Category Archives: Politics and sociology

One of the celebrated incidents of the science v religion myth is the debate of Thomas Huxley with Samuel Wilberforce at Oxford in 1860. It’s presented as the clash of enlightened science with biblical obsurantism. There was no contemporary record of the debate, though, and even the famous quip of Huxley about preferring to be descended from an ape than a bishop is likely to be, at best, exaggerated. But we do have access to Wilberforce’s review of Origin of Species in the Quarterly Review, which is quite an illuminating counterbalance to the myth. It shows, once more, how much one can learn by not taking received wisdom as fact.

History has long been relegated to the humanities, on the basis that it is a narrative of fortuitous events rather than a natural process amenable to scientific laws. Granted, scientific tools like methodological naturalism have been applied, but inconsistently, to exclude divine miracles but not the equally unscientific attribution of human teleology to history. Similarly, teleology has sometimes been disguised as science, for example under the banner of “Social Darwinism” where human ambition was miscategorised as historical inevitability – its failure now being obvious to all. Only now has the unfolding of history  been recognised as the obvious result of a simple and self-evidently real scientific process, which I summarise … Continue reading →

My final nod to Gertrude Himmelfarb’s enlightening biography of Charles Darwin is another reference to his “bulldog”, Thomas Huxley. As I mentioned before his attraction to natural selection, more than perhaps any other of Darwin’s immediate circle, was primarily because of its ability to “make atheism respectable.” Like Thomas Nagel in our time, he didn’t want there to be a God.