Context

Presbyterianism came to Ireland with the arrival of Scottish settlers in Ulster in the early years of the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹¹ Over the following decades they established a distinct religious and political identity in the north-east that culminated in the formation of the General Synod of Ulster in 1690, which was to remain the largest Presbyterian grouping in Ireland until 1840. In the early eighteenth century the synod experienced internal controversy over subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith that led to the expulsion of the non-subscribing Presbytery of Antrim in 1726. Though this presbytery remained small and separate from the synod, non-subscribing and liberal theological views, known as New Light, became prominent within the synod as the century progressed. This tendency was opposed by an amorphous group of theological conservatives within the synod known as the Old Light party. It was also opposed from without by the Seceders, who arrived from Scotland in the middle of the century and, despite division into Antiburgher and Burgher synods in 1747, became the growth sector of Presbyterianism before 1820. Both orthodox and rational Presbyterian traditions were challenged and modified by evangelicalism in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In 1829 a Remonstrant minority, direct descendants of the New Light party but of whom many had adopted a more radical Arian or Socinian doctrinal position, were forced out of the synod by the orthodox-evangelical majority. Over the course of the following decades, evangelicalism became the dominant voice within Ulster Presbyterianism. The latent evangelicalism of conservatives within the synod and amongst Seceders led them to unite to form the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in 1840 and laid the basis for the momentous religious revival of 1859.

During the eighteenth century the majority of Irish Presbyterian ministers, whether theologically conservative Old Light and Seceder or moderate New Light, received their liberal arts education at Glasgow University.Footnote ¹² Glasgow was at the forefront of the Scottish Enlightenment, and moral philosophy, as taught by Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid, became the most popular subject taken by Irish students. This concern with philosophy and mental science would remain a marked feature of the Presbyterian mind in Ireland for the next 150 years. In addition to mental philosophy they were also made aware of the centrality of natural philosophy to the Scots, especially the importance of experimental science and its practical application to the world of industry.Footnote ¹³ Back in Ireland, scientific learning is most often associated with the New Light party, who were committed to a liberal education, had a nominal interest in theological matters and were eager to avoid religious controversy.Footnote ¹⁴ Reflecting such attitudes, students at the Strabane Academy, established in 1785 by the prominent New Light minister William Crawford, were examined in natural philosophy, ‘Electricity, Optics, Astronomy, and Magnetism’. Their education was more about commercial possibilities and practical applications than about pure scholarship. The Belfast Academy, founded a year later by another New Light minister, William Bruce, taught science with a direct application to linen manufacture and, during the early nineteenth century, the school authorities added a natural-history society and a school museum.Footnote ¹⁵

Most New Light Presbyterians emphasized the importance of natural theology, though some were more adventurous than others. In a sermon preached before the Synod of Ulster in 1745, James Carlisle argued that ministers were

Moses Nelson, in a sermon entitled Whether the Light of Nature be Sufficient for Salvation (1787), was more circumspect, admitting that a knowledge of natural theology ‘may be capable of attaining considerable degrees of happiness’ yet also pointing out that, owing to sin, the ‘degeneracy of mankind’ had made revelation necessary for a knowledge of salvation.Footnote ¹⁷ The interest of Presbyterians more generally in science was facilitated by the development in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth of institutions and societies for the study and discussion of natural history. These grew out of the development of a powerful middle class in Belfast, dominated by Presbyterians, and included such groups as the Belfast Reading Society (1786), the Belfast Literary Society (1801), the Belfast Academical Institution (1810), the Belfast Natural History Society (1821) and the Belfast Botanical Society (1827).Footnote ¹⁸

It would be a mistake to assume that it was only theological moderates or liberals who were open to scientific advances and the ideas of the Enlightenment. Theological conservatives and evangelicals were also interested, not least because they too wanted to encourage the commercial and industrial expansion of the north of Ireland.Footnote ¹⁹ The use evangelicals made of the rhetoric of science and the Enlightenment can best be seen in their attitude towards missionary activity at home and overseas, which was combined with a variety of other influences such as the Reformed theological tradition, eschatology, the expansion of the British Empire and a sense of patriotic duty.Footnote ²⁰ The Revd Samuel Edgar, minister of the Burgher Seceder congregation of Ballynahinch and one of the founding members of the Down Missionary Society, laced a sermon he preached before that society in 1815 with an Enlightenment vocabulary which included ‘rational’, ‘enlighten’, ‘education’, ‘improvement’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘civilisation’.Footnote ²¹ Elsewhere he maintained that by the means of missionary societies ‘Christianity and civilisation, agriculture and commerce, have obtained a footing, where Hottentot barbarity had reigned for ages without control’.Footnote ²² In a treatise on Irish Catholicism Edgar argued that Catholics could be won from their superstition by reasonable means. In highly evocative language he spoke of the ‘light of science and the light of divine revelation’ bursting forth on the moral world, intimating that ‘it is vain as it is wicked, to shut our eyes against it, or to endeavour to stop its progress’.Footnote ²³ Edgar also subscribed to the Enlightenment ideal of progress, dressed up in a postmillennial rhetoric, suggesting that the ‘plan of God from the beginning of time, seems to have been a gradual communication of more and more knowledge; and consequently of moral improvement’.Footnote ²⁴

The opening in 1814 of the college department of the Belfast Academical Institution (known locally as Belfast Inst, also known as the Academical Institution) met a long-standing desire amongst Irish Presbyterians for a home education for their ministers and allowed Presbyterian evangelicals to influence the theological proclivities of future generations of ministers.Footnote ²⁵ In 1815 Edgar was installed as the Seceders professor of divinity and two years later the Synod of Ulster appointed Samuel Hanna to a similar chair. Both professors were evangelical Calvinists. Their colleague as professor of mathematics, James Thomson (the father of Lord Kelvin), had been educated by Edgar in Ballynahinch and attended the meeting-house of Hanna in Belfast and it is most probable that he shared their religious outlook. Thomson's course, however, rarely touched on theological themes as students learnt how to apply their knowledge of mathematics to practical activities such as surveying and accounting. His textbooks on arithmetic, trigonometry, geography and calculus were eminently useful books aimed at the mercantile classes and unconcerned with metaphysical issues.Footnote ²⁶ By contrast the curriculum of James L. Drummond, professor of anatomy and physiology, did embrace ‘a very wide field of natural history and a good deal of natural theology; there is scarcely a fact in Paley's Natural Theology that is not explained and illustrated, and a great deal more of the like description’.Footnote ²⁷ Drummond likewise attended the meeting-house of Hanna, who also used Paley and Butler as the basis for his lectures on natural theology.Footnote ²⁸ The ministerial students of the Synod of Ulster were not required to attend Drummond's classes, though it was recommended in 1829.Footnote ²⁹ Other branches of science were covered by James Stevelly, an Anglican, who taught chemistry and mechanics but whose labours were undermined by the lack of laboratory space and suitable apparatus.Footnote ³⁰

Apart from natural science, the education received at the Academical Institution also involved a significant dose of Scottish Common Sense philosophy that reinforced the tradition of mental philosophy instilled amongst Presbyterian ministers at Glasgow. Common Sense philosophy, or philosophical realism, was formulated by eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers such as Thomas Reid to counter the scepticism of David Hume.Footnote ³¹ Our knowledge of the world, they argued, was not a product of sensations of the mind as claimed by Hume, rather ‘the mind is structured in such a way that it is impossible not to act and think as if our perceptions revealed the world to us directly’.Footnote ³² In order to discover how the mind worked, these thinkers applied the inductive scientific method of Francis Bacon to create a science of the mind.Footnote ³³ This Baconian approach to philosophy and learning more generally was administered in Belfast by two more Presbyterian evangelicals, John Young, professor of metaphysics and moral philosophy, and William Cairns, professor of logic, belles-lettres and rhetoric.Footnote ³⁴ Not only did Cairns and Young propound versions of the Scottish philosophy, but their opposition to the ‘fallacies’ of Hume, and of George Berkeley, was shared by Hanna and James Carlile, another prominent evangelical.Footnote ³⁵ When Young died, however, his chair was filled in 1829 by a Scotsman, John Ferrie, who seems to have been more materialistic in his approach to philosophy than was his predecessor. Almost immediately Presbyterian evangelicals expressed their reservations about the appointment, not least because their preferred candidate, James Carlile, had been beaten in the poll. The problem was that the debate was subsumed into the conflict between evangelicals and theological liberals over the doctrine of the Trinity. The precise philosophical issues at stake are hard to fathom, but the protracted debate between the synod and the Academical Institution over Ferrie finally came to an end in 1835 when the synod withdrew its students from Ferrie's classes.Footnote ³⁶ Alternative arrangements were made for the students, who were to be taught ethics and natural theology by Henry Cooke, leader of the evangelical party, and metaphysics by Henry Molyneaux, the minister of Larne.Footnote ³⁷

The tensions between the synod and Belfast Inst rumbled on for the next few years until the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland decided to break the connection upon the opening of Queen's College, Belfast, in 1845. The relationship with the Academical Institution was not an easy one, but in terms of Presbyterian attitudes to science it played a vital role in two particular areas. First, the teaching of science and natural theology received by students came from professors who were sympathetic to the form of evangelical Calvinism that characterized the ministers of the Presbyterian Church. This approach would be continued in the two denominational colleges, the Presbyterian College, Belfast (1853), better known as Assembly's College, and Magee College, Derry (1865).Footnote ³⁸ The college in Derry provided a non-denominational arts education for all students and a theological education for Presbyterian ministerial students. Assembly's College only provided ministerial education, but the liberal-arts qualification demanded by the General Assembly was available through Queen's College, Belfast, one of the three colleges that comprised the Queen's University of Ireland (1850).Footnote ³⁹ As will be highlighted below, the different functions and concerns of the two colleges provide part of the explanation for individual variations in the tone of Presbyterian attitudes to evolution. Second, the teaching of Young and Cairns continued the Presbyterian interest in Scottish Common Sense philosophy and the development of a science of the mind. This emphasis would be continued by the faculty of the two Presbyterian colleges and by James McCosh, the second professor of logic and metaphysics at Queen's College (1851–68), president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton, 1868–94), and a pre-eminent champion and expositor of the Scottish philosophy.Footnote ⁴⁰

In addition to these intellectual factors, Presbyterian attitudes to science were also shaped by political and cultural circumstances.Footnote ⁴¹ Presbyterians comprised the majority religious community in the north-east of Ireland but Roman Catholics made up well over seventy per cent of the total population of the island. Since the efforts of Daniel O'Connell in the 1820s, Irish Catholics were increasingly agitating for a measure of independence from Great Britain, to whom they had been formally joined by the Act of Union (1801). The overwhelming majority of Irish Protestants, irrespective of social, denominational or political background, believed their civil and religious liberties and economic prosperity would be threatened by Catholic dominance in an independent Ireland. The reactionary response to Irish Home Rule was based upon bedrock Protestant assumptions about the imperialist and tyrannical power that Catholicism represented.

In such a context it was inevitable that Presbyterian attitudes to science would be at the very least coloured by their politico-religious situation. As with Protestants elsewhere in the United Kingdom, Presbyterians in Ireland sought to emphasize the Protestant character of true science against the threats of Roman Catholicism and Anglican ritualism. In his response to the government's proposal to increase the grant to the Catholic college of Maynooth in 1843, William Gibson, then the minister of Rosemary Street but soon to become professor of Christian ethics at Assembly's College, asserted that Catholicism was ‘the enemy of intellectual improvement and sound knowledge’ and, because of this, ‘it must necessarily be adverse to all truth, whether of science or religion; for the human mind is an emanation of the Supreme Intelligence, and there is a glorious harmony among all the gifts of God's gracious hand’. The influence of Catholicism debased and fettered the mind by ‘its endless train of lying miracles’, ‘the rubbish of its relics’, ‘its multiplied and monotonous observances’ and ‘the strange delusion’ of transubstantiation.Footnote ⁴² He went on to compare the careers of Galileo in Rome and Isaac Newton in Protestant England in favour of the latter, observing in the process that the proposed increased endowment of Maynooth, ‘in the gloomiest sense sectarian and exclusive’, was the repudiation of the tradition that fostered Newton and negated the ‘humanizing influences of a united education’.Footnote ⁴³

Presbyterians in Ireland were committed to the principle of a united, non-sectarian education, if not always in practice then at least in rhetorical terms, as a means of ensuring their own interests.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was thus common, though not notably Calvinist, to hear Presbyterians arguing that ‘Literature and science should know no sects. There is nothing Popish, Prelatic, or Presbyterian in Mathematics’; ‘True religion can sustain no injury from the presence of true science.’Footnote ⁴⁵ In an attempt to secure the admission of Magee students to degrees through the Queen's University of Ireland, Professor J. R. Leebody affirmed in 1872 that the university

As discussed in the final section of this article, Leebody's desire to secure the educational and cultural status of his institution through his championing of an objective, value-free scientific methodology would partly shape his more positive reception of the theories of Darwin and other scientists.

Despite the apparently liberal tone of this rhetoric, Presbyterians remained opposed to the tyrannical power that Catholicism was said to have over the human mind and soul. These bedrock assumptions explain the appendix Robert Watts added to his response to Tyndall's 1874 speech. There he took time to criticize the Roman Catholic hierarchy and their claim that there was a distinctive Catholic approach to science: the irony was that Watts was himself committed to some form of distinctive Calvinist approach. Whatever the details and ironies, it is significant that it seemed self-evident to Watts to link together within the Presbyterian mind materialistic science and popery, the age-old enemy.Footnote ⁴⁷ Furthermore, as Greta Jones has demonstrated, many Irish scientists, including Tyndall himself, were implacable opponents of Home Rule, or Rome Rule as it was often called, because the establishment of a parliament beholden to the Catholic hierarchy would threaten their plans for scientific modernization and would exclude the teaching of Darwinism from all levels of education. Their fears may have been somewhat vindicated after 1922, when education in the newly founded Irish Free State became more explicitly Catholic and Gaelic, while their own links with scientists in Britain diminished.Footnote ⁴⁸

The theology of nature and the science of theology

The argument from design was supreme amongst British Christians in the early nineteenth century, though different models were employed and each addressed different concerns. Amongst evangelicals at this time there was a very complex debate about the nature and utility of knowledge of the natural world.Footnote ⁴⁹ At the risk of gross oversimplification, there were two main approaches. Many followed Paley's analogy of the watch and the watchmaker by charting the minute adaptations of various organisms to their environment in order to illustrate the wisdom and creative sovereignty of God. Others began to utilize the comparative anatomy of Richard Owen by looking for general patterns and plans within the natural world as a whole rather than minute adaptations. For example, in a paper delivered before the Londonderry Natural History Society in 1840 on ‘The clothing of animals’, the Revd William McClure, minister of First Derry and a prominent evangelical, followed in the Paleyite tradition by showing how his subject illustrated ‘the goodness of the deity’.Footnote ⁵⁰ On the other hand, Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation (1855), co-authored by two Scottish Presbyterians teaching at Queen's College, Belfast, George Dickie, professor of natural history, and James McCosh, used the Owenite categories of transcendental plans and homologous relations. This later allowed McCosh to adopt an open attitude to Darwinian evolution.Footnote ⁵¹

Perhaps the most important exponent of an evangelical theology of nature, and certainly for Irish Presbyterians, was the great Scottish churchman Thomas Chalmers.Footnote ⁵² For Chalmers natural theology had two functions. It laid the basis for Christianization, rather than Christianity, by removing doubts about the existence of God, and it hinted at the human dilemma – sin – that could be solved only by the atoning death of Christ. Chalmers had a chastened view of the value of natural theology and sought to reintroduce the doctrines of sin and grace that had been neglected by the Moderate party with whom he was locked in a struggle for the soul of the Scottish church. It is true that Common Sense philosophy, most often associated with the Moderates, provided some kind of framework for his theology, but it only did so as the basis from which he then attempted to establish the credibility of his version of evangelical Christianity. His natural theology, therefore, was as much a criticism of Moderate religion as it was an apologetic device. It also drew a distinction between the types of question that science and religion could answer. Science explored, catalogued and helped to exploit the components of the natural world, while theology, and to a lesser extent philosophy, dealt with key spiritual and philosophical issues about the meaning of life and the relationship between humanity and God.

Chalmers was a very popular figure amongst Presbyterians in Ireland. He visited on a number of occasions and preached sermons throughout Ulster. As the professor of theology at Edinburgh he educated a considerable number of leading evangelicals within the Synod of Ulster. His collected works, which began to appear in the 1830s, were well reviewed in denominational periodicals. Certainly Irish Presbyterians shared Chalmers's view about the inadequacies of natural theology and, indeed, one of the concerns expressed about the teachings of John Ferrie was that he gave too much prominence to that branch of apologetics.Footnote ⁵³ William Gibson, a pupil of Chalmers in Edinburgh, declared in his inaugural lecture at Assembly's College,

Chalmers's roots in the tradition of Baconian methodology also had deep resonance amongst Irish Presbyterians. Bacon's inductive approach to the gathering of scientific facts was eagerly adopted in the eighteenth century by Scottish moral philosophers, rather than by natural philosophers. In the following century those theologians and philosophers who continued that tradition, including Chalmers, were challenged by practising scientists, such as David Brewster, who believed that Bacon's theory of induction ‘did not adequately represent scientific practice or the process of scientific discovery’ and attempted instead to defend the use of imagination and deduction by Newton.Footnote ⁵⁵ Baconian inductivism may have become less salient for scientists, but for those interested in mental science, biblical interpretation and systematic theology it retained its iconic status and rhetorical authority. For example, Bacon's Novum Organum was a set text for ministerial students in the Synod of Ulster.Footnote ⁵⁶ Predictably, an Irish Presbyterian review of Chalmers's Natural Theology (1836) praised the Baconian approach of their Scottish co-religionist:

Chalmers not only applied Baconian methods to natural theology but he also sought more generally to replace Moderate theology with ‘the science of revealed theology’, established through inductive method, in order to portray evangelicalism as rational and respectable to the Scottish middle classes.Footnote ⁵⁸ The development of a science of theology was not confined to Scottish Presbyterianism. At roughly the same time Presbyterians in the United States developed a ‘Baconian theology’. According to Mark Noll, ‘In divinity, a vigorous empiricism resting on facts of consciousness and facts from the Bible became the standard for justifying belief in God, revelation, and the Trinity.’Footnote ⁵⁹ For Charles Hodge, the American Presbyterian divine who could rival Chalmers in terms of influence and intellectual power, theology was a true science that utilized the inductive method pioneered by Bacon and developed by eighteenth-century Scottish Common Sense philosophers. ‘The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science … It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches.’Footnote ⁶⁰ It is significant that the Presbyterian elite in Ireland wanted to model their own Assembly's College on Hodge's Princeton.Footnote ⁶¹

In Ireland Chalmers was hailed as an original thinker in his treatment of theology as a ‘science’. Commenting on his theological lectures at Edinburgh, one writer, probably Gibson, observed that the

A striking characteristic of Chalmers's lectures was ‘the resolute, but sober spirit of inductive investigation, on which it uniformly proceeds’, a course, the writer claimed, not followed by many theologians: ‘Is it not a lamentable thing, that in defiance of all sound and philosophic principle, so many loose a priori speculations should have been generated upon this subject?’Footnote ⁶²

A number of points ought to be made about the Presbyterian commitment to induction. First, the inductive method became essential to any form of inquiry pursued by Presbyterians, whether natural science, systematic theology, biblical criticism or philosophy. Second, though this method could be applied universally, Presbyterians did distinguish between the purposes and ends of certain types of study. In this context the most important distinction is that between theology and science. Each had its separate sphere of inquiry and importance. The former dealt with the key moral and spiritual questions faced by humanity, the latter with the recording and classification of the natural, sensible world. Third, owing to their concern with hard facts and induction, Presbyterians became very allergic to any form of theorizing or speculation not based on facts. Fourth, as the inductive method correctly used was so basic to any form of inquiry, it was claimed that there would be an inevitable harmony between the two books of God, the book of nature and the book of revelation. Presbyterian writers from the 1830s asserted the essential harmony between the Bible and various forms of scientific knowledge such as mineralogy, natural history, geography and astronomy.Footnote ⁶³ Those who taught in the two colleges of the church urged their students to use the book of nature to illustrate and defend the book of revelation. W. D. Killen, professor of ecclesiastical history for the General Assembly since 1841 and president of Assembly's College between 1869 and 1902, told his students in 1843,

Similarly, a writer examining the relationship between religion and science in 1853 observed that the

Perhaps the best example of this attitude was the much-neglected figure of James Gracey Murphy, educated, unusually for a Presbyterian, at the Anglican-dominated Trinity College Dublin, professor of Hebrew at Assembly's College from 1847 to 1888, and prolific author of theological texts and biblical commentaries. Murphy's harmonizing approach was evident in his first major commentary, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Genesis, published by the Edinburgh firm T. & T. Clark in 1863. From the Preface it was clear that Murphy saw no conflict between the revelation of God in scripture and any other form of knowledge. The ‘fair interpretation’ of the Pentateuch, he claimed, served

In terms of details, he held, along with Chalmers and other evangelicals, that there was a significant and indeterminate temporal gap between the first and second verses of the first chapter of Genesis. This allowed him to accept a much older geological age for the earth than the traditional date of 4004 BC, determined by Archbishop James Ussher in the seventeenth century, and provided a suitable ‘interval of time required for the light of the most distant discoverable star to reach the earth’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Consequently, the verses after Genesis 1:1 ‘reveal a new effort of creative power, by which the pre-adamic earth, in the condition in which it appears in the second verse, is fitted up for the residence of a fresh animal creation, including the human race’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Murphy interprets the ‘days’ of Creation as literal twenty-four-hour periods of time, observing that all

At other points he observed that the description of the act of Creation recorded in Genesis was limited in geographical extent and that the Flood was also limited to the known world at the time, which, consequently, harmonized with the findings of geology.Footnote ⁷⁰

Though Murphy claimed that harmony was inevitable, he also believed, along with his colleagues, that the Bible was not a scientific treatise but had the much higher purpose of revealing how fallen humanity could be reconciled with God.Footnote ⁷¹ During the Ferrie debate in 1829 one writer to the Belfast News-Letter stated that the ‘Scriptures were not given to make us philosophers, but to make us real Christians, and the man who turns them into storehouses of philosophical speculation is perverting them from their original purpose.’Footnote ⁷² Others pointed out that the purpose of the Bible was to teach humanity faith, holiness and hope in language that opened the Bible neither to the opprobrium of scientific claims nor to the threat of future discoveries.Footnote ⁷³ Despite his conspicuous role in the aftermath of the Tyndall speech, Robert Watts claimed in 1885 that the Bible fixed ‘neither the antiquity of the universe nor the antiquity of man’, and nor did it ‘furnish sufficient data for a system of chronology’.Footnote ⁷⁴ There was also a belief amongst Presbyterians that conflict would be common while sciences ‘are passing through their formative periods’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Mind over matter and the science of the mind

A central principle of Presbyterian attitudes to science was the ascendancy of mind over matter. This reflected the general evangelical prioritization of the salvation of the soul over the needs of the body. Presbyterians asserted these principles because they raised humanity from a mere collection of atoms to something that not only had control over matter, but was also able to have a direct and accountable relationship with God. For present purposes, it is important to stress the division between mind and matter because it highlights how far Presbyterian attitudes to science were indebted to certain basic philosophical commitments. The importance of Scottish Common Sense philosophy ought to be placed in this context, for, in the hands of Chalmers, the inductive investigation of the facts of the workings of the mind led to the conclusion that humans possessed a conscience and suggested that its existence ‘gave grounds for supposing there to be a moral governor whose laws all had violated’. Coupled with an inductive examination of the Bible that revealed the existence and influence of sin, this pointed inexorably towards the Gospel as the remedy for the fallen condition of humanity.Footnote ⁷⁶

Presbyterian theologians and scientists in Ireland eagerly asserted the supremacy of mind over matter, demonstrating their indebtedness to Common Sense philosophy. In 1857 Murphy highlighted the danger of relying on material science when discussing metaphysical or theological difficulties:

Henry Wallace, Gibson's successor in Assembly's College, argued that mental science was much more influential than physical science because it encompassed every person's consciousness and not only ‘the convolutions of the brain’. Consequently Wallace believed that philosophical criticisms, rather than those furnished by physical science, were more of a threat to Christian faith.Footnote ⁷⁸ In his inaugural lecture of 1866 Watts gave ‘prominence and precedence’ to the study of mental science amongst ministerial students for two reasons: first, because it provided ‘the conditions of all true philosophising, and the scales by which the products of the process are to be weighed’ and, second, ‘Because the errors of the physical sciences, which Christianity has been called upon to combat, are errors into which men have fallen by violating some of the first principles of mental philosophy.’Footnote ⁷⁹

In addition to these theologians, John Robinson Leebody is a good example of a practising scientist who also betrayed his commitment to the principle of mind over matter. Leebody was appointed by the General Assembly to Magee College as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy in 1865 on the basis of testimonials from his professors at Queen's College, Belfast, P. G. Tait, Wyville Thompson, Thomas Andrews and James McCosh.Footnote ⁸⁰ His scientific credentials were, therefore, impeccable, as was his commitment to Common Sense philosophy. In an able review of various theories of development, including those of Tyndall himself, published in 1872, Leebody affirmed that the

Presbyterians in Ireland not only stressed the supremacy of mind over matter, they were also committed to a distinctive science of the mind prosecuted with the methods of inductive science. The Presbyterian predilection for Common Sense was reinforced by their admiration for Chalmers and the teaching of Henry Molyneaux who, in a lengthy pamphlet published in 1844, outlined how a science of the mind was arrived at by the induction of mental phenomena.Footnote ⁸² The influence of James McCosh was also crucial. His 1852 inaugural lecture in Belfast noted that the unprecedented advance of the physical sciences, those that explained the ‘sensible’, was owing to ‘the circumstance that the right method of investigation has been employed. That method is the method of induction’. He then applied the same approach to mental philosophy:

The importance of cultivating the mental sciences led McCosh, and Presbyterians in Ireland more generally, to defend the need for a broad college curriculum that taught students how to think rather than merely how to accumulate knowledge.Footnote ⁸⁴

Owing to the education they had received at Glasgow, Belfast Inst, Queen's College and the denominational institutions, coupled with the influence of figures such as Chalmers and McCosh, Presbyterians in Ireland defined science in terms of the application of the inductive methodology of Francis Bacon. This could be applied to a variety of areas, including natural and revealed theology and mental philosophy. This allowed Presbyterians to discern an essential harmony between the works of God and the word of God. As far as they were concerned, so long as scientists concentrated on the natural world and did not attempt to answer questions only properly addressed by philosophers and theologians, the relationship between religion and science would remain harmonious.

Science and the ‘signs of the times’

Ministerial education and the teaching of science were increasingly viewed by Presbyterians in terms of their eschatological commitments, which, in turn, shaped their response to Tyndall's speech in 1874. Victorian Presbyterians interpreted contemporary events through biblical prophecy as ‘signs of the times’. The chosen eschatological scheme for Presbyterians was postmillennialism, an optimistic creed that envisioned the ushering in of the millennium before the second coming of Christ at the end of time through temporal and spiritual progress in the form of revivals, missionary success, philanthropic work and scientific progress. The historicist version espoused by Presbyterians understood that the Bible, the book of Revelation in particular, provided the framework for viewing the shape and direction of history. One important outcome of this historicist reading was the identification of the Pope as the Antichrist, which had obvious political and cultural importance for Presbyterians in Ireland and united political liberals and conservatives within the denomination.Footnote ⁸⁵ Another consequence of their commitment to this progressive eschatology was their belief that scientific advances were a harbinger of the millennium predicted in Revelation 20. Some noted that technical advances such as steamships and the electric telegraph were facilitating the spread of the Gospel to all peoples in fulfilment of biblical prophecy. The Revd W. E. Breakey of Lisburn concluded his overview of progress in science and the arts in 1860 with the rhetorical question,

The ardent postmillennialist J. G. Murphy wrote in 1871,

As Presbyterians believed in the final authority of Scripture, they had to make sense of those parts of the book of Revelation that predicted hard times for God's people before the dawning of the millennium and the struggle of the Church Universal against evil in all its forms. This sense of impending struggle began to be expressed during the 1830s and 1840s when the relationships between the religious communities of the United Kingdom began to fray and there was a concern amongst orthodox Christians that the forces of irreligion seemed to be mustering their strength. Pointing in 1847 to the significant process of reform and revival which had affected the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, William Gibson believed that it would now form ‘no unimportant section in that great army which, in these last times, is to do battle for the faith’. He discerned an impending ‘crisis in the world's history’ and ‘an elemental war’, circumstances in which ‘the Presbyterian Church in Ireland has, by the favour of a gracious Providence, been furnished with additional facilities’ in the form of a college under their control.Footnote ⁸⁸

For Presbyterians, the potential challenges to Christian faith came from a variety of sources and in a variety of forms, from rationalism, atheism and pantheism to certain types of geology and astronomy. In the late 1850s and early 1860s the main threat came from the advanced biblical criticism emanating from England and Germany. On taking up his duties as professor of biblical criticism in 1860, J. L. Porter intimated his resolve

He urged his audience to keep abreast of the latest developments in science and literature in order to defend ‘the facts of Revelation’. In an attempt to deflate the pretensions of what he referred to as so-called German ‘master minds’, Porter observed that genius must be tempered by true religious feeling.Footnote ⁸⁹ He put into practice these principles in his geographical apologetics, which aimed to demonstrate how the careful observation of ancient ruins, based upon his own travels in the Middle East and archaeological investigation, confirmed the accuracy of both the historical narratives of the Old Testament and prophecies about the fate of certain cities. Porter also responded to the biblical criticism of J. W. Colenso in 1864 when he used the ‘facts’ of the Bible, especially the testimony of Christ to the truth of the Pentateuch, to challenge the bishop's theories.Footnote ⁹⁰

There was an increasing concern amongst some Presbyterians that scientists were moving outside their remit of the study of the natural world by making unfounded extrapolations from their data. Consequently, some in Ireland believed that a conflict between science and religion might be on the horizon. In that view they were not alone. After the American Civil War, according to Ronald Numbers, Charles Hodge expressed concern that ‘methodological naturalism’ was driving out ‘Baconian inductivism’ in science. This was not the view of a man out of touch with developments in modern science, but a realization by someone who genuinely loved scientific endeavour that science was changing in a materialistic direction and was seeking to remove God from the world of nature.Footnote ⁹¹

To equip the Church for this approaching battle for truth, Presbyterians claimed they needed an educated ministry fully aware of the pressing issues and questions of the day.Footnote ⁹² Watts, who had been a student of Hodge's at Princeton, chose the subject of ‘The ministerial curriculum’ for his 1866 inaugural lecture in which he proceeded to ratchet up the conflict between Christianity and its enemies.Footnote ⁹³ According to Watts, the training received by the clergy in the fourth, the eleventh or the sixteenth century would not do for ministers of the nineteenth century. He attempted to meet head-on the challenges of speculative philosophy and, though he expressed his thankfulness that laymen had defended the truth of Christianity, he believed that the ordained ministry ought to be at the vanguard of the struggle and to take their rightful positions ‘as the acknowledged expounders and defenders of the great truths of our holy religion’. The curriculum to be mastered by those who ministered in the second half of the nineteenth century was ‘of no ordinary comprehension or disciplinary power’, and ranged from linguistic competence to a knowledge of systematic and historical theology, from an intimate knowledge of the Bible to a possession of a thorough understanding of mental philosophy. Given the growing general concern that the claims of science and religion were opposed to one another, an overture was brought before the General Assembly in 1867 by the Synod of Derry and Omagh to ‘establish a chair or chairs of natural and physical science’.Footnote ⁹⁴ For many Presbyterians, therefore, there was a growing concern that a pitched battle between religion and science was imminent. As a consequence, the content of the education given to ministerial students had to be adjusted to ensure they could defend their understanding of orthodox Christianity.

Presbyterians and evolution before 1874

We have outlined the principles that informed the Presbyterian approach to science and the steadily increasing sense that there was an imminent conflict between religion and science. This provides the necessary background for consideration of the response of Presbyterians in Ireland to theories of evolution, especially the work of Charles Darwin, in the fifteen years before 1874. The first point to note is that, in common with other groups at the time, the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 was not much commented upon by Presbyterians in Ireland.Footnote ⁹⁵ In the same year a momentous revival of religion spread across the Presbyterian-dominated counties in the north-east of Ireland, bringing in its wake profound confusion as well as transformed lives.Footnote ⁹⁶ More generally, conservative Christians in Britain and Ireland throughout the 1860s, including J. L. Porter and J. G. Murphy, were much more concerned about the development of biblical criticism in the form of Colenso's critique of the Pentateuch and the publication of Essays and Reviews by seven liberal Anglican clergymen in 1860.Footnote ⁹⁷ Nevertheless, there was a feeling amongst some individuals that the Church needed to be wary about the challenge of the new evolutionary science. In a lecture delivered in 1863 entitled ‘Our Church in its relation to progressive thought’, William Todd Martin, then a minister in Newry but later professor of Christian ethics at Assembly's College, observed that the manner in which the theories of Charles Darwin and Sir Charles Lyell had been received was ‘conclusive proof that the tendency of philosophic thought is flowing away from evangelical truth, and towards scepticism’. Essays and Reviews, he believed, demonstrated the same tendency within certain sections of the Church.Footnote ⁹⁸

In their general response, Presbyterians drew the familiar distinction between Darwin as a first-rate scientist and Darwin as second- or third-rate metaphysician and theologian. By doing so they were imitating, consciously or unconsciously, the approach of Charles Hodge. He believed Darwin to be a supreme naturalist but that his theory of natural selection was wrong because it removed God from creation, contradicted the Genesis account of humans being created in the image of God and the special creation of each species, and replaced Baconian induction with groundless theories.Footnote ⁹⁹ In 1863 George Macloskie, then a young minister in Ireland but later brought to Princeton in 1875 by McCosh as the professor of natural history, responded directly to The Origin of Species. In his article he defended the relatively recent origin of the human race and relegated geological changes to the period before Moses' narrative in Genesis 1. According to Macloskie, Darwin's work was worthy of notice more because ‘of the celebrity and undoubted scientific experience of its author’ and ‘on account of the valuable scientific observations recorded in its pages, than because of the value of the arguments adduced to prove his point’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He observed that the trend was not progress towards ‘a higher and healthier type of being’ but rather degeneration to the original type. Showing his commitment to Common Sense and induction, he believed that Darwin's teleology was disproved by experience and was ‘not confirmed by a sufficient induction of the facts’. ‘As far as the general scope of the book referred to reaches, it is an example of transcendental philosophy rather than a scientific investigation’, containing ‘wild speculations’ beyond the realm of reason and ‘unsupported by facts’. Consequently he claimed that ‘scientific’ men would never accept Darwin's theory. This was to prove ironic, as Macloskie applied natural selection to the study of marine life and would later in his career at Princeton defend both a form of theistic evolution and the need for imagination and speculation in science.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The tone of the response to Darwin did, however, vary between individual commentators according to their professional vocation, apologetic purpose and educational context. As indicated by the response of Watts in 1874, theologians were particularly irked by the metaphysical pretensions of scientists. Writing in 1867, Thomas Croskery, a professor at Magee from 1875 to 1886, told the readers of the British and Foreign Evangelical Review that if they accepted the theories of Darwin, Huxley and Lyell then the credibility of the Genesis account would be undermined, while if they accepted the polygenism of Agassiz then the doctrine of the Fall and the redemption of man would be subverted.Footnote ¹⁰² On the other hand, the response of Croskery's colleague at Magee, J. R. Leebody, recognized the merits of the new theories as confirmed by inductive science, whilst also remaining committed to the anti-materialist position of Presbyterians more generally. In articles published in the early 1870s and before the Tyndall speech, Leebody gave a judicious and less belligerent response to the theories of Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, John William Draper and others. He admitted the value of natural selection to the development of animals and ‘the possibility of the development of new species’ but retained the general Presbyterian concern with the exaltation of matter over the mind and expressed his worries about the moral implications of Darwinism. Compared with his theological colleagues in Belfast and Derry, Leebody's ‘discrimination between scientific findings and philosophical speculation was much more carefully prosecuted, his language more restrained, his assessments of Darwinism more tolerant’. His more measured response was due to his training as a scientist, his belief that the progress of science was not at odds with the teaching of revelation and his concern to assert the academic credentials of Magee College.Footnote ¹⁰³ Unlike the theologians whose primary constituency was the denomination, Leebody had to secure the future of Magee College through the admission of its arts students to the examinations of the Queen's and later Royal Universities. To help him do so, he championed the universal and value-free character of science as a way to assert the non-denominational and academic credentials of Magee.

Leebody believed that there was an inevitable and perfect harmony between the two books: ‘God's word, rightly interpreted, and nature fully understood, cannot contradict one another.’ He was, however, aware that the reality in 1872 was that there was a tension between Scripture and the ‘hypotheses recently advanced to account for the origin and present condition of the earth and its inhabitants’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In an attempt to create harmony, he cautioned against accepting traditional readings of Genesis, pointing out that recent scientific work ‘has given us reasons which should convince us that the Bible narrative is intended to be somewhat indefinite’. The watch-and-watchmaker analogy, he believed, had been pushed too far. This implied the need for a newer teleology, though he had not given up observing ‘marks of design’ and ‘a guiding and governing Intelligence’ in the natural world.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Leebody was, therefore, open yet cautious towards scientific advances. His caution was based on a personal commitment to a certain understanding of science: induction, the careful sifting of evidence, the harmony of the book of nature and the book of God, and Common Sense philosophy. It was also based on the practical need to assert the non-denominational nature of the education delivered in his own institution. He adopted the theistic evolution of McCosh against the forms advocated by Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley and Spencer, yet he cautioned against the acceptance by theologians such as McCosh of the evolution of the body along Darwinian lines until it had been proven. There was a danger, he claimed, of faddishness on the part of theologians too eager to reconcile religion and modern science lest they be seen as narrow-minded or opposed to progress.

As a good inductive scientist, he claimed that Darwin's theories did not account for the development of the human body, especially the larynx, eye, ear and hand, and that these theories utterly failed to account for the origin of human mental powers and the existence of conscience. He expressed a concern about Darwin's ‘rash use of his wealth of facts’, ‘unproved assertions’, and ‘sweeping conclusions’ drawn from ‘such slender premises’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Elsewhere he took aim at advocates of abiogenesis who argued ‘for a purely gratuitous hypothesis, which no biological fact, yet ascertained, justifies’, concluding that no Christian could reconcile their faith with a combination of this theory and Darwinian evolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Despite his criticisms, Leebody was able to conclude his 1872 review on a positive note:

Reflecting upon the popular impact of Darwin's arguments, he conceded that ‘half-educated’ persons may well be unsettled, especially as the expense of the book meant that they would only come across its arguments in periodicals where the juiciest quotations were used. Nevertheless, his commitment to the democratic impulses of the Scottish philosophy and the inductive method led him to conclude that

Both the measured response of Leebody and the more belligerent attitude of Watts, Croskery and others were based upon the same bedrock assumptions about the relationship between religion and science. This raises the question of why the response of some Presbyterians to Tyndall in 1874 was so vociferous. Certainly, others outside the denomination reacted in a similar manner, including William Robertson Smith, who was in Belfast at the time and ridiculed Tyndall's knowledge of history in one of the local newspapers.Footnote ¹¹¹ Tyndall was certainly spoiling for a fight. His colleagues, including the scarcely timid T. H. Huxley, suggested he tone down his rhetoric.Footnote ¹¹² Specifically, if Tyndall wanted a sympathetic audience, Belfast was not likely to provide one. Belfast was the heartland of Presbyterianism in Ireland, a town that contained one thoroughly Presbyterian college and one, Queen's College, that may have been non-denominational but drew the majority of its students from that community. Tyndall's confrontational comments were bound to provoke the intellectual leaders of Presbyterianism, many of whom were expecting a fight owing to the widely held belief that the signs of the times pointed to some approaching upheaval in the area of science and religion. It is significant that all but one of those who gave the lectures in Rosemary Street in the winter of 1874–5 were either theologians or ministers, not scientists. It is also significant that the moderating tone adopted by both J. G. Murphy and J. R. Leebody was not heard. It seems that their reaction to Tyndall's speech was not recorded. Consequently, the field was left open to those who were more likely to react in a belligerent fashion. Nevertheless, it is clear that Tyndall's speech challenged a number of the foundational principles of the Presbyterian world view, especially their commitment to the inductive method and Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which allowed them to discern an inevitable harmony between science and religion. The challenge to these principles explains their vigorous response in 1874.