The three different kinds of responses Stewart and Tait received for their book, are identical to the ones my book "The imagined conflict" from 2021 has received in the eight or so reviews that have been published. Therefore I found comfort in reading it and reproducing it here. So little has changed in 150 years!
Stewart and Tait wrote: "As a preface to our Second Edition, we cannot do better than record the experience derived from our first. It is indeed gratifying to find a wonderful want of unanimity among the critics who assail us, and it is probably owing to this cause that we have been able to preserve a kind of kinetic stability, just as a man does in consequence of being equally belaboured on all sides by the myriad petty impacts of little particles of air.
Some call us infidels, while others represent us as very much too orthodoxly credulous; some call us pantheists, some materialists, others spiritualists. As we cannot belong at once to all these varied categories, the presumption is that we belong to none of them. This, by the way, is our own opinion.
Venturing to classify our critics, we would divide them into three groups:- There are those who have doubtless faith in revelation; but more especially, sometimes solely, in their own method of interpreting it; none, however, in the method according to which really scientific men with a wonderful unanimity have been led to interpret the works of nature. These critics call us, some infidels, some pantheists, some dangerously subtle materialists, etc.
- There are those who have faith in the methods according to which men of science interpret the laws of nature, but none whatever in revelation or theology. These consider us as orthodoxly credulous and superstitious, or as writers of "the most hardened and impenitent nonsense that ever called itself original speculation.''
- There are those who have a profound belief that the true principles of science will be found in accordance with revelation, and who welcome any work whose object is to endeavour to reconcile these two fields of thought. Such men believe that the Author of revelation is likewise the Author of nature, and that these works of His will ultimately be found to be in perfect accord. Such of this school as have yet spoken have approved of our work.
Our readers may judge for themselves which of these three classes of belief represents most nearly the true Catholic Faith."
A comment also on their apologetic method. Heinemann in 1972 discussed their book, starting his paper like this:
"In 1875 two Scottish physicists, Balfour Stewart and PG Tait, published a book entitled The Unseen Universe: or Physical Speculations on a Future State, in which they employed the theories of Victorian physics—the ether, energy conservation, the second law of thermodynamics, and the vortex atom—to confute 'the materialistic statements now-a-days so freely made' by demonstrating that 'immortality is strictly in accordance with the principle of Continuity (rightly viewed)', the principle of the uniformity of nature.
Stewart and Tait used theories long abandoned, such as the ether and the vortex atom, to argue their case. Now, 150 years later, their book serves as an example of how unwise it is to build your apologetics on the latest scientific theories. If they change, as in this case, your entire argument becomes worthless also. Although energy conservation is still considered to be a valid principle, few would consider it to be of apologetic value today as Stewart and Tait did.
