his argument that humans and apes had a common ancestor, Huxley compared human skeletons to those of other apes, as shown here in the frontispiece from his book, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature.
Sidgwick’s account of his response was clearly intended to portray Huxley in a heroic light: ‘On this Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us, and spoke those tremendous words – words which no one seems sure of now, nor I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out: I, for one, jumped out of my seat; and when in the evening we met at Dr Daubeney’s, every one was eager to congratulate the hero of the day.’
Huxley’s retort seems mild by today’s standards, but the audience clearly inferred that he was saying he would rather be an ape than a bishop. Is this what really happened? According to Ronald Clark, a biographer of the Huxley dynasty, ‘The details of what Huxley said differ as much as do those of Wilberforce’s speech.’ Huxley himself seems to have offered at least three different versions, and according to many accounts his immediate reaction to Wilberforce’s sally was to mutter to a companion, ‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.’ He knew that Soapy Sam had overstepped the mark, and went for the jugular in his response. Contemporary accounts of the meeting record nothing of either Wilberforce’s ‘grandmother’ comment or Huxley’s loaded response.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN AND CREATIONISM
Creationists are those who believe in the truth of the biblical account of Creation. There are many different stripes of Creationist: Day-Age Creationists, for instance, believe that the six days of Creation mentioned in Genesis correspond to six ages or epochs of geological time; Young Earth Creationists believe that it took literally six days for God to create the Earth. Such an extreme belief is clearly at odds with Darwinian (or most other forms of) evolutionary theory, and fundamentalist Christians who advocate such beliefs try to challenge Darwinism on several fronts.
In America, where the Creationist lobby is powerful and vocal, there have been various attempts to limit the teaching of evolution in schools, such as the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925; or to ensure that some form of Creationism is taught alongside evolution. These attempts have mostly failed because the courts have deemed them to be attempts to teach religious beliefs in state-funded schools, which contravene the constitutional separation of Church and State in the United States.
In the late 1980s, a new movement arose propounding a theory known as Intelligent Design (ID), which is ostensibly a non-religious critique of Darwinian evolution that builds on the ‘watch on the heath’ argument proposed by William Paley in his 1802 book Natural Theology. Briefly stated, Paley’s argument was that if you were out walking on a heath and came across a watch, you would assume that its intricate construction could not be the result of accident but that there must have been a watchmaker. This is a version of the teleological argument for the existence of God, which says that if there is some form of design or purpose to life/the universe, there must be a designer. Modern ID seeks to show gaps in Darwinism’s account of the universe: for example, the eye is a complex organ that cannot have evolved through intermediate stages as it only confers a survival advantage in its ‘final’ form, in which all the components work together in perfect harmony. If it cannot have arisen by accident, the eye must therefore have arisen by design, which implies some form of intelligent designer.
The ID movement has attempted to circumvent America’s Church–State separation rules by claiming that ID is a science and does not actually invoke God as the intelligent designer, that is is different from Creationism and should therefore be legal to teach in state-funded schools as an alternative explanation of the origin of life. Opponents of ID argue that this is transparent nonsense. In the 2005 Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District trial, US Judge John E. Jones III ruled that ID is not a science and ‘cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents’.
DAWKINS vs GOD
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist who first achieved fame with his books The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker (1986), which popularized modern Darwinian theory. He has become one of the figureheads of a new breed of assertive atheism, and his 2006 book The God Delusion has sold over 2 million copies. The book’s assault on the dangerous and delusory nature of religion, together with his high-profile public pronouncements on the issues, have led former bishop Lord Harries to describe him as ‘one of the attack dogs of fundamentalist atheism’. Harries, who recently debated with Dawkins at Oxford to mark the anniversary of Darwin’s birth and commemorate the Wilberforce–Huxley clash, points out that ‘The old atheism was content to say that Christianity was untrue. The new attack dogs also say it is dangerous ... That’s fighting talk.’
Dawkins pulls no punches in The God Delusion, describing the God of the Old Testament as ‘arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction’. He dismisses practitioners of what he calls ‘understated, decent, revisionist religion’ as being ‘numerically negligible’, focusing almost entirely on extremists, such as American television evangelists, or, as he puts it, ‘crude rabble-rousing chancers’.
Dawkins’ attack on religion has attracted a blizzard of criticism, most of it centred on what is perceived as his stridency and intolerance, which is often characterized as simply the mirror image of language used by religious fundamentalists. He dismisses criticism of his tone as pleas for exceptionalism on the part of religious belief: ‘The illusion of intemperance flows from the unspoken convention that faith is uniquely privileged: off limits to attack.’ More serious criticisms include that he swallows uncritically the myth of enlightened science at constant war with delusional and dishonest religion, that he ignores or is unaware of millennia of theological scholarship, and that by taking aim at only the crudest and most extreme caricature of religion he is prey to the ‘straw man’ fallacy (where an argument seems powerful because it fails to engage with the serious, substantive elements of the opposing view and concentrates only on easily disproved elements). Dawkins and others, such as American philosopher Daniel Dennett, who seek to apply the modern Darwinian philosophy to all areas of human experience, from psychology and spirituality to sociology and history, are also accused of unwarranted ‘empire-building’.
Fighting talk. Spanish version of a global atheistic ad campaign, featuring posters on buses reading, ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life.’ The campaign has drawn fire from all sides – religionist and atheist.
Dawkins rebuts all these criticisms with varying degrees of success. For instance, he insists that ‘Most believers echo Robertson, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or Ayatollah Khomeini,’ and points out, ‘These are not straw men. The world needs to face them, and my book does so.’ Journalist William Rees-Mogg, however, suggests that Dawkins’ approach is fundamentally flawed, and fails to do justice to the legacy of Darwin: ‘His tone is not like that of Charles Darwin himself; thoughtful, reflecting detailed observation, sensitive in the search for truth. It is more like that of Bishop Wilberforce in the Oxford debate of June 1860, in which the bishop attacked Darwinism.’
The legend of this encounter has grown over the years, whereas in reality it was probably little more than a minor skirmish in the protracted battles over evolution that continue to this day. For instance, Huxley’s battle with Richard Owen continued. Owen claimed to have proved that man was not descended from the apes through his studies of brain anatomy, but Huxley marshalled proof to the contrary in his 1863 book Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. Wilberforce went to an early grave in 1873, courtesy of head injuries sustained in a fall from a horse, which occasioned Huxley to remark uncharitably that ‘reality and his brains came into contact and the result was