Science versus Religion in Nineteenth Century New Zealand: Robert Stout and Social Darwinism

Abstract

Though for Sir Robert Stout the theory of evolution had relegated Christianity to the status of a relic of our benighted past, his scientific rhetoric was misleading and virtually propaganda. He blended the prestige of Darwinian evolution with Spencerian philosophical ideas to produce a potent ideology. This was used to attack groups like the clergy, the wealthy, the unproductive poor and the non-white races, all of whom stood in the way of “progress”. The source of antagonism to Christianity lay not in science, but in political developments associated with the rise of the middle classes.