Religion and Science

Fundamentally a religious age – more so than the preceding 18th C. Why?

Fear that Enlightenment scepticism had led to the French Revolution

Belief that religion bound a society together:

“an established religion...is the sanction of moral obligation; it gives authority to the commandments, creates a fear of doing wrong, and a sense of responsibility for doing it....” (J.A. Froude, The Nemesis of Faith)

Sermons frequently published – some bestsellers

Bibles available at railway stations

Missionary fervor –David Livingstone 1813-73, doctor and missionary, a national hero. London Missionary Society

Catholic Emancipation –1828 & 1829 acts of parliament removed restrictions on Catholics in public office

Tractarians and Oxford Movement in the Church of England: John Henry Newman, John Keble and Edward Pusey. regarded the Church of England as a branch of the universal Church led by the Pope

The Methodist movement reached 489,000 by 1850.

evangelical revivals in Wales and Scotland, and sects such as the Baptists and Unitarians won mass adherence in mining and industrial districts across Britain.

Nonconformist movements all emphasized a simple form of religion, dependent on the Bible, without ritual, and with open-air sermons to attract support.

Survey of Public Worship Sunday 30 March 1851

Mann commented that “a sadly formidable portion of the English people are habitual neglecters of the public ordinances of religion”

7 Million (out of 18 million population) attended public worship 400, 000 Catholic

3.35 million Anglican

3.25 million Protestant Dissenting / Nonconformist (Methodist, Congregationalist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Unitarian)

David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874)

Das Leben Jesu’or ‘Life of Jesus’ (1835) (Translated by the then unknown ‘George Eliot’ in 1846)

“"the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell.” (Lord Shaftsbury)

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)

In The Essence of Christianity’ (1841) he states: “the secret of theology is anthropology”. -man is not made in God’s image, but rather, it is the other way round.

William Paley’s ‘Natural Theology’ (1802)

Divine wisdom could be discerned in nature which seemed to offer an independent proof of the existence of God (the watchmaker)

Only an intelligent Designer could have created animals and plants, just as only an intelligent watchmaker can make a watch:

‘The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is GOD.’

Charles Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology’ (1830)

undermined the account of the Book of Genesis as it asserted that the mineralized remains of dead organisms preserved in the layers of the stratified rock formations, told of a universe infinitely older than the one in the Genesis.

Lyell developed James Hutton’s principle of ‘uniformitarianism’ : that what seem the most stable elements of the world have changed gradually over time due to observable phenomena such as volcanic activity and wind and water erosion.

Robert Chambers ‘Vestiges of the Natural History Creation’ (1844)

His argument of the development hypothesis was mainly drawn from the sciences such as geology, astronomy and Lamarck’s evolutionary theory

Lamarck (1744-1829) argued that organic changes were to be understood as a response to changed environmental circumstances rather than being fixed and created by Divine power. E.g. The giraffe:

Romantics to VIctorians

Respected zoologist / marine biologist + fervent Evangelical Invented seawater aquarium, popularised

natural science,

Omphalos (1857) Attempts to reconcile Biblical story of

Creation with Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) explaining former changes of earth’s surface, by

reference to causes now in operation ‘Prochronism’ – since living things had cycle

of reproduction & development, God must have created them in act of developing

Son Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) – poet, author, critic Memoir Father and Son (1907) – portrays

father as fundamentalist zealot whose faith he rejects

1831-1836 Voyage of the Beagle

1836-38 Development of the main elements of the theory of evolution

1859 The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1st ed.

1871 The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

1872 The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals

Random variation within populations

Natural selection in the struggle for existence

Transmutation of Species

Common Ancestor(s)

The Principle of Diversification

The Tree of Life

“the view, which most naturalists until recently entertained, and which I formerly entertained – that each species has been independently created - is erroneous.” Species had not been made in their final form by God but changed and evolved over time.

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Darwin’s Bulldog – Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)

Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873)

1860 Oxford Evolution Debate between Huxley and Wilberforce

“First, then, he not obscurely declares that he applies his scheme of the action of the principle of natural selection to MAN himself, as well as to the animals around him. Now, we must say at once, and openly, that such a notion is absolutely incompatible not only with single expressions in the word of God on that subject of natural science with which it is not immediately concerned, but, which in our judgment is of far more importance, with the whole representation of that moral and spiritual condition of man which is its proper subject-matter. Man's derived supremacy over the earth; man's power of articulate speech; man's gift of reason; man's free-will and responsibility; man's fall and man's redemption; the incarnation of the Eternal Son; the indwelling of the Eternal Spirit,—all are equally and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God, and redeemed by the Eternal Son assuming to himself his nature.” Wilberforce, Review of Origin of the Species

George Combe:TheConstitution of Man, Considered in Relation to External Objects, published in 1828, became a best seller

Mesmerism claimed miraculous medical cures could be affected by manipulating the invisible flows of ‘animal magnetism’ that passed through and between bodies.

The Mesmerist would throw his subject into a trance, allowing the passage of energy into the weaker body of his patient, as if literally recharging their battery

George Eliot’s novella, The Lifted Veil, (1959) - a central male character Latimer who has psychic/ clairvoyant powers. He marries unhappily. When his wife’s maid dies, a blood transfusion is able, briefly, to bring her back from the dead so that she can name her murderer.

Spiritualism contested doctrines of eternal damnation for a much more liberal conception of the afterlife.

Many men of science were also converts, most famously the evolutionary theorist Alfred Russel Wallace,

Spiritualism was consistently figured in terms of new magical technologies like the telegraph or telephone.