Posted: May 01, 2012 10:14 pm
DavidMcC wrote:jerome wrote:Now I noted that I did not think that Wallace was a Theistic Evolutionist. He does seem to have had some teleological ideas, but they are actually sort of reverse teleology - moving towards a final outcome, with discarnate (dead) human spirits guiding the process.
That's bad enough, AFAIAC. As Huxley put it, Darwin "killed god", and I reckon he also killed "discarnate human spirits" with the same dagger (or whatever he "killed god" with).
Except that Huxley never said that. OK, Huxley the character says it in the film Creation, but Huxley never held anything like that opinion as far as I can see from the primary sources: and Huxley was never one to be shy talking about his religious ideas. Creation is a fine work of art, but not in any way to be trusted as a source: it portrays Huxley like some weird version of Dawkins.
The screenplay is based on Randall Keyne's excellent Annies Box but neither pretend to be strict biographies: Keynes book is an interpretation of his ancestor's life, and a moving one. The film also misses out a crucial step in the development of the Wallace Darwin relationship and the promulgation of their work, as it omits any reference as I recall to the joint presentation of the their papers in absentia (Darwin was at his sons funeral, Wallace abroad) to the Linnean Society in 1858. Instead the implication is (wrongly) given that Darwin was moved to work on On the Origin again by the correspondence with Wallace panicking in to believing he would be preempted -- partially true, and indeed the book was far shorter than planned, but Wallace and Darwin reached their gentleman's agreement in 1858 so their was no real time pressure on Darwin and he was working on Origin anyway. I could go on and on: I'm a historian, and can see the spin in the film, like the utter misrepresentation of the relationship between Darwin and the local reverend -- but such things are acceptable in a novel or a film, for artistic reasons -- "why let the facts get in the way of a good story" - but we should not mistake them for truth. As you may have gathered I regard the so called religious opposition to Darwin's ideas as mythical, the creation of three decades later, and also as it happened Thomas Huxley would have fully agreed with me.
For example Huxley wrote
Huxley wrote:“The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely fictitious - fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, Theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension”. T.H.Huxley, "The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature" in Science and Hebrew Tradition
So what did Huxley think of Darwin's ideas impact on religion? Well again let us hear from the man himself...
Huxley wrote:The teleology which supposes that the eye, such as we see it in man or in the higher vertebrata, was made with the precise structure which it exhibits, to make the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow. But it is necessary to remember that there is a higher teleology, which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based on the fundamental proposition of evolution. That proposition is, that the whole world, living and not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed. If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay potentially in the cosmic vapour; and that a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of that vapour, have predicted, say, the state of fauna of Great Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapor of the breath on a cold winter’s day.”
Academy 1869
Now in fact there are perfectly good reasons why we have come to regard Huxley as the belligerent opponent of Wilberforce. A few I can list immediately off the top of my head One of these, often overlooked, is that the (probably) mythical exchanges in the 1860 Oxford debate between Huxley and Wilberforce are reported by John William Draper, who had read a paper which actually was the main focus of the evening, On the intellectual Development of Europe. This is the same John William Draper who creates the myth of a conflict between Science and Religion as inevitable in 1874 in his book The Conflict of Science and Religion. Draper's hypothesis has come to be far more accepted by all sides than Darwin's and Wallace's, yet is based on rather less historical or empirical evidence. J.R. Lucas' paper on the events of that night is a superb analysis of what probably actually happened - http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/legend.html
What we do know is that Wilberforces objections were scientific in the main, and probably revolved around the incompatibility of Evolution with physics -- objections most strongly put forward by Lord Kelvin, who Darwin disliked a great deal. Those objections were probably fatal to the theory in most physicists eyes until we understood the sun was not combusting but a nuclear reaction, forty years later. We also know that Huxley and Wilberforce remained on good terms and working together on projects long after the debate.
Now Huxley was not actually entirely dismissive of spirits and life after death either - to Charles Kingsley, September 23 1860
Huxley wrote: I neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it. I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing in anything else, and I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force or the indestructibility of matter...
Huxley was genuinely agnostic, unsurprisingly as the man who gave us that term --
Huxley wrote:When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis,"–had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. To my great satisfaction the term took.
I happen to have an immense liking for Huxley, and think he was far from the caricature he appears as in Creation.
Perhaps sometimes the facts should get in the way of a good story after all...
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