366 Lightman
universe, Redfern’s interest in astronomy “at once took me away from the
Bible.” There was “no earth- centred cosmos, no skies that could make a
heaven, and stars that were no lesser lights,” and this “discredited” the
Bible and cast doubt on the existence of a God. Redfern was now receptive
to agnosticism and secularism.^89
Finding school unsatisfying, Redfern was apprenticed to a draper in
Nottingham at the age of fourteen but left to seek employment in London
and Coventry. In Coventry, where he was employed as a shop worker, he
was plagued by the tension that he saw between his scientifi c secularism
and his faith in the religious ideal “love thy neighbour.” Secularists fi rmly
believed in science “and science questioned or contradicted the faith. Man
was of Nature, and Nature demanded the evolutionary struggle.” But the
more Redfern was drawn into the world of radical politics, the more he
began to question evolutionary naturalism. He joined the Social Demo-
cratic Federation, where the ideal of “fraternal happiness” was seen as the
antidote to “those ever- depressing doubts created by scientifi c agnosti-
cism.” In 1895 he moved to London and joined the Hammersmith Social-
ist Society, and then in 1896 he became a member of the Independent
Labour Party when he moved to Huddersfi eld. Shortly afterwards, he read
Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics” and was appalled even more by the sci-
entifi c naturalist’s notion that there were natural limits to social reform.
“So it was the message of science,” Redfern wrote, “that we could change
the world only here and there, easing this and that, but altering nothing
radically. The last word was death; and the intermediate hope, some small
mitigation of the old, animal struggle.” Redfern was not prepared to ac-
cept Huxley’s reading of evolutionary theory as “the last word.” Exercis-
ing his agency as reader in order to escape the “paralysis of agnosticism,”
he questioned the authority of scientists like Huxley, limited the role of
science in legitimating leftist ideology, and maintained that scientifi c
data had nothing of value to say about the true “meaning” of human
life. Though he continued to work in the Labour movement throughout
the twentieth century, becoming editor of Wheatsheaf, the Co- Operative
Wholesale Society’s monthly magazine, he was critical of the abandon-
ment of religion by British socialism.^90 Redfern, then, began his active en-
gagement with science by rejecting the religious dimensions in Proctor’s
astronomy, became attracted to the secularized vision of nature offered to
him by scientifi c naturalism, and ended up returning to a vague religiosity
when evolutionary naturalism confl icted with his socialist ideals. Working
class readers of science like Mann and Redfern were not passive consum-
ers of science, whether it came from science journalists such as Proctor or
scientifi c naturalists like Huxley.