Evolution And Religion - Instant Essays

Religion & Evolution Essays

Creationsim vs. Evolution :: Science Religion Essays

The only problem with this account of that June day in Oxford is that most of it is tendentious and some of it simply untrue. Since at least the 1980s, historians have widely regarded the traditional account of that day as a myth or legend. The exchange between Huxley and Wilberforce, these revisionist accounts have shown, barely registered on public consciousness at the time, mainly because press coverage of the event was so limited. Nor was the exchange part of a formal debate, instead arising more or less spontaneously during a discussion that included a number of other participants following another speaker’s paper. Wilberforce’s case against Darwinism was made primarily on scientific and philosophical, not religious, grounds, and some thought botanist Joseph Hooker, another friend and ally of Darwin’s, the more effective defender of the evolutionary faith. The exact forms of Wilberforce’s question and Huxley’s retort are uncertain, and the most detailed contemporary journalistic account of their exchange, in the Athenaeum, mentioned neither. Opinions of participants and observers were divided as to who could claim victory, and on what grounds. One of the few contemporary journalistic accounts of the exchange even cast the event as a sign of toleration, not hostility, between science and religion.

Evolution religion vs science essay - OAB Roraima

It is hardly surprising that Darwin’s theory of evolution should meet with so much resistance. We encounter an idea that comforts us, an account like that establishes our specialness, and ask: “Can I believe it?” We consider a thing that troubles us, a process like evolution that seems chance-driven and dethrones us from our special place in the universe, and ask instead: “Must I believe it?”

Free Religion Essays and Papers

The British Association for the Advancement of Science was a relatively young organization in 1860, having been founded just thirty years before. Membership and participation were to be more meritocratic than Britain’s most prestigious and much older scientific body, the Royal Society of London (f. 1660), although gaining power and authority meant inclusion of sympathetic aristocrats, urban gentry, and wealthy manufacturers. To promote the pursuit of science throughout Britain, the Association’s annual meeting moved from city to city, and some of the proceedings were open to the public. The Association was dominated in its early decades, however, by a gentlemanly elite centered in London and Cambridge, many of them in holy orders (see Morrell and Thackray). For these men, mindful of the connections between scientific materialism and radical politics and atheism, particularly in France and among the medical community in London (see Desmond, Politics of Evolution), natural science should be pursued and defended as a buttress to Christianity, and thus to the moral and political order of society. This gentlemanly elite reserved to itself the right to speculate and theorize; those from the provinces or without connections to traditional institutional bulwarks like the ancient universities or the Royal College of Surgeons were expected to confine themselves to such empirical enterprises as field observations and data collection, preferably as part of a larger project endorsed by the elites.