Home | 18-19th Centuries Index

SECULARISM and SCIENCE to 1900

In Britain early in the 1800s the study of geology contributed to a revolution in how people viewed the world. The Geological Society of London was created in 1807, its founders expressing their desire to avoid preconceived notions and to collect facts for discussion. Geologists had been describing their findings in a way compatible with Biblical scripture. They had been explaining the formation of mountains and other distributions of earth according to the catastrophic theory of geological change -- change as the result of sudden upheavals, including a flood thought to have covered the entire globe -- a view compatible with the prevailing belief that the earth was about 6,000 years old.

In the early 1830s a British geologist, Charles Lyell, tried to make sense of what he was seeing in geological formations. He proposed that volcanic activity, earthquakes and erosion had slowly been remodeling the earth's surface, and for this he supplied empirical evidence. His Elements of Geology, published in 1838, became a standard work in stratigraphical and palaeontological geology. Lyell and his successors found no evidence of a flood that had been world wide and Lyell's theory of change required an earth much older than 6,000 years. It took 6,000 years for just one inch of limestone to build.

Lyell's views on geology reached a 21-year-old collecting beetles in the Americas -- Charles Darwin. Darwin was thinking about species changing with their environment. He was trying to make sense of mockingbirds on one island in the Galapagos differing from the mockingbirds on another island and his awareness that South America had only one specie of mockingbird. He thought maybe the different species of mockingbird had a common ancestor and that maybe species evolved (transmuted). In 1838, Darwin devised his theory of natural selection: that across a broad span of time a member of a specie might reproduce a creature with a new trait that survives and reproduces, creating a new species. This was heresy among those who believed all species were basically the same as when God made them.

Rudimentary theories of evolution had been around a long time, and as recently as that of the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamark (1744-1829). Darwin worked on it quietly. Then in 1858 the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay describing a similar theory, so Darwin had a book published, in 1859, entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In the book, Darwin made one long argument, with empirical support, that changes in creatures were more than one creature changing and another creature changing, that it was a group phenomenon, the creation of a new group of creatures.

Darwin and his contemporaries did not know of genetic mutations. Like other theories drawn empirically his theory was imperfect. It was rudimentary approximation, but Darwin gained supporters. And Darwin and his supporters were criticized by people who believed in God‘s perfect plan. A public debate arose, including the well-known exchange in 1860 between an Anglican bishop, Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley, a student of natural history. It was Huxley who began using the term agnostic, meaning not having knowledge in spiritual matters – some of Darwin’s critics believing Huxley's self-characterization appropriate.

Moving further from science as method into the realm of philosophy, atheists picked up the theory of evolution as an argument against the long-standing theory among the religious that creation was the work of intelligent design. Atheists rejected the old notion of the physical world as the work of godly magic. Rather than clone-like uniformity they saw something like a random lack of uniformity. Atheists found in the theory of evolution a view of humanity existing only because circumstances allowed it, rather than those circumstances having been created so that humanity could exist. And atheists preferred to think of bodily functions and desires that humans had in common with other creatures as not just an accident of nature, godly whim or a punishment as described in the ancient fable of Adam and Eve, but as a development that made life possible.

For some people of faith it was easier to imagine the creation of species as sudden and miraculous rather than to imagine development across millions of years. Those among them who believed in the scientific method complained that the theory of evolution was faulty because it had gaps, and they filled those gaps with their certainties about the miraculous. But some persons of faith accepted Darwin’s theory, opting for a view of godly intention behind all of the variation and change that atheists viewed as a happenstance.

please continue

to navigation links at the top

Copyright © 2009 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.