Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
neutrality that was won by claiming to have joined a “materialistic terminol-
ogy with the repudiation of materialistic philosophy” that enabled him to
join with Archbishop Thomson in the next passage in hewing “M. Comte
in pieces, as a modern Agag.” By portraying himself as a scientific Samuel
and Comte as the Amalekite king he would slay in the name of the Lord,
Huxley invoked a traditional Baconian vision. Science remained the sword
of Christendom wielded against the idols of philosophy. No one listening
would have mistaken Huxley for an orthodox Anglican, but this did not
really matter. In the Baconian mind-set that he appealed to, science was
already metaphysically neutral. So long as it read the topic of nature exactly
as God had written it, it could not help but be the ally of religion. The per-
sonal beliefs even of an infidel like Huxley did not matter.
e
volution
Plus
c
hRistianity
If English society was in danger of being infected with Comtian positivism,
Huxley's cure was to inoculate it with the germ of an indigenous strain of the
same thing. Positivism's reincarnation as agnosticism enabled him to work
two audiences of prospective constituents simultaneously, the same radical
elements that were drawn to positivist scientism and a larger, more moder-
ate representation of the old Protestant order that still resonated to Baco-
nian conceptions of science. To use an adage that Huxley himself sometimes
employed, we find him “holding with the hare and hunting with the hounds.”
But how do these enduring Protestant themes in Huxley's rhetoric
anticipate evolutionism? How do they enable us to understand why evolu-
tionary science was destined to become tied up with the scientific ethos?
Part of the answer comes from thinking through the symbolic potential
that biological evolution held for a culture already accustomed to regarding
nature as a theological text. To the extent that Protestants already regarded
empirical science as revelation, historical meaning was likewise a logical
complement of scientific knowledge. If special revelation was destined to
culminate in the purification of Christ's bride, natural revelation was des-
tined to culminate in the restoration of the creation. This was what had
made the millenarian features of Bacon's
New Atlantis
the logical comple-
ment to his efforts to link science with the Protestant reform movement. A
corresponding historical endpoint for natural revelation was needed to go
with the millenarian one that Protestants envisioned in eschatology. Just
as the restoration of the Bible was destined to purify the church, science's
restoration of natural revelation was destined, via technical application, to
