JH: Numerous British physicists were discussing the same philosophical questions as Compton and his peers, yet I get the impression that the influence ran more from east to west than from Americans to their British cousins. (See Peter Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain, 101-121.) Is this true?
TD: From glancing at Bowler’s book, Jack, I gather you are thinking primarily of James Jeans and Arthur Eddington. (On Eddington’s religious beliefs, incidentally, I strongly recommend Matthew Stanley’s recent book, Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington.) Pupin liked Jeans and (as discussed in my essay) Compton was very impressed by Eddington, a liberal Quaker who believed in free will no less strongly than Compton did. Compton was also influenced by physicist-turned-theologian E.W. Barnes, someone else discussed in Bowler’s book. Yes, the influence does seem to have been mainly from England to America rather than the other way around. Prior to the Civil War, at least, American thinking about science and religion was pretty much all derived from the other side of the pond. The first geology textbook written by an American wasn’t published until 1840, by Edward Hitchcock, and the schemes he put forth for understanding Genesis were borrowed from William Buckland and others in England. The first detailed efforts by an American to relate natural history to the Bible—those of Benjamin Silliman in 1829 and the following decade—were very heavily based on ideas imported from Edinburgh. Asa Gray, writing in the 1860s and 1870s, might have been the first American to have original thoughts about science and religion, though I’m hesitant to make such a claim. In the 1920s, Pupin advanced at least one idea that was probably original; he called it “creative co-ordination,” a kind of cosmic design principle that pointed toward union with the incarnate Creator as the ultimate end of the created order. But Americans have in general been thrifty, not prodigal, in this regard, until after World War Two—when ASA members and others have done a fair bit of original thinking about science and Christian faith.
Your last question, Jack?
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