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10 - Christian Darwinisticism: the role of providence and progress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2010

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Summary

Pseudo-science…has grown and flourished until, nowadays, it is becoming somewhat rampant. It has…an army of ‘reconcilers’, enlisted in its service, whose business seems to be to mix the black of dogma and the white of science into the neutral tint of what they call liberal theology.

T.H. Huxley, 1887

Only those who could inject spiritual dimensions into Darwinism could directly come to terms with it. For others, Darwinism produced conflicts in which the real issue was frequently obscured. In essence, one can say that Darwinism could be reinterpreted or transformed.

John Dillenberger

In the polemical world of T. H. Huxley liberal reconcilers of Christianity and evolution could be nothing but an ‘army’ bent on blending scientific truth with theological error. Their exploits were simply ‘pseudo-science’, the neutralising of issues as plain as black and white. Huxley was of course mistaken, though his caricature has persisted in a military metaphor. The reconcilers did not always confront clear-cut issues, much less did they blur them. One might well argue that they ‘engaged the advance lines of the realistic modern mind’, but to chide them for a ‘strange insensitiveness to all the implications of science’ and for a delusive belief that they had ‘made contributory to their faith the grand army of scientific inquiry’ seems altogether unjust. Scientists themselves, most of whom were overtly religious, could hardly agree on the theological ‘implications’ of their theories. The ‘grand army of scientific inquiry’ never did exist.

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The Post-Darwinian Controversies
A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900
, pp. 217 - 251
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1979

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