Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800–1860 (Past and Present Publications)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: 1st Edition, 5/26/1988
EAN 9780521242455, ISBN10: 0521242452
Hardcover, 360 pages, 23.6 x 15.5 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Science and Religion assesses the impact of social, political and intellectual change upon Anglican circles, with reference to Oxford University in the decades that followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. More particularly, the career of Baden Powell, father of the more famous founder of the Boy Scout movement, offers material for an important case-study in intellectual and political reorientation: his early militancy in right-wing Anglican movements slowly turned to a more tolerant attitude towards radical theological, philosophical and scientific trends. During the 1840s and 1850s, Baden Powell became a fearless proponent of new dialogues in transcendentalism in theology, positivism in philosophy, and pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories in biology. He was for instance the first prominent Anglican to express full support for Darwin's Origin of Species. Analysis of his many publications, and of his interaction with such contemporaries as Richard Whately, John Henry and Francis Newman, Robert Chambers, William Benjamin Carpenter, George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, reveals hitherto unnoticed dimensions of mid-nineteenth-century British intellectual and social life.
Preface
List of abbreviations
Part I. Biographical Introduction
1. The Hackney Phalanx
a family network
2. Baden Powell's early theological papers
3. Baden Powell's reflections on science in the early 1820s
4. Science and religion in the 1820s
5. Rational Religion Examined
6. Baden Powell between Oriel and Hackney
Part II. Baden Powell and the Noetic School
7. The teaching of Richard Whately
8. The collision
9. Science and academic politics at Oxford
1825–1835
10. Science and revelation
1826–1836
Part III. The New Synthesis and its Developments
11. The methodology of science
12. The Christian apologetic and the fallacies of natural theology
13. Christian tolerance
14. The parting of the ways
Baden Powell versus Richard Whately
Part IV. The Question of Species
15. The French threat
16. Species without Darwin
17. Towards the Origin
18. Conclusions
Bibliography
Index.