For one hundred years it has been fashionable to employ military metaphors to characterise the religious debates over evolution in the later nineteenth century. Implicit in this historiography of ‘conflict’ and ‘warfare’ is the positivistic assumption that science and metaphysics, evolutionary theory and Christian theology, can or should be divorced. This book undertakes a revision of the received historiography by describing its polemical origins and baneful effects and by offering an interpretation of Protestant responses to Darwin that shows their affinities with the metaphysical and theological traditions from which Darwinism and post-Darwinian evolutionary thought derived.

In offering a non-violent interpretation of the post-Darwinian controversies this study supports and enlarges the standard revisionist thesis that Christian theology has been congenial to the development of modern science. What M. B. Foster, R. K. Merton, and R. Hooykaas inter alia have argued concerning the rise of physical science and technology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – namely, that the Christian (and especially the Reformed) doctrine of a contingent creation, ordered and superintended by a perpetual Providence, has led to the adoption of empirical methods in science and the extension of causo-mechanical explanations of nature – is here applied to the rise and spread of theories of biological evolution in the later nineteenth century.