Science and Conspiracy

From natural theology to scientific naturalism

I took a hiatus from writing about contemporary politics to finish my thirteenth book. I know, not the best timing, given the rapid and breath-taking political sweep we are witnessing during the first few days of the second Trump administration, which I will discuss in later posts. The question, as I see it, is whether Trump represents a white pill, or whether we should withhold our judgment for the time being before taking the white or black pill. As for me, for now, I have taken a gray pill. I am quite encouraged by some of the recent developments, including the full pardons granted to Ross Ulbricht and the J-6 protesters; the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Accord and the World Health Organization; the pause of most foreign aid (I wish he’d permanently ended all of it); the order to declassify the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassination files; the cancellation of the global minimum tax; the barring of U.S. government officials from pushing social media companies to ban “misinformation” and “disinformation;” the elimination of federal DEI officers; forbidding federal spending for the promotion of transgender ideology, and more. But I have serious concerns, especially regarding the $500-billion contract with Stargate—a new consortium including Sam Altman’s Open AI, Larry Ellison’s Oracle, and Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank—and the AI-digital panopticon whose construction may be accelerated. Much more on all that later.

Back to the book: It treats the politics of knowledge in the first half of nineteenth-century Britain. Entitled Authority and Contest: Periodicals and British Knowledge Politics, 1820-1860, the 510-page book admittedly derives, in part, from my Ph.D. dissertation, “The Publics of Science: Periodicals and the Making of British Science, 1820-1860,” completed over 20 years ago. I updated and revised the dissertation and wanted to publish the book, because I believe it is a worthwhile study of nineteenth-century history of science and culture. Having it published has been a bucket list item, if you will.

Nevertheless, for the most part, the book represents a perspective that I no longer hold. I stand by what I wrote, but I have much more to say. What I said is substantially supported by the evidence. What I would change (in a subsequent work) is the perspective or orientation under which I say it.

In part, the work traces the history of the rise of scientific naturalism from the early to mid-nineteenth century as located in periodical writing during the period. The term “scientific naturalism” may not mean much to the lay reader but scientific naturalism is the philosophical framework that supported and promoted Darwinism and the theory of natural selection. As historian of science Bernard Lightman points out in the final essay of a relatively recent anthology, the term “scientific naturalism” was marshaled by Thomas H. Huxley to refer to the movement in the last half of the nineteenth century to “redefine science and transform British society.” I should add that it ended up transforming all of Western society. The term was used by Huxley to describe a philosophical position as applied to science. Huxley apparently appropriated the term from a professor of Greek at Union College in Schenectady, NY, named Tayler Lewis, who had used the expression pejoratively as early as the late 1840s. The phrase subsequently entered the British lexicon in the 1860s, where it was also deployed pejoratively in the religious press to refer to a scientific worldview unmoored from natural theology. The main tenets of scientific naturalism are one, methodological materialism (confining science to natural causes in scientific inquiry) and two, epistemological naturalism (the idea that all valid knowledge comes from natural means, like science.) And here lies the rub. Scientific naturalism cannot explain the origin of the universe or the introduction of life.

My book begins with treatments of early nineteenth-century science and the philosophical and scientific materialism of such artisan radicals as Richard Carlile. It ends with a chapter on the importance of a mid-nineteenth-century movement called Secularism for scientific naturalism’s rise to dominance. I treated the latter issue in my essay, “Secularism and the Cultures of Nineteenth-Century Scientific Naturalism,” published in the British Journal for the History of Science in 2013. The importance of my work has been to show how largely unacknowledged lower-class agents (the likes of Carlile and George Holyoake, for example) impacted British culture and science.

The problem with this treatment (in the essay mentioned above and in my new book) is not that I consider scientific naturalism to be the “natural” and inevitable result of scientific inquiry. Far from it, as I show, its rise and hegemony by the end of the nineteenth century was fraught with controversy and involved intense political jockeying for position on the part of Huxley, John Tyndall, William K. Clifford, et al.

The problem is that I no longer consider scientific naturalism or Darwinian evolution to be either philosophically sound, or, especially in the case of Darwinism, empirically true. I am now much more interested in and swayed by the work of the Cambridge University-trained and intellectually independent philosopher of science, Stephen C. Meyer, whose arguments for intelligent design—of the universe and life itself—I find much more compelling. Meyer’s work is damning for both scientific naturalism and Darwinian evolutionary theory. I won’t venture into his persuasive arguments here, except to say that three issues plague scientific naturalism and Darwinism: the beginning of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, and the necessity for life of DNA as the carrier of critical information. As Meyer demonstrates, there’s simply no way that the universe or life are the result of random material combinations.

This leads me to the final point. I asked Stephen Meyer this question on X: “What caused the mutation in science that led from natural theology to scientific naturalism? This is the question I am pursuing now as a fellow historian of science. Can you help me?”

Of course, my book addresses this question in part. I traced the many interlocutors and agents who contributed to this “mutation” from natural theology to scientific naturalism over the course of the nineteenth century. But I am beginning to think that a “conspiracy” of sorts was behind it. After all, scientific naturalism and Darwinian evolution demoted God from His position as superintendent of the universe and life, leading to the possibility for the later social engineers to assume this role.

Likewise, I am considering looking into the role of the Masons in this mutation of scientific frameworks. Many of the founding members of the Royal Society were free masons, as was Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. In his book, Zoonomia (1794), Erasmus Darwin introduced his own theory of evolution, some 65 years before Charles published his seminal treatise On the Origin of Species (1859). Of course, an exploration of this thesis would take me outside the domain of the history of science per se and into that of “conspiracy theory.” But I believe I’ve earned the prerogative. More soon.

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On another note, I’ve also encountered a significant health issue. I’m scheduled to have open heart surgery!—for severe stenosis of the aortic valve and an aortic aneurysm. If you can help me get through the six-week recovery by making a contribution, I’d very much appreciate it. Thank you.