The more progressive theologians who adopted the new historical-critical method often found that their staunchest supporters were scientists who, like themselves, were at the cutting edge of their field.52 When, for example, John William Colenso (1814–83), missionary bishop of Natal, was ostracized for his critical study of the Pentateuch, Lyell introduced him to his club and gave him financial help and the two became firm friends. When the Reverend Frederic William Farrar (1831–1903) wrote an article on the Flood, arguing, on evidence provided by the Higher Criticism and geological science, that the deluge had not in fact covered the entire earth, his essay was rejected by the editors of William Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible. But Darwin supported Farrar’s candidacy for the Royal Society, and Farrar was one of the bearers of Darwin’s coffin and preached a moving eulogy beside his grave.53
In the United States, the more liberal Christians were open to the Higher Criticism. Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87), Lyman’s son, believed that doctrine and belief should take second place to charitable work and argued that it was unchristian to penalize somebody for holding a different theological opinion. The liberals were also willing to “christen” Darwinism, arguing that God was at work in the process of natural selection and that humanity was gradually evolving to a greater spiritual perfection: soon men and women would find that no gulf separated them from God and that they were able to live at peace with one another. But a rift was developing between the liberals and conservatives. In dedicated opposition to the Higher Criticism, Charles Hodge insisted that every single word of the Bible was divinely inspired and infallibly true. His son Archibald wrote a classic defense of the literal truth of the Bible with his younger colleague Benjamin Warfield. All the stories and statements of the Bible were “absolutely errorless and binding for faith and obedience.” Everything in scripture was unqualified “truth to the facts.”54
In 1886, the revivalist preacher Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–99) founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to combat the Higher Criticism, his aim to create a cadre to oppose the false ideas that, he argued, would bring the nation to destruction. Similar colleges were founded by William B. Riley in Minneapolis in 1902 and by the oil magnate Lyman Stewart in Los Angeles in 1907. For some, the Higher Criticism was becoming a symbol of everything that was wrong in the modern world. “If we have no infallible standard,” argued the Methodist clergyman Alexander McAlister, “we may as well have no standard at all;” once biblical truth had been unraveled, all decent values would disappear.55 For the Methodist preacher Leander W. Mitchell, the Higher Criticism was to blame for the drunkenness and infidelity now widespread in the United States,56 while the Presbyterian M. B. Lambdin saw it as the cause of the rising divorce rate, graft, corruption, crime, and murder.57 But the stridency of these claims reflects an anxiety. Christians had been taught to regard the truths of religion as well within the grasp of their minds and to treat the plain sense of scripture as factual. This attitude was becoming more and more difficult to maintain.
After Darwin, it was possible to deny God’s existence without flying in the face of the most authoritative scientific evidence. For the first time, unbelief was a viable and sustainable intellectual option. But people were still wary of the term “atheist.” The English social reformer George Holyoake (1817–1906) preferred to call himself a “secularist,” because atheism still had overtones of immorality.58 Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91), who refused to take the parliamentary oath with its invocation of God when he took up his seat in the House of Commons, was proud to call himself an atheist—but immediately qualified his position: “I do not say that there is no God; and until you tell me what you mean by God I am not mad enough to say anything of the kind.” But he knew that God was not “something [a word he deliberately italicized] entirely distinct and different in substance” from the world we know.59
The British biologist Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) felt that outright atheism was too dogmatic, because it made metaphysical claims about God’s nonexistence on insufficient physical evidence.60 It was probably Huxley who coined the term “agnostic” (a word based on the Latin agnosco: “I do not know”) sometime in the 1860s. For Huxley, agnosticism was not a belief but a method. Its requirement was simple: “In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated and demonstrable.” Because they had all maintained this principled reticence, refusing the luxury of absolute certainty, Socrates, Paul, Luther, Calvin, and Descartes had all been agnostics, and agnosticism was now “the fundamental principle of modern science.”61 But Huxley also saw scientific rationalism as a new secular religion that demanded conversion and total commitment. People would have to choose between the myths of religion and the truths of science. There could be no compromise: “one or the other would have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration.”62
Huxley clearly felt that he had a fight on his hands. While science was the symbol of irreversible progress, religion seemed part of the old world that was doomed to disappear.63 For Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–99), lawyer, orator, and state attorney general who became a leading spokesman of American agnosticism, humanity would soon outgrow God: one day everybody would recognize that religion was an extinct species.64 For the American poet and novelist Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), “the loss of religious faith among the most civilized portions of the race is a step from childishness to maturity.”65 By the 1870s, this conviction had hardened into a new myth that saw religion and science as locked in eternal and inevitable conflict. The champions of science constructed a revisionist history of the relations between the two, floridly told, that cast the heroes of “progress”— Bruno, Galileo, Luther—as the hapless victims of evil cardinals and fanatical puritans. For the American propagandist Joel Moody, religion was the “science of evil.”
Men of generous culture or of great learning and women of eminent piety and virtue from the humble cottage to the throne have been led out for matters of conscience or butchered before a mindless rabble lusting after God. The limbs of men and women have been torn from their bodies, their eyes gouged out, their flesh mangled and slowly roasted, their children barbarously tortured before their eyes, because of religious opinion.66
For Ingersoll, human history had been scarred by “a deadly conflict” in which the brave, lonely champions of truth, “straining against fear and mental slavery, prejudice and martyrdom,” had dragged humanity “inch by inch” closer to the truth.67
In 1871, John William Draper (1811–82), head of the department of medicine at New York University, published The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, which went through fifty printings and was translated into ten languages. While Religion clung timidly to the unchangeable truths of revelation, Science forged expansively ahead, giving us telescopes, barometers, canals, hospitals, sanitation, schools, the telegraph, calculus, sewing machines, rifles, and warships. Only Science could liberate us from the tyranny of Religion (Draper habitually capitalized these terms so that they seemed like characters in a morality play). “The ecclesiastic must learn to keep himself within the domain he has chosen, and cease to tyrannize over the philosopher, who, conscious of his own strength and the purity of his motives, will bear such interference no longer.”68
Ultimately, however, Draper’s polemic was marred by his blatantly anti-Catholic prejudice. Less immediately popular but more influential long-term was A History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom (1896) by the ardent secularist Andrew Dixon White (1832–1918), first president of Cornell University.
In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and science—and invariably. And, on the other hand, all untrammelled scientific investigations no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed, for the time, has invariably resulted in the highest good of religion and of science.69<
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The two were implacably opposed. One of these protagonists was beneficial to humanity; the other, evil and dangerous. Ever since Augustine had insisted on the “absolute authority of scripture,” all theologians “without exception, have forced mankind away from the truth, and have caused Christendom to stumble for centuries into abysses of error and sorrow.”70
In reality, the relations between science and faith had been more complex and nuanced. But this overblown polemic has remained the stock-in-trade of the atheist critique of religion and is widely accepted as a matter of fact. White’s misrepresentation of Augustine’s view of scripture is just one example of his bias. One of the most persistent of the apocryphal tales that developed at this time is the story of Huxley’s encounter with Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford (1805–73). In June 1860, shortly after the publication of Origin, they took part in a debate at a meeting of the British Association. Wilberforce is said to have played to the gallery and, having shown that he had absolutely no understanding of evolution, concluded by facetiously asking Huxley whether he claimed descent from a monkey through his grandmother or grandfather. Huxley retorted that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man like Wilberforce, who used his great talents to obscure the truth. It is a story that brilliantly encapsulates the “warfare” myth in its depiction of intrepid science victoriously triumphing over complacent, ignorant religion. But, as scholars have repeatedly demonstrated, there is no record of this exchange until the 1890s. It is not mentioned in contemporary accounts of the meeting. In fact, Wilberforce was entirely conversant with Darwinian theory; his speech at the British Institution summarized the recent review that he had written of Origin, which Darwin himself, acknowledging that Wilberforce had pointed out serious omissions in his argument that he would have to address, had considered “uncommonly clever.”71
Closely allied to the “warfare” myth in atheistic polemic was the view that belief in itself was immoral, which has also become an essential ingredient of atheist ideology. It dates from the publication of Ethics of Belief (1871) by William Kingdon Clifford (1845–79), professor of mathematics at University College, London, who argued that it was not only intellectually but morally perverse to accept any opinion—religious, scientific, or ethical—without sufficient evidence. He illustrated his thesis with the story of a shipowner who knew that his ship needed extensive repairs but decided to spare himself the expense, reflecting that it had survived many voyages and that God would not allow it to sink with so many passengers on board. When the ship went down in midocean, he was able to collect the insurance.
Clifford’s book struck an instant chord. By the late 1860s, widespread veneration for science as the only path to truth had made the idea of “belief” without verification offensive not only intellectually but morally. For the American sociologist Lester Ward (1841–1913), superstition (a term that he applied indiscriminately to any religious idea) led to neurological softening of the brain and weakened moral fiber. Once you had accepted the idea that some matters lay beyond human comprehension, you would swallow anything.72 For the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73), the delusions of faith “would sanction half the mischievous illusions recorded in history.”73 Credulity was an act of abject cowardice: “Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith!” Ingersoll protested with his usual bravura, “Banish me from Eden if you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!”74
Today we are so used to the idea that science and religion are at loggerheads that these ideas no longer surprise us. But in the late nineteenth century, most churchmen still looked up to science; they had not yet fully appreciated how thoroughly Darwinism had undermined the natural theology on which their “belief” was based. At this time, it was not the religious who were fueling the antagonism between the two disciplines but the advocates of science. Most scientists had no interest in bashing religion; they were content to get on quietly with their research and objected only when theologians tried to obstruct their inquiries.75 It was the popularizers of Darwin who went on the offensive in an antireligious crusade. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Karl Vogt (1817–95), Ludwig Buchner (1824–99), and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) toured Europe, lecturing enthusiastically to packed audiences.76 Vogt was a good scientist (though some of his colleagues feared that he reached his conclusions too hastily) but was so vehemently anticlerical that when he discussed religion, he lost all perspective. His method was to present faith at its most simplistic—inveighing fiercely against the myth of Noah’s Ark, for example, as though it were a real impediment to scientific advance—and then to devote a disproportionate amount of time and energy to attacking the straw dog he had set up.
When they turned their attention to religion, all three were liable to depart from the precision that characterized their discussion of science, so their critique was marred by wild generalizations. When he read Haeckel’s best seller The Riddle of the Universe, the philosopher Friedrich Paulsen said that he burned with shame to think that it had been written by a German scholar in the land of scholarship.77 Haeckel had, for example, argued that at the Council of Nicaea, the bishops had compiled the New Testament by simply picking the four gospels at random from a pile of forged documents—information he had acquired from an exceptionally scurrilous English pamphlet. He even got the date of Nicaea wrong. When he discussed science, Haeckel was careful, methodical, and accurate; none of these qualities was in evidence when he wrote about religion.
Huxley had little time for this polemic, because he understood that no investigation of the physical world could provide evidence for or against God. He thought Draper a bore, Vogt a fool, and utterly despised Büchner’s best-selling Force and Matter, which argued that the universe had no purpose, that everything had derived from a single cell, and that only an idiot could believe in God. Pascal had explained that “the heart has its reasons” for beliefs that were not accessible to our reasoning powers, and this also seems true of late-nineteenth-century unbelief. The proselytizing atheists did not exemplify the precision, objectivity, and impartial examination of the evidence that was now characteristic of the scientific rationalism they glorified. Nevertheless, their emotional diatribes attracted huge crowds. There had always been an intolerant strain in modernity; it had long seemed necessary to abjure recent orthodoxy as a condition for the creation of new truth. Atheism was still a minority passion, but people who nurtured subterranean doubts yet were not ready to let their faith go may have found this passionate critique vicariously cathartic.
Others relinquished their faith with sorrow and felt no Promethean defiance, no heady liberation. In “Dover Beach,” the British poet Matthew Arnold (1822–88) heard the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith as it receded, bringing “the eternal note of sadness in.” Human beings could only cling to one another for comfort, for the world that once seemed
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.78
At its best, religion had helped people to build within themselves a haven of peace that enabled them to live creatively with the sorrow of life; but during the scientific age, that interiorized security had been exchanged for an unsustainable certainty. As their faith ebbed, many Victorians sensed the void that it left behind.
When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) looked into the hearts of his contemporaries, he found that God had already died, there, but as yet very few people were aware of this.79 In The Gay Science (1882), he told the story of a madman who ran one morning into the marketplace, crying: “I seek God!” In mild amusement, the sophisticated bystanders asked him if God had run away or emigrated. “Where has
God gone?” the madman demanded. “We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!”80 The astonishing progress of science had made God quite irrelevant; it had caused human beings to focus so intently on the physical world that they would soon be constitutionally unable to take God seriously. The death of God—the fact that the Christian God had become incredible—was “beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.” The tiny minority who were able to understand the implications of this unprecedented event were already finding that “some sun seems to have set and profound trust has been turned to doubt.”81
By making “God” a purely notional truth attainable by the rational and scientific intellect, without ritual, prayer, or ethical commitment, men and women had killed it for themselves. Like the Jewish Marranos, Europeans were beginning to experience religion as tenuous, arbitrary, and lifeless. The madman longed to believe in God but he could not. The unthinkable had happened: everything that the symbol of God had pointed to—absolute goodness, beauty, order, peace, truthfulness, justice—was being slowly but surely eliminated from European culture. Morality would no longer be measured by reference to an ultimate value that transcended human interests but simply by the needs of the moment. For Marx the death of God had been a project—something to be achieved in the future; for Nietzsche it had already occurred: it was only a matter of time before “God” would cease to be a presence in the scientific civilization of the West. Unless a new absolute could be found to take its place, everything would become unhinged and relative: “What were we about when we uncoupled this earth from the sun?” the madman demanded. “Where is the earth moving to now? Are we falling continuously? And backwards and sideways and forwards in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?”82 Nietzsche was, of course, familiar with the philosophical and scientific arguments for the denial of God, but he did not bother to rehearse them. God had not died because of the critique of Feuerbach, Marx, Vogt, and Buchner. There had simply been a change of mood. Like the ancient Sky God, the remote modern God was retreating from the consciousness of his former worshippers.
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