24 - Religious Responses to Modern Science, 1865–1945

Summary

American religious thought generally kept pace with the nation's continued social and cultural growth throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Prominent universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton supported thriving Protestant seminaries, enabling the nation to produce a steady stream of academically sophisticated theologians. Many of these were conversant with recent scientific writings in botany, chemistry, physics, and geology. They incorporated their scientific knowledge into a sophisticated natural theology built on the premise that nature contains clear, compelling evidence of God's existence and perfection.

Antebellum natural theology rested on two basic premises. First was the assumption that God created the natural universe, which therefore contains evidence of his creative design. Second was total certainty that God has also provided completely reliable information about himself in the Bible. Natural theology expressed American Protestantism's confidence that our universe had a sudden beginning as explained in Genesis, evidenced a divinely orchestrated development, and was heading toward a predetermined end, the salvation of the faithful and the establishment of the kingdom of God.

The natural theology developed in the first six decades of the nineteenth century was, however, destined to break apart after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Before 1860, theologians had been able to reconcile biblical faith and sciences such as botany or geology with relatively little difficulty.