Matthew Stanley - Huxleys Church and Maxwells Demon

Huxleys Church and Maxwells Demon

From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science

MATTHEW STANLEY

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON

MATTHEW STANLEY is associate professor at New York Universitys Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-16487-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-16490-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164908.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stanley, Matthew, 1975 author.

Huxleys church and Maxwells demon : from theistic science to naturalistic science / Matthew Stanley.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-16487-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-226-16490-8 (e-book)

1. ScienceGreat BritainHistory19th century. 2. Maxwell, James Clerk, 18311879. 3. PhysicistsGreat Britain. 4. Huxley, Thomas Henry, 18251895. 5. NaturalistsGreat Britain. 6. NaturalismHistory19th century. 7. Religion and scienceGreat BritainHistory19th century. I. Title.

Q127.G4S73 2015

509.2'241dc23

2014010890

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

FOR MAYA AND ZO

Introduction

Every now and then, enemies agree. The philosopher of biology and anticreationist crusader Michael Ruse describes the practice of science thus: Inasmuch as one is doing science, one avoid[s] all theological or other religious references. In particular, one denies God a role in creation. This book is about how we came to believe that.

The intelligent design movement targets naturalism for elimination, explicitly saying that modern science would go with it. The ID adherents proposed alternatives bear little resemblance to what scientists do today, and are essentially completely different enterprises. Science proponents agree that without naturalism, there is nothing recognizable as science. The 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover court decision in the United States equated naturalism with science to justify keeping intelligent design out of science classrooms, a move consistent with years of judicial precedent. It works better than anything else.

But it was not always this way. Naturalism has a history. The existential connection of naturalism with science is a relatively recent development. Further, naturalism has a specific birthplace. Despite naturalisms high profile in modern American courts, its roots are in Victorian Britain. It was not until the end of the Victorian period (18371901) that naturalism became a common way to think about science, and it was a distinctively British creation. Regardless of this late and local appearance, naturalistic science has come to be seen as universal and eternal. Somehow the long-standing practice of nonnaturalistic science has been forgotten. Science that was developed, considered, and evaluated in deeply religious contexts became sanitized of its divinity. We have come to think of science as obviously naturalistic, without even the possibility of an alternative. Examining the history of how we came to this point will help us understand the meaning and role of naturalism in modern America.

The use of the term itself is usually traced back to Thomas Henry HuxleyCharles Darwins bulldog. In fact, scientific naturalism was originally used by American evangelicals in the mid-nineteenth century as a pejorative term to describe science practiced without reference or deference to religious matters. Huxley appropriated the term for his own purposes to indicate expertise rather than scandal. His first public use of it was in the prologue to his 1892 Essays upon Some Controverted Questions to indicate the form of science that he and his allies had been practicing for decades.physics in particular, were presented by the scientific naturalists as showing that the universe was closed to external forces. Matter and force were posited to be the basic elements of science, not spirit or divine will. From these foundations the scientific naturalists launched attacks against theology and religious institutions, battling for power and cultural prestige. The naturalists had to fight for their definition of science.

The history of naturalism in a broader conceptual sense is more controversial. That is, that no supernatural or divine forces exist.

This distinction is offered by modern scientific naturalists as a way to provide space for religious belief even while doing science without God.

The purpose of the distinction, though, is a valuable one. It draws attention to how the practice of science distinguishes it from ID, rather than relying on specific claims about the physical world. The methodological principles that underlie science are essential to its function. And both ID and its opponents agree that those principles as they operate in science today are distinct from religion.

There were, however, alternatives to this view. In the Victorian period, naturalism was only one possibility of how to practice science. Because science today is naturalistic, it is easy to overestimate the influence of scientific naturalists in the past.science in close embrace with Christianity. This had been the standard in Britain since the days of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.

I will refer to this tradition as theistic science. Its practitioners were overwhelmingly Christian (and largely Protestant), but the term Christian science would be confusing for obvious reasons. One could easily divide theistic science into many subcategories, such as Catholic, voluntarist, scriptural, and so forth. However, this would rapidly grow confusing. This book will instead focus on the common traits of theistic science, and how that methodological community functioned despite its internal diversity. It is also important to note that theistic science was quite distinct from what the ID community imagines its adherents version of science to be. Theistic science, like naturalistic science, should be considered in terms of methodology, not in terms of particular theoretical allegiances. Theistic science was a way to do science. This is not a story about science versus religion. All parties discussed here, theist and naturalist, cared deeply about science and wanted it to thrive. Rather, the question was about how religious ideas and values should appear in scientific practice, if at all.

The core of this book explores the relationship between the methodological values of theistic and naturalistic science: that is, the foundational principles on which scientific researchers were expected to base their work. As already discussed, our modern expectation is that theism should dramatically change the way science is done. Here I will argue that this was not the case in Victorian Britain, the birthplace of scientific naturalism. Instead, both theistic and naturalistic science held virtually identical methodological values. While this is remarkable on its own, it is even stranger when we see that each group argued that proper scientific methodology could only be justified in their worldview. That is, naturalistic men of science thought science could only be done naturalistically; theistic men of science thought science could only be done theistically. Despite this split, the foundations of their practices were extremely similar, and they were able to function smoothly (if loudly) as members of the same intellectual communities.