Introduction
Placing Evangelical Encounters with Science Until relatively recently, and under the influence of a number of late Victorian
works of historical apologetic, the connections between science and religion
were routinely cast in the pugihstic language of warfare, struggle, and conflict.
Such aggressive metaphors have been common currency at least since the mid-
nineteenth century writings of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson
White, 1 and the supposed fracas between Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas
Henry Huxley at the 1860 Oxford meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science -- a symbolic altercation which, like that of Galileo,
occupies a strategic place in the cartography of the conflict interpretation. 2 The
inadequacies of this portrayal of systemic strife, however, have now been fully
exposed, 3 and stimulating work on the social origins of the conflict thesis pro-
duced. 4 Even for the Darwinian epoch, revisionists have pointed to some of the
ways in which many of the theologically orthodox accommodated to evolu-
tionary, if not more narrowly Darwinian, science. 5 Given the prevalence, until recently, of this confrontational historiography,
it is scarcely surprising that studies of the encounters between evangelicalism
and science are, with few exceptions, conspicuous ...
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