A Doubter’s Doubts about Science and Religion: By a Criminal Lawyer

This 1889 volume was published anonymously and later ascribed to Robert Anderson, a barrister and theological writer who became Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard. Mixing his religious beliefs with his detective skills, Anderson argues for true scepticism to be embraced, comparing the tricks played on people by organised religion and science to the scams of confidence tricksters. Writing from a self-confessed standpoint of ‘destructive criticism’, Anderson discredits the theory of evolution as a newfangled superstition. Science, he says, assumes the existence of life, but has not the answer to the basic question - how did man come to be? ‘The man who can give no account of his existence is a fool, and he who denies a god can give no account of his existence.’ A Doubter’s Doubts About Science and Religion proposes that the true sceptic cannot deny that the origin of life exists under the name of God.