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Science and Religion
Contributing teacher:
Daniel Kotzin
Time period: 1880–1900
Point
Casey Blake argues that Americans in the late nineteenth century were excited about new scientific developments but also somewhat fearful—or at least ambivalent—about how science might alter religious and moral values. Blake says there was a fundamental tension between religious faith and a scientific approach to knowledge, which Americans sought to resolve. He describes the gradual acceptance by many Christian leaders of biblical criticism as one effort to reconcile scientific thought and religion. He points out, however, that by acknowledging that the Bible could be interpreted as a historic and literary document, those Christian leaders unintentionally implied that truth, rather than residing in the biblical text itself, was to be determined by those who were interpreting it. This established a path for a more pragmatic approach to religion.
Blake also categorizes three different Christian responses to the theory of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin (1809–82). Conservative Christians simply rejected it. Liberal Christians were able to accept Darwin's ideas by conceptualizing a way to see God as the designer of the evolution of human progress. Finally, many other Christians, according to Blake, instead of finding ways to integrate Christianity and science, simply separated the two into different spheres: Science was in the public sphere of reason, and religion was in the private sphere of emotions. Some American thinkers, Blake says, even presented science as a new religion, maintaining that science was a "moral vocation" because of its "objective" search for the "truth."
Counterpoint
Charles E. Rosenberg, in No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), argues that there was "fluidity" rather than tension between science and religion in late-nineteenth-century America. In contrast to Blake, Rosenberg maintains that American culture and society during the late nineteenth century provided a ripe climate for the scientific community to flourish. According to Rosenberg, science validated many American values, especially those influenced by religion. Medical explanations of diseases, for example, supported moral values that criticized such things as gluttony and sexual excesses. Thus, whereas Blake accounts for the American enthusiasm for science as being one of awe, but also one subject to ambivalence because of the tensions between science and religion, Rosenberg presents religion and science as having a symbiotic relationship at the end of the nineteenth century.
On the other hand, James Turner in Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) suggests that Blake understates the tension between science and religion. Instead of seeing Christian acceptance of biblical criticism as opening the way for religious pragmatism, Turner argues that these late-nineteenth-century Christian leaders actually promoted an "unbelief" in God. According to Turner, such Christian leaders went too far in their embrace of modernity and science—not reconciling religion with science but instead compromising religious power by giving too much authority to science. Turner points to ministers such as Francis Ellingwood Abbot (1836–1903), who argued that knowledge of God could come from science, as an example of religious leaders undermining the power of religious belief.
Paul Croce in Science and Religion in the Era of William James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) expands further on the relationship between science and religion. Focusing on the philosopher William James (1842–1910), one of the great American pragmatist thinkers, Croce describes the rise of a new "culture of uncertainty" that replaced Victorian notions of absolute truth. Professional scientists and religious philosophers in late-nineteenth-century America, according to Croce, established a culture of doubt as they tried to reconcile science and religion.
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