Science and Religion 261ena, the task of actually explaining them—of uncovering the “Supreme
Effi ciency” that actually “lies at the bottom and works from behind the
phenomena”—fell to theology. Science and religion thus became, as the
Andover Seminary theologian George Harris asserted, “different modes of
viewing the same facts.”^15
Some people resisted the idea that theology played an important role
in understanding the natural world. A small but culturally infl uential
group of “scientifi c naturalists,” for example, sought to establish the cul-
tural hegemony of science, promote the professionalization of scientifi c
inquiry, enhance the intellectual and social prestige of scientists, and pro-
mote the secularization of society by extending scientifi c inquiry to “the
whole of Nature.” From this perspective, the Irish physicist John Tyndall,
who trumpeted “the impregnable position of science,” demanded that
“all religious theories, schemes, and systems which embrace notions of
cosmogony, or which otherwise reach into its domain, must, in so far
as they do this, submit to the control of science.” Some members of this
camp differentiated between theology, a cognitive enterprise that typically
obstructed the advance of knowledge, from the larger religious impulse,
which nurtured the moral, aesthetic, and emotional realms of human
life—“in those deeps of man’s nature which lie around and below the
intellect, but not in it.” On occasion, scientifi c naturalists treated science
itself as a form of religion. Thomas H. Huxley, for instance, entitled one of
his works Lay Sermons and alluded to “the church scientifi c.”^16
SEPARATING THE SPHERES
Although few Anglo American intellectuals shared the scientifi c natural-
ists’ conviction that “there is but one kind of knowledge and but one
method of acquiring it,” many did concur with their view that the seem-
ingly “ceaseless confl icts” between science and religion were the result of
“the imperfect separation of their spheres and functions.” Thus, in the late
nineteenth century there developed a sustained tendency among Anglo
American thinkers to look to realms other than nature when discussing
the foundations and impulses underlying religion. Although they con-
tinued to affi rm that “nature is wonderfully suggestive of God,” they ac-
knowledged that “external arguments for the being of God” had become
less compelling. In the face of this situation, many Christians in Great
Britain and the United States—especially those who viewed themselves as
liberals—began to draw more heavily than ever before on the work of Ger-
man theologians and philosophers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and