Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes: Reconsidering the History of Science and Christianity (Part Three)
This reliance on the typical historiographical caricatures has, as we stated, begun to change. To
stick with the same historical environment of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate,
Aileen Fyfe in her fascinating recent study Science
and Salvation, has painted a much different picture of Evangelicals and
their relationship to science. By no
longer focusing on major figures, but on Christian pamphlet and popular science
publishing for the masses, she demonstrates just how interested in science
evangelicals were. “It was probable that
most of these evangelicals [covered in her book] did not spend a lot of time
worrying about the relationship between ‘science and religion,’ but just got on with writing about the sciences
[from an evangelical perspective].”[1] Her conclusion is that leading evangelicals
and laymen in the mid-nineteenth century were not so much worried about
scientific conclusions, but rather the “distorting manner” in which these
discoveries were presented as evidence for atheism.[2] The evidence of these widely circulated
pamphlets and books by the Royal Tract Society indicates that the supposed
antagonism of nineteenth-century evangelicals to science grossly distorts the
reality. Rather, a significant portion
of the most widely read science books in the post-Darwinian era presented the
sciences—even the variety of evolutionary theories, Darwinian, Lamarckian, or
otherwise—in an altogether different light than that of the secularizing young
guard like Huxley and John Tyndall.
Thus
Fyfe, through her historical work, attempts to write a “people’s history,” of
science and religion, as it were, which moves the focus from examining the
topic as the interaction of ideal types floating on the open plains in the
heads of geniuses, to one in which attitudes can be discerned from “practical
activities, like writing and publishing.” Fyfe’s work represents a broad
category of historiographical re-thinking that is not only deconstructing the Warfare
thesis, but refuses some of its most cherished terms by taking broader, or
unusual angles, to discern details hitherto hidden by preconceptions regarding
both content and method. Another example
of this would be the work of Sujit Sivasundaram. If Fyfe shifted the camera-focus to popular
works of science and their reception, Sivasundaram broadens the frame to a more
global scale, and argues that evangelical missionary work—in particular his
case study is that of the London Missionary Society—demonstrates not only that
evangelicals had an immensely positive (albeit diverse) relationship to the
sciences, they saw this as key to their missionary efforts:
[My
work] is a concerted attempt to examine the emergence of science and religion
and their interdependences outside the West.
In doing this [I] attempt to stretch the burgeoning historiography of
science and religion outside its traditional focus on Europe and America. Its is my claim that the missionaries who
followed in the wake of [Captain] Cook saw themselves as practitioners of
science, while their knowledge [taken from their exotic locales] was avidly
consumed by a religious populace [back in London]. … I will present these
natural historical practices—both private and public—as a form of knowledge
that eludes categorization as science, religion, or colonialism. … Our modern
classifications were still undefined, and so science was indistinguishable from
religion or empire.[3]
This of course comes with its own set of
problems—regarding how the missionaries treated and classified indigenous
people, for instance, or how their idea of the “universality” of Christianity
looked, unsurprisingly, very much like a Victorian Gentleman. Yet the point of all this—our essay
included—is not to present a hagiography for Christians who never did anything
wrong. It is rather to present them in
their humanness and complexity, attempting as best we can to avoid caricature
and understand the messiness of the human endeavor of understanding the world
we find ourselves in. Science served a
variety of purposes for the missionaries.
One being that the emphasis on conversion as a “matter of the heart”
meant that it became exceedingly difficult for the missionaries to “see” their
results. Thus part of the project of conversion
was “achieving civilization,” that is, making the natives into scientific
practitioners themselves.[4] As such Sivasundaram advises that
“re-evaluation of the meta-narrative of how Darwinism disentangled science from
religion are therefore needed. Instead
of proposing a clean account of how science became secular in the nineteenth
century, [we should] emphasize the diversity of contexts in which the relations
of knowledge and belief were forged.”[5]
It
is no wonder then that the histories of the interaction and reception of Darwin
by Evangelicals back in Britain and America were much more nuanced than the
typical stories of outright horror and rejection would have us believe.[6] It seems the encounter with Darwinism did
little to change any affiliation with religion, for example. In a statistical study of members of the
National Academy of Sciences—whose members ranged from atheist, to agnostic, to
Christians of all stripes—Ronald Numbers notes “I have found no evidence in
either biographical or autobiographical accounts to suggest that a single one
of these men severed his religious ties as a direct result of his encounter
with Darwinism.” By and large, Numbers
continues, “Catholic naturalists in the Academy remained Catholic, the
Presbyterians remained Presbyterian, and the agnostics remained agnostic.”[7]
Not
even Darwin was a “de-converted” Darwinian.
It was not his theory that shook his faith; after the death of his
father and favorite daughter Annie, it was the problem of evil that rendered
him agnostic.[8] And while we can in no sense make light of
this tragic and severe question mark over traditional Christian theism, it is
also a struggle that has hardly been unique to the Victorian era. Just as telling regarding the weakness of
traditional theories of how reception of Darwin’s theory occurred, is the fact
that those who supported Darwin, and those who rejected him do not fall into
what we would assume would be the usual Liberal vs. Conservative spectrum.[9] In fact, one of the first and most famous
supporters in America was the Harvard Botanist and conservative Evangelical,
Asa Gray, while one of the most powerful scientific opponents to Darwin was the
liberal Unitarian and scientific celebrity, Louis Agazzis. And yet as a liberal, Agazzis nonetheless
advocated special creation—dozens, in fact, at least one for each time the
earth was de-populated via cataclysm.
Nor was it the Bible alone that made him believe in the immutability of
animal forms—rather it was his time in Germany studying with the German
Idealists. That sound you hear is
history laughing, as we make generalities.
To
be fair, it was not all White and Draper, as if the Warfare Metaphor was some
atheist conspiracy. As Numbers puts it
the Warfare Metaphor has been driven in turn by many Christian
Fundamentalists. Just as Draper read all
of religion in the totalitarian and repressively dogmatic form of Pius IX, so
too the Fundamentalists “because of their unprecedented success in pushing evangelicals
to choose between young- and old-Earth histories, after the early 1960’s the
flood geologists increasingly dictated the terms of debate over origins”[10]
precisely because “many, ignorant of history, equated it with traditional
biblical creationism.”[11]
Indeed by the last decades of the 20th century the richness of
Christian theology and its diverse opinions of an even more diverse array of
scientific practices seemed to shrivel in the popular consciousness as
Young-Earth Creationists “virtually co-opted the creationist label,” in the
public mind.[12]
This
narrowing of issues happened in the South as well, where subjects of science
and Christianity became blended with notions of Southern identity, which were
also under strain due to the recent loss in the Civil War.[13] This entanglement with Southern identity
played a part as well in the Scopes Trial, perhaps one of the most famous
display pieces on the walking tour of the Warfare Metaphor. But, as Adam Shapiro demonstrates in his
fascinating book Trying Biology, the
Scopes Trial was a storm related as much to education reform, textbook
politics, and invasive urban teaching methods seen to threaten the rural way of
life by indoctrinating children with aspirations for the city, as it was about
Genesis and science:
Considering
the way in which biology education was brought to places like the rural South
and the ideological agenda associated with biology textbook authors, it is easy
to understand the emergence of the school antievolution movement without
appealing to a conflict with the biblical account of creation. Religion
initially intersected the school antievolution movement, not because evolution
disproved Genesis, but because the issue of compulsory public schooling was
frequently seen in religious terms, especially in the South. … Control of the
schools was viewed by many Tennessee parents as a matter of cultural religious
identity. … To reform the culture, as progressives tried to do in the early
twentieth century, would mean a symbolic rejection of the ways of the fathers.[14]
From
the onset, then, school antievolutionism was not conceived in a spirit of
science-religion conflict. Shapiro
continues, “Though conceiving science and religion as distinct enterprises was
most memorably associated with those who did so in order to claim inherent
conflict between the two, many who discussed the idea of a relationship between
science and religion emphasized harmony.”
In fact, antievolutionists and their
opponents frequently asserted there could be no true conflict of science and
religion. “Each side did accuse the
other of fomenting conflict by misrepresenting either the nature of science or
the nature of religion. While this
debate took place within what Jon Roberts has called the “trope ‘science and
religion,’” partisans on both sides of the school evolution issue had different
understandings of the components of that trope.”[15]
The Scopes trial came about as a result of
many of these forces, but presented itself in front of a media hungry for a
clash of titanic conflict as quite simply the sparring of two timeless and
essential forces at war—science, and religion.
Though the reception history of the Scopes trial is itself much more
various than often presented, it is still not too much of an exaggeration to
say that in the bright lights of the camera, all the subtle shades and hues of
forces subterranean to the print headlines faded away, until we were left in
the popular mind with what was a largely a rhetorical invention by men
posturing for a position in history.
Conflict there was aplenty. But if we use the Warfare of Science and
Religion trope to understand the subtexts and unusual party lines, we remain
blind to who was fighting whom, with what weapon, for what purpose. Instead of a war of flesh and blood, we get
cardboard soldiers with pre-made speech bubbles over their heads, who never do
anything surprising. To investigate this
more, we now turn, not just to the myths White and Draper told, but also to the
faulty conceptual apparatuses they bequeathed for us to attempt to understand
the complexities involved in the history of science and Christianity.
[1]
Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation:
Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 2004), 275.
[2]
Ibid., 4.
[3]
Sujit Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly
Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific 1795-1850
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4, 11.
[4]
See, especially, Ibid., 148-177.
[5]
Ibid., 4.
[6]
On this Cf. David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s
Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and
Evolutionary Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1987).
[7]
Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to
America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 41.
[8]
James R. Moore, “Of Love and Death: Why Darwin ‘Gave Up Christianity,’” in History, Humanity, and Evolution: Essays for
John C. Greene, ed. James R. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 195-229.
[9]
I owe this point to George Marsden, Understanding
Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing,
1991), 136-137.
[10]
Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America,
130.
[11]
Ibid., 109.
[12]
Ibid., 57.
[13]
Monte Harrell Hampton, A Storm of Words:
Science, Religion, and Evolution in the Civil War Era (Alabama: University
of Alabama Press, 2014), 9: “The irony of southern-biblicist apologia was that while it claimed to
defend the universality of biblical authority, its hermeneutical approach particularized the scriptures, pouring
them into a Dixie-shaped mold. The
modern reader might wonder, for instance, whether the Bible so clearly mandated
slavery, prohibited women’s suffrage, opposed public education, or demanded a
rejection of Henry Grady’s New South program on theological grounds. … This epistemological tension constituted a
most acute form of modern crises for a community whose members’ very identity
as Christian intellectuals inhered in their ability to interpret nature and
scripture concordantly, to arbitrate between reason and revelation, and whose
identity as post-Civil War southerners required that they manifest their
southern-biblicist orthodoxy to the world.”
[14]
Adam R. Shapiro, Trying Biology: The
Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 2015), 88.
[15]
Ibid., 87-88.
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