By Matthew Stanley
Matthew Stanley explores the overlap and shift among theistic and naturalistic technological know-how via a parallel learn of 2 significant medical figures: James Clerk Maxwell, a religious Christian physicist, and Thomas Henry Huxley, the iconoclast biologist who coined the notice agnostic. either have been deeply engaged within the methodological, institutional, and political matters that have been an important to the theistic-naturalistic transformation. What Stanley’s research of those figures finds is that the medical naturalists done a couple of suggestions over a iteration to achieve keep watch over of the associations of clinical schooling and to reimagine the background in their self-discipline. instead of a unexpected revolution, the similarity among theistic and naturalistic technological know-how allowed for a comparatively gentle transition in perform from the outdated safeguard to the new.
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Additional resources for Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science
Example text
93 Huxley quickly became “Darwin’s bulldog,” far and away the most aggressive and effective advocate for that hermetic evolutionist. 95 He was excited about this new kind of explanation Religious Lives 29 figure 1. Huxley’s chart on the historical development of religions. 1. of life, not the mechanics of the theory. His increasingly powerful polemics got everyone reading the book, even if he did not help them understand it. The debates over Darwin became set in the public imagination as an epic battle between science and theology.
That distinction was critical for the way the naturalists presented their own ideas and goals. It allowed them to maintain their respectability and to claim that they provided spiritual leadership for British society. A foundational resource for this distinction was the work of Thomas Carlyle. 73 Carlyle persuaded them that it was possible to be rational and scientific without being materialistic or atheistic. His critique of the Anglican clergy was inspirational, and his call for the replacement of the old aristocracy with a new meritocracy was exactly what those young men of science hoped for.
Richard Owen was one of Huxley’s fi rst targets. 90 Their assault on theistic science gained new vigor with the 1859 publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. As Darwin considered breaking his many-year silence on his ideas, he spoke with his confidant John Lubbock about which men of science might be sympathetic. Lubbock, a naturalistic entomologist, suggested Huxley. 91 But when the Origin appeared, Huxley swore his loyalty despite his reservations about the truth of natural selection. What he was fascinated by was not so much the content of the book as its purely naturalistic approach to the living world.