On 19 August 1874, the Irish physicist John Tyndall—now better known as the co-founder of climate science—spoke to 2,000 people for nearly two hours in Belfast's Ulster Hall. What generated one of the most intense controversies about science and religion in the modern period. The aftermath is still felt today.
Tyndall's three core arguments threatened strongly held . The first was that science alone was competent to speak about the material world. The second was that the physical universe contained the "promise and potency" of life, consciousness and reason.
The third was that religious believers had no grounds for claiming definite knowledge of the unfathomable mystery at the heart of existence. The strain between Tyndall's vision of science and religion and that of many of his Victorian contemporaries had been building for decades. His high-profile lecture was designed to increase the pressure to breaking point.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution provided Tyndall with a powerful resource to pursue that goal. To Tyndall, Darwin offered a compelling natural explanation for the diversity of life on Earth and made the idea of divine interference obsolete. If Darwin held back from making confident assertions about life's beginning, Tyndall exercised no such caution.
There was, Tyndall declared, no point in the history of the cosmos when "creative acts" of a "deity" were required. This included the emergence of two remarkable phenomena: and consciousness. Tyndall fully reco.