By Bill Jenkins
Scripture played an important role in the development of modern theories of the universe, as seen in the work of a few influential 19th-century scientists who entwined religion and cosmology. The Victorian physicist and hero of science, William Thomson, better known today as Lord Kelvin, was brought up in the austere Presbyterian faith of his father, James Thomson. Although William was to go on to become an episcopalian later in life, his religious faith continued to be shaped by his Presbyterian upbringing. The family had moved from their home town of Belfast in 1833 when William was nine years old and established themselves in Glasgow, where James Thomson had been appointed professor of mathematics at the university. William Thomson was himself to go on to become professor of natural philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1846.
The Reverend Thomas Chalmers, the effective leader of the Evangelical Party within the Church of Scotland, was a close family friend and a regular visitor to the Thomson household during William’s childhood. Chalmers was a man with strong scientific interests as well as an ardent evangelical faith. As a young man he had taught mathematics, and he went on to pen a series of ‘Astronomical Discourses’, delivered to great acclaim at the Tron Church in Glasgow in 1815. Evangelicals then as now tended to take a strong interest in the prophetic books of the bible and to take very seriously the accounts given there of the apocalypse and the world to come. It was therefore important to men such as Chalmers that modern cosmology was in accord with scripture. This also became a preoccupation for Thomson.
Another scientific evangelical who was well known to the Thomson family was the natural philosopher David Brewster. When William Thomson was to visit France both Brewster and Chalmers wrote letters of introduction for him to the great French natural philosopher Jean Baptiste Biot. In a review of Auguste Comte’s Course in Positive Philosophy in the Edinburgh Review in 1838, Brewster was delighted to note that the predictions for the future of the universe espoused by Comte and drawn from the work of the great French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace were fully in accord with those prophesied in the Bible:
the great First Cause must preside at the dawn of each cosmical cycle – and, as in the animal races which were successively reproduced, new celestial creations, of a nobler form of beauty, and of a higher order of permanence, may yet appear in the sidereal universe. ‘Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former shall not be remembered.’ [2 Peter 3:1 3]
This accordance between the prophesies of science and the Bible was also noted and celebrated by Thomson. According to one of the key principles of the energy physics developed by him in the 1850s and 1860s, later known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, all the energy in the universe tends to dissipate over time, becoming increasingly evenly distributed throughout space. This implies that at some distant point in the future all energy will be perfectly evenly distributed, all activity will cease, and the universe will be effectively dead: the so-called ‘heat death’ of the universe. Nothing further can then happen without some ‘divine intervention’ from outside to restart creation.
In 1862 Thomson made his belief in accordance of scripture and science explicit in an article on ‘Energy’ co-authored with Peter Guthrie Tait, professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and published in the magazine Good Words, which was edited by the leading Church of Scotland minister, Norman Macleod:
Thus we have the sober scientific certainty that heavens and earth shall ‘wax old as doth a garment;’ [Psalm 102: 26] and that this slow progress must gradually, by natural agencies which we see going on under fixed laws, bring about circumstances in which ‘the elements shall melt with fervent heat.’ [2 Peter 3: 10] With such views forced upon us by the contemplation of dynamical energy and its laws of transformation in dead matter, dark indeed would be the prospects of the human race if unillumined by that light which reveals ‘new heavens and new earth.’ [2 Peter 3:1 3]
It is striking that Thomson chose exactly the same passage from the Second Epistle of Peter as Brewster to illustrate the convergence of religion and cosmology. For Thomson as for Brewster both science and scripture pointed to the dissolution of the universe as we know it, and to its glorious renovation at the end of time through God’s direct intervention.
About the Book
David Brewster and the Culture of Science in Scotland, 1793–1843 addresses the question of how Scottish scientific culture changed from the Enlightenment to the Victorian period.
‘Bill Jenkins’ deft portrait of David Brewster’s multifaceted scientific career illuminates a long-neglected period in the history of Scottish science. No other book tells us as much about the intersections of Evangelicalism, Whig politics, patronage and the cultivation of natural knowledge in post-Enlightenment Scotland as this one.’ – Paul Wood, University of Victoria
About the Author
Bill Jenkins has been interested in the history of science since studying zoology at the University of Aberdeen in the 1980s. In 2015 he successfully completed a PhD on pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories in early nineteenth-century Scotland at the University of Edinburgh. This research formed the basis for his book, Evolution before Darwin: Theories of the Transmutation of Species in Edinburgh, 1804–34, which was published by Edinburgh University Press in October 2019.
After completing his PhD, Bill lectured in history of science at the University of Edinburgh for two years. From 2018 to 2022 he was a research fellow at the University of St Andrews, working on a Leverhulme Trust funded project entitled ‘After the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, c.1790-c.1843’. His second book, David Brewster and the Culture of Science in Scotland, 1793–1843, published by Edinburgh University Press in November 2024, was based on his research for this project. He is currently lecturer in nineteenth-century British history at the University of St Andrews.
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