ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines how an early distaste for infant baptism led to his preference for Lamarckism over natural selection. It discusses the role played by analogical reasoning in the discovery of knowledge and thereby as a means by which intellectual authority is both claimed and conferred. A belief in the necessity for infant baptism formed part of the Thirty-Nine Articles to which all Church of England ordinands had to subscribe and Bishop Butler's scepticism as to its efficacy thus presented an obstacle to ordination. The concept of original sin held that man was sinful from birth, an innate, hereditary condition resulting from Adam's fall, which necessitated infant baptism as a means of attaining grace. Scriptural authority for infant baptism, robust or otherwise, was not, however, sufficient for Butler: he required personal empirical evidence, by observing the behaviour of a group of children, albeit, unlike Wilberforce's narrator, to arrive at his heterodox conclusion.
