Rectenwald, Michael (Author)
This essay examines Secularism as developed by George Jacob Holyoake in 1851--1852. While historians have noted the importance of evolutionary thought for freethinking radicals from the 1840s, and others have traced the popularization of agnosticism and Darwinian evolution by later Victorian freethinkers, insufficient attention has been paid to mid-century Secularism as constitutive of the cultural and intellectual environment necessary for the promotion and relative success of scientific naturalism. I argue that Secularism was a significant source for the emerging new creed of scientific naturalism in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only did early Secularism help clear the way by fighting battles with the state and religious interlocutors, but it also served as a source for what Huxley, almost twenty years later, termed `agnosticism'. Holyoake modified freethought in the early 1850s, as he forged connections with middle-class literary radicals and budding scientific naturalists, some of whom met in a `Confidential Combination' of freethinkers. Secularism became the new creed for this coterie. Later, Secularism promoted and received reciprocal support from the most prominent group of scientific naturalists, as Holyoake used Bradlaugh's atheism and neo-Malthusianism as a foil, and maintained relations with Huxley, Spencer and Tyndall through the end of the century. In Holyoake's Secularism we find the beginnings of the mutation of radical infidelity into the respectability necessary for the acceptance of scientific naturalism, and also the distancing of later forms of infidelity incompatible with it. Holyoake's Secularism represents an important early stage of scientific naturalism.
...MoreDescription Examines Secularism as developed by George Jacob Holyoake in 1851--1852.
Chapter
Dawson, Gowan;
Lightman, Bernard;
(2014)
Introduction
(/isis/citation/CBB001422057/)
Book
Stanley, Matthew;
(2014)
Huxley's Church and Maxwell's Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001422028/)
Book
Lightman, Bernard;
Dawson, Gowan;
(2014)
Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity
(/isis/citation/CBB001422041/)
Chapter
White, Paul;
(2014)
The Conduct of Belief: Agnosticism, the Metaphysical Society, and the Formation of Intellectual Communities
(/isis/citation/CBB001422052/)
Article
Flaherty, Niall O';
(2010)
The Rhetorical Strategy of William Paley's Natural Theology (1802): Part 2, William Paley's Natural Theology and the Challenge of Atheism
(/isis/citation/CBB001021664/)
Thesis
Ohlers, R. Clinton;
(2007)
The End of Miracles: Scientific Naturalism in America, 1830--1934
(/isis/citation/CBB001561499/)
Book
Alan Charles Kors;
(2016)
Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650-1729
(/isis/citation/CBB590380548/)
Chapter
Brooke, John Hedley;
(2005)
Darwin, Design, and the Unification of Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB000773844/)
Article
Baxfield, C. R. C.;
(2013)
“To Mend the Scheme of Providence”: Benjamin Franklin's Electrical Heterodoxy
(/isis/citation/CBB001252898/)
Article
Claggett, Shalyn;
(2010)
Harriet Martineau's Material Rebirth
(/isis/citation/CBB001213087/)
Book
Hecht, Jennifer Michael;
(2003)
The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France
(/isis/citation/CBB000751137/)
Book
Pleins, J. David;
(2014)
In Praise of Darwin: George Romanes and the Evolution of a Darwinian Believer
(/isis/citation/CBB001510109/)
Article
Lightman, Bernard;
(2002)
Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism: The Strange History of a Failed Rhetorical Strategy
(/isis/citation/CBB000202580/)
Article
Lightman, Bernard;
(2012)
Does the History of Science and Religion Change Depending on the Narrator? Some Atheist and Agnostic Perspectives
(/isis/citation/CBB001200888/)
Chapter
Money, John;
(2004)
Science, Technology, and Dissent in English Provincal Culture: From Newtonian Transformation to Agnostic Incarnation
(/isis/citation/CBB000471147/)
Article
Paylor, Suzanne;
(2005)
Edward B. Aveling: The People's Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB000630793/)
Article
Hahn, Roger;
(2010)
Laplace's Private Religious Discomfort
(/isis/citation/CBB001220613/)
Chapter
Lightman, Bernard;
(2004)
Interpreting Agnosticism as a Nonconformist Sect: T. H. Huxley's “New Reformation”
(/isis/citation/CBB000471152/)
Article
Heide, Janneke van der;
(2006)
Darwin's Young Admirers
(/isis/citation/CBB000771703/)
Thesis
Tison, Richard Perry, II;
(2008)
Lords of Creation: American Scriptural Geology and the Lord Brothers' Assault on “Intellectual Atheism”
(/isis/citation/CBB001561388/)
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