Abstract
Throughout his career Tyndall fought against what he saw as the predominance of blind faith—according to Huxley, “the one unpardonable sin”1—in the British public. Having wrestled himself with the question of religious belief and the nature of God, he was determined to encourage in others a similar questioning of theological doctrine and to promote a reliance on science as the best authority on natural phenomena. His first opportunity to represent the scientific community on this issue came during his opening year at the Royal Institution in 1854, when he and Faraday initiated their lecture series on the scientific method in education.2 From that time forth, Tyndall regularly published essays and delivered speeches on matters connected with faith, the problems of religion, and the benefits of agnostic science over Christianity as an agent of investigation in the natural world. As Tyndall’s essays and addresses grew more antagonistic to established theology and the commonly held religious views of the day, the range of responses to his publications, which began with good-natured opposition, escalated over the course of three decades into angry treatises on Tyndall’s danger to society.
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Notes
T. H. Huxley, “On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge” (1866), in Method and Results: Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893), 40.
John Tyndall, “Preface,” in Andrew D. White, The Warfare of Science (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1876), iv.
Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
John Tyndall, “Professor Virchow and Evolution” (1879), Fragments of Science, 8th edn, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1899), 378.
John Tyndall, “The Belfast Address” (1874), Fragments of Science, 5th edn (London: Longmans, Green, 1876), 472.
John Tyndall, “Science and Man” (1877), Fragments of Science, 6th edn (London: Longmans, Green, 1879), 358.
Herbert Spencer, “The Late Professor Tyndall,” The Fortnightly Review 61 (February 1894): 143.
Frank M. Turner, “Rainfall, Plagues, and the Prince of Wales,” in Contesting Cultural Authority, 151–70. See also Philip Williamson, “State Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings: Public Worship in Britain, 1830–1897,” Fast and Present, no. 200 (August 2008): 121–74; and Matthew Cragoe, “‘The Hand of the Lord is upon the Cattle’: Religious Reactions to the Cattle Plague, 1865–67,” in ed. Martin Hewitt, An Age of Equipoise? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 190–206.
[Henry Thompson], “The ‘Prayer for the Sick’: Hints towards a Serious Attempt to Estimate Its Value,” Contemporary Review 20 (July 1872): 205.
For more on the debate between Mozley and Tyndall, see Robert Bruce Mullin, “The Rise of the New Debate over Miracles,” Chapter 2 of Miracles in the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 31–57
John Tyndall, “Miracles and Special Providences” (1867), in Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 385.
Baden Powell, “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity,” in Essays and Reviews (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1860), 142. For more on Powell,
see Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Charles Kingsley, “Lord Palmerston and the Presbytery of Edinburgh,” Eraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 49 (January 1854), 50.
John Tyndall, “Vitality” (1865), in Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 463. Though Tyndall believed in the existence of the potential for life in all elements of matter, he did not believe in spontaneous generation and indeed conducted extensive biological experiments disproving the possibility of it. He argued that though science decreed that life must be inherent as a potentiality in all matter, it was thus far powerless to explain the transition between the potentiality and actuality of life—another example of his acceptance of a mystery at the heart of natural phenomena.
James M’Cann, The Inter-Relations of Prayer, Providence, and Science, being a Reply to an Article by Professor Tyndall in the Fortnightly Review (London, 1866), 8.
William Fowler, Mozley and Tyndall on Miracles (London, 1868), 14–15.
John Henry Newman, “Theology a Branch of Knowledge” (1852), in The Idea of a University (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1927, reissued 1982), 58. Compare Newman’s title with the series of lectures on education that Tyndall took part in, with Faraday and others, in 1854 at the Royal Institution, each lecturer discussing a scientific discipline as “a branch of education” (see chapter four).
Joseph Taylor Goodsir, The Divine Rule Proceeds by Law (London, 1868), 28; emphasis in the original.
See G. C. Boase, “Irons, William Josiah (1812–1883),” rev. H. C. G. Matthew, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac. uk:2117/view/article/14459.
For more on the Victoria Institute, see W. H. Brock and R. M. MacLeod, “The Scientists’ Declaration: Reflections on Science and Belief in the Wake of Essays and Reviews, 1864–5,” The British Journal for the History of Science 9 (1976): 57–8.
For more on the founding and early years of the British Association, see Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
William Binns, Science, Religion, and the Bible (London, 1874), 2.
T. H. Huxley, Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London, 1870).
Alexander Williamson, Address to the British Association (1873), 14.
William Thomson, Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London, 1871), 28;
William B. Carpenter, Presidential Address to the Brighton Meeting of the British Association (London, 1872), 18.
Bernard Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address,” in Science Serialized, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 199–237.
G. B. Shaw, Man and Superman (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1907 [1903]), 164.
Ruth Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Rereading of the Belfast Address,” Osiris, 2nd series, 3 (1987): 111–34.
Charles Whitmore Stokes, The General Election (London, 1879).
Charles Whitmore Stokes, Letter to the Rt. Hon. R. A. Cross, MP (1874), 8.
Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 203–5.
Henry Reeve, “J. S. Mill’s Essays on Theism,” Edinburgh Review 141 (January 1875), 5.
John MacNaughtan, The Address of Professor Tyndall, at the Opening of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Examined in a Sermon on Christianity and Science (London, 1874), 8–9.
See James Drummond and C.B. Upton, The Life and Letters of James Martineau (London: J. Nisbet and Co., 1902).
See Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947).
James Martineau, Religion as Affected by Modern Materialism (London: Williams and Norgate, 1874), 6–7.
James Martineau, Modern Materialism: Its Attitude towards Theology (London: Williams and Norgate, 1876), 5.
Henry Larkin, Extra Physics, and the Mystery of Creation (London, 1878), 8.
[Henry Wace], “Scientific Lectures—their Use and Abuse,” Quarterly Review 145 (1878): 39.
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© 2011 Ursula DeYoung
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DeYoung, U. (2011). Tyndall and Theology. In: A Vision of Modern Science. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118058_4
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