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Lone Voices?

Newton and the Hairdresser • Selling Starlite • Lone Voices • Partners in Crime? • Plotting Our Course • Two Cults • Positive Thinking • The Religion of Humanity • Love–Hate Relationships • The Specter of Comte • Belligerent Bulldogs and Strangled Snakes • Belfast and the Furious • Blood on Their Hands • The X Club • Every Thoughtful Man Must Take Part • The Proof Is in the Reading

Newton and the Hairdresser

Ask any practicing scientist to list their top ten thinkers of all time, and it is likely that Isaac Newton (1643–1727) will make the cut. This is with good reason: he personally formulated three laws of motion which are still taught to every physics student in the world; he painstakingly analyzed the colored spectrum of visible light; he invented the now-essential mathematical calculus; he built the first ever reflecting telescope. And, if all that wasn’t already enough, then there’s also the small matter of gravity—which he comprehensively described in his game-changing Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687).

Maurice Ward, on the other hand, will not get a mention from anyone. A hairdresser from Hartlepool (a town whose occupants are most famous for convicting a monkey of being a French spy and publicly executing it¹), Ward would not make their top thousand, let alone trouble the likes of Newton. Born in 1933, he achieved precisely nothing in the formal world of academia, is unheard of in the halls of our greatest universities, and died without a single law, principle, or even journal paper to his name.

And yet, despite the incontestably lopsided pen-pictures above, Ward can still make a genuine claim to be Newton’s scientific superior. For, like Newton, Ward came up with an invention that could change the world—but, unlike the much-lauded Enlightenment powerhouse, the barely known hairdresser did it all, entirely, on his own.

Let’s deal with Newton’s long list of spectacular achievements first. His laws of motion were indeed paradigm-shifting—and yet he was, in reality, building on the breakthroughs of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). In the same vein, Newton’s immediate predecessors—Willebrord Snellius (1580–1626) and René Descartes (1596–1650), for example—had laid much of the necessary groundwork for his ideas about light.

The pattern continues: at almost the same time as Newton developed calculus, Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) came up with it too—a fact which strongly suggests that mathematicians had recently created the ideal conditions for the discovery. The reflecting telescope was indeed a clever new design, but it was a modification of pre-existing concepts. Even Newton’s gravity was highly dependent on the equations of Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), as well as on suggestions put forward (sometimes to Newton directly) by Robert Hooke (1635–1703).

None of this, of course, should serve to detract from Newton’s genius—he is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds in human history. It is true, however, that he lived and worked in an era when other great minds were making highly significant contributions in the same arenas. His community included the likes of the nascent Royal Society, and mathematical and experimental leaps forward were being made left, right, and center. Newton, then, was not a lone voice in the wilderness. He was not an isolated savant. As he famously wrote in a letter to Hooke, he was “standing on the shoulders of giants.”²

Maurice Ward, however, was a different kettle of fish.

Selling Starlite

Ward, like much of the UK population, had been deeply affected by the horrific deaths of 55 passengers on British Airtours Flight 28M in 1985. The aircraft, a Boeing 737, had caught fire while still on the Manchester runway, and only 82 of the 137 people on board managed to escape. The tragedy was due mainly to two factors: the great speed with which the fire spread, and the deadly nature of its fumes. The overwhelming majority of fatalities were ascribed to “rapid incapacitation due to the inhalation of the dense toxic/irritant smoke atmosphere within the cabin.”³

Despite a lack of any notable background in science or technology, Ward set about developing a fire-resistant material that would ensure such a disaster could never happen again. He did not consult with any professionals, he did not book any laboratory slots, and he did not build on the discoveries of others. Instead, he worked at home—with occasional help from his (equally non-qualified) daughter.

Against all the odds, though, Ward developed a miracle material which outperformed anything that has been produced by any multinational engineering company before or since. He christened it Starlite—and its list of properties staggered even the experts.

Starlite was tested by the likes of NASA, NATO, the British Ministry of Defence (MOD), Cambridge University, and even Boeing itself. Between them, they found that just a few millimeters of the substance would comfortably withstand laser beams at 10,000 °C, sustained flame temperatures of well over 1000 °C, and even the full and direct heat blast from a nuclear explosion. What’s more, it did all this without transmitting any warmth across itself or emitting any dangerous fumes.⁴ It was the perfect defense against the threat of fire—and the miracles do not stop there.

Starlite, according to Ward and his daughter, is more than 90% natural. It is fully biodegradable and, they claimed, even edible. It is flexible when dry, can be painted onto a surface when wet, is waterproof, UV-proof, and remarkably light. Such is the adaptability of the product that it could potentially be sprayed harmlessly over lawns or gardens to protect the houses within from the horrors of wildfires.

This wonderstuff hit the big time when it got the prime slot on the BBC’s flagship science show Tomorrow’s World in 1990.⁵ Presenter Peter Macann subjected a hen’s egg coated in a thin layer of Starlite to five minutes of blowtorching from about an inch away. He then turned the blowtorch off, immediately picked the egg up in his hand (with no ill effects) and cracked it into a dish. To the delight of the viewers (and Macann) it was raw.

The big-hitters, unsurprisingly, promptly piled in. Ward found himself with potential suitors all over the world. He sent samples of Starlite out for them to test, and the verdict was unanimous—this was an unprecedented material that could change engineering forever. The world could be a much safer place. Ward could be a much richer man. Starlite could be a household name.

And yet, it was not to be. Ward, the quirky outsider, simply could not get along with the wider scientific community he was suddenly plunged into. He was fiercely defensive when it came to discussing his formula and methods and he continually resisted collaboration of pretty much any kind. Mark Miodownik is one of the foremost materials scientists in the world, and has personally tested Starlite. When asked why it was never brought to market, he says:

It’s a very different skillset, inventing material, and building a business out of it. Those are, in a sense, two completely separate things and I think he either couldn’t do the second thing, or he didn’t have someone around him he trusted to do the second thing.⁶

Keith Lewis, who performed the laser tests for the MOD and described Starlite as better than anything else he had ever seen, agrees that Ward’s stark individualism was his downfall:

I think Maurice was very, very bothered about knowledge leaking out. He wanted to own it. He wanted Starlite to be “his.” He was not happy with giving over details of what might be in it.⁷

As the years rolled on, Maurice Ward proved more and more difficult to work with. Frustrated, the big companies began to lose interest. Eventually, they cut their losses and moved on. Ward never did sell Starlite. And then, in 2011, he died—taking his secret with him.

The miracle material that could have revolutionized our millennia-old relationship with fire was lost forever. Many well-funded and well-educated experimentalists have tried, and failed, to replicate it. The conclusion is as clear as it is surprising: Ward and his invention, it would seem, were both one of a kind. The undecorated and previously unheard of hairdresser from Hartlepool was clearly not standing on anyone’s shoulders—let alone on those of giants.

Lone Voices

So what about John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White: were they Newtons, or were they Wards? Were they talented and respected members of an active and interconnected academic community, or highly individualistic lone wolves? Did their grand masterworks—Conflict and Warfare—emerge brilliantly but naturally from the thinking of the day, as with Principia? Or, more like Starlite, did they suddenly appear, without any precedent whatsoever, from the minds of disconnected and idiosyncratic outsiders?

Essentially, what we really want to know is this: is the conflict thesis entirely of our duo’s own making, or did they have (lots of) help?

In May 2015, a group of the world’s top historians of science and religion gathered together for a three-day conference at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Messrs. Draper and White, as one might have expected, came up more than just once. So, what was made of our prickly pair? Were they deemed to be lone voices, or part of the chorus?

Well, as is often the way with such events, the various discussions ended up in a book. Published in 2018 by Johns Hopkins University Press, it was given the more-than-a-little-revealing title of The Warfare Between Science & Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die.

No fewer than ten of the seventeen essays in this wide-ranging volume—chapter titles include “Continental Europe,” “Social Scientists,” “Muslims,” and “The View on the Street”—mention Draper and/or White on their very first page. A further two introduce them just one page later. That is a rather considerable hit rate of twelve from seventeen—it would seem, then, that the specialists simply cannot separate the notion of God-and-science enmity from our two pugnacious penmen.

Lawrence M. Principe, for example, is professor of the humanities at Johns Hopkins. He is also the director of the Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe, and has been awarded the Francis Bacon Medal for significant contributions to the history of science. In his section of the book, he could hardly be accused of holding back:

Historians identify two late-nineteenth-century books as the chief vectors of the conflict thesis: John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). The melodramatized “history” and the dubious “facts” upon which these books rest are easy to point out and refute, and many historians have done so.⁸

Elsewhere, Bernard Lightman says Draper and White are “generally seen by scholars as the founders of the ‘conflict thesis’ ”; Ronald L. Numbers and Jeff Hardin call them “the chief architects of the ‘warfare thesis’ ”; M. Alper Yalçinkaya says they “introduced” the God-versus-science idea; Efthymios Nicolaidis names Conflict and Warfare as “the two most influential nineteenth-century books positing the existence of ‘warfare’ between science and religion.”⁹

This is pretty damning. Does all this serve to tell us, then, that the two of them really are solely responsible—as in, Maurice Ward–style solely responsible—for the existence of the badly-wrong-but-widely-accepted conflict thesis? Is it exclusively their fault that so many school students now believe we must choose between Science or God as our Guide? Does the whole darn show hang on them—and on them alone?

Well yes, sort of.

And also no.

Partners in Crime?

When we dig a little deeper into the articles written by the Wisconsin collective, new structures begin to emerge. Principe, for example, hints that Draper and White might not have been the first to attempt their particular summit: “A few limited claims that ‘religion’ (broadly understood) opposed ‘science’ (equally broadly understood) do predate the nineteenth century.”¹⁰

Jon H. Roberts, professor of history at Boston University, makes a different but related point—he says of those who first reviewed Draper’s Conflict that:

Many acknowledged that the relationship between religion and science was, as one commentator put it, “the question which is now agitating the world of thought.” Many recognized, too, that Draper was hardly alone in perceiving significant tension between religious thought and the scientific world view.¹¹

If, though, it is true that some others had mentioned, fomented, or even propagated the conflict thesis before or alongside Draper and White, then who were they? What, exactly, had they said? Were Draper and White aware of them? More to the point, if the conflict thesis was doing the rounds, then does that mean that people were already telling lies, and spreading myths, and getting history wrong? How could such a thing possibly happen? And why would Draper and White end up, more than a hundred years later, getting all the blame for it?

Let’s find out.

Plotting Our Course

Before we continue, a caveat: tracking any intellectual idea back to its earliest origins can be a bit of a fool’s errand. Invariably, what starts off as a seemingly simple quest soon becomes an odyssey, often of appropriately epic proportions. What initially appears to be the first seed of a movement turns out, instead, to be a bloom in its own right—one with a still-earlier seed of its own. “First” versions of arguments can have the rather annoying habit of wriggling around, slipping our grasp, and running away. And they tend to run backward, through time.

It is very hard, then, for a historian to ever start a story—for the case can always be made for going just one more step further into the past. And, given that our particular topic is the relationship between science and religion, the risk of indecision is especially bad—for both appear to have been with us, in one form or another, for the entirety of recorded history.

Still, a choice must be made, or we will get nowhere. Here, then, is our itinerary: we shall begin in France, at the end of the 1780s. We shall drop in on some revolutionaries and then, a few decades later, on a troubled philosopher. From there, we shall head to Victorian Britain and visit some high-society freethinkers. Finally, we shall set sail across the pond to America—where, armed with what we have learned, we shall at last find the answers we need about Draper and White.

So, off to France we go . . .

Two Cults

Owing to their discontent with the economy, or the ruling classes, or the class system itself, or the questionable behavior of those in Catholic orders, or the lavish hypocrisy of the royal family, or their own (lack of) diet—or some combination of all of these—a whole lot of people living in France toward the close of the eighteenth century decided that they had now had enough. A confusing and messy political revolution was embarked upon—one which is almost impossible to follow closely and accurately, even with the benefit of more than two centuries of hindsight.

It is hardly the business of this book to analyze the French Revolution in any grand sense. Instead, we will attempt to pick out just a few key elements from the notoriously complex whole—for both science and religion featured, in their own way, rather heavily.

The revolutionary leaders, for example, despised the Catholic Church and wanted to deprive it of its power. The problem was that they could not agree on precisely how this should be done. Indeed, such disagreement among the sans culottes, as they were sometimes known, was a constant feature of the revolution, and one that left many of them dead—often at the hands of each other.

Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) was one of many who thought he knew best what to do. To him, it seemed to make sense to dechristianize France altogether. Under his instruction, churches were stripped of their religious symbols, and their assets were sold to fund the revolutionary efforts. Crosses were even removed from cemeteries, with the atheistic Fouché insisting on the inscription “Death Is an Eternal Sleep” being placed over their gates.¹² Public Christian worship was outlawed; priests were now effectively enemies of the state.

Fouché found an ally in Jacques Hébert (1757–1794). The latter realized, though, that getting rid of Christianity altogether might present its own problems—for much of the rural population were deeply committed to it. He set about devising a highly rational replacement for Catholicism, in the hope that it would both appease and enlighten these countryfolk. Soon, he unveiled his brainchild: the excitingly new and refreshingly godless Cult of Reason.

Officially established as the creed of the Revolution in 1793, the Cult of Reason didn’t actually last all that long. Its mayfly-like climax came with the “Festival of Reason,” celebrated nationwide in November of that year. Running somewhat contrary to its name and intention, it ended up being an inconsistent and haphazard blend of music, partying, sage proclamations of revolutionary philosophy, nods to ancient Greece, grand displays of art, and wanton rejoicing in the newly bought “freedom” of France.

So unclear, in fact, was the actual purpose of the festival that different parts of the country even gave it different names: some went for the Festival of Virtue, some for the Festival of Morals. Many towns decided to have local women portraying “goddesses,” with some claiming that their particular divinity (sometimes Liberty, sometimes Reason, sometimes Fame) was the one and only goddess—no matter what the folk down the road had to say.

Other celebrants missed the point of the charade even more badly, and used the occasion to worship an unspecified but almighty creator. All of this confused and chaotic my-town’s-god-or-goddess-is-bigger-than-yours business, we must remember, was happening entirely at the behest of an atheistic cult which had been formed with the sole purpose of championing level-headed, anti-superstitious, clear-thinking reason.¹³

To make matters even more complicated, the head honcho of the revolution at this particular time was Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794)—who did believe in God. He found himself appalled at the rampant godlessness of the Cult of Reason and its frenzied festival, and decided he needed to rescue his embryonic France from it as soon as possible.

Robespierre, however, was in no man’s land—for he, most certainly, was not a traditional believer either. His “God” was a vague and undefined entity, a concept he felt was far beyond human understanding. As a result, he set himself a monumental task: he would eradicate both the ancient Catholic Church and its modern atheistic replacement in one fell swoop.

His solution was to copy Hébert, and form yet another cult: this time, it was the Cult of the Supreme Being. Convinced that his new invention was the answer, Robespierre did not hold back—after all, he was currently enjoying a lot of power and influence, and he might as well use it. He, too, would have a festival—the Festival of the Supreme Being—and his would not be the embarrassing free-for-all that Hébert had made such a mess of. Instead, it would be a carefully choreographed and ostentatiously orchestrated triumph.

Paris, Robespierre commanded, was to come to a standstill as his bold new religion was ushered in. Everyone—no matter what they had believed up until this point—would stand to benefit. The discomfort stirred up by the atheism of Hébert would be relieved by the acknowledgment of the (sort of) supernatural; the corruption and irrationality of the Catholicism that had held the old France back could be binned once and for all. He was, therefore, providing his fortunate country with the best of both worlds.

No expense was spared on the day itself, which began with a lavish parade through Paris. Historian David Andress takes up the story:

Robespierre headed the march. . . . He was reportedly radiant with happiness at the proceedings. . . . After the massive choral performance at the Tuileries, he made another set-piece speech on virtue, then applied a flaming torch to a large effigy of Atheism—from it . . . emerged a smaller figure of Wisdom.

The spectacle continued with a heady, dream-like, mishmash of imagery:

A vast mountain . . . had been built from plaster and board, and alongside it a fifty-foot column with the figure of the French people as Hercules. Crowned with a massive tree of liberty, and supplied with a convenient staircase, the mountain was ascended by the deputies in procession, as choirs, and some half-million spectators, boomed out more newly composed hymns. As the noise crashed to a halt, Robespierre descended like Moses himself.¹⁴

Magisterial indeed.

Within six weeks, though, Robespierre was dead. Earlier that year he had sent his fellow revolutionary, Hébert, to the guillotine; now it was his turn to be executed by his supposed teammates. The Royalist Protestant Jacques Mallet du Pan (1749–1800) summed the murderous situation up fairly well in 1793: “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”¹⁵

A few years later, Napoleon became emperor of France. He outlawed both the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being in 1801 and, in the process, restored Catholicism’s civil status in the country. The short and exceptionally bloody revolution was suddenly over.

The cat, though, was out of the bag. Before all of France, traditional Christianity had been openly questioned, derided, attacked, and then replaced with reason. Rationality had been set up against dogmatism in the most spectacularly visible of manners—and it was a sight that the Western world, ever since, has never been able to unsee.

Positive Thinking

Auguste Comte (1798–1857), yet another Frenchman, managed to avoid getting caught up in the French Revolution by rather cleverly being born at the very end of it. His parents—who, somehow, still had their heads on their shoulders—were strict Catholic Royalists, but Comte did not follow in their footsteps. He rejected Christianity, snubbed the reinstated monarchy, and plunged himself instead into the world of secular philosophy.

The switch paid off. By the age of just 28, Comte was teaching his own take on life to some of the best minds around, including Joseph Fourier (1768–1830) and Alexander Von Humboldt (1769–1859)—a fact which is particularly notable given that both men were brilliant scientists already, and both were significantly his senior.

All, however, was not well. Comte had married Caroline Massin (1802–1877) and they were both often desperately unhappy. She was a strong and independent woman—which had played a part in his initial attraction to her—and this, when combined with Comte’s instability, jealousy, and paranoia, led to a stormy relationship between the two of them.

Only a year after he began lecturing on his radical new ideas, Comte had a nervous breakdown, with devastating effects for him and his family. Mary Pickering, who has written extensively on Comte, describes just how extreme matters quickly became:

Sombre and uncommunicative, he would often crouch behind doors and act more like an animal than a human. He still had many fantasies. Every lunch and dinner, he would announce he was a Scottish Highlander from one of Walter Scott’s novels, stick his knife into the table, demand a juicy piece of pork, and recite verses of Homer. He often tried to scare Massin by throwing his knife at her. . . . One day, when his mother joined them for a meal, an argument broke out at the table, and Comte took a knife and slit his throat. The scars were visible for the rest of his life.¹⁶

Remarkably, Massin nursed her undeserving husband back to full health by applying a psychology well ahead of its time. She removed the precautionary protective bars from his windows so that he would feel less patronized; she sat and took a dose of his medicine with him whenever he had to, so that he would feel less like a patient. There were still some significant ups and downs—Comte tried to kill himself by jumping off a Paris bridge and was stopped, somewhat ironically, by a royal guard—but Massin’s techniques worked. Before long, Comte was teaching again.

Committing his theory of life, the universe, and everything—a view he called positivism—to paper, Comte produced a mammoth six-volume text entitled Cours de Philosophie Positive. Although it was methodical and meticulous in its presentation, the Cours was also horribly dense and tended to put off all but the most hardened of readers. Fortunately for Comte, he was once again rescued from a potential plunge into obscurity by an inventive young woman. This time it was Harriet Martineau (1802–1876)—from Ambleside, in England.

Martineau had ploughed her way through Comte’s Cours and was won over by the sheer scope of his vision. She promptly translated it into English, condensing it in the process. The outcome was so much more palatable than the original that it soon became the version of choice for interested readers. Comte himself was so impressed that he had Martineau’s text translated back into French again—and advised his compatriots to study her edition instead of his own.

Central to Comte’s thesis was his identification of what became known as the Three Stages of human thinking. Martineau’s introduction to these stages is as follows:

The law is this: that each of our leading conceptions—each branch of our knowledge—passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.¹⁷

For Comte, there was a clear hierarchy of thought, with theology at the bottom and “positive” science at the top. Note that “Theological” views are assumed to be “fictitious” and that, in the hunt for ultimate reality, humanity must work its way up from such fairy-tale lowlands to the “Scientific” summit. Martineau continues:

In the theological state, the human mind, seeking the essential nature of beings, the first and final causes (the origin and purpose) of all effects—in short, absolute knowledge—supposes all phenomena to be produced by the immediate action of supernatural beings.¹⁸

Believing in God (or gods) like this is naïve, Comte argues. Real progress is only made once we begin to let go of such childlike ideas:

In the metaphysical state, which is only a modification of the first, the mind supposes, instead of supernatural beings, abstract forces . . . inherent in all beings, and capable of producing all phenomena.¹⁹

This metaphysics, warns Comte, is only marginally better than theology. It still believes that there are driving forces and purposes behind life, even if these have now become vague and abstract, rather than godlike. Espousers of pantheism have such a view, for instance—that the Earth, or even the universe, is “alive” as a whole somehow, and has both design and meaning. Comte considers such views to be wholly incorrect but credits them, nonetheless, as being a necessary stepping-stone toward the goal—which is coolly objective science:

In the final, the positive, state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws. . . . What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of facts is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts, the number of which continually diminishes with the progress of science.²⁰

In other words, we will always arrive, ultimately, at a mathematical formulation—a law—which allows us to calculate an answer, and then do no more. We should assign this law (and its “answer”) no meaning, no purpose, no design, and certainly no designer—it just is. And, once we have found it, that particular “branch of our knowledge” is truly “positive”—it is complete.

Religion, under Comte, was defunct. It simply wasn’t needed. All conceivable subject matter—even so-called religious experiences—would eventually yield to positivism. Cold and blind equations lay underneath all of existence, and that was that—we just had to find them. Comte was sure that his godless, meaningless, and uncompromisingly rational system was all-sufficient.

Then, in 1846, he changed his mind.

The Religion of Humanity

Devising a philosophy is one thing; living by it is quite another. Comte discovered this painful lesson twice over—at least.

Firstly, his miserable marriage to Caroline Massin came to an end when, in 1842, she left him for the final time. Although his Cours theoretically championed progressive intellectual independence among both men and women, Comte ended up, in reality, longing for a quiet and subservient wife. Massin later wrote “My great crime was to see in you a husband, not a master.”²¹

A second incongruity between Comte’s theory and his practice was dramatically exposed when he met Clotilde de Vaux (1815–1846). She was a devout Catholic; she was traditionally feminine; she was gentle, and emotional, and delicate—and Comte promptly fell head over heels in love with her. Clotilde then died, within a year of his first letter to her, at the tender age of 31.

Comte was devastated—and became increasingly haunted by the harshness of the universe he had created. He had dismissed all theological and transcendental affectations as small-minded, and supplanted them with cold, hard, mathematical and logical facts—brute facts that came from nowhere and didn’t care about anyone or anything. Yet where, in this mechanical scheme, could he find the emotional comfort he now craved? Where was there hope? Where was love?

Echoing his revolutionary forebears, Comte decided that getting rid of religion entirely was not the answer after all—it was more that it needed updating. Inspired by this insight, he devised the Religion of Humanity. Writing at length again, he proposed what he called the positive church—complete with its own secular saints, a priesthood, a catechism, and even a calendar.

Although this new religion sold itself as an intellectual exercise, the whole initiative was, really, a desperate attempt from a desperate man to fix his own broken heart. In a remarkable 1918 journal article, “A Psycho-Analytic Study of Auguste Comte,” Phyllis Blanchard made this all too clear:

“Dear angel,” he says, after her death, “I can only adore you by trying to serve better the Great Being in whom I know you are irrevocably incorporated.” But this worship for Mme. de Vaux passed all bounds of rationality and became fetichistic in its import. The arm chair in which she was wont to sit became his altar where three times daily he prayed.²²

This “Great Being” was not God; neither was it some unknown vagueness, as per Robespierre. Instead, it was humanity itself. We were to worship and celebrate ourselves, Comte said, as was made manifest in his prayers to the departed Clotilde—whom he now idolized as everything good about (wo)mankind.

Comte, then, had had two bites of the cherry: the first a robotic, meaningless, laws-only philosophy, and the second a slightly richer version that reintroduced some sort of humanistic bigger picture. Either way, traditional religion was out—and rationality was in.

All in all, Comte taught that humankind is the master of its own destiny; that we must move on from the immaturity of Christian dogma; that science gives us ultimate truth, but allows for no purpose; that we can survive this devastating blow by reflecting upon how magnificent we are (especially Clotilde). In doing so, he left quite the legacy—as is pointed out by literary scholar Tony Davies in his book, Humanism:

The Church of Humanity . . . soon declined, via the usual schisms and internal wranglings. . . . But the informal influence of the cult, with its injunction to “live for others” (“vivre pour autrui,” from which we get the word “altruism”), its practice of meditative reflection on the image and example of an idealized Madonna-figure, and its slightly dispiriting vision of a small sphere of human action encompassed on all sides by the vast indifferent presences of nature and history, percolated deeply into the fibre of late-Victorian middle-class thinking.²³

Comte, on the coattails of the French Revolution, had laid down yet another significant God-versus-science marker for others to mull over—so maybe Draper and White are not the only ones to blame for the conflict thesis after all.

Still, we are not quite done with our investigation—for Davies has provided us with our next major clue. Let’s follow that lead, then, and drop in on some Victorian middle-class thinking.

To England!

Love–Hate Relationships

It is not hard to guess what John Peder Zane’s 2007 bestseller The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favourite Books is all about.

Somehow managing to corral one-hundred-and-twenty-five of the world’s foremost authors into sending him their lists, Zane collated their responses and collapsed them down until he was left, in their combined opinion, with the ten best books ever written.²⁴ All ten have men’s names on the cover. One of those men, though, was a woman.

George Eliot (1819–1880)—the writer of tenth-placed Middlemarch—was born Mary Ann Evans in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. A brief account of her subsequent life reads very much like a barnstorming novel in its own right.

Growing up in the countryside as the daughter of a devout estate manager, Eliot was quickly deemed unattractive and unlikely to marry. Her only asset of note was her extraordinary mind and, as a bored teenager, she fell under the influence of a nearby group of edgy, progressive, freethinkers—folk who gradually persuaded her to reject her Christian faith, and “discover” herself in the process. Suitably enlightened, she moved to the bright lights and busy streets of London where, having finally come of age, she won a place as assistant editor of the radical and controversial journal, the Westminster Review.

The melodrama doesn’t stop there. Eliot the Londoner launched herself into a highly public sexual relationship with a brash literary philosopher, George Henry Lewes (1817–1878), with the full permission of said philosopher’s wife—for theirs was, scandalously, an open marriage. Despite this racy affair, Eliot saved her deepest and most intimate feelings for a second philosopher, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), known to all of them—a man for whom true romantic attachment seemed to be a profound difficulty, if not an outright impossibility. It is all quite the soap opera.

And, to top the whole lot off, Eliot also dallied in a lifelong love–hate relationship with the writings and the ideas of a third professional thinker: Auguste Comte.

Bernard J. Paris, professor emeritus of English at Johns Hopkins University, explains more:

The real crisis in George Eliot’s history came not when she broke with Christianity, but when she broke with pantheism, for only then did she have to ask herself if life has any meaning without God. . . . The great question for Eliot, as well as for many of her contemporaries and ours, was, how can man lead a meaningful, morally satisfying life in an absurd universe?²⁵

Although she found Comte’s first attempt at an answer—the Cours—intellectually fascinating, Eliot couldn’t help but feel that it offered only an empty and heartless solution. She wanted something more:

What Eliot needed, of course, was a new religion, a religion which would mediate between man and the alien cosmos, as the old religions had done, but which would do so without escaping into illusion²⁶

The editor, socialite, and highly successful novelist, therefore, moved on from early Comte to late Comte—and to his Religion of Humanity. Even then, she did not accept it wholesale, but picked out the bits and pieces that she liked. Eliot, then, is a fantastic example of her community—a community that was looking for great big answers, dissatisfied with traditional truths, fascinated by science and natural law, and embarrassed by revealed religion. The conflict thesis feels like it is hovering, here, looking for a suitable landing place.

Would it find one?

The Specter of Comte

Herbert Spencer was a genuine philosophical heavyweight. Like Comte, his great aim was to draw together a single, overarching scheme of thought that would eventually explain the totality of existence—he called his rival version “synthetic philosophy.” Like Comte, he believed that the physical sciences and mathematics were the only route to ultimate truth. Like Comte, he was a religious dissenter who considered conservative biblical Christianity to be outdated nonsense.

An all-rounder who studied and wrote on psychology, politics, physics, economics, and more, Spencer became almost the heartbeat of progressive Victorian culture. He coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” sold possibly as many as a million copies of his works in his own lifetime,²⁷ and is described by anthropologist Thomas Eriksen as “the single most famous European intellectual” of his era.²⁸

Spencer, as mentioned, had a lifelong friendship with George Eliot. They leaned on each other, learned from each other, and admired each other’s great intellects. One might even describe them as besotted with one another. The precise nature of their relationship is still much discussed, but we do know that it was never physical—even if Eliot might possibly have wanted it to be.

On one occasion, in fact, the lovelorn Eliot wrote Spencer a letter packed with so much pathos that it could have come straight out of one of her love stories:

I want to know if you can assure me that you will not forsake me, that you will always be with me as much as you can and share your thoughts and feelings with me. If you become attached to someone else, then I must die. . . . If I had your assurance, I could trust that and live upon it. . . . Those who have known me best have always said, that if ever I loved any one thoroughly my whole life must turn upon that feeling, and I find they said truly. You curse the destiny which has made the feeling concentrate itself on you—but if you will only have patience with me you shall not curse it long. You will find that I can be satisfied with very little, if I am delivered from the dread of losing it—I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this.²⁹

Given the extraordinary intensity of both their relationship and their minds, it is impossible to believe that the two of them did not discuss Comte’s positivism extensively—Eliot was obsessed with it, and Spencer’s synthetic philosophy covered essentially the same topics, making, at times, some almost indistinguishable arguments. The Englishman, however, went to his grave protesting that Comte had never influenced either his thought or his work at all; and that he himself was not even slightly a positivist; and that Comte’s analysis was completely wrong, anyway.

That Spencer could make these dismissive claims with a straight—indignant, even—face is curious indeed. Here, for example, is a quote from his 1851 book on sociology, Social Statics:

Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the constitutions of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness.³⁰

Comte could have written that.

And yet, like a schoolboy caught doing something he shouldn’t have been, Spencer continued to insist that he had never even read Comte until three years after this passage was written and that, when he finally began to, he thought it was bunk and gave up pretty quickly: “Being an impatient reader, especially when reading views from which I dissent, I did not go far.”³¹

Still, inspired by Comte or not, Spencer is key to our investigation into the origins of the conflict thesis. Was it really all the invention of Draper and White, as seems to be often suggested—or were they merely two more faces in a crowd?

Well, here is Spencer, offering his opinion on the Bible’s opening book, Genesis, and its relation to science:

Ask one of our leading geologists or physiologists whether he believes in the Mosaic account of the creation, and he will take the question as next to an insult. Either he rejects the narrative entirely, or understands it in some vague non-natural sense. Yet one part of it he unconsciously adopts; and that, too, literally. For whence has he got this notion of “special creations,” which he thinks so reasonable, and fights for so vigorously? Evidently he can trace it back to no other source than this myth which he repudiates. He has not a single fact in nature to cite in proof of it; nor is he prepared with any chain of reasoning by which it may be established. Catechize him, and he will be forced to confess that the notion was put into his mind in childhood as part of a story which he now thinks absurd.³²

This is a nuanced passage. In it, the most-read thinker of his generation—which was, of course, also Draper’s and White’s generation—is telling his audience to grow up. They could have the Sunday school stories of their youth, or they could have the truth. Their thoughts could be led by a naïve, literalistic reading of the Bible, or they could be led by the more mature argumentation of logic and science. Spencer, like the revolutionaries and Comte, was warning of an inherent and unavoidable tension between dogma and reason—a tension that, ultimately, demanded a choice to be made.

And he was not the only member of the English intelligentsia to bang on that particular drum.

Belligerent Bulldogs and Strangled Snakes

At a mere twenty-five years old, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. At thirty, he was made professor by the also-very-prestigious Royal Institution. These achievements are made all the more remarkable when we note that Huxley had left school as a youngster due to financial pressures and, from the age of ten onward, had been entirely self-taught.

Skilled in anatomy, physiology, technical drawing, rhetoric, philosophy, and anthropology—with a stint in the navy to boot—Huxley was witty, charismatic, and driven. He was never afraid to put his opinion forward, even when it touched on highly controversial subjects—including, of course, the relationship between progressive science and conservative doctrine. Here he is, in typically bombastic form:

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.³³

Huxley was a Victorian celebrity. His fierce support of modern science earned him a nickname—"Darwin’s Bulldog”—and he soon became famed for his spiky public debates with pious Christians. An enemy of both Catholicism and Protestantism, he felt that that their outdated creeds—and, indeed, even the newer, more liberal versions of them—simply could not stand up in an era of logic, and experiment, and methodical study:

I invented the word “agnostic” to describe people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters about which metaphysicians and theologians both modern and heterodox dogmatise with the utmost confidence.³⁴

Huxley, then, added his voice to those of Robespierre and Comte and Spencer in calling for supernatural doctrines to be dropped—they were infantile, overly prescriptive, and unjustifiable in a scientific age. Yet, despite his outspokenness, even this belligerent and iconoclastic bulldog didn’t manage to cause quite as much science-and-religion chaos as another well-known Victorian scientist did, in Belfast, in 1874.

Come on down to the stage, John Tyndall.

Belfast and the Furious

The British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was founded in 1831. A powerhouse of academic thought, it boasted the involvement of pretty much anyone and everyone who was making scientific waves at the time. Among those to hold its presidency were William Whewell (1794–1866), who was the first to use the term “scientist”; Richard Owen (1804–1892), who was the first to classify dinosaurs; and Prince Albert (1819–1861), who was the first to marry Queen Victoria.

In 1874, the BAAS appointed John Tyndall (1820–1893), a much-lauded Irish physicist, as its next president. Tyndall, like Huxley, had emerged from relative obscurity to achieve great things in the sciences, including work on the Earth’s greenhouse effect, the behavior of glaciers, and the movement of sound through air. Also like Huxley, Tyndall was a brilliant communicator, one who knew how to hold an audience in his thrall. On no occasion would this matter more than in Belfast, on August 20th of that fateful year—when he was due to give the British Association’s traditional presidential address.

Tyndall had been building himself up for the event for quite a while, going so far as to write draft material as much as a year beforehand. Traditionally, the address was a rather dry affair; a safe-as-houses, painting-by-numbers lecture which would note some scientific progress made that year, avoid any emotion or controversy, and then give way to opportunities for small talk and networking.³⁵

Tyndall, however, had other ideas.

Two years earlier, the Irishman had already annoyed the religious establishment by suggesting that hospital wards be used to test the efficacy of prayer by scientific experiment—thus proving himself to be a potentially provocative participant in the God-and-science conversation.³⁶ Now, in Ireland, he saw the chance to nail his colors well and truly to the mast—and to do so on one of the grandest stages available.

Despite some of his closer friends warning him to consider his words very carefully—more on this shortly—Tyndall steeled himself to break with tradition and launch into a full-blown, big-picture analysis of all of nature.

The result, it would be fair to say, was dynamite.

Tyndall began his address by lamenting our earliest ancestors’ naivety in attributing just about everything to the will of supernatural beings—and then moved on to praise “men of exceptional power, differentiating themselves from the crowd” who dared to “connect natural phenomena with their physical principles.”³⁷ Thanks to these men, he said, Greek and Roman science was born: all was bright and beautiful, and a great deal of pleasing progress was made. At this point, Tyndall paused to ask a question:

What, then, stopped its victorious advance? Why was the scientific intellect compelled, like an exhausted soil, to lie fallow for nearly two millenniums before it could regather the elements necessary to its fertility and strength?³⁸

His answer, broadly speaking, was religious dogmatism—with Christianity, in particular, proving to be a major stumbling block:

Not unto Aristotle, not unto subtile hypotheses, not unto Church, Bible, or blind tradition, must we turn for a knowledge of the universe, but to the direct investigation of Nature by observation and experiment.³⁹

Building to a crescendo, Tyndall hammered his main point home one final time:

All religious theories, schemes and systems which embrace notions of cosmogony, or which otherwise reach into the domain of science, must, in so far as they do this, submit to the control of science, and relinquish all thought of controlling it.⁴⁰

The response, over the next few days and weeks, was nothing short of uproar. In his preface to the sixty-page published version, Tyndall boasted that he had “provoked an unexpected amount of criticism . . . numberless strictures and accusations, some of them exceeding fierce.”⁴¹

Bernard Lightman—one of our aforementioned science-and-religion investigators—has studied Tyndall for decades. He recounts what happened to the physicist in the aftermath:

Tyndall was denounced in the periodical press . . . a London merchant by the name of C.W. Stokes had sent an inquiry to the Home Secretary, asking whether Tyndall should be imprisoned for blasphemy. . . . The entire British religious world seemed to be against him.⁴²

Indeed, Frank Turner—historian, and former second-in-command of Yale University—goes even further: “Probably no single incident in the conflict of religion and science raised so much furoure.”⁴³

So much for painting by numbers.

Blood on Their Hands

Perhaps we should stop here for a moment, and do a little summing up.

Firstly, we saw that Draper and White appear to have been singled (or doubled) out as the likely perpetrators of our conflict thesis felony—and by the top detectives, no less. It is Draper and White who appear, time and again, in the court documents; it is Draper and White who have spent most of the time in the dock.

Yet the likes of Hébert, Robespierre, Comte, Martineau, Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall all seem to have blood on their hands, too. Each one of these people has, in one way or another, pitted science against religion, and done so publicly. Each has willingly promoted some form of the conflict thesis to the masses.

And they, as it happens, are not alone either. We have not even mentioned, for instance, the English deists or the German higher critics—both of whom will turn out, in Chapter 7, to be key to the ever-thickening God-versus-science plot. It seems that the list of suspects just goes on and on. So, is ours not a case of two lone gunmen, after all?

Is it actually an act of organized crime?

The X Club

Thomas Archer Hirst (1830–1892) was, by way of profession at least, a mathematician. What he is most famous for, however, is not his extensive work on geometry, nor his fellowship of the Royal Society, nor even his assorted professorships—it is, instead, his diary.

Hirst’s entry for November 6, 1864, reads:

On Thursday evening Nov. 3, an event, probably of some importance, occurred at the St George’s Hotel, Albemarle Street. A new club was formed of eight members: viz: Tyndall, Hooker, Huxley, Busk, Frankland, Spencer, Lubbock and myself. Besides personal friendship, the bond that united us was devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas. . . . There is no knowing into what this club, which counts amongst its members some of the best workers of the day, may grow, and therefore I record its foundation.⁴⁴

Yes, the “Tyndall” is John Tyndall. Yes, the “Huxley” and “Spencer” are our Huxley and our Spencer. What’s more, this night did not go down in history as a one-off meeting of minds—the group of men continued to dine and converse together, on a monthly basis, for the next thirty years. They even gave themselves a name—the X Club.

Ruth Barton, historian and mathematician, knows the X Club better than most—she has written on its formation, members, and influence in impressive detail on multiple occasions. Remarking on the diary entry above, she says:

Hirst was correct in his guess that the club would become important. Its members were closely associated with the defense of evolutionary theory and the advocacy of scientific, naturalistic understandings of the world; they were representatives of expert professional science to the end of the century, becoming leading advisors to government and leading publicists for the benefits of science; they became influential in scientific politics, forming interlocking directorships on the councils of many scientific societies. James Moore [History Professor at Cambridge and Harvard] describes the club as “the most powerful coterie in late-Victorian science.”⁴⁵

The X Club was not a cynical or pragmatic grab for power; neither was it a mere think tank. It was, primarily, a meeting of friends—the members of the group had known each other for years before it first formally convened. In 1851, for example, when Tyndall was nominated for a fellowship of the Royal Society, Huxley signed it off. In 1860, when Huxley’s young son died, it was Tyndall who took him to the mountains of Wales to take his mind off things.

It was Spencer who had introduced Huxley to Eliot, and to literature’s high society; it was Huxley who had introduced Spencer to the scientific community, and its varied associations. When Spencer got all defensive about his alleged dependence on Comte, he composed an article denouncing positivism—and Huxley and Tyndall, as a personal favor to their friend, promptly added their signatures to it.

As we might expect, then, the three men discussed their views on science and religion at length. Huxley had been president of the British Association four years before Tyndall and had, after much soul-searching, given an uncontroversial lecture. In 1874, aware that Tyndall might choose a more radical approach, he cautioned his colleague not to go overboard. Bernard Lightman details the resulting correspondence between X Club members:

Huxley wrote, “I wonder if that Address is begun, and if you are going to be as wise and prudent as I was at Liverpool. When I think of the temptation I resisted on that occasion . . . I marvel at my own forbearance! Let my example be a burning and shining light to you.” Tyndall wrote [to Thomas] Hirst on July 5 that he was amused “to find Huxley expressing anxiety.”⁴⁶

The existence, longevity, and influence of the X Club serve to confirm what we might already have suspected—that the likes of Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall were not just acquainted, but were constantly feeding off one another’s work. As Hirst said in his diary, what united them was “devotion to science . . . untrammelled by religious dogma”—and so they continued to promote this view, both internally and externally.

But what about Draper and White?

Every Thoughtful Man Must Take Part

By 1872, John Tyndall’s scientific discoveries and thrilling demonstrations had made him famous enough to merit an invitation to America. It came from the inventor of the electromagnet, Joseph Henry (1797–1878)—who was, at the time, the first ever secretary of the Smithsonian Institute.

Tyndall happily accepted, and headed across the Atlantic to give more than thirty talks across six US cities. He was a major hit: his delighted audiences often numbered over a thousand. Roland Jackson, biographer of Tyndall and one-time chief executive of the British Association, relates just how quickly the Americans took to this bold and dynamic orator:

His reputation was such that he found himself better known in Philadelphia than in many English cities. Demand for reprints of his lectures—a series of six on the theme of Light—was huge. Printed by the New York Daily Tribune, some 300,000 were sold across America.⁴⁷

Reports of Tyndall’s success were wired back over to Britain; Huxley and his pals were “uncommonly tickled” by them. Of most interest to us, however, is something that happened when the tour was virtually over, and Tyndall was preparing to head home. Bernard Lightman again:

Near the end of Tyndall’s visit, his friends organized a farewell banquet in his honor. Held at Delmonico’s in New York City on February 4, 1873, the attendees included Draper [and] White. . . . Andrew Dickson White praised Tyndall as the embodiment of the spirit of scientific research, a spirit sorely needed for the “political progress of our country.”⁴⁸

And there, ladies and gentleman of the jury, we have it.

Yes, Draper and White knew John Tyndall. What’s more, they knew Thomas Huxley, and they knew Herbert Spencer, too. They wrote to one another, they read one another’s material, they appeared in the same publications, and they mixed in the same circles. As such, their ideas and careers served to buttress one another. Tyndall, for instance, cited Draper during his Belfast thunderbolt—and, hearing of this, the chemist encouraged him right back in a letter:

Stand fast. Your address is doing great good. If you need any help, let me know . . . the friends of science will stand by you in England as they are standing by me in America. Let us all fight shoulder to shoulder in our fighting.⁴⁹

And, while Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall were undoubtedly major influences on Draper and White, Comte and Robespierre were not entirely absent either. Here is our history of science detective Lawrence Principe putting the clues together once again:

What makes a sudden appearance [in Draper’s writings] is the explicit influence of the positivism of August Comte. Claiming that all systems of metaphysics have fallen into disarray, Draper asserts the need for a new guide for human thought and declares that this “guide is Positive Science.”⁵⁰

White, too, was more than a little clued up on the French Revolution and its intellectual fallout—not only had he lectured on it extensively, but he had also amassed his own collection of thousands of books and manuscripts on the topic.⁵¹ Even when we do not include the huge influence of the deists and higher critics on our two men—which shall be explained in full in good time—we can conclude, without much equivocation on the matter, that they did not act alone. In short, they were much more like Newton than like Ward.

Draper and White, then, were not only standing on the shoulders of giants—they were also fighting shoulder to shoulder alongside them. John Tyndall sums up the group mentality well in his review of Conflict: “This, in our day, is the ‘conflict’ so impressively described by Draper, in which every thoughtful man must take a part.”⁵²

The Proof Is in the Reading

Still, there remains a rather important question hanging over all this: how is it that Draper and White seem to have been landed with all of the blame? Were they simply the unfortunate fall guys, pushed out by the rest of the mob to take the heat? Why—given that Comte, and Robespierre, and Spencer, and Huxley, and Tyndall, and many, many more were all telling a similar story—do the experts tend to pin the conflict thesis myth-making almost entirely on Draper and White?

Perhaps the answer is a surprisingly simple one. Perhaps, of all the varied contributors and conspirators on show, they were the most effective. Perhaps they were the best of the storytellers. Perhaps their versions—Conflict and Warfare—of the God-versus-science legend were just in a whole different league to everyone else’s.

Well, there is one sure-fire way that we could test this theory.

We could start reading them.