Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion, and Literature by Michael Rectenwald

Author:Michael Rectenwald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137463906
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Conclusion: secularism, historiography, and ‘secularization’

With mid-century Secularism, a cultural and intellectual work was done that contributed significantly to what James R. Moore has called the new ‘creed’ of scientific naturalism. By claiming to exclude questions of belief from those of positive knowledge, Secularism served as a precursor for advancing a naturalistic epistemology within science, thus addressing the ‘science versus religion’ controversy, however understood. Secularism paved the way for a partial détente between belief and unbelief that would be characteristic of agnosticism as a disposition of the later scientific naturalism. Secularism’s contribution of an early form of agnosticism, I have suggested, did much to advance the worldview developed and promulgated by Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall. The social network established between Holyoake and the scientific naturalists is further evidence of the compatibility of Secularism and scientific naturalism, and the work that the former had done for the latter, and vice versa.

What then are the implications of these findings for the historiography of science, for the relationship between science and the secular, and for the question of ‘secularization’ itself? In terms of historiography, non-elite, lower-class actors gain importance by this history. The focus on such non-elites has been a preoccupation of historians of science since Adrian Desmond’s 1987 essay ‘Artisan Resistance’, and his major intervention with the Politics of Evolution (1989).140 Here, non-elites gain importance for the ethos of science, rather than its actual practice.

Further, the connection between artisan Secularism and scientific naturalism sheds light on the class-character and origins of scientific naturalism itself. The scientific naturalists, it should be recalled, were young men during the 1840s. Both Tyndall and Huxley hailed from lower-middle-class backgrounds. Tyndall went to mechanics institutes regularly. Holyoake was read by a sophisticated working-class and lower-middle-class audience, a group to which Tyndall, Huxley, and even Spencer belonged in the 1840s, before they rose to prominence. Secularism and pre-Secularism doubtless would have been familiar to them, especially to Spencer as part of the Confidential Combination, and Huxley as he became part of the Westminster coterie at 142 Strand and the Westminster reported on Secularism in its pages.

More importantly, perhaps, this history has shown the danger of taking elite actors at their word. While occasionally recognizing Holyoake’s role in tilling the soil for scientific naturalism – for easing legal restrictions and mitigating the moral opprobrium associated with freethought – the scientific naturalists rarely if ever paid tribute to Secularism’s theoretical and philosophical contributions. It is important to recognize the reasons for this apparent neglect. Holyoake had advanced a form of ‘agnosticism’ well before Huxley coined the term in 1869, or appropriated ‘scientific naturalism’ from the Secular press in 1892. Yet, had he paid homage to a source associated with lower-class atheistic freethought and infidelity, Huxley would have tainted the new creed, and likewise undermined the very reasons for issuing a new terminology in the first place. Instead of crediting such a proximate source as Holyoake’s Secularism, Huxley instead recalled a noble tradition dating to the Renaissance and extending to the Enlightenment, invoking the names of Descartes, Hume, and Kant.

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