The events of Saturday 30 June 1860 in the library of the new Museum of Natural History of the University of Oxford during the annual meeting of the British Association present the historian with a number of serious problems. That afternoon Samuel Wilberforce, Thomas Henry Huxley and Joseph Dalton Hooker engaged, with others, in a discussion of The Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin the previous November. This discussion was poorly reported at the time and late nineteenth-century reconstructions of it were deliberately designed to turn the event into a major milestone in the supposed struggle between a triumphant science and a vanquished religion, thereby giving it a mythological guise.

Modern historians tackling the debate are troubled by at least three issues: the paucity of evidence for the event itself, the necessity of understanding the subsequent mythologizing process, and the modern contexts in which the Oxford discussion is still referred to, inevitably inaccurately, by scientists and by proponents of the Christian right – especially in North America. The last confronts many historians with a particularly difficult dilemma since I, at least, have no desire to provide any support whatsoever to the Christian right, but with equal vehemence do not wish to be associated with the ill-informed and triumphalist views of the former Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

Addressing the first issue, the methodology pursued by Hesketh is to spend the first four chapters summarizing the life, work and views of Wilberforce, Huxley and Hooker as well as those of Darwin and the comparative anatomist Richard Owen. Neither of the last two were at the meeting, although Owen had spent the previous evening staying in Wilberforce's palace. All these discussions are entirely based on the secondary literature, which on occasion leads Hesketh astray. For example, on p. 42 he quotes the famous letter to Darwin of February 1839 from his new wife Emma, but cites a 1915 source rather than volume 2 of Darwin's Correspondence. This causes Hesketh to assume that Emma was discussing Darwin's grandfather rather than his brother.

Hesketh's final two chapters are on what he entitles ‘The Oxford Debate’ itself and ‘Remembering the Oxford Debate’. Since the afternoon discussion lasted roughly four hours and the contemporary evidence about it is limited, one might expect, in a book-length study, a comprehensive and accurate use of sources, especially as a great deal of scholarly effort has gone into studying it in recent years. Instead there is again an over-reliance on the secondary literature – the only archives used are the Huxley papers in Imperial College and the Wilberforce papers in the Bodleian. Even when Hesketh does use primary material he has problems identifying individuals. To take one example: throughout the book he confuses Adam Storey Farrar (a professor at Durham University and a canon of the cathedral there), who was present in Oxford, with Frederic William Farrar (apparently no relation but dean of Canterbury rather than bishop of Durham as Hesketh asserts (p. 84)), who was not. Hesketh does not make use of the important documents in the Library of Congress relating to John William Draper, whose paper commenced the afternoon, nor does he use some of the few newspaper accounts, especially the important references in the weekly Literary Gazette. He thus missed the complaint in Jackson's Oxford Journal about the poor facilities accorded to reporters during the meeting, which may go a long way to explain our lack of knowledge of the afternoon. And so on.

This lack of comprehensiveness impacts on the understanding of how the discussion was (re-)created at the end of the nineteenth century and its current relevance to contemporary concerns. Here I found it impossible to discern what Hesketh is trying to say. At one point he claims that the discussion ‘had become a key victory in the rhetorical battle between science and religion’ (p. 97), and, two pages later, ‘Despite their success in dismantling the previous compromise between science and religion, many scientific naturalists continued their drive to secularize science’. And then, ‘As we have seen, it isn't so certain that he [Wilberforce] was defeated on that occasion’ (p. 102). I think what is happening here is that Hesketh is caught in the dilemma I mentioned above and cannot see how to get out of it.

What we need to do is to consider the whole issue of science and religion in much broader social and cultural contexts. The notion that there are unchanging things called ‘science’ and ‘religion’, that there once existed a ‘compromise’ between them and that there then came a ‘war’ has been thoroughly discredited by scholarship over the last few decades. Nevertheless, the claim is still popularly made that the ‘rise of science’ brought about the ‘decline of Christianity’. This fails to take account of the many other factors at work in the decline of Christianity in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the endless debates and heresy trials conducted in extraordinarily unpleasant ways by theologians, the mass slaughter in the trenches and extermination camps, and illiberal church views on women and sexuality. Indeed, both historically and now, I have come across very few people whose belief system was solely shaped by science. The claim that science could have achieved the decline of Christianity all by itself is merely an arrogant assertion made by a few scientists who, continuing in the mode of Huxley and John Tyndall, have an ideological axe to grind. I am surprised that anyone takes them seriously.

This, of course, applies to Europe; it is different in North America, where Christianity is still strong – surely that in itself must give the lie to ‘science’ being somehow innately opposed to ‘religion’. But because the debate has become so polarized in North America, with scientists feeling that they are under attack from the Christian right, who in turn feel that they are being attacked by a powerful irreligious group, there seems to be no middle ground. It is clear from Hesketh's ‘Epilogue: the history of the present’ that this is the context in which he is writing. In theory, historians should be able to bring some sense and broader perspectives to these debates. However, to command the respect needed to achieve this, historical studies will have to be more contextual, comprehensive and accurate than this volume.