Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution

Preface

This book has been more than a dozen years in the making. In a conversation one afternoon in March 1999 in Berkeley, California, my good friend Ron Numbers talked me into writing two books. One was on the history of the idea of humans before Adam. It eventually saw the light of day in 2008 under the title Adam’s Ancestors. This is the other book. At that stage I had written a few articles on the ways in which Darwin’s theory was encountered in different settings and was working on a short book about the spaces of scientific inquiry. Ron thought that it might be worth trying to gather these thoughts together into a fuller account of what I was beginning to call “the geographies of Darwinism and religion.” I am more grateful than I can say to Ron for the prompt. For when the invitation to deliver the 2014 Gifford Lectures came along, that seemed the ideal venue for trying out these ideas. In a speech space that has been occupied mostly by philosophers, historians, and theologians, the thought that bringing a geographical perspective to bear on the whole issue of the encounter between science and religion struck me as novel . . . if risky! Still, the project of locating debates over evolution in particular sites and situations seemed to me a useful way of going beyond stereotype and caricature in understanding how religious communities dealt with Darwin and of ascertaining the role played by what I call place, politics, and rhetoric in public encounters with one of the greatest scientific theories of our time. So I am enormously indebted to Dr. Philip Ziegler and the other members of the Gifford Lectures Committee at the University of Aberdeen for presenting me with such a wonderful opportunity to share my thoughts on this whole subject. On my journey I have incurred many other debts too. First and foremost I am grateful to Ron Numbers, not only for the stimulus to write the book but also for his generosity in making available to me his collection of materials on the James Woodrow case. For assistance with other parts of the story, I am grateful to Kim Arnold, archivist of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, Toronto, who willingly responded to various queries on Knox College; to Magomat Philemon of the Chancellor Oppenheimer Library, University of Cape Town, who provided some South P r e f a C e x Preface African material; to Wesley Bonnar and the staff at Sentry Hill, for their assistance with my research on Samuel B. G. McKinney; to Stephen Gregory of the Union College Library for facilitating various aspects of my research on the Tyndall episode. Patrick Harries of the University of Basel provided me with a number of fertile leads, and John Stenhouse, University of Otago, willingly made some of his unpublished work available to me. The late Ernan McMullin, whom I had the privilege of meeting frequently after he returned to Ireland, read and commented astutely on parts of the manuscript. I still enormously miss his wise counsel and penetrating wit. My good friend Mark Noll, now at Notre Dame, has patiently listened to the substance of this story on many occasions and, with the instincts of the historian, has probed me—hopefully to good effect—on my geographical predilections. John Hedley Brooke and Janet Browne read the entire manuscript and offered extremely valuable insights. I am very much in their debt. In Belfast I have been fortunate to be surrounded by a group of scholars with different disciplinary interests who combine in full measure critical insight tempered with enthusiastic encouragement: John Brewer, Diarmid Finnegan, Frank Gourley, Andrew Holmes, Nuala Johnson, Philip Orr, and Stephen Williams , and when he has been visiting Queen’s University from UCLA, John Agnew. Their willingness to read what I write and listen to my enthusiasms means more than I can say. But as ever, my greatest debt is to Frances, who has borne with great patience and good humor the challenges of living with a husband who spends too much time in the nineteenth century and not enough doing chores in the twenty-first. Dealing with Darwin This page intentionally left blank ...