Frank M. Turner

The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension

Was there a conflict between science and religion in late Victorian England? T. H. Huxley, Bishop Wilberforce, John Tyndall, Francis Galton, W. K. Clifford, and William Gladstone certainly thought so. Other contemporaries, such as Lord Tennyson, E. B. Pusey, Frederick Temple, Frederic Harrison, and Herbert Spencer feared so but hoped not. Sermons criticizing the arrogance of scientists and articles decrying the ignorance of clergy, as well as books such as John Drapers History of the conflict between religion and science (1874) and that of his fellow American Andrew White, The warfare of science (1876), with a preface by British physicist John Tyndall, suggested a bitter controversy between spokesmen for religion and science. Early twentieth-century writers including J. M. Robertson, J. B. Bury, Bertrand Russell, and Arthur Balfour assumed that a conflict had raged over the subject a generation or so earlier. Later commentators were less certain about the existence of the struggle, its dimensions, and even its issues. Robert Ensor regarded it parenthetically as ‘(real enough at the time)’. Charles Raven contended the debate over science and religion amounted to little more than ‘a storm in a Victorian tea-cup’. R. K. Webb explained that the number of people whose religious faith was shaken by scientific discoveries was ‘probably fairly small’ but consisted of ‘people whose opinions counted for much’. Owen Chadwick drew the important distinction ‘between science when it was against religion and the scientists when they were against religion’.

An Intellectual Intermediary

Intellectual historians have traditionally given insufficient consideration to the context of ideas, particularly to those institutions and social presuppositions that constitute a distinctly intellectual context in contrast to the macropolitical or macrosocial settings. Of these institutions, few have been so frequently ignored or so unimaginatively examined as those persons or groups that stand as intermediaries between the writer, scientist, critic, or publicist, and his or her potential audience. Rather than neutral or indifferent conduits of ideas, these intermediaries are informal and usually nongovernmental vehicles of intellectual control and social accommodation which choose, define, revise, and censor ideas and varieties of intellectual activity. They in effect decide which thinkers and ideas will and which will not enter the realm of public and professional discourse. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, was the most important institution of intellectual intermediation within the Victorian scientific world. More than any other single institution it established the contours of the culturally possible for Victorian practitioners of science. The Royal Society possessed more social prestige, and the specialized scientific societies were more significant for furthering research in particular fields. But the British Association, because of the interrelationships of its leaders with scientists in all fields and with key groups outside scientific circles, established and interpreted the aims and character of science to the larger community. No less important, the leaders of the Association interpreted the social, political, religious, and economic constraints and opportunities of the day to the various constituencies of the emerging scientific community. The British Association defined how science should be pursued, who would be regarded as its proper practitioners and spokesmen, and wherein resided its real cultural worth.

Scientific ResolutionThe Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists. Martin J. S. Rudwick

In this brilliant and probing study Martin Rudwick pursues a narrative history of the Devonian controversy among British geologists both for its own sake and for the purpose of drawing certain substantial methodological conclusions for the history of science. The latter will no doubt foster a controversy of their own, and it may be expected that for many historians of science there will be a preand a post-Rudwick era. This volume is immensely important but no less intellectually difficult and demanding. In the early 1830s geologists stood among the most esteemed and best organized members of the British scientific community. They held major appointments in both the ancient universities, enjoyed government employment on the ordnance survey and ranked among the most outstanding contemporary men of science working without formal institutional connection. The Geological Society in London and the Geology Section of the fledgling British Association for the Advancement of Science provided ongoing venues for debate and intellectual interchange among geologists. It was among these practitioners in these institutional structures that during the 1830s there occurred a prolonged, heated controversy over the character of the geological strata of Devon. The subject in dispute was the transitional stratum, then generally known as Greywacke, that lay between the Carboniferous layers and the primary rocks soon to be known as the Silurean system. In 1834 Henry De la Beche, a gentleman geologist of limited personal means working for the Ordnance Survey, reported to the Geological Society that he had discovered fossil plants in the Greywacke of Devon. That empirical claim raised serious theoretical questions for Roderick Murchison, a wealthy independent gentleman geologist, who contended that no plant remains could possibly be located beneath the coal deposits of the Carboniferous layers. Murchison immediately attacked De la Beches evidence and his competence. Thereafter for almost ten years the geology of Devon spurred ongoing exchanges which involved not only the two initial protagonists but virtually all the major and many of the minor British geologists, such as Adam Sedgwick, Charles Lyell, William Buckland, George Greenough, and John Phillips. The debate concluded in the early 1840s, more or less to the personal and scientific satisfaction of all concerned, with the recognition of the transitional rocks as a distinct stratum-the Devonian. Thereafter the debate became generally forgotten because it had been thus resolved and its resolution assimilated into the working knowledge of geological science. It would be useful if one could define the quiestion that lay at the heart of the Devonian controversy. However, that is not possible because the question or questions under debate as well as the proposed solutions kept transforming themselves throughout the ongoing interchanges of papers, articles, and personal correspondence among the protagonists. Sometimes the question concerned the character of the physical evidence, sometimes the quality of the observations, sometimes the character and quality of the theoretical interpretations, and some-