W2A-003 Darwinism Calvinism-0.txt
DARWINISM AND CALVINISM The Belfast-Princeton Connection

By David N. Livingstone

STUDENTS OF THE RELATIONSHIP between scientific thought and religious belief are now well acquainted with the broad contours of the encounter between Protestantism and Darwinism. Thanks to the outline maps that recent historians of science have compiled, the major features of this landscape - at least for the English-speaking world - are now familiar territory, with the significance of natural theology, the standing of humankind, and the status of biblical criticism figuring prominently among the key conceptual landmarks.

The cartographic image that I have chosen to refer to these developments usefully introduces the major aims of the present investigation. First, because there still remain many blank spaces on the science-religion map, I hope to chart a hitherto-unsurveyed stretch of terrain: the response of Belfast Calvinists to the Darwinian challenge. That this region has remained unexplored is surprising, I suggest, given the much-publicized speech of John Tyndall to the Belfast meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874. That Tyndall's presidential address provoked a spirited response from the religious community is well known, but the precise nature of that local reception remains terra incognita.

My cartographic allusions, moreover, are more than merely decorative in a second way. The particularities of place have always been of significance to cartographers, and it is my contention that understanding the religious response to Darwin requires us to take seriously the historical geography of science and theology. By this I mean that local circumstances are at least as important as grand doctrinal themes in conditioning religious reactions to scientific claims. It is thus by reference to the specifics of geographical locality that I hope to make sense of the surprisingly different responses of orthodox Calvinists in Belfast and Princeton to the onslaught of evolutionary theory, notwithstanding the remarkable congruity of their doctrinal commitments. This approach, moreover, is in keeping with the recent merging of work in cultural geography and the historical sociology of science, the former elucidating the geography of knowledge that arises from the uneven distribution of scientific information, the latter portraying the character of the spaces (on a variety of scales) in which scientific knowledge is produced and the diffusion tracts along which both it and its attendant political power migrate. Both conform to what has been called "an influential localist genre, marked by attention to national and regional features of an enterprise once regarded as paradigmatically universal."

CALVINISM IN CRISIS

The Belfast Presbytery met for its monthly meeting on Wednesday, 2 September 1874. Rev. William Johnston, a recent moderator of the Presbyterian Church's General Assembly, rose to address the gathering. The principles of Christianity, he began, had just been subjected to an "open and determined onslaught." Two weeks ago that very day Professor John Tyndall had in the name of science assailed "Christianity in its vital parts." It pained him, Johnston went on, to hear the professor thanked for his disquisition, and to discover, as had some of the newspapers, that "in Belfast such materialism and atheism [could be] propagated without any protest on the part of the audience who heard it." But what bothered Johnston even more was the fact that while the British Association had pronounced its blessing on Tyndall's speculations, that same body "had excluded a paper proposing to show how the inquiries of science could be conducted in thorough accordance with the principles of Christianity." "Thereby," he went on, "the Association made themselves a party to a one-sided attack on Christianity." Cries of "Hear hear" from the assembled company indicated that he had touched a raw nerve among the Presbyterian ministers present. The paper to which Johnston referred had been prepared for the meeting of the association by the Presbyterian Assembly's College professor of systematic theology, Rev. Dr. Robert Watts, and before concluding his comments Johnston "proceeded to eulogise" Watts's endeavors.

Johnston had no intention of leaving the matter as a mere record of proceedings in the presbytery's minute book. Some two weeks later he met with a number of fellow clergymen to lay plans for a course of evening lectures, to be given at Rosemary Street Church during the winter months, on the relationship between science and Christianity. In due course these addresses would be drawn together into a book, distributed on both sides of the Atlantic, entitled Science and Revelation: A Series of Lectures in Reply to the Theories of Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer, Etc. and furnished with a preface by Johnston himself.

William Johnston was certainly not the only one irritated by Tyndall's Belfast address. Tyndall himself had confided to a close friend that "every pulpit in Belfast thundered of me," and a contemporary observer noted that "at no time since the Arian Controversy, has the religious mind of Ulster been so deeply and indignantly stirred." The reasons for the commotion are clear: Tyndall's speech was widely interpreted as perhaps the chief pronouncement of scientific materialism in the nineteenth century, though whether his stance is best typified as materialism or as something closer to a naturalistic pantheism is a matter of some dispute.

To be sure, in his preface to a reprint of the address Tyndall made the following qualifying observation on the attacks to which he had been subjected:

"They have lost their power to wound or injure. So likewise as regards a resolution recently passed by the Presbytery of Belfast in which Professor Huxley and myself are spoken of as "ignoring the existence of God, and advocating pure and simple materialism;" had the possessive pronoun "our" preceded "God," and had the words "what we consider" preceded "pure", this statement would have been objectively true; but to make it so this qualification is required."

Nevertheless, even if Tyndall felt that the Presbyterians'dubbing of his stance as "pure and simple materialism" was too imprecise, there was no doubt that he had launched a frontal assault on teleology and Christian theism. He had begun by presenting his own history of the atomic theory since the time of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, suitably eliding those chapters in the story that did not serve his immediate purposes - namely, to show how science had progressively routed the forces of metaphysical dogma - and daring even to assault such scientific advocates of natural theology as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. He bolstered his argument that science had sustained materialism by calling upon the testimony of Darwinian biology, the conservation of energy, and the physiological basis of the nervous system. Nothing seemed excluded from the reign of science, for even the human species, Tyndall insisted, had been derived "in... totality from the inter-action of organism and environment." The implications were plain. All "religious theories, schemes and systems which embrace notions of cosmogony... must... submit to the control of science, and relinquish all thought of controlling it."

However pugnacious Tyndall's intentions, his voice, as one eyewitness recalled, was "rather jerky and uneven" as he began the speech, though "as he proceeded it became steadier and more impressive." As for his style of presentation, even the Presbyterian weekly newspaper, the Witness, conceded that "it was everything that could be desired.... Clear as noonday, chaste, and rising at times to true eloquence, it reflected honour on the whole Association.... There was no flippancy, no sneering coarseness, but a calm recognition of the solemnity of the task in hand." Yet for all that, Tyndall had profaned sacred principle and violated social propriety. To attack orthodox Christianity was one thing. To do so in Belfast of all places, where Calvinist professors had nurtured the scientific enterprise, was simply not "in good taste."

CALVINISM «S CHAMPIONS: WATTS AND HODGE

During the Belfast fracas, Robert Watts (1820-1895) emerged as the most doughty defender of orthodox Calvinism. He had studied in the early 1850s at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey under the tutelage of Charles Hodge, J. Addison Alexander, and W. H. Green, all major figures in nineteenth-century American theology, before returning to his native Ireland to take up the position of professor of systematic theology at the Presbyterian College in Belfast. At Princeton he had found himself among a company of leading Calvinists who saw themselves as the scholarly guardians of conservative Presbyterian theology. So it is not surprising that it was Watts, more than anyone else, who gave the Irish Presbyterian's College its "reputation for virile Calvinism" during the middle decades of the century. Under Watts's regime the college became a "citadel of Calvinism," "worldwide in its reputation for scholarship and orthodoxy"; for this reason Scottish students crossed the Irish Sea to hear him discourse on reformed dogmatics. The connection between Belfast and Princeton that Watts cemented was to remain firm for generations, as numerous students for the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland opted to pursue their studies in New Jersey. Indeed it was William Gibson's visit to the Princeton Theological Seminary - where his son was a student - in the late 1850s that encouraged him to work for the establishment of the Assembly's College in Belfast modeled on the Princeton prototype. As for Watts, determined to make Belfast another Princeton, he demonstrated his boundless enthusiasm for Hodge's Systematic Theology by ensuring that it remained the standard textbook in Belfast until the end of the century.

Watts remained a lifelong devotee of Princeton theology, and, like his mentor Hodge, he emerged as a staunch critic of Darwinian evolution. In the very year that Tyndall created such a sensation in Belfast, Hodge published his last book, What Is Darwinism? His diagnosis was as clear as it was simple: Darwinism was atheism. Hodge's answer is certainly well known and, at least among some later commentators, earned him the reputation of being both reactionary and obscurantist. Frank Hugh Foster, for instance, condemned him as "not a man to entertain new ideas, and it may be doubted if he was capable of understanding them"; Herbert Hovenkamp observed that "Hodge was paricularly paranoid about science"; and Wilson R. Jackson asserted that his "career and world view were both rigid and confined" and that his "ways of thinking were as severely constricted as the geography of his career."
