God head-to-head with science

For, on offer was a rematch of a titanic intellectual contest that passed into Oxford legend almost 150 years ago, when the scientist Thomas Huxley took on Samuel ‘Soapy’ Wilberforce to win the day for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Tight-laced women were said to have fainted as Huxley laid into the stuffy Bishop of Oxford, who had tried to ridicule Darwin’s theories.

With traditional church-dominated thinking well and truly flattened, the meeting was said to have ended in uproar, with the hero of the hour being chaired shoulder high from the scene of science’s greatest victory.

Last week events were being staged all over the world to mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, with 300 events being held in the UK alone.

But Oxford stole a march on everyone by offering us, not just museum pieces and manuscripts, but the delicious prospect of ‘The Scientist versus the Bishop: The Rematch’.

Nor had the organisers been squeamish when it came to selecting two serious heavyweight combatants to debate whether the story of creation really does all come down to the survival of the fittest.

If Huxley came to be regarded in the Victorian age as Darwin’s bulldog, there is no doubt who is recognised as Darwin’s rottweiller today.

Richard Dawkins, is the most ferocious atheist of his age. Never mind that his book, The God Delusion, sold in excess of two million copies, Oxford University’s Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, is so famous that his character even appeared in an episode of South Park, the cult American cartoon series. It is an honour perhaps just one step below the ultimate measure of celebrity — a role in The Simpsons.

Pitched against him would be Lord Harries, until recently the high-profile Bishop of Oxford, who has sparred with Prof Dawkins on numerous occasions in the past.

“Dawkins is one of the attack dogs of fundamentalist atheism,” Lord Harries told the Independent. “The old atheism was content to say that Christianity was untrue. The new attack dogs also say it is dangerous. Christopher Hitchens calls it a poison in the system. That’s fighting talk.” Not that Lord Harries really needed to talk up a debate that was always going to be a hot ticket, as the original event had been on June 30, 1860.

And what an audience. Last Thursday it seemed that every row contained at least five Oxford professors, with a number from Cambridge University (where Charles Darwin went as a student in 1827) and an impressive smattering of Nobel Prize winners for good measure.

By way of warm-up, many had arrived in the lecture hall straight from a concert in the Sheldonian Theatre, where Oxford Philomusica had performed excerpts from Haydn’s Creation with the choir of New College. Even Prof Dawkins had found it inspiring, although he later complained: “Even the wonderful music of Haydn couldn’t disguise the banality of the words we were listening to. It needs great poetry to express the wonder of the universe. But Genesis isn’t it.”

For the audience, too, there was the thrill of reliving history, because the evolution debate would be taking place in the very place where it had been originally staged.

Well, almost.

The 1860 meeting took place in a library that has now been sub-divided into smaller rooms on two floors, making it impossible to picture the scene, after one of those maddeningly practical decisions that deprives Oxford seeing a place that witnessed a key moment in the development of the modern world.

The entrance is usually bolted with a plaque outside the door recording the event. Instead we had to be satisfied with being in another historic room, where Sir Oliver Lodge sent the first radio signal one year before Marconi.

And it would all be happening under the gaze of a modern day broadcasting giant, Jeremy Paxman, who had agreed to act as chairman, ensuring fair play in an event to recreate a confrontation from the Victorian age, organised by the Institute of Biology.

Paxman set the scene by reminding us of a legendary exchange, even more famous than his Newsnight clash with Michael Howard. Samuel Wilberforce (“not being played by the retired bishop on my left,” he assured us) had asked Huxley whether it was on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side that claimed descent from a monkey.

Huxley reportedly hit straight back with the immortal put down that he would rather have been descended from a monkey than a bishop.

So, could we look forward to similar abuse and verbal cut and thrust?

Already, the Newsnight presenter was having serious doubts, detecting the whiff of “a friendly stitch-up”.

“I had the impression that we would be recreating the Huxley-Wilberforce debate of 1860. But I am alarmed that both of you have agreed to have a civilised conversation, involving no such invective,” he said.

Paxman’s worst fears seemed to be confirmed as both men set out their shared regard for Darwin, who had been unable because of illness to attend the original debate, which attracted between 700 and 1,000 people.

Darwin, below, was a gentle, lovely man, who had once seriously thought about being ordained, said Lord Harries. And, what’s more, Darwin, like the former bishop, never saw any inherent incompatibility between the Christian faith and his theory of evolution.

As for Wilberforce, Lord Harries assured us that ‘Soapy’ was, in fact, no slouch. With a first in maths, he was in fact a respected ornithologist whose review of The Origin of Species was heralded as “uncommonly clever” by Darwin himself.

The original debate took place only a few months after the publication of Darwin’s masterpiece, when most of the science community did not accept Darwin’s idea.

Prof Dawkins turned out to be dismissive of the whole Huxley-Wilberforce event, in any case. “I confess that I have always regarded the debate as a bit of a bore. I am more interested in the issues than who won debating points.”

If Wilberforce had been expected to wipe the floor with Huxley, this one was always set to go the full distance.

Lord Harries is hardly a believer in the story of Adam and Eve and could not distance himself much further from American fundamentalism, but he soon found himself under a double attack on the issue of creationism.

Prof Dawkins challenged him and other clergy to do more to put their flocks straight on the issue of evolution, at a time when 50 per cent of people in America still believe in the literal truth of Genesis.

Paxman waded in by asking how people are to know which parts of the Bible are true and which are not.

So, is the virgin birth a myth as well as the Garden of Eden? demanded Paxman. There was a hush before Lord Harries replied: “The virgin birth can be interpreted either way.”

An answer that did little to satisfy his atheist friend, nor, we may guess, a significant number of true believers either.

With the evening in danger of becoming a debate on the unanswerable questions of religion, Paxman steered the discussion back to the birthday boy.

Prof Dawkins seized the moment with a masterful summary of Darwin’s achievement.

Darwin had a big idea, arguably the biggest and most powerful idea ever. Yet it offers a beguilingly simple answer to explain life on this planet, and on any other planet come to that. An idea powerful enough to blow away the idea of creation, and simple enough to be stated in a sentence.

It explains all of life, all its consequences, everything that possesses more than minimal complexity, he said, adding: “That is what science does, explaining how we get to wonderful things by starting with something simple,” he said.

Lord Harries fell back on the words of the Victorian novels: “God does not just make the world, he does something much more wonderful, he makes the world make itself.”

By then, even Jeremy Paxman appeared to have given up any hope of injecting controversy into what had really become a congenial discussion between two old sparring partners.

But nobody fainted, no one was humiliated and Darwin had been properly celebrated.

And if most people left thinking Dawkins had narrowly won, it was because his argument did not complicate Darwin’s genius with the Scriptures or anything else.

The theory of natural selection may be cruel, but the logic is beautiful.