore could be healed.

Huxley, who had formally retired just a few months before, and who had forsworn future controversy of exactly this kind, responded with an article in the December issue of
The Nineteenth Century—
“The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature.” Obviously pleased with himself, and happy with his return to fighting form, he wrote to Herbert Spencer: “Do read my polishing off of the G.O.M. [Gladstone was known to friends and enemies alike as the “Grand Old Man”]. I am proud of it as a work of art, and as evidence that the volcano is not yet exhausted.”

Huxley begins by ridiculing the very notion that harmonizing Genesis with geology has any hope of success or intellectual potential to illustrate anything meaningful. He places Gladstone among “those modern representatives of Sisyphus, the reconcilers of Genesis with science.” (Sisyphus, king of Corinth, tried to cheat death and was punished in Hades with the eternal task of repeatedly rolling a large stone to the top of a hill, only to have it roll down again just as it reached the top.)

Huxley arranged his critique by citing four arguments against Gladstone’s insistence that Genesis specified an accurate “fourfold order” of creation—water population, air population, land population, and man. Huxley wrote:

He then presents his arguments in sequence:

1. Direct geological evidence shows that land animals arose before flying creatures. This reversal of biblical sequence holds whether we view the Genesis text as referring only to vertebrates (for terrestrial amphibians and reptiles long precede birds) or to all animals (for such terrestrial arthropods as scorpions arise before flying insects).

2. Even if we didn’t know, or chose not to trust, the geological sequence, we could deduce on purely anatomical grounds that flying creatures must have evolved from preexisting terrestrial ancestors. Structures used in flight are derived modifications of terrestrial features:

3. Whatever the order of first appearances, new species within all groups—water, air, and land dwellers—have continued to arise throughout subsequent time, whereas Genesis implies that God made
all
the sea creatures, then all the denizens of the air, and so on.

4. However we may wish to quibble about the order of animals, Gladstone should not so conveniently excise plants from his discussion. Genesis pushes their origin back to the third day, before the origin of any animal. But plants do not precede animals in the fossil record; and the terrestrial flowering plants specifically mentioned in Genesis (grass and fruit tree) arise very late, long after the first mammals.

Huxley then ends his essay with a powerful statement—every bit as relevant today as 100 years ago at its composition—on the proper domains and interactions of science and religion. Huxley expresses no antipathy for religion, properly conceived, and he criticizes scientists who overstep the boundaries and possibilities of their discipline as roundly as he condemns an antiquated and overextended role for the biblical text:

The moral precepts for our lives, Huxley argues, have been developed by great religious thinkers, and no one can improve on the Prophet Micah’s statement: “…what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” Nothing that science might discover about the factual world could possibly challenge, or even contact, this sublime watchword for a proper life: