Endnotes
1 Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (London: Touchstone, 1995), 3, 6.
2 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Black Swan, 2007), 57.
3 Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 243.
4 Edward O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York: Norton, 2006), 3–4.
5 See Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism (Grand Rapids/ Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008), for a discussion of different kinds of naturalism.
6 Richard Dawkins is probably the most famous British advocate of atheism. The expatriate British Christopher Hitchens has written widely in the United States. In Australia, Phillip Adams advocates similar views.
7 This is despite many practicing scientists being theists, including Francis Collins (director of the National Human Genome Research Institute) and computational and theoretical chemist Fritz Schaeffer. There are thousands of other examples. See, for example, R. J. Berry, ed., Real Science, Real Faith (Crowborough: Monarch, 1991).
8 There is also what is known as “methodological naturalism.” This is a mode of doing, say, scientific experiments, assuming that whatever natural phenomenon is being studied will have a natural explanation. It leaves unasked and unanswered questions about ultimate explanations and is frequently the heuristic used by theistic scientists in their day-to-day scientific work. It is in many ways a misleading term, as the scientist may believe firmly that God is entirely responsible for the natural activity being studied, but the scientist is just not interested in that question at the moment. As we will see, there are various historical reasons for why many Christians take this approach to the natural world, assuming that natural events have natural causes, even if ultimately the overall cause is God. It is a very different position from what we are calling naturalism in this essay (the metaphysical position that the natural world, as opposed to any supernatural world, is the only thing that exists).
9 There are many different ways of categorizing causation; we are looking at one simple schema here. Another important part of the Scientific Revolution was the way in which Aristotle’s ‘final cause’ was excluded from the workings of science; this was also discussed in Bacon’s work.
10 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 11.
11 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667), 63.
12 Ibid., 82.
13 See the discussion in Stephen Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 135–55.
14 William Perkins, Foure greate lyers, striuig who shall win the siluer Whetstone. Also, a resolvtion to the countri-man, prouing it vtterly unlawfull to buye or use our yeerly prognostications, 1608, W. 1585; STC 19080, spelling updated.
15 William Paley, Natural Theology, in the Miscellaneous Works of William Paley (London: Baldwyn, 1821), 3:9–11.
16 This is not a fair summary of the whole of Paley’s writings. We are concerned here with the ideas that influence popular perceptions about God and science.
17 Charles Darwin, “Autobiography,” in Francis Darwin, The Life of Charles Darwin (London: John Murray, 1902; reprint, London: Studio Editions, 1995), 18.
18 This is exactly how Richard Dawkins responds to Paley’s argument: “Paley’s argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way.” Without Darwin’s explanation of apparent design, Dawkins says, it would have been very difficult to resist Paley’s argument, but “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker [London, Penguin, 1988], 5–6).
19 Cf. how Richard Dawkins presents the argument from design: “Things in the world, especially living things, look as though they have been designed. Nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed. Therefore there must have been a designer, and we call him God. . . . The argument from design is the only one still in regular use today, and it still sounds to many like the ultimate knockdown argument. . . . Unfortunately for Paley, the mature Darwin blew it out of the water” (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion [London, Black Swan, 2007], 103).
20 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 169–70.
21 Francis Darwin, The Life of Charles Darwin, 58.
22 On Thomas Huxley, see Adrian Desmond’s excellent work, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (London: Penguin, 1997).
23 See Morris Berman, “‘Hegemony’ and the Amateur Tradition in British Science,” Journal of Social History 8 (1975): 30–43.
24 Cyril Bibby, ed., The Essence of T. H. Huxley: Selections from His Writings (London: Macmillan/New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967), 8.
25 For a description of this campaign, see J. V. Jensen, “The X Club: Fraternity of Victorian Scientists,” The British Journal for the History of Science 5 (1970): 63–72; R. M. MacLeod, “The X-club: A Scientific Network in Late Victorian England,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 24 (1970): 305–322; Edward Caudill, “The Bishop-Eaters: The Publicity Campaign for Darwin and On the Origin of Species,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994): 441–66; and David Starling, “Thomas Huxley and the ‘Warfare’ Between Science and Religion: Mythology, Politics and Ideology,” kategoria 3 (1996): 33–50.
26 Huxley, Collected Essays (New York: Greenwood, 1893), 1:41, quoted in F. M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Victorian Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 17–18.
27 In Bibby, Essence of T. H. Huxley, 15. For further discussion of Huxley’s campaign and his appropriation of religious trappings, see Colin A. Russell, “The Conflict Metaphor and Its Social Origins,” Science and Christian Belief 1 (1989): 3–26.
28 Huxley, “The Origin of Species” (1860), in Collected Essays, 2:52. This has been a tactic frequently used by anti-Christian polemicists. Cf. J. W. Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1883) and A. D. White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: Appleton, 1898).
29 See note 14.
30 Parts of this section are taken from my essay, “What Is science?” published in kategoria 7 (1997): 29–50.
31 Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997).
32 For a classic discussion of what a scientific “law” is, see Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).
33 A useful text on historical justifications of scientific method is David Oldroyd, The Arch of Knowledge: An Introductory Study of the History of the Philosophy and Methodology of Science (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1986).
34 See Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) and The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1980).
35 See for instance Peter Lipton, “Is the Best Good Enough?” in David Papineau, ed., The Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 93–106.
36 See Larry Laudan, “A Confutation of Convergent Realism,” in ibid., 107–138.
37 This trend was famously introduced by the physicist Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). A further revision of his ideas can be found in “Second Thoughts on Paradigms,” in Frederick Suppe, ed., The Structure of Scientific Theories (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 459–82. For a critique see Frederick Suppe, “Exemplars, Theories and Disciplinary Matrixes,” in ibid. (483–99). See also Suppe’s “Introduction” and “Afterword” in the same volume (3–232, 617–730).
38 See Graham A. Cole, “Do Christian Have a Worldview?”
39 See the discussion in John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
40 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1998), 37.
41 This is a reply that often turns up in discussion of the anthropic principle. See Denis Alexander, Rebuilding the Matrix: Science and Faith in the 21st Century (Oxford: Lion, 2001).
42 For more on this see Denis Alexander, ibid.
43 Cf. Philip Sampson’s Six Modern Myths (Leicester: IVP, 2000).
44 Richard Dawkins is a prime example of this tendency. Cf. also Edward O. Wilson.