The Best Panaceas for Heartaches
STANDING BEFORE A CROWD of listeners in 1914, the fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday took a few moments to ridicule science’s pretensions of being a new salvation. “People are dissatisfied with Philosophy and Science and New Thought as panaceas for heart-aches!” he cried:
It does not amount to anything, when you have a dead child in your house, to come with these new-fangled theories … Let your scientific consolation enter a room where the mother has lost her child. Try your doctrine of the survival of the fittest. Tell her that her child died because it was not worth as much as the other one! … And when you have gotten through with your scientific, philosophical, psychological, eugenic, social service, evolution, protoplasm and fortuitous concourse of atoms, if she is not crazed by it, I will go to her and after one-half hour of prayer and the reading of the Scripture promises, the tears will be wiped away and the house from cellar to garret will be filled with calmness like a California sunset!
Billy Sunday was not known for nuance; a journalist once described a Sunday sermon as “the most condemnatory, bombastic, ironic and elemental flaying of a principle or a belief that [he] ever heard in [his] limited lifetime and career from drunken fist fights to the halls of congress.” The contrast Sunday describes is indeed stark: for someone faced with the death of a child, science leads to despair and madness, while Christian faith leads to a deep sense of peace. Though hyperbolic, Sunday’s condemnation of what he presented as scientists’ claims to provide both salvation and solace efficiently—even eloquently—captured profound, long-standing tensions between the promises of Western science and the obligations and goals of Christian faith.
I have taught courses on the history of science and religion, evolution theory, and medicine for more than a decade now. But although it is my job as a historian to try to understand the complex factors behind positions and beliefs, I never quite grasped what might be at stake in Sunday’s belligerent sermon against science—and, indeed, in the long-running debates among fundamentalists, modernists, and atheists—until a few years ago, when I witnessed the struggles of dear friends during the illness and loss of their six-month-old baby girl. Claire was born with a congenital condition that meant her heart and liver could not function properly. Surgeons made four attempts to repair the broken pump, the clogged filter, and the missing tubing; all ultimately failed.
In many of my classes students learn about modern science and medicine’s beginnings in seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy. Thinking of the body as analogous to a machine led not only to arguments about God as the Designer but also to the idea that broken parts might be fixed through surgery. That foundation has led to many of the greatest
