ABSTRACT
Science in the developed world controls and guides most of what we think and do. When a crisis hits the nation it is to the scientists that governments turn, believing that they will be presented with the facts and the remedy in a way that religion cannot do. One of the reasons is the tremendous advance of science in the centuries preceding our own and the development of technology as a result of its research. Religion has to take into account what science is saying about the creation of the world and mankind because its assumptions about these crucial matters have been challenged in the past and continue to be today. In the next chapters we will see some of the implications of scientific research for what we are and what we could become, but in this one we want to understand how scientific knowledge replaced religion in understanding how the human race originated and developed. Religion permeated every aspect of life in nineteenth-century England, so the impact of Charles Darwin’s work was devastating on a society which prided itself in being superior in every way to the animal kingdom. We need to discover how this happened.
