Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes: Reconsidering the History of Science and Christianity (Part Two)
Such
is the level of saturation that these warfare and military metaphors have taken
in the popular, and even in some academic quarters,[1]
that it will no doubt come as a surprise that very few—if any—historians of science speak in this manner any more. In fact, in the last thirty years or so not
only do historians of science not speak in terms of “Warfare,” they have
“mount[ed] a sustained attack on the thesis.”[2] The concept of warfare really only exists “in
the cliché-bound mind” of some popular works of polemical history.[3] The Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley
Hart laments
this reality with his typical panache: we are, he says, often left with little
more than “attitudes masquerading as ideas, emotional commitments disguised as
intellectual honesty … ballasted by a formidable collection of conceptual and
historical errors.”[4]
The aim of this essay is thus
twofold. In the first sections, we will
briefly survey recent scholarship regarding the question of the historical
relationship between science and Christianity in order to demonstrate in both
theory and example how the “Warfare Metaphor” is simply too blind and blunt an
instrument to handle the complex varieties of interaction. Just as importantly,
it is to point out how often historically misinformed judgments—about how
Christian ignorance of nature caused us to languish in something called the
“Dark Ages,” for example, or the more particular example of Christians
believing in a flat earth—ballast our contemporary imaginations and habits
regarding science and religion in ways that are both skewed and damaging. “As a
first step toward correcting these misperceptions,” writes Numbers, “we must
first dispel the hoary myths that continue to pass as historical truths.”[5]
We
undertake our essay as well because, though the literature we are about to
cover is vast, and the examples nearly endless, explicitly Christian works have
focused almost exclusively on the current
relationship between science and Christianity in their task to diffuse the
trope of Warfare, and generally only give a passing nod to the historical
concerns.[6] Thus, in addition to simply dispelling the
myths, it is also to call attention to the fact that our works are one-sided if
they do not also deal with the historical and historiographical concepts that
have led to the very constructions of the dilemma that so many take for granted
as the natural course of things. As John
Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor put it:
[These grand stories of the relation between science and
religion throughout history] are vulnerable because they are selective in their
use of evidence. They gloss over the
diversity and the complexity of positions taken in the past. Each tends to assume that ‘science’ and
‘religion’ can be given timeless definitions and that there is some inherent,
some essential, relationship between them.
… Many such attempts have been made in the past to construct an ideal
model. The study of history is humbling
because it shows how ephemeral most have been.
[Thus there is] value in a historical approach if it alerts us to the
way in which prior interests, political, metaphysical, and religious, have
shaped the models that have been sought. … The point is that there is no single
story one can tell about this.[7]
Thus
we might say “philosophy of science without history of science is empty;
history of science without philosophy of science is blind.”[8] If nothing else, that is the humble task of
this presentation: to display certain works already out there, and hopefully
inspire and encourage others to dive into an often ignored or passed over body
of literature.
A Picture held us Captive.
“Sometime
in the middle third of the nineteenth century, some observers began to suspect
that every new conquest achieved by science involved the loss of a domain to
religion.”[9]
The
year was 1860. Amidst riotous applause
and—in a language of praise now lost to us—a field of fluttering white
handkerchiefs waving like battlement flags, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce sat down
within Oxford’s new university museum, looking satisfied with himself. Gazing aristocratically upon a room of intellectuals
who would—surely—declare his cause victor before the night was over, he peered
imperiously once more at the man he believed he had just made look the fool.
That man was Thomas Huxley, or, as he was sometimes called for his ferocious
defense of evolution, “Darwin’s Bulldog.”
The insult that Wilberforce had just uttered was to ask Huxley “tell me,
was it through your grandfather, or your grandmother that you claim descent
from a monkey?” By our standards, this
is tame; in polite Victorian culture such a breach of etiquette showed how high
the stakes were. As one account
noted—“in another idiom lost to us”—a woman, at this remark, showed her
intellectual crises by fainting. Calls
came now for Huxley’s rebuttal.
The
clapping no doubt muffled it from reaching Wilberforce’s ears, but unperturbed,
even delighted, at this public impropriety, Huxley, before he stood, had said
to the man sitting next to him, “the Lord has delivered him into my
hands.” This was ironic, for Huxley—who
in fact had coined the newly minted word “agnostic” for himself—was not sure he
even believed in the Lord. But, as the
story goes, there was truth in his saying nonetheless. Standing, the room fell silent, and the field
of handkerchiefs respectfully unbloomed.
The stage had been set for his theater, and in a voice both solemn and
grave, Huxley retorted he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for an
ancestor; he would, however, be ashamed to be connected to a man who used his
great gifts to slander and obscure those “wearing out their lives” in search of
truth. This had done it; more riotous
applause equal, if not greater, than that given to Wilberforce thundered from
the seats. Handkerchiefs sprouted. Flags of a new war. The evening, it seemed, had slipped from Wilberforce’s
fingers.
This
may appear an incidental skirmish, but this story, like that of the Flat Earth,
is one of many held up like a Byzantine icon, a picture summarizing an episode
of a canonical narrative—only in this story the good news is one of the light
of science warring to overcome the ignorance of dogmatic superstition and
scientific repression. “In these
scenarios, 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.”[10] As John Lienhard put it, it was “the first
major battle in a long war.”[11]
Indeed it is, as an image, one of the cornerstones of the “perennial warfare of
science and Christianity,” the rock upon which their church is built. It is a
story repeated so often, a recently scholarly exposé of its somewhat mindless
repetition was given the title “1859 and All That.”[12]
This
reference to the “first battle in a long war” is meant not just typologically,
but quite literally as well: as it happens, Wilberforce’s remarks were not just
aimed at Huxley. They were initially in
response to a paper on evolution delivered at the same meeting by John William
Draper who, along with Andrew Dixon White, were the two men who became most
responsible for perpetuating the military and warfare imagery of science and
Christianity in their similarly titled volumes (respectively) The History of the Conflict Between Science
and Religion (1873), and The History of the Warfare of Science with
Theology in Christendom (1896). The warfare image was an enormous
success, sinking its teeth at just the moment when in the period of 1870-1910
images of war saturated Western society—“the whole age echoed gunfire,”[13]
as historian Jeffery Burton Russell aptly put it.
There
is a moment in Umberto Eco’s novel, Foucault’s
Pendulum, when his character Belbo proclaims, “Why write novels? Rewrite
history. The history that then comes
true.”[14] Though they are not novels, it would not be
beyond the pale of cynicism to think that Draper and Wright wrote their
respective works precisely so they would “rewrite history, the history that
becomes true.” Draper, not just because of being accosted by Wilberforce, but
due to the escalating hostility of the papacy to liberal thought, and the
increasing intractability of Protestantism to evolution, began to “project his
condemnation backwards” from his own time, and saw “the whole [of] religion in
the image of Pius IX,”[15]
who had, to boot, recently declared the Papacy (and by extension himself),
infallible. White, the President and
founder of Cornell University, also had a great deal of personal grievance with
the church and its theologians, who chastised him to no end about founding a
university that did not have the aim to mold its curriculum around theological
education. And so both White and Draper
set out to teach the churchmen a lesson, in a sense, by making the occurrence
of the Wilberforce-Huxley event paradigmatic for history at large.[16]
The
trouble is, however often this event appears among the icons of secularist
narrative, it, like the flat earth, is also a myth. The idea that Huxley trounced Wilberforce
does not appear until twenty years after the
event. All immediate reports we have
indicate both parties thought they walked away that evening the victor. Draper apparently heard what he wanted to
hear. No vote was taken, so we have no
ability to determine what proportion of the audience supported what
position. The only extensive
contemporary report about the meeting in the paper Athenaeum, “contained no references to grandfathers, grandmothers,
or ape relations.” Many who were there
in fact reported that Huxley’s voice was too weak to carry to the whole
audience anyway, and at any rate it is hard to imagine a worse scenario for a
“Science vs. Religion” thesis, as not only did many clerical members of the
audience give support to Huxley (despite
Huxley’s own anti-clerical stance), as a matter of record several other
non-clerics left Huxley’s side, convinced by many of Wilberforce’s
arguments. Charles Darwin, for his part,
responded to Wilberforce’s published review of his book The Origin of Species, by noting Wilberforce’s criticisms were
“uncommonly clever” and picked out “all the most conjectural parts.”[17]
[1] Cf. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies,
77-101.
[2] Collin A. Russell, “The
Conflict of Science and Religion,” in Gary B. Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical
Introduction (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 4.
[3] Ronald Numbers, “Science
and Religion,” Osiris, 2nd
ser. (1985): 65.
[4] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution
and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale, 2009), 19. Ignore the bombastic title (which was not
Hart’s choice at any rate) this is a very serious (and wonderfully readable)
work that stomps about in deconstruction of nearly all historical “tropes”
used. If you read only two works cited
in this paper, read this one and Galileo
Goes to Jail. They will set you on
the proper course.
[5] Numbers, “Introduction,”
6.
[6] A few works that I have
found extremely helpful: Mikael Stenmark, How
to Relate Science and Religion: A Multidimensional Model (Grand Rapids:
Eerdman’s Publishing, 2004); Alister McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (London:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); Steven M. Barr, Modern
Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
2012); Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious
Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010); Michael Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[7] John Hedley Brooke and
Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature:
The Engagement of Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), 21.
[8] Quoted in Murphy, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning,
xii.
[9] Ronald Numbers,
“Aggressors, Victims, and Peacemakers: Historical Actors in the Drama of
Science and Religion,” in Harold W. Attridge, ed., The Religion and Science Debate: Why Does it Continue? (New Haven:
Yale, 2009),20.
[10] Sheridan Gilley, “The
Huxley-Wilberforce Debate: A Reconsideration,” in Religion and Humanism, ed. Keith Robbins, Studies in Church History 17 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1981): 325-340,
quote at 325.
[11] Quoted in David N.
Livingstone, “Myth 17: That Huxley Defeated Wilberforce in Their Debate Over
Evolution and Religion,” in Ronald Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail, And Other Myths About Science and Religion
(Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009), 152.
[12] James R. Moore, “1859
And All That: Remaking the Story of Evolution and Religion,” in Roger G.
Chapman and Cleveland T. Duval, eds., Charles
Darwin, 1809-1882: A Centennial Commemorative (Wellington: Nova Pacifica,
1982), 167-194.
[13] Russel, Flat Earth 36.
[14] Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum (Orlando: Harcourt,
1988), 514.
[15] Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth, 40.
[16] On Draper and White, cf.
Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies,
19-50.
[17] All of these points are
taken from Livingstone, “Myth 17.”
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