The claim that the nineteenth century was a period of major transition for the relation between theology and natural science has become a historical truism. With its implications for the design argument and the doctrines of divine providence, Darwin's theory of evolution has rightly attracted the attention of scholars of Victorian science. Yet so much emphasis not only on Darwin himself, but on the life sciences generally, has tended to obscure some important issues concerning the relation of theology to natural (...) science in the first half of the nineteenth century. As John Brooke has argued recently, natural theology in this pre-Darwinian period was far from being an essentially static, autonomous, and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, but was, for various reasons, in a fragmented and disordered state. The general aim of the present note is to suggest some further dimensions to historical debates about the nature of natural theology, and in particular to emphasize the need for an examination of the physical sciences as well as the life sciences in this period. (shrink)

The role of Robert Chambers's anonymous Vestiges of the natural history of creation in popularizing evolutionary ideas establishes it as a significant work in the history of science even though its intrinsic scientific value is not great. Its fascinating subject, a universally applicable developmental hypothesis, piqued the curiosity of the nineteenth-century reading public. The clientele to whom the book especially appealed was not too concerned with errors in fact and unsupported generalizations, but instead was attracted by the smoothness of its (...) literary style and the glibness of its pronouncements. These same characteristics caused it to be an anathema to both scientists and clergymen, who joined together to voice their disapproval; they agreed that the ideas in it were potentially harmful to those untrained in scientific procedures and unaware of the book's inherent religious heresies. (shrink)