The Scientists' Declaration: Reflexions on Science and Belief in the Wake ofEssays and Reviews, 1864–5

Abstract

During the decades following the publication of Darwin'sOrigin of speciesin 1859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early 1860s saw the appearance of Lyell'sEvidence of the antiquity of man(1863), Tylor's research on the early history of mankind (1863), Renan'sVie de Jésus(1863), Pius IX's encyclical,Quanta cura, and the accompanyingSyllabus errarum, John Henry Newman'sApologia(1864), and Swinburne's notoriousAtalanta in Calydon(1865); it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the ‘Test Acts’ as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath (1864), the first meeting of the X-Club (1864), and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, ‘the controversy between “science” and “religion” took fire’.