Science and Religion from the Ground Up
What did fourteen-year old physician’s daughter Ellen Parry think about science and religion as Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837? What was she reading in her comfortable family home on the outskirts of Bath that helped her and others of her generation to navigate the latest scientific findings and contemplate their significance in relation to the feelings and concerns of everyday Christianity? And why might we care?
So often, our histories of science and religion have been written from the perspectives of religious or scientific specialists – often male, often wealthy, often white. My new book Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age seeks instead to tell the history of science and religion from the ground up, focusing on how a wide range of readers encountered and engaged with the rapidly changing sciences through the pages of a series of books written by leading scientific practitioners at the behest of the President of the Royal Society and the Archbishop of Canterbury. What emerges from my study is that the concerns of ordinary readers in encountering the sciences were at least as much to do with religious practices, values, and feelings as they were to do with religious beliefs. Telling the history of science and religion from the perspectives of a range of ordinary people thus significantly reorients the story away from the dominating concern of theologians with belief towards the complexity of lived religion.
The eight books at the heart of my study were the Bridgewater Treatises, published between 1833 and 1836 as the result of a bequest by the last Earl of Bridgewater and ranging across the full range of the emerging sciences, encompassing astronomy and physics, chemistry and physiology, natural history and comparative anatomy, geology and political economy. The authors were instructed by the terms of the Earl’s will to write on the “power, wisdom, and goodness of God as manifested in the creation,” but rather than offering theistic proofs or a formal natural theology they were much more concerned to demonstrate the consistency of the latest scientific findings with orthodox faith. As one of them put it, the task was the limited one of leading “the friends of religion to look with confidence and pleasure on the progress of the physical sciences, by showing how admirably every advance in our knowledge of the universe harmonizes with the belief in a most wise and good God.”
This task seemed an especially important one in the 1830s. The rapid cheapening of books and the great increase in a literate, urban population meant that information concerning the sciences was vastly more accessible to readers than ever before. Moreover, the sciences were rapidly changing, with many more aspects of nature being reduced to laws and with the history of the creation becoming increasingly subject to scientific analysis. In such a context, and with the emergence among working-class radicals of an organized atheist movement, it is hardly surprising that the all-too-gendered cohort of “men of science” gladly embraced the opportunity to demonstrate the religious safety of their work.
Contemporaries were nevertheless surprised by the extent to which the Bridgewater Treatises became best sellers. Running to six thousand pages in twelve large volumes, they were hardly the sort of cheap fare that was becoming popular in the 1830s, yet they sold thousands of copies, appearing in libraries up and down the land and being widely discussed in newspapers and magazines. At this key moment of transition, the series became a sign and symbol that the sciences that were increasingly prevalent in British national life remained consistent with Christian orthodoxy.
So what did Ellen Parry think? We know a great deal about the soul-searching of this young reader of the Bridgewater Treatises due to her tragically early death at the age of seventeen. Seeking solace, her heart-broken father – fellow of the Royal Society Charles Henry Parry – printed great screeds from her personal diaries, intent on showing that she was, in the words of her famous explorer uncle Sir Edward Parry, “another lamb added to the Saviour’s fold.” And what becomes clear is that, within a highly ordered life of Christian devotion grounded in the devotional classics of British Protestantism, Ellen found works on science like the Bridgewater Treatises to feed her feelings of humble thankfulness and devotion without engendering a spiritually damaging pride of intellect.
Ellen was in good company in reading the Bridgewater Treatises in this way. The series proved useful in both personal and family devotions, becoming incorporated into devotional guides and private poetical compositions. Nor were these the only practical religious contexts in which the series was appreciated. Reading together was often a key part of family life that was important in creating and sustaining relationships and thus the religious culture of the household. Fascinatingly, the Bridgewater Treatises became an aspect of many courtships, as couples sought to find common ground in an increasingly gendered world. By showing how the scientific knowledge of an industrial society could be spiritualized and made to sustain religious virtue, the series provided a shared focus that brought devout men and women closer. Moreover, the series offered parents authoritative and up-to-date accounts of the sciences that made regular reference to the creator, establishing the kinds of religious associations for scientific knowledge that were expected to foster an all-important Christian disposition in the young.
Such concerns with practices, values, dispositions, and feelings also became apparent when the Bridgewater Treatises became incorporated into public worship. Training manuals instructed Victorian preachers that their primary role was to evoke feelings in those listening that would impel them to appropriate action – to make a “lasting impression on the heart, and effect a corresponding change in conduct.” Thus, while few preachers sought to lecture their Sunday congregations concerning science and religion, they found in the Bridgewater Treatises rich troves of illustrative material to evoke feelings of wonder in God’s creative and sustaining power, to inculcate habits of intellectual humility, to impress upon hearers that the promptings of conscience were a divine gift, and (more controversially) to urge their acceptance of the machinery of the state.
Nor was it only ordinary pew-sitters who found the Bridgewater Treatises religiously valuable in ways that went beyond the merely doctrinal. Among those actively engaged in the sciences, the books functioned as important tools for carving out the cultural role and identity of the Christian “man of science” and for inculcating religiously inflected values and standards in scientific practice. By the 1830s, scientific practitioners were beginning to become important figures in British national life but this required careful negotiation, with the new British Association for the Advancement of Science serving not only to advertise the benefits of science, but also to demonstrate the suitability of scientific men to be cultural leaders. The Bridgewater Treatises provided an invaluable means on such occasions of demonstrating that the virtues required in the leaders of a Christian nation were exactly the epistemic virtues found in “men of science” – humility, patience, and piety.
These concerns were also very evident in the growing number of universities, where scientific professors often used the Bridgewater Treatises to point to the religious benefits of a scientific education and to explore how scientific knowledge related to wider human concerns. Moreover, both for students and for more mature scientific researchers, the series helped to guide reflection on they key underlying principles of scientific practice. Just where did the limits of nature’s laws lie? And how far was the perception of design in nature necessary for, or undermining of science? These were among the most pressing practical questions for men of science in the 1830s, and it was in wrestling with them as he read the Bridgewater Treatises following his return from the voyage of HMS Beagle that the young Charles Darwin came to formulate his theory of evolution by natural selection.
A generation later, Darwin’s Origin of Species used an epigraph from William Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise to demonstrate that it was no threat to religious orthodoxy. In the material world, Whewell had observed, events were not brought about by separate miracles, but by “the establishment of general laws.” For Darwin’s generation, the Bridgewater Treatises had come to epitomize the widespread view that the emerging disciplinary sciences were congruent with and supportive of Christianity. But they had come to do so, not by offering to prove the existence of God, but rather by helping Christians to find value in the sciences in a range of practical ways. In private and family devotions, in relationships and in public worship, the series helped to incorporate the sciences with religious concerns about habits, feelings, dispositions, and values. Similarly, for those learning, teaching, and researching the sciences, these were books that helped readers negotiate the role, identity, values, and practice of science in relation to religious concerns.
These, then, are some of the new insights that one can expect to emerge when telling the history of science and religion from the ground up, focusing on a wide range of readers like Ellen Parry who were concerned at least as much about their daily religious experiences and practices as about theology. Such work valuably expands the cast list of history to include women, children, and workers alongside those typically wealthy “men of science” and clergymen who have more commonly been considered. And – partly in consequence – it decentres questions of knowledge and belief, showing them to be only one aspect of a history of science and religion that extends far beyond, into the complex realities of everyday religious and scientific life.
