The Case for God (43 page)

But in opposing Darwin on religious grounds, Hodge was a lone voice. Most Christians, unable to appreciate the full implications of natural selection, were still willing to accommodate evolution. Darwin was not yet the bogeyman that he would later become. During the late nineteenth century, conservative Christians were far more troubled by an entirely different issue.

In 1860, the year after the publication of
Origin
, seven Anglican clergymen published
Essays and Reviews
, a series of articles that made the German Higher Criticism of the Bible available to the unsuspecting general public, who now learned to their astonishment that Moses had not written the first five books of the Bible, King David was not the author of the Psalms, and biblical miracles were little more than a literary trope. At this time, German clerics were far better educated than their counterparts in Britain and America, who were ill-equipped either to follow German scholarship themselves or to explain it to their flocks.
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But by the 1850s, British nonconformists,
who were not allowed to study at either Oxford or Cambridge, had started to attend German universities, and they brought the Higher Criticism back home with them. There had already been clashes between these “Germanized” scholars and their colleagues in colleges and seminaries.

Essays and Reviews
caused a sensation. It sold twenty-two thousand copies in two years (more than
Origin
in the first twenty years of its publication), went through thirteen editions in five years, and inspired some four hundred books and articles in response.
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Three of the authors belonged to a circle of progressive clergymen and scientists at Oxford and Cambridge who kept one another abreast of developments in their fields:
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Baden Powell, Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford; Benjamin Jowett, classicist and later master of Balliol College; and Mark Pattison, rector of Lincoln College. The essays were of variable quality: they discussed the nature of predictive prophecy, the interpretation of miracle stories, and the authorship of Genesis. But by the far the most important article was Jowett’s essay “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” which argued that the Bible should be subjected to the same rigorous scholarship as any other ancient text. Evangelical Protestants, who had been taught to look for the plain sense of scripture and had in the process lost any understanding of the nature of mythology, found these ideas deeply disturbing. In 1888, the English novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward published
Robert Elsmere
, which told the story of a clergyman whose faith was destroyed by the Higher Criticism. At one point his wife complains: “If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, I cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.”
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The novel became a best seller, indicating that many readers shared her dilemma.

The hierarchy was equally disturbed by these new theories. Immediately after the publication of
Essays and Reviews
, a letter to
The Times
, cosigned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and twenty-five other bishops, threatened to bring the authors to the ecclesiastical courts. Two were indeed tried for heresy, convicted (though the ruling was later overturned), and lost their posts, and Jowett was temporarily suspended from clerical duties. Bishops, theologians, and professors collaborated on major symposia to counter
Essays and Reviews
, and, in an unlikely alliance, Anglo-Catholics joined forces with Evangelicals in a statement that affirmed the divine inspiration
of the Bible. Seven hundred seventeen scientists (of minor status) also signed a strongly worded protest, and some of the signatories established the Victoria Institute to defend the literal truth of scripture.
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The more progressive theologians who adopted the new historical-critical method often found that their staunchest supporters were scientists who, like themselves, were at the cutting edge of their field.
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When, for example, John William Colenso (1814–83), missionary bishop of Natal, was ostracized for his critical study of the Pentateuch, Lyell introduced him to his club and gave him financial help and the two became firm friends. When the Reverend Frederic William Farrar (1831–1903) wrote an article on the Flood, arguing, on evidence provided by the Higher Criticism and geological science, that the deluge had not in fact covered the entire earth, his essay was rejected by the editors of William Smith’s
Dictionary of the Bible
. But Darwin supported Farrar’s candidacy for the Royal Society, and Farrar was one of the bearers of Darwin’s coffin and preached a moving eulogy beside his grave.
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In the United States, the more liberal Christians were open to the Higher Criticism. Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87), Lyman’s son, believed that doctrine and belief should take second place to charitable work and argued that it was unchristian to penalize somebody for holding a different theological opinion. The liberals were also willing to “christen” Darwinism, arguing that God was at work in the process of natural selection and that humanity was gradually evolving to a greater spiritual perfection: soon men and women would find that no gulf separated them from God and that they were able to live at peace with one another. But a rift was developing between the liberals and conservatives. In dedicated opposition to the Higher Criticism, Charles Hodge insisted that every single word of the Bible was divinely inspired and infallibly true. His son Archibald wrote a classic defense of the literal truth of the Bible with his younger colleague Benjamin Warfield. All the stories and statements of the Bible were “absolutely errorless and binding for faith and obedience.” Everything in scripture was unqualified “truth to the facts.”
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In 1886, the revivalist preacher Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–99) founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to combat the Higher Criticism, his aim to create a cadre to oppose the false ideas that, he argued, would bring the nation to destruction. Similar colleges were
founded by William B. Riley in Minneapolis in 1902 and by the oil magnate Lyman Stewart in Los Angeles in 1907. For some, the Higher Criticism was becoming a symbol of everything that was wrong in the modern world. “If we have no infallible standard,” argued the Methodist clergyman Alexander McAlister, “we may as well have no standard at all;” once biblical truth had been unraveled, all decent values would disappear.
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For the Methodist preacher Leander W. Mitchell, the Higher Criticism was to blame for the drunkenness and infidelity now widespread in the United States,
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while the Presbyterian M. B. Lambdin saw it as the cause of the rising divorce rate, graft, corruption, crime, and murder.
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But the stridency of these claims reflects an anxiety. Christians had been taught to regard the truths of religion as well within the grasp of their minds and to treat the plain sense of scripture as factual. This attitude was becoming more and more difficult to maintain.

After Darwin, it was possible to deny God’s existence without flying in the face of the most authoritative scientific evidence. For the first time, unbelief was a viable and sustainable intellectual option. But people were still wary of the term “atheist.” The English social reformer George Holyoake (1817–1906) preferred to call himself a “secularist,” because atheism still had overtones of immorality.
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Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91), who refused to take the parliamentary oath with its invocation of God when he took up his seat in the House of Commons, was proud to call himself an atheist—but immediately qualified his position: “I do not say that there is no God; and until you tell me what you mean by God I am not mad enough to say anything of the kind.” But he knew that God was not
“something
[a word he deliberately italicized] entirely distinct and different in substance” from the world we know.
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The British biologist Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) felt that outright atheism was too dogmatic, because it made metaphysical claims about God’s nonexistence on insufficient physical evidence.
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It was probably Huxley who coined the term “agnostic” (a word based on the Latin
agnosco:
“I do not know”) sometime in the 1860s. For Huxley, agnosticism was not a belief but a method. Its requirement was simple: “In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are
certain which are not demonstrated and demonstrable.” Because they had all maintained this principled reticence, refusing the luxury of absolute certainty, Socrates, Paul, Luther, Calvin, and Descartes had all been agnostics, and agnosticism was now “the fundamental principle of modern science.”
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But Huxley also saw scientific rationalism as a new secular religion that demanded conversion and total commitment. People would have to choose between the myths of religion and the truths of science. There could be no compromise: “one or the other would have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration.”
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Huxley clearly felt that he had a fight on his hands. While science was the symbol of irreversible progress, religion seemed part of the old world that was doomed to disappear.
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For Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–99), lawyer, orator, and state attorney general who became a leading spokesman of American agnosticism, humanity would soon outgrow God: one day everybody would recognize that religion was an extinct species.
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For the American poet and novelist Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), “the loss of religious faith among the most civilized portions of the race is a step from childishness to maturity.”
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By the 1870s, this conviction had hardened into a new myth that saw religion and science as locked in eternal and inevitable conflict. The champions of science constructed a revisionist history of the relations between the two, floridly told, that cast the heroes of “progress”— Bruno, Galileo, Luther—as the hapless victims of evil cardinals and fanatical puritans. For the American propagandist Joel Moody, religion was the “science of evil.”

For Ingersoll, human history had been scarred by “a deadly conflict” in which the brave, lonely champions of truth, “straining against fear and mental slavery, prejudice and martyrdom,” had dragged humanity “inch by inch” closer to the truth.
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In 1871, John William Draper (1811–82), head of the department of medicine at New York University, published
The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science
, which went through fifty printings and was translated into ten languages. While Religion clung timidly to the unchangeable truths of revelation, Science forged expansively ahead, giving us telescopes, barometers, canals, hospitals, sanitation, schools, the telegraph, calculus, sewing machines, rifles, and warships. Only Science could liberate us from the tyranny of Religion (Draper habitually capitalized these terms so that they seemed like characters in a morality play). “The ecclesiastic must learn to keep himself within the domain he has chosen, and cease to tyrannize over the philosopher, who, conscious of his own strength and the purity of his motives, will bear such interference no longer.”
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Ultimately, however, Draper’s polemic was marred by his blatantly anti-Catholic prejudice. Less immediately popular but more influential long-term was
A History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom
(1896) by the ardent secularist Andrew Dixon White (1832–1918), first president of Cornell University.

The two were implacably opposed. One of these protagonists was beneficial to humanity; the other, evil and dangerous. Ever since Augustine had insisted on the “absolute authority of scripture,” all theologians “without exception, have forced mankind away from the truth, and have caused Christendom to stumble for centuries into abysses of error and sorrow.”
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In reality, the relations between science and faith had been more complex and nuanced. But this overblown polemic has remained the stock-in-trade of the atheist critique of religion and is widely accepted as a matter of fact. White’s misrepresentation of Augustine’s view of scripture is just one example of his bias. One of the most persistent
of the apocryphal tales that developed at this time is the story of Huxley’s encounter with Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford (1805–73). In June 1860, shortly after the publication of
Origin
, they took part in a debate at a meeting of the British Association. Wilberforce is said to have played to the gallery and, having shown that he had absolutely no understanding of evolution, concluded by facetiously asking Huxley whether he claimed descent from a monkey through his grandmother or grandfather. Huxley retorted that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man like Wilberforce, who used his great talents to obscure the truth. It is a story that brilliantly encapsulates the “warfare” myth in its depiction of intrepid science victoriously triumphing over complacent, ignorant religion. But, as scholars have repeatedly demonstrated, there is no record of this exchange until the 1890s. It is not mentioned in contemporary accounts of the meeting. In fact, Wilberforce was entirely conversant with Darwinian theory; his speech at the British Institution summarized the recent review that he had written of
Origin
, which Darwin himself, acknowledging that Wilberforce had pointed out serious omissions in his argument that he would have to address, had considered “uncommonly clever.”
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