Science and Evangelical Theology in Britain from Wesley to Orr

Abstract

Abstract Evangelicals, in Britain as elsewhere, have often been seen as wary of science. The movement springing from the Evangelical Revival, it has been supposed, generated a species of religion alien to painstaking research. The hothouse atmosphere of evangelicalism, marked by intense feeling and sudden conversions, seemed unlikely to nurture the calm, reflective temper of scientific investigation. Historians have pointed out that it was not evangelicals but liberal Anglicans of the Broad Church school, often seconded by Unitarians, who were at the heart of British science. Evangelicals, by contrast, appeared the defenders of a literal interpretation of the Bible that made them suspicious of advances in the understanding of nature. It has been suggested, furthermore, that their antiscientific stance was theologically grounded. They so exalted biblical revelation as to cast aspersions on other sources of religious knowledge. Hence evangelicals, it has recently been argued, were marked by a “rejection of the natural theology” that bound together science and religion during the eighteenth century.