Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (33 page)

Bishop Samuel “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce:
He was so nicknamed for the slippery evasiveness of his arguments and had recently published a 17,000-word review against Darwin’s theory.

Richard Owen:
A scientist variously described as “distinguished,” “odious,” “brilliant,” “hateful,” and “sadistic,” Owen published anonymous attacks on Darwin and coached Wilberforce before the event. (Search online for Owen’s face, and prepare for nightmares.)

Joseph Dalton Hooker:
Hooker was a botanist, supporter, and close friend of Darwin.

Robert FitzRoy:
He was a highly religious captain of the five-year voyage of the HMS
Beagle
on which Darwin first began to formulate his theory. He was present by accident, scheduled to present a paper on weather forecasting that (thanks to the chaos described shortly) was never given.

Darwin himself wasn’t present, of course. Orchids.

No one knows exactly what was said in the meeting, but by most accounts it was a terrific show. The discussion was civil enough with several good points made all around. Opponents of the theory voiced concerns about what would later be called social Darwinism, the misapplication of Darwin’s theory to justify brutality and cruelty in human society.

At some point, though, the discussion escalated, as these things tend to do. Bishop Wilberforce rose and asked Huxley whether it was on his grandmother’s side or his grandfather’s side that he claimed descent from an ape. Huxley said that given a choice between a miserable ape for an ancestor or a man who used his great gifts to introduce ridicule into an important scientific discussion and to obscure the truth, “I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape!”

Oh, that did it. Arguments broke out around the room. One account had Captain FitzRoy suddenly thrusting a Bible aloft over the din, telling those assembled, “Here is the truth! Believe God rather than man!” The crowd shouted at him, and he was abruptly escorted from the building. The room erupted into a frenzy of shouts and scooting chairs as all hell broke loose.

Of course another account said there was no shouting, that it ended very jovially, and that they all went to dinner together. But where’s the fun in that?

Coining agnosticism

Though religious doubt had been around for millennia, the word
agnosticism
itself wasn’t coined until 1869 when none other than Thomas Henry Huxley created it as a label for his own beliefs. Huxley felt that atheism implied certainty, and though he was very confident God didn’t exist, he didn’t want to imply that he was 100 percent sure. But he was also nowhere near being a religious believer.

The more he thought about it, he said, the less sure he was about the right label for his beliefs. After puzzling over the problem for some time, Huxley decided that uncertainty was the defining feature of his belief and coined the word
agnostic
— Greek for “not knowing” — to describe his position. (For more on agnosticism, see
Chapter 2
.)

As it turns out, he wasn’t alone. “To my great satisfaction,” he said, “the term took.” You can say that again. Countless writers and thinkers in England and beyond quickly adopted the term themselves, and it remains an important description for many people today.

Mixing signals: The Vatican warns against “the unrestrained freedom of thought”

The Catholic Church often came in for criticism regarding its attitude toward advances in science, and it was often deserved. But to give credit where it’s due, the Vatican was ahead of the curve in seeing the implications of human evolution for traditional belief in the 19th century. Allowing people to chase those implications wherever they led, however, was another matter.

“All faithful Christians are forbidden to defend as the legitimate conclusions of science those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith,” said one pronouncement of the First Vatican Council, held ten years after
On the Origin of Species
was published. “Furthermore, they are absolutely bound to hold them to be errors which wear the deceptive appearance of truth.” The more something appeared to be true, the more strongly it must be rejected if it contradicts Church doctrine.

So what was the official Catholic position on evolution? For more than a century, that wasn’t clear. In 1860, a council of German bishops said, “Our first parents were formed immediately by God . . . to assert that this human being . . . emerged finally from the spontaneous continuous change of imperfect nature to the more perfect, is clearly opposed to Sacred Scripture and to the Faith.” A prominent Jesuit newspaper that was considered a mouthpiece of Vatican opinion took an aggressive anti-evolution position for decades.

But it turned out that Catholic theologians were busy throughout this period engineering ways to make evolution and special creation work together, even explaining at what point in evolutionary history God might have inserted the soul. The Vatican Council said that “God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason.” And
On the Origin of Species
was
never added to the Index of Forbidden Books. So . . . green light?

The time was confusing for reasonable Catholics who were trying to figure out what to make of Darwin without getting on the wrong side of the Pope. Finally, in 1893, Pope Leo XIII made a statement that clarifies . . . well, he made a statement:

Scientific theory is unstable and ever-changing.

The Bible isn’t always to be taken literally.

Catholic scholars shouldn’t “depart from the literal and obvious sense” of the Bible, except “where reason or necessity requires.”

People must beware of “thirst for novelty and the unrestrained freedom of thought” running rampant in this age.