282 Thurs and Numbers
Pseudo- science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies. It may contain
many truths, and even valuable ones.Holmes repeatedly punctuated his account by denying that he wanted
to label phrenology a pseudoscience; he desired only to point out that
phrenology was “very similar” to the pseudosciences. On other occasions
Holmes categorically included phrenology—as well as astrology, alchemy,
and homeopathy—among the pseudosciences.^2
Before pseudoscience became available as a term of reproach, critics of
theories purporting to be scientifi c could draw on a number of older dep-
recatory words: humbuggery, quackery, and charlatanism. But no phrase
enjoyed greater use than “science falsely so- called,” taken from a letter the
apostle Paul wrote to his young associate Timothy, advising him to “avoid
profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called”
(1 Timothy 6:20). Although “science” had appeared in the original Greek
as gno ̄sis (meaning knowledge generally), English translators in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries chose “science” (a synonym for knowl-
edge). By the mid- eighteenth century (at the latest), the phrase was being
applied to disagreeable natural philosophy. In 1749, for example, the phil-
osophically inclined Connecticut minister Samuel Johnson complained
that “it is a fashionable sort of philosophy (a science falsely so- called) to
conceive that God governs the world only by a general providence accord-
ing to certain fi xed laws of nature which he hath established without ever
interposing himself with regard to particular cases and persons.”^3
Even after the appearance of the term pseudoscience, science falsely
so- called remained in wide circulation, especially among the religious. In
the wake of the appearance of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
(1859) and other controversial works, a group of concerned Christians
started the Victoria Institute, or Philosophical Society of Great Britain;
they dedicated it to defending “the great truths revealed in Holy Scrip-
ture... against the opposition of Science, falsely so called.” The religiously
devout Scottish anti- Darwinist George Campbell, the eighth Duke of Ar-
gyll, dismissed Thomas H. Huxley’s views as “science falsely so called.”
After Huxley’s good friend John Tyndall used his platform as president of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874 to declare
all- out war on theology, one Presbyterian wit dubbed Britain’s leading sci-
entifi c society “The British Association for the Advancement of ‘Science,
Falsely So- Called.’” Ellen G. White, the founding prophet of Seventh- day
Adventism, condemned “science falsely so- called”—meaning “mere the-
ories and speculations as scientifi c facts” opposed to the Bible—over a
dozen times.^4