The contrived image of a “war” between science and religion
In some way it was to the advantage of both parties (Darwin’s partisans as well as his opponents) to radicalise and streamline their oppositions and to build the conflict up into an epic or a myth. No sooner had On the Origin of Species come out than its legend set in. It was crystallised around a confrontation that earned the status of founding or seminal episode.
At the end of June - beginning of July 1860, the meeting took place in Oxford of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Leading British scientists were members of this prestigious association and many attended. As for Darwin, who steered as clear as he could from the debates, his ill-health was ground enough for him not to attend. However one of his most active supporters, Thomas Henry Huxley[1], known as Darwin's bulldog was present. His harsh and hostile exchanges with the Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce[2], left its mark on history and resulted in the legend of a “war”, to use a word Huxley showed a liking for. Even though the exact content of the exchanges has not been confirmed and though the debate had involved other actors, the story got around notably in the pages of the press. Huxley and Wilberforce were held up as the champions of two radically opposed camps.
Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, was a noted public speaker and polemicist. Representing the “High Church” the traditional trend within the Church of England; he stood against all attempts to conciliate evolutionism and Christianity, stressing that the notion of evolution, even in its theist or deist version was problematic at a moral level. In his view, the notion of a nature in thrall to progress weakened a key point of Christian dogma, that of the “Fall”, that is to say of “Original Sin”. This theological and moral argument was at the heart of the most radical objections to Darwin whether among Protestants or Catholics. Confronting Wilberforce, Huxley was one of the foremost standard bearers for the Darwinian case. He also championed secularisation. Without stretching to calling for disestablishment, he demanded that the political class resort to non-clergy, adequately specialised expertise. He was most particularly keen on the secularisation and professionalization of science and education. He refused however to be labelled an atheist and claimed like Darwin to be an agnostic.
Similar confrontations took place in France, where they took on a more radical hue, in the context of the conflicts attendant upon the secularisation of schooling and the show down with the Catholic teaching orders. The debate around human evolution took a specific turn in the context of a new scientific discipline, namely prehistory. Gathered under the materialist banner, the most militant spirits turned the study of ancient humanity into an ideological battlefield. Their ideas found their way in the press linked to the Free Thought movement. Their materialism was first and foremost anticlerical. Asserting that science had shown that there is no transcendence and that all human facts, including morals and religion result from physical causes and laws, members of this group virulently denounced religion as a retrograde superstition and championed a thorough-going severance of the state from the churches, starting with the Catholic Church. Prehistorian Gabriel de Mortillet[3] was one of its ringleaders.
Though not solely motivated by Science this Manichean presentation of the conflict between evolutionist prehistory and religion no less addressed a reality. In Catholic circles, many thought that the scientific realm must not be left in the hands of secular scientists and anticlerical thinkers but rather that every effort must be made to fight them on their own ground by showing that the most recent scientific data comforted Christian dogma, and by invalidating those that happened to contradict it. The abbé Pierre Amard[4] was foremost among the upholders of this Concordist apologetics. An Oratorian father who received Holy Orders in Rennes in 1872, he undertook on the advice of his hierarchy to study the prehistoric sciences in order to be in a position to defend the Catholic faith and its reading of the Bible against the attacks it sustained. He prospected on the Archaeological dig of the Mont-Dol (Ille-et-Vilaine), read the publications relevant to the field, attended specialized symposiums and published in 1883 a synthesis entitled L'Âge de la pierre et l'homme primitive [The Stone Age and Primitive Man]. There, he proposed to demonstrate that the Genesis account is confirmed and not contradicted by Prehistory's findings. He radically excluded the hypothesis of an Evolution of living things. He quoted the fixist naturalists and denied the fact that human remains found in a range of Paleolithic sites, such as Neanderthal near Dusseldorf (Germany) in 1856 display anatomical features different from those of contemporary humans. Catholic periodicals such as Cosmos, a Concordist scientific popularizing review founded in 1852 by abbé François Moigno propagated theses of that nature.
