Abstract
Sir George Gabriel Stokes is justly recognized for his substantial contributions to mathematics and physics, particularly optics and hydrodynamics. Yet Stokes also had a particularly noteworthy involvement in the religious life of Victorian Britain, and especially in the relationship between science and religion. As an outspoken evangelical, a prominent religious scientist, a lecturer on natural theology, and a lay writer on widely-debated theological topics such as eternal punishment, Stokes made contributions unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. However, these have often been overlooked. This article redresses this situation, by explaining Stokes's religious life, his influence on debates over science and religion, his natural theology, and his promotion of the doctrine of conditional immortality.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Stokes at 200 (Part 1)’.
1. Introduction
George Gabriel Stokes was one of Victorian Britain's most celebrated mathematical physicists. To his contemporaries, he was also renowned for his religious convictions. Although it was much less unusual for a Victorian scientist to be publicly, even outspokenly, religious than it is today, the prominent role that Stokes played in religious life is nevertheless remarkable [1]. Over the course of his career, the natural sciences became distinct disciplines, pursued by specifically trained professionals rather than the gentleman amateurs who had previously undertaken so much research in natural philosophy. These gentleman amateurs had quite often been clergymen, ‘parson-naturalists’ such as William Buckland, who first described Megalosaurus, or John Stevens Henslow, a friend and tutor to Charles Darwin. Anglican clerics were university educated, and generally had sufficient time and money to indulge their intellectual interests. The rising class of scientific specialists, meanwhile, were professionals devoted to the full-time pursuit of their disciplines. Many, such as the physicist John Tyndall and the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, were from comparatively humble origins. Professionalization offered an opportunity for social advancement, with the creation of university degrees and professorships in these new disciplines. Tyndall and Huxley were also members of the X Club, an informal dining group which was dedicated to the professionalization of science, to reform of the Royal Society, and to a strict demarcation between science and religion. Through the secularization of their disciplines, and by their insistence that scientific research must never be subservient to religious concerns, the X Club aimed to wrest the cultural authority and social capital afforded to practitioners of science away from gentleman amateurs, clerical or otherwise, and towards professional specialists. Between 1875 and 1883, three consecutive presidents of the Royal Society were X Club members: Joseph Dalton Hooker, William Spottiswoode, and Huxley. This represented a stunning level of dominance of the world's leading scientific society by outspoken scientific naturalists. Yet this dominance was short-lived. Huxley was succeeded by Stokes, a passionate evangelical who was nevertheless of comparable scientific standing to his predecessors, and who was an outspoken advocate for a harmonious relationship between science and religion. Stokes also frequently wrote and lectured on religious topics, particularly natural theology and the immortality of the soul. Further, he was president of the Victoria Institute (1885–1903), a body established in 1865 to provide a forum for Christian intellectuals, and which placed itself in opposition to the X Club and its objectives. As this article explains, Stokes therefore made contributions to the science–religion debate and to Victorian religious life that were as significant as his contributions to optics and fluid dynamics. First, Stokes's religious background is briefly explained. The article then details his contribution to three areas: the relationship between science and religion, natural theology, and the immortality of the soul.
2. Religious formation: from Skreen to Cambridge
Stokes was born in Skreen, a small village in County Sligo, on Ireland's rugged west coast, where his father, Rev. Gabriel Stokes, was the Church of Ireland rector. Following the Acts of Union 1800, Ireland and Great Britain became one united legal entity, and the Churches of England and Ireland were similarly combined. This large church had various factions, from the ‘high’ church party which emphasized ritual, liturgy, music, and sacraments, to the ‘low’ evangelical movement, which lent more importance to an experiential religion of the heart. Rev. Stokes was a member of the church's evangelical wing, and Stokes absorbed much of his father's religious thought. Broadly speaking, evangelicals have certain theological commitments and a particular way of expressing their faith, none of which are unique to the movement, but which considered together constitute a specifically evangelical understanding of Christianity. First, and most important, is the prominence given to the Bible. Evangelicals, like most Protestants, adhere to the principle of sola scriptura, that the Bible is the ultimate source of religious authority and contains everything necessary for salvation. The Bible was also the book used most often to teach children how to read and write (Stokes himself learned to read from the Psalms), and a literary work from which quotations, allusions, and metaphors were incredibly culturally significant [2]. Similarly important is conversionism, the idea that human beings need to be actively converted to Christianity, and be ‘born again’. Also crucial is activism, the open expression of the Gospel and faith through words and action. Gabriel Stokes clearly embodied the principles of evangelicalism and instilled them in his children. Of his four sons, three followed him in becoming Church of Ireland ministers, while his youngest became Victorian Britain's most significant religious scientist. All of these evangelical qualities Stokes inherited from his father, and they shaped his religious convictions for the rest of his life. Henry Paine Stokes, the vicar of Saint Paul's, Cambridge, where George Gabriel Stokes attended, wrote that although his parishioner (to whom he was unrelated) ‘was never narrow in his faith and religious sympathies, he always held fast by the simple evangelical truths he learned from his father, the Protestant rector of Skreen, in the county of Sligo’ [3]. Stokes remained committed to the church in which he had been raised. In 1849, he declined an invitation from his friend William Thomson, the later Lord Kelvin, to apply for the chair of mathematics at Glasgow. While the English universities required adherence to the Anglican faith, in Scotland professors were expected to be members of Scotland's national, Presbyterian church. Although this denomination had an evangelical theology similar to his own, Stokes still felt a sense of loyalty and belonging to his own church. After an exchange with his older brother, the Rev. John Whitley Stokes, he declined to apply for the Glasgow post.
After education at home in Skreen, at school in Dublin, and then at Bristol College, Stokes entered Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1837 to read mathematics. While Oxford University was the home of the high church Oxford Movement, led by John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey, Cambridge was, alongside Clapham, one of the two major centres of evangelicalism at that time in England. As well as the keenly evangelical atmosphere in the university city, Stokes was heavily influenced by several of the texts that he studied. Students were expected to read widely and beyond their narrow subject interest, and two works by William Paley were part of undergraduate examinations. Paley had been, as Stokes would later be, senior wrangler, the highest-scoring student in the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge. However, he went on to become one of the most influential English clergymen and philosophers of the late nineteenth century, and his The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) and View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) were still required reading at Cambridge more than three decades after his death, while his Natural Theology (1802) was also a widely-read work of apologetics. Evidences was a particularly influential work of Christian apologetics, which laid out in strikingly clear prose several rigorous arguments for the existence of God. Charles Darwin, who read Paley as part of his examinations at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1831, wrote in his autobiography that he was ‘convinced that I could have written out the whole of the Evidences with perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley’. Yet it was another work by Paley that particularly impressed Darwin and stimulated him as much as geometry: ‘The logic of this book and as I may add of his Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid’ [4]. Stokes was similarly taken with Natural Theology, a work widely credited with popularizing the teleological argument, or the argument from design for the existence of God. Paley laid out a straightforward argument by analogy, reasoning that if a walker were to discover a watch, even without having seen or heard of one before, it would bear the obvious hallmarks of having been designed and then manufactured. The natural world, Paley argued, bore similar evidence of design, and thus must have had a designer, just as a watch must have a watchmaker, which was clear and compelling evidence for the existence of God [5]. Stokes, like Darwin, was persuaded, and his own natural theology remained indebted to Paley for the rest of his life. In 1880, for instance, Stokes was still explaining to an audience that he understood a designed universe ‘much in the same way that was mentioned long ago by Paley in his Natural Theology’ [6]. For Stokes, Paley's Evidences and Natural Theology were particularly influential because they provided a framework in which scientific practice and religious faith could coexist in a harmonious, mutually-reinforcing manner.
3. The relationship between science and religion
Although Stokes never wavered in his evangelical beliefs, the middle decades of the nineteenth century presented a series of challenges to faith, to the extent that mid-Victorian Britain is often described as having undergone a crisis of faith. These challenges came from several directions. A previously popular chronology proposed by James Ussher, a seventeenth-century Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, suggested that the world had been created in 4004 BCE. This chronology sat alongside catastrophism, a theory that explained changes in geological features as being a result of sudden changes, such as the flood of Noah. Both theories became increasingly difficult to support, however, following the rise of the new science of geology. Works such as James Hutton's Theory of the Earth (1795), and Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (3 volumes, 1830–1833) suggested a new theory, uniformitarianism, which argued that historical geological features were instead the result of the same processes that could be observed in the present day, acting at a more or less constant rate. This required a much older earth that that suggested by the Ussher chronology, extending into the millions of years, rather than 6000. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) required a similarly long period of time for his proposed mechanism of evolution by natural selection. Further, the observable differences in species were attributed to a gradual series of changes over time rather than to the work of God. Put together, geology and biology therefore represented a scientific threat to traditional Christian cosmologies. Yet not all threats to Christianity came from the natural sciences.
The concept of eternal punishment, the idea that God would condemn those who had not been saved or ‘born again’ to be punished for eternity in hell, was difficult to reconcile with the notion of a just, loving, paternal God that was central to how many Victorians understood their faith. Another threat was biblical or ‘higher’ criticism, a method of literary scholarship that advocated treating the Bible as if it were any other document and attempting to interpret it by paying attention to its original historical context. When this technique arrived in Britain from Germany, where it originated, it caused deep consternation, because it challenged the idea that the Bible could be taken at face value as an authentic historical document. This was, of course, particularly troubling for evangelicals, given the centrality of the Bible to their faith. One response to these threats was the formation, in 1865, of the Victoria Institute, an explicitly Christian ‘philosophical society’ headed by the Earl of Shaftesbury, one of Britain's foremost evangelicals. According to its mission statement, the Victoria Institute pledged to ‘defend revealed truth from “the oppositions of science, falsely so called”’. This was a biblical allusion (a reference to 1 Timothy 6:20) which made clear that the Victoria Institute was an organization that considered these intellectual threats to the Bible to be ‘false’ science. In December 1865, the satirical magazine Punch described the new organization as an ‘Anti-Geological Society’ [7]. However, early meetings were dominated by the society's honorary secretary, James Reddie, a somewhat eccentric civil servant who had been engaged in a running battle with London's scientific elite over his attempts to promote anti-Newtonian physics. Darwinism was a particularly controversial issue, and when the talented young chemist George Warington gave his cautious approval to aspects of Darwin's theory, it produced a thunderous response from Reddie that extended over several meetings. Having read a report of proceedings, Darwin wrote to Warington, praising him for his ability to summarize Darwin's work and expressing ‘sincere admiration of your powers of reasoning & illustration’ [8]. Darwin also wrote to his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, noting that Warington had ‘read an excellent & spirited abstract of the “Origin” before the Victoria Inst. & as this is a most orthodox body he has gained the name of the Devil's Advocate. The discussion which followed during three consecutive meetings is very rich from the nonsense talked.’ [9].
Reddie's esoteric views and hostility did little to promote the Victoria Institute's objective of providing a serious scientific forum for Christians; one ‘distinguished professor’ refused an invitation to attend, on the grounds that Reddie ‘actually did not believe in the theory of universal gravitation’ [10]. After a bright start, membership declined precipitously before Reddie's death in 1871. Reddie's successor, Francis Petrie, was somewhat more diplomatic, and began a charm offensive in order to attract leading religious scientists to the cause. Stokes, by now into his third decade as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, was an obvious choice. Several letters were exchanged, with Petrie sending information about membership, praising Stokes's work with leading scientific bodies such as the Royal Society, of which Stokes was a secretary, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Stokes had been president of the latter organization in 1869, in between the presidencies of two X Club members, Hooker and Huxley. Petrie's invitation to present a paper was politely declined, and he turned his attention to other religious scientists. This was not entirely successful, although his efforts did manage to rescue the Victoria Institute from irrelevance, and establish it as credible space for some sympathetic scientists and gentleman amateurs who felt out of place in the secularizing, professional environment of other scientific societies to engage on questions of science and religion. Petrie did recognize, however, that a prestigious scientist would lend an air of authority to proceedings, and maintained his efforts to recruit leading lights of the field. James Clerk Maxwell, who was the first head of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge and another evangelical, was approached but declined to join, and so Petrie began another series of correspondence with Stokes, sending invitations to meetings, clippings, and an invitation to become an honorary member. Eventually, appeals to Stokes's sense of duty got the better of him, and in March 1880 he presented a paper ‘On the Bearings of the Study of Natural Science, and of the Contemplation of the Discoveries to Which That Study Leads, on Our Religious Ideas.’ [11].
In his paper, Stokes explained how he believed that many of the supposed points of conflict between science and religion arose from misconceptions. He hoped that the ‘alarm at one time felt at the conclusions of geologists that the antiquity of the earth itself, and even of plants and animals, was to be reckoned by something considerably exceeding a few thousand years, may pretty well be looked upon as a thing of the past’. Nevertheless, he believed that ‘instances in which scientific discoveries, or conclusions based on good evidence, run counter to our preconceived ideas occur from time to time, and are likely to occur in the future’. Religious scientists thus had to be prepared to engage with scientific discoveries without fearing that they would undermine their faith. Evolution, for instance, could be thought of a ‘useful guide’ without committing to the idea that humans had evolved from inert matter. In fact, Stokes told the assembled members that he considered such a hypothesis to be a ‘gigantic “extra-polation” (to borrow a term sometimes employed in mathematics) to conclude the form of a complete curve from the mere infinitesimal arc which alone is open to our observation’. This nuanced approach earned Stokes gushing praise from the audience. The meeting's chair, the chemist John Eliot Howard, commented that ‘it does credit to his high position among the highest scientific minds of the age’. Petrie, meanwhile, argued ‘that this paper must be regarded as being one of the most important ever brought before the Institute. It is eminently a scientific paper, by one in the very highest rank of scientific men, which tends to show “that there is no discrepancy between the book of Nature and the book of Revelation, if rightly interpreted”’. Stokes returned to the Victoria Institute in January 1883, at which he gave a paper ‘On the Absence of Real Opposition Between Science and Revelation.’ [11]. Anticipating a large audience, the Institute moved the venue from its premises in Adelphi Terrace to the more commodious Society of Arts. Indeed, the presence of Stokes attracted several of the Victoria Institute's scientific members, who, while not infrequent attendees, rarely appeared together at meetings. Sir Joseph Fayrer, a physician who had attended the Prince of Wales on his tour of India, was in the chair, while Sir James Risdon Bennett, another distinguished physician and vice-president of the Royal Society [12], and the microscopist Lionel Smith Beale also attended. So too did several colleagues from the Royal Society, such as the marine biologist George Charles Wallich, and the explorer John Rae. These non-members, perhaps intrigued to hear their long-standing Royal Society colleague speak on religious matters, may have been invited by Petrie, or Stokes might have invited them himself. In characteristic fashion, Stokes had taken his responsibility as lecturer rather seriously, and invited a biologist colleague to attend and offer his own interpretation. Unfortunately, the anonymous colleague was struck down by illness at the last minute, and so Stokes spoke alone. He offered a slightly more refined version of his earlier argument and was rewarded by praise even more effusive than that shown to his first paper.
Stokes played a crucial role in the rehabilitation of the Victoria Institute as a serious forum for religious scientific voices, and he was joined as an honorary member by such distinguished figures as Louis Pasteur and the Canadian geologist John William Dawson. In October 1885, Shaftesbury died, and eventually Stokes was offered the Institute's presidency. This came at a particularly high point in Stokes's already distinguished career, for he had just been elected president of the Royal Society. The Royal Society's presidency had been something of a battleground in the science and religion debate, with the X Club colluding to keep a member in the chair for three successive presidencies. Indeed, it took all of their savvy to twice keep Stokes from obtaining the chair, since, as Ruth Barton notes, ‘he had scientific stature and had served the society conscientiously as secretary for over twenty years’ [13]. In 1873, the role had gone to Joseph Dalton Hooker, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, and a figure of both social and political and scientific standing. With the nomination of William Spottiswoode in 1878, however, their machinations were more obviously political. As Barton notes, by ‘supporting Spottiswoode over Stokes for the Royal Society presidency, his X Club friends chose wealth, dignity, liberal principles, modest mathematical achievement, and amateur status over a retiring personality, conservatism, and mathematical brilliance’ [13]. Huxley, one of the most strident voices for the primacy of science over religion, then succeeded Spottiswoode. Nevertheless, Stokes followed Huxley, and was succeeded in turn by Thomson, and then by Sir Joseph Lister, both of whom were ennobled during their presidencies. Thomson and Lister were deeply religious, and the appointment of Stokes as president represents a resurgence of religious scientists in public life. Stokes constantly badgered his illustrious colleagues to lend their weight to the Victoria Institute, and was relatively successful. Thomson, now Lord Kelvin, became an honorary member and presented the Institute's annual address for 1897. Kelvin and Lister both attended Stokes's annual address in 1899, meaning the current and two preceding presidents of the Royal Society were present at the Victoria Institute's annual celebration of the harmony between science and religion.
4. Natural theology
Stokes, as president of the Royal Society, of the Victoria Institute, and as an active council member of various evangelical organizations such as the London and Foreign Bible Society, became established as one of Victorian Britain's most prominent voices on matters of science and religion. A frequently recurring theme in his lectures on science and religion was natural theology. Indeed, Stokes's first lecture to the Victoria Institute had more or less been an explication of his own natural theology. Natural theology is a type of theology that provides arguments for the existence of God from the natural world, rather than from the Bible or supernatural revelation. Paley's watchmaker analogy, which argued for the existence of God from the appearance of a universe so complex that it must have been designed, is a paradigmatic example of this approach. One of the most striking features of Stokes's natural theology was the extent to which he claimed a debt to Paley, who had by then become somewhat unfashionable. Alternative explanations for the complexity of the universe abounded, and the inference that it had the hallmarks of design and so must have had a designer could not be taken for granted. Where Stokes made a particularly significant contribution was to change the terms of the argument. Rather than a universe that had been designed by, and operated according to, interventions and instructions from God, Stokes instead saw a universe that operated according to fixed laws of nature. For Paley, design implied a designer; for the physicist, laws implied a lawmaker. The first paper that Stokes delivered at the Victoria Institute laid out this argument in broad terms, relating it to the wider debate about the relationship between science and religion. However, he was soon offered an opportunity to develop this approach into a deeper argument drawn from his own research into optics when he was invited to Aberdeen to become the first Burnett lecturer. The Burnett lectures were founded from a bequest by the Aberdeen merchant John Burnett, who left his fortune to various philanthropic endeavours, including an essay prize for the promotion of natural theology. His trustees eventually decided that a lectureship would more effectively fulfil Burnett's objectives, and invited Stokes to inaugurate the series. Stokes gave 12 lectures over 3 years, from 1883–1885. In a preface to the published version of the first course of four lectures, Stokes introduced his chosen topic, light, and explained that he had assumed ‘on the part of the reader a knowledge of the rectilinear propagation of light in the same medium, of the laws of reflection and refraction, of the compound character and of the decomposition of white light’, but not ‘that he is acquainted with the phenomena of interference, or diffraction, or double refraction, or polarization’. It is easy to forget that behind Stokes's laconic manner of expression, stern face, and serious demeanour there lay a keen sense of humour, as evidenced by his dry remark that ‘some acquaintance with these subjects will make the lectures much more easy to follow’ [14]. His seriousness eventually won out: this passage did not appear when the lectures were published in a single volume. Nevertheless, listeners and readers with the requisite knowledge were able to enjoy a remarkable series of lectures on the history of the study of light. Stokes guided his audience through theories of emission and undulation, even spending some time on a favourite theory of his, the now-discredited luminiferous ether. Stokes's explanations were framed in such a way that he believed that the inference of a universe operating according to fixed laws, which expressed the will of God, would be unmistakeable. A close study of the eye, Stokes argued, would demonstrate its remarkable adaptation to its purpose. Even if it was taken for granted that the eye had developed from a less complicated state to its current form, it was nevertheless adapting to a set of fixed laws which were one part of a wonderfully complex universe. ‘The greatness of the universe’, said Stokes in his final lecture, ‘displays to us something of the greatness of its Author.’ [15].
Now established as a leading authority on natural theology, Stokes was an obvious choice when a new lecture series was established by a bequest from Adam, Lord Gifford, in 1887. In 1891 and 1893, he gave two series of ten Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, again using research in physics, principally optics, to point out what he considered to be compelling evidence of design in the universe. Yet the larger number of lectures also allowed Stokes to expand his discussion into the philosophical implications of science, particularly on issues of morality and duty, which he considered to be innate features of the human condition. If humans had been designed to operate according to certain laws, such as with the eye and light, Stokes argued that it was also reasonable to assume that humans were similarly designed to follow moral laws using their innate sense of right and wrong, and to ‘look on this innate sense of right and wrong as the will of God written upon the heart’ [16]. Here was the crux of Stokes's approach to natural theology. As a thoroughgoing evangelical, he took for granted the truth of the Bible and supernatural revelation; indeed, these were the essential basis of his own faith. He therefore found lecturing on natural theology, without having recourse to either of these, restrictive. As a physicist, he had a deep understanding of the laws of nature, and a personal conviction that these laws expressed the will of a creator. Yet he also acknowledged the limitations of natural theology. It was possible that a naturalistic explanation could account for the operation of these laws. While Stokes was convinced that humans had been specially created by God, he could only point to scripture or supernatural explanations as evidence, and this placed such arguments outside the field of natural theology. By explaining morality as an innate characteristic of humans, Stokes believed that he could demonstrate a design, and a law, that transcended purely materialistic concerns and provide evidence from the natural world for not only a design and lawgiver, but also a moral authority.
5. Immortality of the soul and eternal punishment
The Gifford Lectures offer a fascinating insight into the confluence of Stokes's scientific and religious thought. Of course, his research interests in physics dominated the lecture series. The role played by duty and morality are also unmistakeable. Yet one other, perhaps surprising topic received a comparatively thorough examination: the human soul, its survival after death, and immortality. According to traditional Christian accounts of the afterlife, after death those humans who had not been saved by being ‘born again’ would be condemned to eternal punishment in hell. However, by the Victorian era, God's nature was considered analogous to that of a loving father; just, merciful, and loving of his children. Explaining how a merciful and loving father would send the souls of his unsaved children to be tortured forever was a cause of consternation for Christians, and a source of frequent controversy. Attempts to argue against the doctrine of eternal punishment frequently fell afoul of the ecclesiastical authorities. F. D. Maurice, for instance, lost his professorial chair at King's College, while Henry Bristow Wilson, an Oxford theologian, found himself on trial for heresy for his contribution to the controversial volume of liberal theology, Essays and Reviews (1860). Charles Darwin, reflecting on his own loss of faith in his autobiography, pointed out that that the eternal punishment condemned his father, brother, and many of his friends to be tortured forever, and described it as ‘a damnable doctrine’ [4, p. 87]. This epithet was, however, considered too controversial and excised from future editions until a revised edition was published in 1958. For Stokes, even at a young age the concept of torture extending to eternity agonized his mathematically-inclined mind, since he ‘took in the idea of infinite duration more readily than most children would have done’ [17]. As an evangelical, Stokes relied on the Bible as the final authority on all matters of religious controversy and was relieved when, after an exhaustive search, he found no explicit statement that the souls of the unsaved would be punished forever. Without a statement in scripture, evangelicals could not be required to believe that eternal punishment was an essential part of their faith. Nevertheless, the Bible did make clear that the souls of the saved would have eternal life. This presented another problem: what happened to the souls of those who were not saved, if they did not have eternal life in heaven, and if they were not condemned to hell? Stokes was particularly impressed by the efforts of his native church, particularly Richard Whatley, archbishop of Dublin, and Henry Constable, the canon of Cork. Both Church of Ireland ministers adhered to a view known as conditional immortality. This doctrine argued that souls were not innately immortal, but that their immortality was conditional upon being saved by being ‘born again’. The souls of those who had been saved would, as the Bible suggested, have eternal life. The souls of those who had not been saved would be sent to Hell, although here, rather than be subject to eternal torture, they would simply be destroyed.
Stokes was deeply impressed with this argument, since it reconciled the Bible and his image of God. As an evangelical, and therefore committed to social action, he was determined to promote conditional immortality among his friends, sending them copies of Constable's Duration and Nature of Future Punishment. Eventually, contact was made between Stokes and the congregationalist minister Edward White, who argued that the idea of eternal punishment arose from a misunderstanding of the soul's natural immortality. Not only did the Bible fail to support the natural immortality of the soul, argued White, it actually directly contradicted it. The idea of an immortal soul instead came from the Greek philosopher Plato, and been promoted by earlier Christian thinkers, such as Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, who were also Platonists. Stokes now had a satisfactory explanation for how the idea of immortal souls became part of mainstream Christian thinking, and a series of arguments to demonstrate that it was not scriptural. Realizing that eternal punishment presented a major obstacle to accepting the rest of Christian morality, Stokes contacted the Christian Evidence Society, an apologetics body, in an attempt to make conditional immortality part of its official teaching. On this, he was unsuccessful, but one of its lecturers, James Marchant, exchanged a series of letters on the topic with Stokes, which were eventually published as Conditional Immortality: A Help to Skeptics (1897). Here, Stokes's position as a religious scientist was on full display. A mathematical physicist, with an unusual appreciation of what an infinite duration entailed; a natural theologian who saw in the operation of the universe fixed natural and moral laws that reflected the desires of a creator; an earnest evangelical who wished to see souls saved, but whose conception of a benevolent, paternalistic God recoiled at the idea of eternal punishment, and whose relief to find that such ideas were unscriptural is palpable.
6. Conclusion
Stokes made a significant contribution to the debate on the relationship between science and religion in Victorian Britain. Perhaps none of his contemporaries made such important contributions to the field of natural theology. Certainly, none of them were as influential in writing on doctrines such as the immortality of the soul. Other contributions to this issue have demonstrated the enduring impact of Stokes in various fields of mathematical physics, and to scientific life in Victorian Britain, particularly through his work with the Royal Society. It is hoped that this contribution does the same for his equally significant contribution to the relationship between science and religion.
Data accessibility
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Competing interests
I declare I have no competing interests.
Funding
I received no funding for this study.
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