Science and Religion 255ain and North America, the geographical foci of this chapter, remained
extremely porous well into the nineteenth century. This has prompted
some historians to suggest that the production and dissemination of sci-
ence and religion were emanating from a “common context.” There are
certainly some grounds for adopting that position. Many Christians be-
lieved that scientifi c inquiry disclosed “statements, specifi cations, facts,
details, that will illustrate the wonderful perfections of the infi nite Cre-
ator”; therefore, they thought it reasonable to regard “the calm investiga-
tion of science, stamped with the seal of Christian charity,” as “the best of
all swords and all shields.” Moreover, some Christians valued the sciences
for the light they could shed on the meaning of biblical passages relating
to Creation, Noah’s Flood, and other incidents in sacred history. Although
efforts were sometimes made to show that the conclusions of individual
sciences could be reconciled with revealed or natural theology, there was
little sense that religion and science constituted fundamentally different
enterprises. Rather, the view that prevailed in the mid- nineteenth cen-
tury was that articulated by Samuel Harris, a clergyman who eventually
became a professor of theology at Yale, when he declared in 1852 that
“every science runs into theology; every science borders on theology, and
the explorer cannot traverse it without presently crossing over into the
theological domain.”^4
Notwithstanding the prevalence of that view, however, as early as
1750 an ever- growing number of investigators in the realms of natural
philosophy and natural history began making determined efforts to pur-
sue their inquiries untrammeled by concern with the testimony of the
biblical narrative. They also began to substitute natural laws and agencies
for the supernatural in accounting for the history, structure, and opera-
tion of nature. Hostility to religion motivated few of these investigators,
and for much of the nineteenth century most continued to ascribe events
to supernatural intervention when they found it impossible to explain
them adequately in other ways. Nevertheless, the trend was clear: “men of
science” increasingly came to assume that “it is the aim of science to nar-
row the domain of the supernatural, by bringing all phenomena within
the scope of natural laws and secondary causes.” Charles Darwin may not
have suffi ciently appreciated the options available to an omnipotent God
when he asserted that the doctrine of special creation was no explanation
at all. However, the thrust of his complaint highlighted the direction in
which thinking about the nature of scientifi c explanation was moving.
Although the rate at which the norms and practice of scientifi c investi-
gation became naturalistic was slow and uneven, by 1875 many natural
scientists clearly preferred to confess their ignorance rather than invoke