Polarities and their complexity

In conclusion I should like to give three examples to underline the complexity of the polarities. Each marks a different way of saying that there were middle positions. Popular anecdotes about apes and angels play on the polarity but rarely do justice to figures such as Richard Owen or Frederick Temple who saw in the evolutionary process the unfolding of a divine plan. Owen is my first example because, more than Wilberforce, he was willing to see secondary causes at work in the production of new species. He even sought approbation for having been in the vanguard of that openness. But for Owen it did not follow that one had to subscribe to Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection. His refusal to commit himself to any one mechanism cost him dearly when Darwin's theory began winning converts; but it is important to recognise that he had a philosophical position from which he could argue for theistic evolution. This relied on the conception of continuous creation. There had been a skeletal archetype in the mind of the Creator whose work in creation consisted in the instantiation of that archetypal structure in as many and diverse forms as possible.

For my second example, I return to Frederick Temple who caused Wilberforce so much heartache. During the Oxford meeting of the British Association, the sermon preached in the University Church on the first of July was given not by the Bishop but by Temple. It had a topical theme: the present relations of religion and science. In contrast to Wilberforce, Temple created space for Darwin. He criticised churchmen of the past for their god-of-the-gaps. Too often they had found refuge in what the sciences could not explain. But this had been a serious mistake. The expansion of the domain of natural law was rather to be welcomed. Why? Because it increased the plausibility of the belief that were also moral laws governing the universe. One of Darwin's earliest converts was the clergyman and Christian socialist Charles Kingsley. Temple shared Kingsley's view that a God who could make all things make themselves was so much wiser than one who simply made things.

My third example may seem paradoxical because it is Huxley himself. He was not a liberal in every respect. On women's rights Lyell thought he looked embarrassingly like the Bishop of Oxford. True he coined the word "agnostic" in reaction to the presumption of those churchmen who behaved like gnostics, arrogantly claiming a privileged knowledge. True, it can be said of him that he was looking for a new Protestant reformation in which science would be venerated and Britain prosper; true, perhaps, in one biographer's words, that "he oozed Puritan self-righteousness" in making the scientific man seem "more principled, more earnest". And yet, on the touchy subject of design in nature, which Darwin's theory had placed in the limelight, Huxley had something surprising to say. When he wrote on the reception of Darwin's theory, he felt that there had been far too much song and dance about design and its supposed dissolution. "It is necessary", he wrote, "to remember that there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of Evolution. This proposition is that that the whole world ... is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the 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 the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say the state of the fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapour of the breath on a cold winter's day." What was his conclusion? Simply that the doctrine of evolution "does not even come into contact with Theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine."