Spotlight
A Pilgrim’s Regress: George John Romanes and the Search for Rational Faith
In the summer and fall of 1873, George John Romanes lost his belief in God. Of itself, this was nothing unusual. For a young Englishman of the time—particularly one embarking on a career in the sciences—to abandon the faith of his fathers was, if not a universal rite of passage, at least a common trajectory, a well-beaten path traveled by distinguished Victorian intellectuals like Matthew Arnold, W. K. Clifford, Thomas Huxley, John Tyndall, and above all Charles Darwin. And yet Romanes’s case is distinctive both for the care he took to explain the reasons for his loss of faith and for his candid admission of what it cost him to follow, to the best of his ability, wherever the argument seemed to lead.
In the end, it led him where he never expected to arrive.
Quotation of the Week
There has been a tendency of recent years to sneer at the evidential school of the last century, as if Lardner, Paley, and the rest had failed in the task they set themselves, and as if their failure did not much matter to us who have a more sure foundation for our faith. Such sneers indicate a complete failure to apprehend that ours is a historical religion, …
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