Tyndall contended there was no point in the history of the cosmos when ‘creative acts’ of a ‘deity’ were required

On August 19th, 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 he said 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 religious convictions. 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.

Born in Leighlinbridge, Co Carlow, Tyndall ranks as one of Ireland’s most successful scientists and educators. He reached the pinnacle of 19th century science and counted among his friends and collaborators many of the best-known scientists of that century.

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: human cognition and consciousness. Tyndall fully recognised what has since been termed “the hard problem” of consciousness: how subjective experience is derived from non-conscious matter. But he was convinced that knowledge of the gradual evolution of cognition, a more advanced science of the brain and a redefinition of matter would provide a natural explanation of the human mind.

Reactions to Tyndall’s explosive lecture appeared immediately and continued long afterwards. While his Belfast audience politely applauded, the physicist Oliver Lodge recalled the atmosphere growing “more and more sulphurous”. Editorials in the press the following morning raised the alarm, and, within days, newspapers nationwide ran articles and letters attacking the physicist’s misguided materialism (the theory that physical matter is all that exists).

The backlash ramped up in the weeks that followed. On the Sunday after the lecture, Belfast’s pulpits, as Tyndall put it, “thundered at” him. At the end of October, the bishops of the Catholic Church in Ireland published a letter half as long as Tyndall’s address, condemning his materialist metaphysics. Around the same time, a Belfast-based lecture series to combat Tyndall’s philosophy of mind and nature was arranged by prominent Presbyterians.

Over the next few years, numerous articles, pamphlets and books dissecting Tyndall’s lecture were published. Many, if not most, accused Tyndall of abusing his prominent position to endorse an irresponsible materialism that undermined morality and the Christian religion.

#JohnTyndall #Cosmos #Consciousness