Science and Darwinism

As the nineteenth century progressed, scientific thought was often viewed as undermining faith, and was repeatedly employed with that intent. In Germany, materialist scientific

Entries A-Z 545

ideas often assailed religious belief. Carl Vogt’s Blind Faith and Science (1854) was followed the next year by Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter (1855), both highly influential books, and their authors were both prominent models of men of science who opposed religion. The scientific work with by far the most ripple effects, however, was undoubtedly Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species (1859). Darwinism was considered by many to be a challenge to faith because it appeared to undermine the notion that human beings were unique creatures made in the image of God and possessing an immortal soul and a moral nature that set them apart from animals. It also did not seem reconcilable with a more literal interpretation of the accounts in the book of Genesis of the origin of the species. Furthermore, it assumed that cruelty, violence and death on a massive scale were written into the very pattern of life, a notion that seemed incompatible with belief in a good, loving and allpowerful divine creator. Losses of faith ensued. Darwin himself quietly became an agnostic. The English mathematician and philosopher W.K.Clifford had his crisis of faith due to his encounter with Darwinism, and then proceeded to add to the sceptical tradition by arguing that it was immoral to believe something without sufficient evidence (something that he thought religious claims lacked). The German scientist Ernst Haeckel also lost his faith through imbibing Darwin’s work. He went on to unsettle the faith of many others by disseminating Darwinism, notably in his History of Creation (1868) and The Riddle of the Universe (1899).

It must be borne in mind, however, that many Christians did not believe that Darwinism was incompatible with faith and readily harmonized it. For example, the leading champion of Darwinism in the USA, the Harvard professor Asa Gray, was a theologically conservative Christian. The so-called ‘battle between science and religion’ was, to a certain extent, manufactured by scientists who personally disliked religion, who opposed it for political reasons or who felt that it was necessary to curb the authority of religion in order to develop a new profession for themselves (being scientists) that would

be recognized as having its own sphere of authority in which it was the final arbiter of what is true. T.H.HUXLEY, the scientist who championed Darwinism in England, is an example of someone who took this combative approach. Huxley also made an enduring contribution to the conceptualization of unbelief by coining the word ‘agnosticism’ in 1869. In the USA, the war metaphor of the relationship between scientific and religious thought was advanced through J.W.Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and A.D.White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Darwinism was also unsettling because it undermined the argument from design, the notion that the evidence of order, design and intentionality in creation proved that there must have been a divine creator. Christians had employed this argument so prominently that it almost came to be viewed as a kind of tenet of faith. By giving a cogent alternative explanation for the evidence for design in nature, Darwinism dislodged

a prominent plank of Christian apologetics and gave numerous people confidence that it was possible to have a credible world-view without recourse to religious ideas. Although Darwinism sometimes prompted crises of faith, more often people who were already alienated from religion latched onto it as an alternative way to understand the world, and these individuals sometimes enlisted Darwinism as a powerful weapon in campaigns to undermine faith.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 546 Scientific work in other disciplines also contributed to crises of faith, the fields of

anthropology and comparative religion being prime examples. Studies of more ‘primitive’ societies in remote parts of the world undercut the notion that one’s own religion was the result of divine revelation and instead fostered the suspicion that it was simply the product of culture. Christian beliefs regarding atonement and baptism, for example, could lose their unique import once one perceived analogies to tribal sacrificial and purification rituals elsewhere. A Canadian sea captain, Robert C.Adams, who came to such conclusions through his travels, went on to be a vocal unbeliever. Sir John Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times (1865) and The Origins of Civilization (1870) triggered crises of faith along these lines. The work of the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor further served to unsettle believers.

Science and Darwinism