Tyndall's Presidential Address to the British Association meeting in Belfast in 1874 is in many ways more important than the Huxley/Wilberforce clash in 1860. Huxley was merely trying to secure a fair hearing for Darwin's theory, from churchmen and scientists who were opposed to it. Tyndall was making sweeping claims for science as such, which he presents as providing a complete ‘materialistic’ explanation of the whole physical world and its origins. In the first half of the Address, Tyndall had set up a ‘conflict’ model of the relations between science and religion. He surveys the history of science as he sees it, starting promisingly with the Greeks, but later stifled by theology:

Religious thought is seen as retarding scientific thought, completely ignoring the huge debt that nineteenth-century science owed to natural theology. Tyndall presents intellectual history as a battle between the dark and the light, theology and science: in this he was influenced by Draper's The Intellectual Development of Europe (1862), one of the sources of the ‘warfare’ myth of the relations between science and religion.