DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The Victoria Institute 1865-1932: A Case Study in the Relationship between Science and Religion Mathieson, Stuart Award date: 2018 Awarding institution: Queen's University Belfast Link to publication Terms of use All those accessing thesis content in Queen’s University Belfast Research Portal are subject to the following terms and conditions of use • Copyright is subject to the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988, or as modified by any successor legislation • Copyright and moral rights for thesis content are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners • A copy of a thesis may be downloaded for personal non-commercial research/study without the need for permission or charge • Distribution or reproduction of thesis content in any format is not permitted without the permission of the copyright holder • When citing this work, full bibliographic details should be supplied, including the author, title, awarding institution and date of thesis Take down policy A thesis can be removed from the Research Portal if there has been a breach of copyright, or a similarly robust reason. 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Sep. 2021 THE VICTORIA INSTITUTE 1865-1932: A CASE STUDY IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION Stuart Patrick Mathieson B.A., M.A. A thesis submitted to the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Politics, Queen’s University of Belfast in fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2018 Contents Index of figures and tables…………………………………………………………….3 Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………….……....4 Abbreviations…………………………..……………………..………………….…...5 I Introduction.……………………..……………………..……………………..……...6 Chapter One: Forming a haven, 1866-71…………….…………………..…….…....32 Chapter Two: Membership……………………..……………………..…...………..65 II Chapter Three: Conflict, harmony, and natural theology……………...…………...113 Chapter Four: Darwin, Darwinism, and the Darwinists………………..……..……136 Chapter Five: Testimony from the rocks - geology and human antiquity……….….159 Chapter Six: Confronting the higher critics - scriptural geography and biblical archaeology……………………..……………………..………………….……….183 III Chapter Seven: Conflict, decline, and fundamentalism, 1914-32…………….…...205 Conclusion……………………..……………………..……….…………………...242 Bibliography. ……………………..……………………..….……………………..249 Appendix A………….……………………..………………….…..……………… 282 Appendix B……………………..……………………..……….……………..……352 3 Figures and tables Figure 2.1….……………………………………………………………………...…68 Figure 2.2……………………………………………………………………………70 Figure 2.3……………………………………………………………………………71 Figure 2.4……………………………………………………………………………71 Figure 2.5……………………………………………………………………………76 Figure 2.6……………………………………………………………………………77 Figure 2.7……………………………………………………………………………77 Figure 2.9……………………………………………………………………………79 Figure 2.10…………………………………………………………………………..80 Figure 2.11…………………………………………………………………………..81 Figure 2.12……………………………………………………………………….….81 Figure 2.13…………………………………………………………………………..82 4 Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the generous support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, through its Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership, which I acknowledge here with thanks. Without the patience, affability, and unceasingly good advice of my supervisor Dr Andrew Holmes, it is doubtful that this thesis would have been written, and even more doubtful that it would have been worth reading. I have been incredibly fortunate to benefit from Dr Diarmid Finnegan’s generosity of time, insight, and encouragement as a second supervisor. Prof. David Wilkinson has been a similarly generous third supervisor. I owe all three a debt of gratitude. Many librarians have been extremely helpful in my quest for obscure nineteenth-century materials. Tamara Carr at the Center for Adventist Research, Andrews University, Kate Arhel and Rachel Johnson at Tyndale House, the entire staff of Special Collections at the John Rylands Library, and Katrina Dean at the University of Cambridge all deserve the warmest thanks. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Claire, for the patience and good humour with which she has unfailingly supported me throughout my studies. This thesis is dedicated to my family: Claire, Oscar, and Reuben. 5 Abbreviations JTVI: Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute. ODNB: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004-) Online version. RVB: Gerald Parsons and John Wolffe (eds), Religion in Victorian Britain (5 vols, Manchester, 1988-97). 6 Introduction The relationship between science and religion is often portrayed as one of interminable conflict. In contemporary media, this is a commonplace assumption, and, outside the work of specialists in the history of religion and science, that assumption also persists to a considerable degree within the academy.1 One of the most commonly invoked flashpoints in the supposed conflict between science and religion is evolution. A recent article by the sociologist Eric Silva argues that, while there is no essential contradiction between accepting evolutionary theory and maintaining religious faith, evolution’s position in public discourse is as a ‘front in the enduring American culture wars’. Silva’s analysis demonstrates that, in contemporary discourse, evolution is used as a framing device, a means of polarising debate and of legitimising or delegitimising the worldview of those who hold opposing views. Yet Silva’s research also makes clear that this is a relatively recent phenomenon. He credits fellow sociologist Peter Berger with first identifying the phenomenon, and traces its current incarnation to the 1970s, and its roots to the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ in 1925.2 Yet evolution via natural selection was first popularised by Charles Darwin in 1859, and so has been part of public discourse for considerably longer than since the 1920s. 3 Further, the contemporary debate is geographically rooted in the United States, and is thus primarily, though not exclusively, an American phenomenon. The precise historical and geographical origins of evolutionary theory seem, therefore, to be rather tenuously connected to contemporary debate. The concept of an uninterrupted causal chain between Darwin and current arguments between science and religion, particularly as part of a larger, continual state of conflict, thus requires further research. This thesis investigates the Victoria Institute, the world’s first explicitly anti- evolutionary organisation, formed in London in 1865. It covers the period between 1865 and 1932, from the Victoria Institute’s formation, through its most productive 1 D.C. Lindberg and R. L. Numbers (eds), When science and Christianity meet (Chicago, 2008); R. L. Numbers (ed), Galileo goes to jail and other myths aBout science and religion (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 2 Eric Silva, ‘Stigmatization and validation of atheism, literalism, and non-literalism in the discourse over evolutionary theory’ in Secularism and Nonreligion, vii (2018), pp 1, 2, 3, 11; Peter Berger, The sacred canopy: elements of a sociological theory of religion (Garden City, NY, 1967). 3 Charles Darwin, On the origin of species By means of natural selection (London, 1859). 7 and successful period, and its subsequent decline after 1918. 4 It also allows the chronological gap between Darwin and Scopes to be bridged within a very different cultural space than the United States, which has received most of the scholarly attention on the topic. Indeed, David Bebbington has argued that while fundamentalism affected Britain, its controversies were ‘storms in a teacup when compared with the blizzards of invective that swept contemporary America’, and so this thesis attempts to explain and evaluate these relatively mild points of conflict.5 The Victoria Institute’s membership of professed Christians pledged to defend ‘revealed truth from “the oppositions of science, falsely so called”’.6 It therefore offers a case study in the relationship between science and religion, an opportunity to interrogate the conflict thesis, and to investigate the nineteenth-century origins of one of the most contentious points of conflict in that relationship. Somewhat ironically, the conflict thesis has its roots in the nineteenth century and in the respective publications of A.D. White and J.W. Draper. In 1869, the historian and university administrator Andrew Dickson White delivered a lecture in New York entitled The Battlefields of Science. In it, Dickson gave the earliest expression of the conflict thesis: 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 to science … on the other hand, all untrammelled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for