Science, Society, and Faith

Sources

Challenges to Faith. Historians have long argued about the relation between war and change. The Civil War obviously made some changes in American politics, economic life, and technology. However, it may well have retarded intellectual life, particularly religious thinkers’ engagement with new issues. Charles Darwin began to publish his work on the eve of the Civil War; American religious leaders did not begin to discuss Darwinism much until after the war was over. Similarly, in the 1840s Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were already offering an analysis of the impact of industrial capitalism on society. A Christian response to the economy was not part of mainstream American religious thought until the 1870s. In some ways, this lag proved injurious to the ability of various religions to hold the loyalty of some believers.

Darwin. While American pioneers were heading westward, Darwin was exploring another frontier. From 1831 to 1836 he was a naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle. His observations of the differences between animals on South Sea islands and similar animals elsewhere led him to the theory propounded in On the Origin of Species (1859), that animals were subjected to an evolutionary process that led to the survival of animals more suitably adapted to their environment and to the extinction of other species. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin extended evolutionary theories to humanity. Darwin’s scientific investigations challenged religion in several ways. Most obviously, a long, slow evolution in which some species survived and others perished, with human beings as part of this chain of events, contradicted the account of creation in Genesis. More generally, Darwin presented a new way of looking at nature, different from the traditional manner religious people were used to seeing it.

Faith and Science. Darwin’s notion that species changed in response to environmental stimuli led to a fundamental reconceptualization of science. Previously, the model scientist had been the seventeenth-century naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, who had established a system for classifying all life according to genus and species. A scientist’s job, when confronted with a new thing, was to establish what it was. The idea that there were no such fixed categories, that living things, at least, evolved and changed, threatened the traditional way of understanding science. In this case, even though there were at the time perfectly respectable scientists who adhered to the previous goals of identification and classification, the changing definition of science won out. Second, there were holes in Darwin’s logic. Nineteenth-century scientists had gathered little fossil evidence of how animals evolved. Third, religious leaders argued that the ability to explain evolution was not the same as the ability to explain God and creation. Darwin confided to his notebooks that his examination of the physical world was leading him further from belief in God. For theologians, he was looking in the wrong place for his evidence.

Darwin and Genesis. By the early twentieth century, it was common to equate religious opposition to Darwin with fundamentalists who believed the literal truth of Scripture. In the nineteenth century, the subject was much more complex. First, the fundamentalists did not get their name only because they adhered to the literal truth of Scripture regarding creation. The inerrancy or truth of the Scriptures was only one of their concerns; they also disputed emerging Protestant doctrine concerning the Virgin Birth of Christ, the importance of the Crucifixion in atoning for human sinfulness, the Resurrection of the body, and the historical impact of Jesus’ miracles. Second, there was no separate party of fundamentalists in the mid nineteenth century. Both lower criticism (examination of the text) and higher criticism (putting the text in literary or historical context) of Scripture dated from the early nineteenth century, but outside of a few specialists, most people took Scripture literally. Third, despite this pervasive literalism, most denominations found it easy enough to adjust to a new account of creation. Denominations that traced their roots back to early Christianity contained within their histories periods in which Scripture was not taken entirely literally; a particular passage could be interpreted in many ways. Thus, all these denominations emphasized other elements of Genesis, such as the underlying moral of the basic unity of all humanity.

Darwin and Design. Darwin pointed out the basic disorder of the universe and rejected the argument that the world was so intricately, cleverly, and beautifully made that it had to have been designed by an intelligent, purposeful creator. Species competed for survival, and the prize went to the biggest, strongest, and toughest—not the nicest or most moral. Some theologians pointed out that faith was not faith if it required scientific proof and that religion did not need the argument by design as proof of the existence of God.

Marketplace Morality. The debate over Darwin coincided with public interest in another issue. After the Civil War the economy grew more complex and troubling. Jobs required less skill, with machines doing the work that people used to do. Employers tried to save money by lowering wages, and even when they understood how to make conditions safer (by adding fire escapes to factories, for example), they often did not do anything that might cut into profits. More basically, employers treated their employees as if they were components in the manufacturing process; hiring them for as little as they could when they needed workers and then just dismissing them when the job was finished, leaving people without steady incomes.

Social Darwinism. In England pioneer social thinker Herbert Spencer was attempting to apply Darwin’s thought, developed by observing the animal world, to the economic world. American preachers such as Henry Ward Beecher preached an economic survival of the fittest. Those with the traits needed to survive economically—punctuality, thrift, sobriety, chastity and industriousness—would rise to the top. Those with counterproductive traits—the shiftless, drunken, licentious, and lazy—would fall by the wayside.

The Effect on Entrepreneurs. Before the Civil War, religion was part of the entrepreneurial persona. Successful entrepreneurs were supposed to interpret their success as a sign of divine goodness poured out in some way on all people. They were supposed to do their part to merit their good fortune by upright behavior and support of ecclesiastical institutions. They were supposed to be

the means of spreading divine favor even further by using their wealth for charitable purposes, as did Arthur and Lewis Tappan with various evangelical and abolitionist projects. So close was the connection between business and religion that when revivals occurred in major cities in 1857-1858, the phenomenon was seen as a “businessman’s revival.” Some Reconstruction-era captains of industry adopted aspects of this persona: Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan all supported various good works, including churches. However, by the late 1860s and early 1870s churchgoing business leaders were hearing another message from their ministers, turning the traditional teaching on its head. One did not receive God’s bounty and then try to merit it by good behavior. One exercised the proper virtues, and because one made these efforts, one would grow wealthy. People who remained poor obviously were not making the necessary effort.

A Reason for Unbelief. Neither theology nor popular preaching stayed in this state for long. Within twenty years theologians began using the Scripture to argue for the importance of social justice. The important issue here was that during the late 1860s and throughout the 1870s Social Darwinism undercut one development of the nineteenth century, the belief that God was good as human beings understood that term, full of compassion toward the unfortunate. For some God was not quite what the Scriptures described, and he did not create the world in a simple and straightforward way. But a God that was not good was no God at all for the nineteenth century. For author and historian (and descendant of presidents) Henry Adams, Harvard president Charles Eliot Norton, and Ethical Culture founder (and son of a Reformed Jewish rabbi) Felix Adler, the logical conclusion was neither acceptance nor denial of the existence of God.

IS THE BIBLE TRUE?

On 22 January 1866, agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll wrote his friend Richard J. Oglesby. Even in making fun of Scripture, he showed a great deal of familiarity with it, as well as with the personalities and peculiarities of Midwest politics.

I deplore the spread of knowledge—Science I abhor. Art is an abomination, because they deny the word of God. And therefore allow me to say in conclusion that I am rejoiced to learn that you are in favor of the good old times, when Moses was God’s clerk and geologist, when Joshua was his General and Astronomer. When the Earth was flat. When the sky was a solid vault. When the stars moved in grooves and were boosted by Angels. When the sons of God came down and cohabited with the daughters of men. When children were born who grew to be Eight hundred feet high & refused to be weaned and absolutely swallowed their mothers. When Methusalem lived about a thousand years without having been a candidate for any office. When Noah was secretary of the Navy. When God himself came down and cut out and made Adam & Eve breeches & petticoats hoop skirt and clawhammer coat. When jackasses made set speeches to angels that they met in the road. When people went to Heaven in an Omnibus office [with] horses to match and dropped their ponchos to wondering crowds. When Ezekiel made sweet cake of cow dung. And that intrepid mariner Mr. Jonah finding himself in the belly of a whale—did not blubber. And although in the midst of the great and mysterious deep— without compass, tracts, bibles, playing cards, or tobbacco. With nothing but fish balls to eat—The subject of a scaly trick—without knowing what country he was near—only knowing that he was in Finland —still had the presence of mind to thrust an oar out of the whale[’]s alimentary canal and pull himself triumphantly ashore.

Source: Mark A. Plummer, Robert G. Ingersoll: Peoria’s Pagan Politician (Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1984), pp. 29-30.

Sources

Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Octagon Books, 1963);

James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).