The Oxford Debate was held in June 1860 at Oxford University, only seven months after the publication of *Darwin’s Origin of the Species. A special meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it marked a major turning point in England,—just as the 1925 Scopes Trial would be the turning point in North America. Scientific facts had little to do with either event; both were just battles between personalities. In both instances, evolutionists won through ridicule. They dared not rely on scientific facts to support their case, because they had none.

Samuel Wilberforce, Anglican bishop of Oxford University, was scheduled to speak that evening in defense of Creationism. *Huxley had lectured on behalf of evolution in many English cities and was not planning to attend that night. But *Chambers, a spiritualist adviser to Huxley, was impressed to find and tell him he must attend.

Wilberforce delivered a vigorous attack on evolution for half an hour before a packed audience of 700 people. His presentation was outstanding, and the audience was apparently with him. But then Wilberforce turned and rhetorically asked Huxley a humorous question, whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that Huxley claimed descent from an ape.

Huxley was extremely sharp-witted and, at the bishop’s question, he clasped the knee of the person sitting next to him, and said, “He is delivered into my hands!”

Huxley arose and worked the audience up to a climax, and then declared that he would feel no shame in having an ape as an ancestor, but would be ashamed of a brilliant man who plunged into scientific questions of which he knew nothing (John W. Klotz, “Science and Religion,” in Studies in Creation, 1985, pp. 45-46).

At this, the entire room went wild, some yelling one thing and others another. On a pretext so thin, the evolutionists in England became a power which scientists feared to oppose. We will learn that ridicule heaped on ridicule, through the public press, accomplished the same results for American evolutionists in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925.

Source: Evolution Handbook