Science Quote by Asa Gray

Gray is doing something more daring than it first appears: he’s calmly drawing a boundary line in the middle of a 19th-century culture war and insisting it can be surveyed without hysteria. The sentence turns on its deliberately slow, clerical cadence. “It remains to consider” postpones the verdict; it’s the voice of a scientist who won’t be rushed into metaphysics by the adrenaline of controversy. Even the word “attitude” is a tell. Gray isn’t asking what facts are true so much as what posture an educated public ought to adopt when facts collide with inherited frameworks.

The pairing of “thoughtful men” and “Christian believers” is strategic. Gray is addressing the constituency most likely to feel cornered by Darwinian evolution (which Gray supported and helped introduce to American readers) while refusing to concede that scientific seriousness and Christian commitment are mutually exclusive. He’s offering a face-saving bridge: you can remain intellectually respectable and religiously faithful if you stop treating scientific claims as direct competitors to doctrines that operate on “another order.”

That phrase, “beliefs of another order,” is the sentence’s quiet engine. It implies a taxonomy of knowledge: empirical explanations about nature occupy one domain; theological and moral meanings occupy a different register. Gray’s subtext is conciliatory but firm: evolutionary theory should be evaluated on evidentiary grounds, then situated alongside faith without demanding that either side impersonate the other. In an era when scientific naturalism and biblical literalism were hardening into camps, Gray’s rhetorical move is to reframe the fight as a category error - and to recruit “thoughtful” people to stop making it.