Creation Moment 8/6/2020 - The X-Club

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,... Romans 1:22

"British naturalist John Tyndall (1820-1893) actively sought to turn science away from God, and succeeded beyond his dreams.

This contemporary of Darwin got good press this week on The Conversation by his biographer, Roland Jackson, who is helping digitize 7,000 personal letters for the Tyndall Correspondence Project. On the project’s “About” page, he is introduced as a co-conspirator of Darwin:

John Tyndall (1820-1893) was one of the most influential scientists of the second half of the nineteenth century. The Anglo-Irish successor to Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution (1853-1887), Tyndall was a prominent member of London scientific and social elites. His flamboyant lecturing style, honed by teaching science at private secondary schools, made him a highly sought-after public speaker both in the UK and abroad…. With biologist T. H. Huxley, philosopher Herbert Spencer, botanist J.D. Hooker, and five others, Tyndall was part of the “X-Club”, a group formed in 1864 that sought to direct the course of British science and which actively lobbied for increased government support.

Charles Darwin, without the help of his X-Clubbers, might not have been as influential as he became. Tyndall is best remembered for his address to the British Association in 1874, where he made a sustained argument for materialistic science:

The impregnable position of science may be described in a few words. We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire field of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it.

Heady with new discoveries by Maxwell, Faraday and Pasteur, this new breed of professional investigators saw no need for God in

science any more. Using god-of-the-gaps arguments, Tyndall and his fellow X-Clubbers sought to make science a purely secular enterprise. In addition, they wanted no restrictions on the kinds of subjects scientists could investigate.

To promote this view, the X-Clubbers used journals like Norman Lockyer’s magazine Nature as primary ways to preach the new anti-theistic science.
We live today in Tyndallian science: mentions of God, a Creator, or even intelligent design are met with scorn if not horror. In Tyndall’s day, however, eminent scientists like James Clerk Maxwell were horrified at the prospect of science unleashed from its Christian heritage.

Roland Jackson puts a fresh coat of paint on Tyndall by claiming he is the co-founder of climate science, making him seem trendy. (It would be anachronistic to portray Tyndall, however, as a believer in anthropogenic global warming.)
Jackson says, “Climate science is now the future rather than the past, and it is therefore time to recognise and reinstate Tyndall as a major Irish scientist, mountaineer and public intellectual.” How those three traits qualify one man to speak for theology, however, is dubious.

These days, after a century of Tyndall, all conversation, including The Conversation website which caters to scientists and readers of science, one can see the results of a science liberated from theism and launched into every subject.
Even subjects like theodicy (the problem of evil) and the nature of God are fair game for scientific investigation.
In this anti-Christian piece, Barry Dainton, a professor of philosophy at the University of Liverpool, presents the theory of a deistic god who relegated the creation of beings to lesser gods. This is not so much a theory of intelligent design as it is a neo-Gnostic heresy that presumes to distance God from evil corporeality. But Dainton can’t even get the Christian view of God right, and gives the job of explaining Him to an atheist philosopher, Galen Strawson:

We can, for example, know with certainty that the Christian God does not exist as standardly defined: a being who is omniscient, omnipotent and wholly benevolent. The proof lies in the world, which is full of extraordinary suffering…belief in such a God, however rare, is profoundly immoral. It shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or indeed any intense suffering.

Dainton and Strawson make this outlandish claim by completely

ignoring the vast corpus of Christian writing on the problem of evil, and ignoring the Biblical teaching of the fall into sin and the work of Jesus Christ (talk about intense suffering to solve the problem of evil). You can read Dainton’s weird idea that living in a simulation or in a world created by fallible deities might solve the problem of evil, but the point here, though, is What on earth is a “science” site doing usurping a theological topic? 
Thus we see what Tyndall and the X-Club have done to science."
CEH