This is a prepared discourse for students of the formal sciences, set out from a philosophical point of view, as an argument against certain popular attitudes about Darwinism ... you are invited to consider it and respond with a defence of what it attacks.

"Those conversant with the fabricated conflict between science and religion will be puzzled by John Durrant’s defence of Thomas Henry Huxley as a "mild mannered agnostic genuinely sympathetic with the religious spirit.

"On the contrary, Sir Thomas Huxley exalted in the heretical nature of the theory of evolution precisely because "it occupies a position of complete and irreconcilable antagonism to that consistent enemy of the highest intellectual and moral life of mankind — the Catholic Church."

"A century after Darwin, modern science has been unable to come up with a vaguely plausible explanation for the origin of life.

"Huxley’s naturalistic atheism was not only defensive, but intellectually spurious."

Dr James Lefanu (Letter to the Daily Telegraph).
 
 

Hollywood produced a film a generation back which has been identified by some observers as the opening shot of a propaganda war against Christianity; the fuller onslaught of which is excellently described by Jewish film writer and Film Critic, Michael Medved, in his famous book: "Hollywood versus America".

The thrust of that early film was the debunking of Christianity, in the form of the Church of England, by a rather soppy looking Darwin and the heroically intellectual Thomas Huxley. In the Anglican corner, as it were, was the pompously portrayed Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. In a supposed recreation of their 19th century debate the young Huxley is seen twisting and turning in righteous distress as the pontificating voice of the bishop booms inane platitudes (that no man in real life had ever heard the good bishop mouth — for Wilberforce was a scientist of great repute himself). The climax of this dreary invention was when Huxley leapt to his feet and turning to his friends enunciated in a great stage whisper: "God has delivered my foe into my hands". Huxley said something like, "if you are not from a monkey where are you from?" This was taken as a great piece of wit. Extras surged around to laugh and jeer the fat man with the venous face and clerical gaiters. There followed a windy speech from Huxley (or the handsome young actor playing him) in which the lucid purity of science was glorified in heated platitudes while the by now discomfited bishop sloped away stage left dragging his discredited superstitions with him and somebody kissed somebody in close-up. Hmm! The End.

Now alone, this is a film not worthy of archive space. But as an insight into the methods employed against reasonable knowledge of God, not only in the media but almost universally in science classrooms and university labs, it is a classic. Today it is practically impossible to find any educated man who has not in some way been affected by prejudice against his own common sense; if not against his religious faith itself, then against a proper scepticism as regards Science (with a capital S). For indeed science is no more than a label put upon numerous and often disparate observations of matter in its natural state. This film for me marked the debut of what we now call Scientism - the fallacy by which mechanistic cause and effect observable in natures surface is made a launch-pad for the wildest metaphysical belief systems whose avowed intention is to deny the need for a creator and thus to deny God. A few twisted threads in the arguments of men have become a strong hawser ...

But I untwist these twisted threads, having opened my lecture with a little letter from today's Daily Telegraph, written by that newspaper's prestigious medical correspondent, in order to explain to you why I chose to introduce you to philosophy in the course we are now set upon. I am encouraged by the fact that many of you are Christian and have the obvious advantage of possessing open, confident minds. You have no axe to grind, no reasonable hypothesis to deny - at least not for the sake of denial itself. But as the younger philosophers proceed with their adventures in education a quite powerful pressure will be placed upon them, so strong that it has led many thousands of academics into believing in nonsense or acting as though they believed in it which is worse. They begin by way of decent open-mindedness to a mistrust of certainty; and from there descend into a form of nihilism. Alas, if that were all, it would be sad enough; but something worse proceeds from this mental emptiness because by its nature the mind abhors nothingness. It must be filled; yet the damaged will, hating certainty, seeks out what can supply both ill-will and hungry brain and comes upon the religion called Scientism. Founded upon observable effects in the corporeal phenomena about it, this religion leaps to the conclusion that, since matter can effect amazing mutations, seemingly of itself, then it is self-sufficient. It is assumed that the discovery of a cause is an explanation, as though to propose a label for occult forces such as magnetism and to classify a number of magnetic properties one has explained this mysterious power. With the natural drive in all men to apprehend the cosmos and economise the astronomically proliferating facts that emerge as a result of valid scientific exploration they step into the shadows that always accompany this human urge - the temptation to fit a religion to their physical cosmology. christians may do this, indeed have done so now and then in history, as did the ancient Greeks before them to a far wilder extent. But Christian or Pagan Greek made no excuse for his error; neither was out to deny but to discover. The atheist scientist on the other hand, having begun with denial must make that denial part of the fabric of his belief system or it cannot work. So when he is faced with some imponderable but inescapable fact of science, say a discovery such as Dr Michael Behe's which absolutely refutes the notion that mechanical natural selection can account for complex living organisms, he denies the more vehemently that the material cosmos witnesses to the likelihood of a designer because, palpably, it can neither create, organise nor direct itself. Despite the very science which he claims to worship, he kneels instead before a pantheist nature-god; and in blind faith cries out: "Mother nature, we cannot understand! You bear down too heavily upon our human understanding and bewilder us; but we believe in you and proclaim 'credamus!' What we lack today you will grant us tomorrow!"
You may smile, but this folly has more or less entered the academic mind of  Western culture. It is now a dogma of Scientism that design in nature cannot exist, that "nothing is designed",  for to admit the very word "design" is to infer a designer and this in turn implies a Creator. The present incumbent of the Scientism Vatican , Richard Dawkins (Oxford University's interestingly titled Professor of Science) vacuously attempts a compromise by substituting for "design" the term "designoid".
How is such a mad position held against common sense? Are not all men agreed that contempt prior to investigation places a bar against knowledge. From this proceeds a universal mockery of any proposition that might lead to the inference of a prime mover, never mind the loving God of the Christian or Jew. The paradox is this; they who preach contempt of anything which is not the sterilised science of secondary causes, can only sustain this pretended sterility by calling upon a god themselves - a pagan god. That God is Pan. He assumes many forms, sometimes Mother Carey, here Dyonisus, there Mother Nature, often The Force or Karma: but today Pan stamps the reeds and answers to Darwinism. The tune he pipes is Natural Selection. He smiles at fools who imagine a reed can select anything or that a dragonfly had a say in its own flight into being. The acolytes of Scientism are guilty of offending science more directly; since whenever a new discovery asks questions of, say, Darwinism, it is ignored, falsified, or fudged. One wonders how much damage has been done to the progress of genetics by this folly; how many fine minds have been excluded and left idle on the shores behind? How many great teachers never raised to teach and how many fine minds left to struggle on unaided by a properly erected scaffolding of knowledge from the past? With such a superstitious terror of anything that might let light into their dark prejudices, the price of the persecutor is finally demanded - the worst of his type rises to the top and a tyranny is unleashed against the very intellect of mankind. The academic body dies in the same way that any living organism degenerates and corrupts.

We have come to throw down that tyranny and to topple Pan the first sceptic. We shall do so in a paradoxical way. We shall admit at once that, even if the mind and its discoveries flow towards a great central answer as rivers towards an ocean, nevertheless our manner of knowing will never be angelic; that is, it will depend upon our squirrel like system of gathering facts into great bundles made possible by abstraction and thus universalising. It will also be ultimately beyond our final gathering ("a man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for", as Browning wrote so wisely). But despite this we recognise our capacity and instinct for certainty. If we are on a journey too far to finish, whose prospects as we go are too wide to inhabit, our horses are real and our maps accurate. We may lose the way but we have in us a compass to recover it. We are the friends of all other travellers and we share our secrets with a will.
If any man should ask you why you read philosophy then tell him you have heard of certainty and that in philosophy you must find it. If he then complains that this is an act of faith you may confidently point to previous travellers and to those who failed and why and to those who succeeded and why. The study of success is as much the study of history as the study of philosophy. You may ask such a man why he can so often be found among those who "re-write" history - for to do that is to write lies and pretend that they are facts proved by science. That is an offence against sanity and a befouling of science again.
But more, you may point to the hollow God of the Nihilist or the Darwinian naturalist and ask of him: "Ou sont vous, ou allons vous?"

If he does not care you are free to question the condition of his mind. Again, Philosophy is nothing if it is not the training of minds in discourse. This is exactly what we are doing now and we have chosen to open the discourse at a very high level which hopefully will have us reaching soon for some very sharp weapons.

So let's go on about Huxley, who, tutors have impressed upon successive generations of university students, was a humble saint of science, sitting slave like at her feet. Indeed they quote his own words in that.

Those words bear some sceptical examination though. He had not got the best of the wise Protestant Bishop of Oxford. Had he possessed enough wit he would have seen the full depth of the bishop's little jest at his expense. It was Huxley who roared about monkeys, and it was Wilberforce who responded, not vice versa. And what the soft-spoken cleric said as regards Huxley’s simian ancestry was: "and from which side, I wonder! Your mother's?" Biologists are only now discovering the edge in that verbal razor.

As I say, Huxley, as his hurt dawned on him, spent the rest of his life propagating the opposite story, that in effect he had the best of the Bishop. He lied. And now, more and more, historians are looking at the meaning of that lie.

Wilberforce makes the point of this little essay; the argument that while the Christian is open minded and honest, his adversary is sometimes historically revealed as a bigoted liar who twists science to his own ends. Unlike Huxley who was so vindictive against all Christianity while preaching objectivity in order to preserve the integrity of "science" and defend its rights, the bishop kept an open mind. That Protestant clergyman scientist actually wrote: "We have no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in Nature ... because they believe them to contradict what appears to them is taught by revelation". Only then did he go on to prove that science cannot rule out the claims of religion.

Is there ever valid scepticism? Of course; but a rigorous attention to facts can be known as scholarly objectivity and must not be confused for a scepticism whose essence is denial for the sake of denial. Admittedly, at times, the mind stops in awe before its apparent limits.
As Pascal observed; "We have an impotence to prove, which cannot be conquered by any dogmatism; we have an idea of truth which cannot be conquered by any Pyrrhonian scepticism."
The great theoretical physicist, Pierre Duhem stated the paradox thus: "Physical theory aims to preserve a logical unity because of an intuition we are powerless to justify but which it is impossible for us to be blind to .."
Proofs, it must also be insisted upon, must bear a relationship to the subjects they belong to; many must be sought by other means than can be supplied in a laboratory. For example, James Jeans, another scientist of repute indulged himself with this little philosophical proposition when he remarked: "We cannot solve the problem of the universe. This is because we are part of the universe and, therefore, part of the problem we are trying to solve." What would Aquinas say? Find out! What do you say?

Fun to consider but, if by problem, he means the problem of creation, where we and all around us came from, then who could smugly disagree?