Science and Religion PDF

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INTRODUCTION (PART II) Science and religion The Victorian age seems to be one of unprecedented scientific discovery and technological innovation. Nineteenth-century science and technology determined the shape and nature of the modern age (the motor-car, the telephone, moving pictures, and so on). A second commonplace of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century is that the age of science brought about the decline of religion (Music to Nico’s ears). A further dominant feature of contemporary Western life – secularism – also had its origins in the Victorian period. The excitement and fear engendered by technology, the benefit of science weighed against its social cost, the anomie associated with the loss of the certainties of religion make our relationship with the Victorian age a particularly familiar one, and they also make it possible to characterise this period of history in terms which still resonate today. Thomas Huxley dismissed religion as ‘the deadly enemy of science.’ In the famous meeting in Oxford in 1860, of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Huxley mounted a vigorous defence of Darwinian theories of evolution against the criticism of them made by the Bishop of Oxford (but there is no reliable account of this historic meeting, anyway Huxley was seen as the clear winner). The gradual shift of religion by science was not simply a matter of the substitution of one authority for another; rather, it involved a whole new way of thinking about the ways in which knowledge was to be made authoritative. Medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, mathematics – all these areas of knowledge underwent fundamental and systematic changes in the nineteenth century. The understanding of the body (particularly via immunology and germ-theory, comparative anatomy, embryology and sexology), a new understanding of the atomic theory of matter (which underlies the periodic table), an equally new understanding of the forms of energy, the development of inorganic chemistry, evolutionary theories of development, the discovery of set theory in mathematics (and so on) represented great moments in Victorian science. Adding to them the enormous leaps made in Victorian technology (for example, the perfection of steampowered locomotion, the extensive use of iron and steel (particularly in naval and civil engineering), the development of electric lighting, photography, the telegraph, the use of anaesthetics and antiseptics and the internal combustion engine and early cinematography) it becomes clear that one of the outstanding features of Victorian science and technology was their immediate, large scale and irreversible impact on everyday life. Perhaps the four main areas where that impact was most dramatically experienced were in transport, communications, health and in work. There is the intellectual normalising of what we would now loosely term a scientific epistemology: that is, the belief that scientific knowledge, to all intents and purposes, is knowledge. In the nineteenth century, scientific authority meant rational enquiry (= rational investigation). The rise of Victorian science is inseparable from a larger set of changes in the social organisation of knowledge. In order to be competent in a particular field it became increasingly necessary for

Victorian intellectuals, scientists or scholars to narrow their interests: to specialise. These specialists subsequently introduced new standards of scholarly rigour to protect their specialised knowledge and confirm their status as experts. Ensuring expert standards in turn required a system of formal qualifications, and as knowledge became specialised, so in the late nineteenth century it also became professionalised and institutionalised. One consequence of these developments was that universities themselves were forced to become more professional, and one important function of the far-reaching university reforms set in motion in the middle of the nineteenth century was formally to dissociate academic success from religious orthodoxy. (The Oxford University Act of 1854 and Cambridge University Act of 1856 permitted nonconformists to enter without a religious test to take a BA degree and removed the obligation for fellows to take holy orders; religious tests were abolished altogether in 1871.) Another consequence was that scientific authority became intimately bound up with a scientific ‘establishment’, and it is no accident that the dominant figures in Victorian science, including Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, were all institutional men: they all were active members of organisations such as the Royal Society and the Geological Society, and many also held university posts. The intellectual paradigms established by science themselves became institutionalised, defining what was to count as authoritative knowledge, rather than simply as scientific knowledge. For non-scientific subjects, such as history, under increasing pressure to adopt scientific methods of proof and scientific standards of evidence to be considered authoritative, whole new areas of study were mapped out (the study of the mind → the province of the new scientific discipline of psychology, rather than being a part of philosophy). Psychology itself was conceived as an empirical science, grounded in a materialist study of the brain and its physiology. Similarly the study of natural history passed from the hands of amateur zoologists and botanists (zoology and botany were traditional pastimes of gentlemen in the early Victorian period) into those of professionally qualified experts. Indeed Epitome of such a change is the life of Charles Darwin: the amateur collector of beetles at Cambridge became Secretary of one of the century’s most important learned bodies, the Geological Society, and aired his first thoughts on natural selection to the Linnean Society. Theology itself was not immune from these developments. The ‘crisis in faith’ (as it is sometimes termed) in Victorian Britain was the result of many factors. In the first place, religious controversy was not confined to a series of conflicts with the scientific community. In addition there were significant doctrinal disputes within the Anglican Church, there was an attempt to reintroduce High Church ideals into the Church of England. Behind these doctrinal disputes was a much larger question of the relationship of the Church to the State and therefore the relationship of religious to secular authority. The debate about the role of an established church was, for example, taken up in the 1860s by Matthew Arnold who in Culture and Anarchy identified the anarchic tendencies of modern society with the divisions between the Anglican Church and various dissenting groups. The status of nonconformists was a source of controversy throughout the century, exacerbated as it was by falling church attendance.

The prestige of the Established Church was also undermined by the increasing influence of Dissenters in rural and mining communities, and groups such as the Unitarians among urban élites. Agitation about the political and educational rights of Catholics (which were considerably improved during the nineteenth century) was also a source of conflict. All these dilemmas worked together to problematise religious authority. At the same time, however, they were contained within a conventional religious framework in that they were largely about the nature and role of belief, rather than its possibility. It was this last and more fundamental question which was brought sharply into focus by the dominance of Victorian science, and in two ways. First, there was a growing incompatibility between scientific and religious explanations of the natural world and man’s place in it. Traditionally in what was called ‘natural theology’, science and religion were in harmony as the goal of science was perceived to be the revelation of divine order – of the Creator’s design exhibited in the natural world. Importantly the appeal to empiricism – the scientific appeal to material evidence – was a strategy used to support rather than to undermine faith, and a mechanistic explanation of the universe was accommodated to the notion of an originary cause: a mechanistic universe merely pointed to a divine mechanic. However, the growth of evolutionary theories of development in geology, natural history and biology gradually eroded this concept of a perfect design. As a result the relationship between scientific methodology and religious faith was also undermined. Most significantly, Darwin’s radical speculations about the randomness of nature completely severed it, turning science against religion. In the nineteenth century the idea of evolution was not in itself new; nor was it necessarily controversial. It had for example formed the orthodox narrative of much Victorian historiography: the notion of a gradual evolution in social and political organisation was both familiar and comforting for those who believed in the superiority of Western (and particularly of British) civilisation. Moreover a concept of development also underwrote much natural theology: the acknowledgement of continuous change in the natural world led to a revised concept of creation as a slow and gradual process rather than a singular and fixed event (the natural world developed according to a predetermined divine plan, and was evolving towards perfection). Evolutionary ways of thinking only became controversial when they seemed to hint that the original plan or design was in some sense imperfect, and that the powers of the divine Creator were therefore limited or flawed. There were questions like: If evolution was directed towards some divinely ordained end, why should whole species and genera die? Initially in Britain it was geologists (rather than naturalists) who attempted to explain this illogicality. As in natural history, geological evidence tended to be interpreted in relation to the Bible: that is, the Bible was used to authorise or support geological findings and strict proponents of this principle claimed that the Book of Genesis was literally true and therefore scientifically accurate. When geological evidence began to strain such literalism, geologists (unwilling to relinquish their scientific method, and thus empiricism) tried to establish a new kind of relationship between science and religion. It was based upon a more liberal interpretation of the Bible and a revised view of creation.

Some claimed that individual species went extinct one by one as conditions in the environment changed. The subsequent ‘gaps’ in nature were then filled by the introduction of new species already adapted to occupy those changed conditions. Imaginative as it was, in one obvious way this view of biological evolution was no more satisfactory and the question of precisely how new species appeared was once again attributed to a mysterious creative agency. To recognise the impact of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) we need to appreciate how his understanding of evolution differed from both the transformational view of Lamarck (was a traditionalist; working within the Renaissance concept of the ‘great chain of being’, he assumed a teleological development from simple organisms through to complex ones, and so from imperfection to perfection,insistence on a vertical line of development: that is, all lines of evolution originated from the spontaneous generation of simple cellular organisms: it was only through time that these organisms evolved to their present complexity; his transformational theory, in other words, had no really functional concept of speciation, and in particular no concept of the uniqueness of homo sapiens as a species set apart from the rest of creation) and Chambers (wrote Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation which caused a sensation in 1844, opposed to the idea of a fixed creation he accepted principle of the transformation of organisms, but for him the variety and complexity of species could only be explained by divine intervention, one species to give birth to another in an ascending scale of complexity and perfection, origins of life in turn were explained in terms of spontaneous generation ) on the one hand, and the saltationist thesis of figures such as Lyell (the discrete and objective reality of species was the starting-point of all theories of biological development – species were the basic taxonomic unit of inquiry. Hence to ignore them not only threatened the dignity of man but it was also fundamentally unscientific: without a fixed object of inquiry, Lyell argued, science has nothing to study) on the other. Although controversial, transformation and saltation (is a sudden and large mutational change from one generation to the next, potentially causing single-step speciation = evolving into species) were both based within traditional patterns of thought: transformation implied a teleology – a progress towards perfection; saltation implied an essentialist view of the constancy and autonomy of types or species. Both transformation and saltation, then, saw metaphysical elements in the history of life. Darwin’s notion of evolution, by contrast, was both anti-essentialist (the view that every entity has a set of attributes that are necessary to its identity and function) and anti-teleological. At its centre was his most original and radical insight, the principle of natural selection. For Darwin, both transformation (which explained organic diversity as the result of differential rates of development or adaptation) and saltation (which assumed the number of species to be fixed, new ones only replacing extinct ones) failed to account adequately for the enormous variety in the natural world which he had experienced at first hand during his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle. A completely new way of thinking was required. Darwin’s critical insight explained species diversity in terms of space, rather than (as with Lamarck) simply in terms of time.2 Darwin argued that new species could develop from adaptations in existing populations which had become isolated geographically – on the Galapagos Islands, for example. His second and related insight was to realise a principle of common descent: that such

diversity of species could be traced back to a common ancestor, to the original isolated species which had produced the ‘daughter’ species. Ultimately the origin of all species could be traced back to a single ancestor with the result that man became firmly part of the same order of creation as all other animals and no longer a special creation. Taken together these two concepts – of common descent and geographical isolation – implied a branching model of evolution in which species evolve and multiply through time and by dint of spatial isolation. Such a theory was fundamentally different from the linear scale which had characterised earlier developmental theories. The third and most controversial element in Darwin’s thinking was his concept of adaptation: that is, his theory of natural selection. Rejecting both Lamarck’s notion of acquired traits and Chambers’ idea of embryological development, Darwin offered a revolutionary two-step theory of adaptation based on a gradualist view of change. The theory of natural selection first posits the existence of abundant variability within every generation of a species or population. Today such variation is attributed to random genetic differentiation, but for Darwin its mechanisms remained a theoretical concept only. Secondly, adaptation works on individuals by selecting (through differential rates of reproduction) those who are best adapted to their environment. Moreover competition for resources ensures that only the best adapted will survive. Darwin’s model of nature was greatly influenced by contemporary political economy’s description of a competitive market. It led him to see that the struggle for existence took place between individuals rather than between groups or species, and this in turn permitted him to break from Lyell’s essentialist notion that species were fixed. As a consequence, however, nature became a hostile, ruthless environment, rather than a benign and ordered one – that ‘best possible world’ of natural theology. Even more controversially man’s place in nature was no longer privileged, and nature could no longer be said to be created ‘for’ man. Furthermore, in the constant struggle for survival, there was no direction or purpose to natural selection; there could be no line of development (no progress) because the constantly changing environment meant that every process of selection was (as it were) a ‘new beginning’ – an adaptation to those circumstances only. Although On the Origin of Species had an immediate impact, much of the detail of Darwin’s thesis was imperfectly understood at the time of its original publication. Moreover, many of those who called themselves Darwinists did not agree with every aspect of Darwin’s argument. Thomas Huxley, for example, while accepting common descent and gradualism (principles dramatically expounded in his deliberately provocative Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature), rejected geographical speciation and natural selection. Other figures, such as Herbert Spencer, misappropriated the principle of natural selection to underwrite a form of social engineering. Social Darwinism (as it later became known) asserted that the sufferings of the poor or weak were an inevitable consequence of the ‘survival of the fittest’ (a phrase actually coined by Spencer); hence any attempt by the state to intervene in order to alleviate such suffering had the negative impact of hindering the ‘progress’ of society as a whole. (Nico’s thoughts: what the actual fuck?) It has been argued that despite the rediscovery of genetics in 1900, it was not in fact until the late 1930s that natural selection was properly understood and finally accepted. (Indeed it is indisputable that the most systematic attempts to use eugenics to engineer society took place in

the 1930s and 1940s.) Hence when we talk about Darwinism or the impact of Darwin’s views about evolution, we need to exercise some caution. Most importantly, perhaps, Darwinism in the nineteenth century meant different things to different people. It is nonetheless true that his impact on the culture of his time was immediate and far-reaching. It is worth stressing that Darwin’s view of nature and of man’s origins was directly opposed both to traditional creationist arguments and to attempted accommodations between creationism and science. In short, after the publication of On the Origin of Species it was increasingly difficult to see a compatibility between science and religion. Darwin’s scrupulous empiricism was important here, for in many of the controversies over his work it was the overwhelming detail of the evidence which he had marshalled which proved decisive. In other words, On the Origin of Species represented not only the vindication of a particular scientific theory, but also a triumph of the intellectual coherence of the scientific method itself. Thereafter science no longer had to prove itself in the court of religion; rather religion had to justify itself in the face of a scientifically based scepticism. One way in which this process can be seen is in the application of the scientific method to the Bible itself. In the second half of the nineteenth century, influenced by German biblical criticism, a number of Anglican theologians argued that it was no longer possible to dismiss the results of recent scientific inquiry and scholarship, and that the status of theology (and the Bible) would be better served by actively employing such methods rather than ignoring them. In broad terms this programme amounted to substituting a historicised reading of the Bible for the more usual literal reading. Someone argued that the Bible should be treated as any other book – not as the product of direct divine inspiration, but as a historically determined document expressive of the individual characteristics of its various authors. In 1860 a group of seven liberal Anglicans published a collection of pieces broadly in this vein, although they had no editorial policy and no overall plan for their volume. Entitled Essays and Reviews, the book caused a furore and w...