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Evolution and the Eucharist: Bishop E. W. Barnes on science and religion in the 1920s and 1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2000

PETER J. BOWLER
Affiliation:
Department of Social Anthropology, The Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN

Abstract

Accounts of the religious debates sparked by the theory of evolution tend, almost inevitably, to focus on the late nineteenth century. Darwinism is treated as a symbol of the scientific naturalism that so traumatized Victorian thought. Modern accounts have shown, however, that religious thinkers were in the end able to take on board an evolutionism purged of its most materialistic tendencies. We tend to assume that in Britain, at least, the arguments had largely died down by the end of the nineteenth century. Led by Aubrey Moore, the Anglican Church made its accommodation, and Moore's contribution of an essay to the volume Lux mundi, edited by Charles Gore in 1889, symbolized the ability of even the conservative Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church to move in the direction of modernization. In America, of course, the compromise broke down with the rise of Fundamentalism in the early twentieth century, but most British commentators saw the ‘Scopes trial’ of 1925 as a strange transatlantic phenomenon that was unlikely to have a parallel in their own country.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1998 British Society for the History of Science

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