The "Conflict Thesis" and Scientific Naturalism
The zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley, along with his friends, physicist John Tyndall and evolutionist philosopher Herbert Spencer have been central to all accounts of the history of science-religion relationships in the 19th century. Before 1970s, when the “conflict thesis" widely dominated, these “scientific naturalists” were presented as heroes of science, courageous defenders of the theory of evolution from the assaults of Christian reactionaries. However, from 1970s on, the historians started to question the “conflict thesis”, and a new, “complexity thesis” has been formulated. The real position of Huxley and his colleagues turned out to be unclear in this new historiographic perspective: can we extend the “complexity thesis” to their thought? This paper is trying to find an uneasy answer to this question.