Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion

"I was immediately gripped by Impossible Monsters because he begins this book about—to use its expansive subtitle— ‘dinosaurs, Darwin and the war between science and religion’ at the perfect yet most unexpected point. Archbishop Ussher of Armagh, who was the great scholarly prelate of the 17th century before and during the time of the Civil War, constructed a chronology about when the creation of the world described in Genesis could have occurred. Michael Taylor is absolutely brilliant at describing Ussher’s extraordinary, monumental, logical thought processes, how he used Biblical evidence, reasonable deduction, sparse ancient records and everything else available to him to establish that the world was created 6,000 years ago. It’s easy to think it a silly idea now, but for Ussher and his contemporaries it was a huge, global, conceptual achievement. I think Michael Taylor shows great imagination in starting with that perspective, one that exemplifies how he approaches the whole book. What we find here again and again is layers upon layers of paleontologists who—by our smug, complacent, presentist standards—are outdated, are themselves fossils or archaeopteryxes, intermediate beings with wings that don’t fly properly. But in their own day, they were changing the world with what they were discovering. Like Georges Cuvier in France, they were often believers and profoundly opposed to other paleontologists, whom they regarded as heretical underminers of the civil order. Many of them were clergymen, like William Buckland. And yet that did not stop them from making startling discoveries and so contributing to the mass of knowledge upon which we still rely. The other discovery for me at least was that gentle, still, small voice of calm, the calibre of Charles Darwin’s voice. He comes across as so modest and cautious, and filled with integrity. He was not someone who wanted to create an intellectual earthquake, just a slow, cautious seeker of the truth. We also have another Charles, Charles Kingsley, playing an enchanting role. I did not particularly love the The Water Babies as a child, but the Kingsley you see in this book, with his glorious comparisons of dinosaurs to dragons, is highly enjoyable and a real example of how some of the most interesting literary men at the time could have a productive and affectionate relationship to the furthest frontier of the day’s scientific thought. The subtitle mentions the ‘war between science and religion’ but we also see a lot of overlap between science and religion, which rang very true to me. There were a lot of magnificent Victorian clergymen—one thinks of Mr Farebrother in Middlemarch , for instance, and his collection of insects…Back then, clergymen’s pastoral duties were relatively light. They could embark in quest of scholarly bounty with untrammelled enthusiasm (arguably, indeed, exceeding that of the modern academic). There were also fierce arguments over what now seem perhaps rather narrow differences. So often it’s not so much science versus religion as religion and science on one side battling with another group of religious men and scientists on another. Rather as during the Crusades , you often had Crusaders allied with one Muslim prince taking on another bunch of crusaders allied to a second Muslim prince. That seems much more complex, an evolutionary tale of much greater subtlety than the one we’re perhaps used to, with Bishop Soapy Sam on one side and Thomas Huxley on the other, throwing slightly puerile insults at each other."