Secular Beliefs — Suppositions and Presuppositions

Abstract

Like the word ‘science’, the word ‘biology’ first appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century1 and the science of biology emerged from natural history at that time. From the 1820s onwards, biology was firmly established as an approach to the study of living things, and as a bona fide science it could acquire positivist approbation. It could be distinguished from and contrasted favourably with natural history because it sought explanations and systematic organisation of knowledge rather than descriptions and classification. But more importantly as far as positivists were concerned, naturalists, working in a predominantly Christian society, were held to be tainted by Christian dogma and by and large to have assumed that living things were designed and fashioned by a divine Creator; biologists were not thought to be biased in this way. However, the latter contrast is misleading for, as we have seen, biology was very much influenced by Christian doctrine at least until the 1860s. Nevertheless, it is also clear that after the mid-nineteenth century there was less and less appeal to the Scriptures and biology became as secular as other sciences.