Freethought History Webinar #2: Freethought and Evolution—and Darwinian Erasure? With Eoin Carter (15 April)

I’m excited to announce the second in the Freethinker’s series of free online seminars for all those interested in freethought history and its enduring relevance. The webinars, hosted by me, will feature expert guest speakers and you’ll have a chance to ask them your questions. They will also be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. (This post will be updated and the video of the webinar—on which more in a moment—will appear below once the recording is available. All posts about these webinars will be accessible here, and all such posts will also be updated in due course when the webinar recordings are available, thus forming a complete catalogue of the series).

Register for Freethought History Webinar #2: Freethought and Evolution—and Darwinian Erasure? With Eoin Carter

The webinar will take place on 15 April at 7 pm UK time via Zoom. It will feature scholar and National Secular Society Council member Eoin Carter.

About the webinar: In the last thirty-odd years there has been a quiet revolution in the academic history of British evolution. It is now pretty generally accepted that Darwin’s evolutionary theory was not the start of a theological-scientific crisis but an attempt to resolve one that had been raging for decades. Narratives about species change were already publicly circulating, often with explicitly irreligious and/or materialistic framings, from Lamarck’s ideas, to books like the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), to the infidel geological museum of William Devonshire Saull, as Adrian Desmond’s latest book describes. Whereas the public picture of Darwin and evolution’s significance is all about the great and the good—the Oxford Debate, T.H. Huxley, and so on—this talk will look at how freethinkers and others were already challenging the idea that nature testifies to an orderly creation, along the way challenging received beliefs about the relationship between science and society.

About the speaker: Eoin Carter is a doctoral researcher in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge, where he is completing a PhD on Richard Carlile and other pioneers of the British freethought movement. He is a Council member of the National Secular Society.

You must register to secure your place at the webinar. To do so, click here or on the image below, which also contains other ways to access the registration link. I can’t wait to see you there.

With thanks to Bob Forder for suggesting these seminars and helping to organise them.

Some relevant reading

‘Enthralling and useful’: Adrian Desmond’s ‘Reign of the Beast’, reviewed, by Michael Laccohee Bush

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan G. Alexander