Huxley's Church and Maxwell's Demon
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A01=Matthew Stanley
agnosticism
Author_Matthew Stanley
biography
Category=PDX
Category=QRAM3
christianity
class
creation
education
england
environmentalism
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eq_isMigrated=1
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eq_science
evolution
free will
history
hypothesis
intellectual freedom
investigation
james clerk maxwell
knowledge
methodology
natural laws
naturalism
nature
nonfiction
physicists
religion
science
scientific method
scientists
secularism
theism
theory
thomas henry huxley
victorian
working mens college
Product details
- ISBN 9780226164878
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 24 Nov 2014
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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During the Victorian period, the practice of science shifted from a religious context to a naturalistic one. It is generally assumed that this shift occurred because naturalistic science was distinct from and superior to theistic science. As Huxley's Church and Maxwell's Demon reveals, however, most of the methodological values underlying scientific practice were virtually identical for the theists and the naturalists: each agreed on the importance of the uniformity of natural laws, the use of hypothesis and theory, the moral value of science, and intellectual freedom. But if scientific naturalism did not rise to dominance because of its methodological superiority, then how did it triumph? Matthew Stanley explores the overlap and shift between theistic and naturalistic science through a parallel study of two major scientific figures: James Clerk Maxwell, a devout Christian physicist, and Thomas Henry Huxley, the iconoclast biologist who coined the word agnostic. Both were deeply engaged in the methodological, institutional, and political issues that were crucial to the theistic-naturalistic transformation.
What Stanley's analysis of these figures reveals is that the scientific naturalists executed a number of strategies over a generation to gain control of the institutions of scientific education and to reimagine the history of their discipline. Rather than a sudden revolution, the similarity between theistic and naturalistic science allowed for a relatively smooth transition in practice from the old guard to the new.
Matthew Stanley is associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington and lives in New York City.
