Impossible Monsters
Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion
Ratings1
Average rating4
15
Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion
Ratings1
Average rating4
Impossible Monsters is the captivating story of the discovery of the dinosaurs and how it upended our understanding of the origins of the world – overturning the literal reading of the Bible, liberating science from the shackles of religion, and giving birth to the secular age. 'As thrilling as it is sweeping' TOM HOLLAND ‘The most talented young historian around ... A triumph’ SATHNAM SANGHERA ‘A stunning work ... of surprises and revelations’ STEVE BRUSATTE ‘Truly marvellous ... an intellectual thriller’ RICHARD HOLMES * In 1811, a twelve-year-old girl uncovered some strange-looking bones in Britain’s southern shoreline. They belonged to no known creature and were buried beneath a hundred feet of rock. How this was possible was unclear, but over the next two decades, as several more of these ‘impossible monsters’ emerged from the soil, the leading scientists of the day were forced to confront one profoundly disturbing implication: as a historical account of creation, the Bible was wildly wrong. This is the dramatic story of the crisis that engulfed science and religion when we discovered the dinosaurs. It takes us into the lives and minds of the extraordinary men and women who made and grappled with these heretical discoveries, those who resisted them as well as those pioneering thinkers, Darwin most famous among them, who took great risks to construct a new account of the earth’s and mankind’s origins. It took seventy years for them to win their case: that the earth was millions of years old and that man, like every other living being, was an accident of evolution. Doing so had plunged Britain into a crisis of faith, liberated science from the authority of religion and ushered in the secular age. Impossible Monsters is the riveting story of a group of people who not only thought impossible things but showed them to be true. In the process they revolutionised the way mankind thinks about itself, and so they changed the world.
Reviews with the most likes.
On the surface, this is a book about people who discovered ancient skeletons (of dinosaurs and humans).
But mostly it’s a book about epistemology, about what you can say in public, and about how these two influence each other.
Ancient skeletons are a difficult problem in 19th-century Britain: if a species dies out, does it mean that God made a mistake? Since there was only one week of creation, what do you with the fact that birds seem to grow out of dinosaurs? How much weirdness can you sweep under the flood?
In early 19th century, a suggestion of a dangerous thought might get you banned from any social and professional life, but by 1871 Darwin can publish The Descent of Man, which not only fully accepts extinctions, but also replaces “God created man in his own image” with evolution.
I would like to understand this transition better: sure, bones have helped, but other social changes have helped paleontologists to discuss their progress publicly. What drove this change?
In particular, half of the scientists in this book seem to have rejected Christianity because of the regular old “God wouldn’t have allowed this child to die from a random disease this early”. Had this sentiment been common, Christianity wouldn’t survive the Middle Ages. However, child mortality for Victorian-era upper classes was already several times lower than for anyone before the 19th century, so maybe it was fair for them to have higher expectations?
This is also a book about Richard Owen being a dick to everyone who disagreed with him.
