The Watch on the Heath: Science and Religion before Darwin
Keith Thomson
Galileo once wrote that ‘the Bible tells us how to go to Heaven, but not how the heavens go’. From the Greeks to the present day, thoughtful people have struggled to reconcile the discoveries of science with religious belief and authority.In the age before Darwin many powerful clerics were also notable scientific scholars and leading scientists were often at least conventionally pious. Observing life ever more closely, an extraordinary generation of English geologists, fossil hunters and naturalists were compelled to accept that their planet was older, more complicated, diverse and cruel than they had previously imagined. Questions about God and the Bible inevitably began to arise. But for these men, unlike for Darwin, science and religion could share a philosophical basis: a careful, rational study of nature, instead of denying God, would confirm that life is, after all, the product of God’s unique creation. This belief became known as natural theology.Its greatest exponent was William Paley but the work of others such as John Ray, Robert Plot, William Whiston, Thomas Burnet, John Woodward, Erasmus Darwin and countless more writing between 1665 and 1800 gives us an extraordinary glimpse into minds at the forefront of an epic enquiry. Taking his title from Paley’s famous analogy that as a watch requiried a maker, so nature in all its intricacy had to be the creation of a supreme designer, Keith Thomson’s wonderful book brings to life their dilemmas, and is a winning portrayal of intellectuals struggling with their belief systems in an age of revolutionary science.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
THE WATCH ON THE HEATH
Science and Religion Before Darwin
KEITH THOMSON
Drawings by Linda Price Thomson
DEDICATION (#ulink_a26421e6-2f59-59e8-a934-5c3e1100389f)
In memory of
The Reverend Ronald William Thomson (1908–2002)
CONTENTS
Cover (#ufd2e1c5b-b0df-5af0-91db-fa1ac78fce10)
Title Page (#ud44174da-e648-51aa-880c-0574092d386a)
Dedication (#ubacf4c2d-73fe-539a-a2a6-2b34ad9692ea)
Preface (#u9d53abaa-2a52-5051-aa93-8a42e10dab0d)
1 Charles Darwin and William Paley (#u9de3ff1e-6e6f-566b-9320-b72f9f699117)
2 An Age of Science, An Age of Reason (#ucdb101c5-3f41-5ee2-b6bb-b6657cce85b7)
3 Problems at Home (#u7dc17980-0c9f-5e2a-a254-014bcd7ed0a6)
4 John Ray: Founding Father (#u828e93ec-6ebe-5fbb-85e3-729f87662f41)
5 Difficulties with the Theory, and the Argument Extended (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Fossils and Time: Dr Plot’s Dilemma (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Sacred Theories (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Unfinished Business: Mountains and the Flood (#litres_trial_promo)
9 This is Atheism (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Gosse’s Dilemma and Adam’s Navel (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Good and Evil: Concerning the Mind of God (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Paley, Malthus and Darwin (#litres_trial_promo)
13 The Beginning of the End (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix: The Account of Creation in Genesis (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PREFACE (#ulink_2b98614a-59f7-55c3-bbd7-f560cd60e580)
When Charles Robert Darwin entered the University of Cambridge in 1828, it was not with the expectation of studying science but rather with every intention of becoming a Church of England priest. He studied theology, philosophy, classics and a little mathematics. We do not know with what enthusiasm he faced the prospect of actually being ordained; his early writings show a conventional set of beliefs and a noticeable lack of religious zeal. Over the following decades, however, everything changed for Darwin. He found that his science, his intellect and his faith had created a set of personal conflicts that he could not resolve.
Charles Darwin’s dilemma was the inevitable consequence of pursuing a system of rational enquiry like science that seeks to explain all apparent mysteries in terms of lawful, natural phenomena. He was forced to choose an intellectual path between a belief that the world was created by God exactly as it is now, and probably some 6,000 years ago, and the growing evidence that the earth and life upon it have evolved slowly, without supernatural assistance, for some 4.5 billion years. In fact, in various guises and under different names, what we call ‘evolution’ had been in the air for at least two hundred years before the publication in 1859 of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the Preservation of favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Since about 1650, the development of a whole range of new sciences had posed threat after threat to the mysteries of revealed religion. ‘Evolution’ is part of a much broader and older enquiry and a deeper contest for our intellectual commitment, a contest between a world system that expects every part of the cosmos ultimately to be explainable in terms of natural properties and processes and one that maintains the existence of a fundamental core of unknowability, of supernatural mystery and the controlling hand of an eternal non-worldly Being. This may be humankind’s oldest intellectual puzzle, and this book will attempt to trace one small part of it.
It has not always been necessary to choose between one side or the other: science or religion, reason or mystery. In the age before Darwin, many powerful clerics were also notable scientific scholars and leading scientists were often at least conventionally pious. For them, science and religion could share a common philosophical basis with the premise that a careful, rational study of nature, instead of denying God, would confirm that all life is, after all, the product of God’s unique creation. Natural Theology and its counterpart in the geological context, Physico-Theology, provided an intellectual framework that both embraced science and kept it at bay. Indeed, natural theologians believed that a study of God’s handiwork constituted a proof of the very existence of God. Believers who were scientists welcomed natural theology because it gave their endeavours a framework within which to operate. Deist and Christian alike could find much to favour in a movement that sought to discover God through rational study without depending on a belief in miracles or insisting on the literal truth of the Bible. Some theologians naturally worried that this new movement would risk flirting too seductively with material explanations of the world and preferred to remain with the relative safety of the authority of the Bible and revelation. Nonetheless, in one form or another, natural theology has maintained a currency to the present day. Its last and greatest expression was in the classic work of 1802 by Reverend William Paley, usually known by the short version of its title, Natural Theology. Paley’s arguments have never really been improved upon. His book affords a starting point from which to trace a story that reaches from the ancient Greeks to Descartes and to the intellectual environment of the seventeenth and eighteenth century from which Darwin sprang.
Paley and his predecessors set themselves a daunting task. As the explanatory power of science had reached further and further into the previously secret places of nature and as it progressed beyond simple description of phenomena to explain the earth and life on it in terms of underlying processes, their arguments had to change in response. Some of what they wrote – what they theorised, even what they thought was fact – might almost seem absurd to us now, but the work of people such as the Reverend Thomas Burnet, the Reverend John Ray, Dr Robert Plot, Dr William Whiston, Dr John Woodward, Dr James Hutton, Dr Erasmus Darwin and countless more, writing between 1665 and 1800, gives us an extraordinary glimpse into minds at the forefront of an epic enquiry. Many were deeply religious; all were consumed by the need to solve this potentially all-consuming challenge to their world view. They were often under immense pressure to conform with orthodoxy, even when their intellects pointed them in other directions. As well as admiring the force and elegance of the writing and the inventiveness of the arguments, we may also variously envy these earlier scholars their certitude, their daring, and often their humility and caution. It also becomes clear that this is not just a struggle between two sides; it is also a series of debates raging within both what we now call ‘science’ and ‘religion’.
One of the many ironies about the conflict over the subject of evolution is that as a student Charles Darwin read and admired Paley, including his great work on natural theology. The final theme to this book is to trace out the powerful, direct connection from Paley’s belief that natural theology proved the impossibility of ‘evolution’ to Darwin’s championing of a critically important mechanism for the origin of new species.
CHAPTER ONE Charles Darwin and William Paley (#ulink_878119bb-0019-585b-8c51-826437f08fd8)
‘The Bible tells us how to go to Heaven, but not how the heavens go.’
Galileo Galilei, letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,
1615 (quoting Cardinal Caesar Baronius)
‘As it more recommends the Skill of an Engineer to contrive an elaborate Engine so as that there should need nothing to reach his ends in it but the contrivance of parts devoid of understanding … so it more sets off the Wisdom of God … that he can make so vast a machine [the universe] perform all these many things.’
Robert Boyle, Free Enquiry into the Nature of Things, 1688
One enters Christ’s College, Cambridge, through a richly carved sixteenth-century gateway and under a pair of painted heraldic beasts, all contrasting markedly with the sober courtyard of grey buildings within. Across the immaculate lawn, on the right-hand side of First Court, is the doorway to Staircase G with, on the first floor, the pair of rooms occupied by the shy young Charles Darwin when, between 1828 and 1831, he studied to become a Church of England cleric.
Much of Darwin’s early life, his ambitions and the sources of his inspiration, remain a mystery. He had originally started to train for medicine at Edinburgh but neither the subject nor the intellectual climate of the city suited him and in 1828 he entered Cambridge to prepare for a life as a clergyman instead. With his driving passion for natural history, he may have had in mind a career as a country parson-naturalist in the long tradition that had produced such luminaries as the Reverend John Ray (known as ‘the father of natural history’) in the seventeenth century and the Reverend Gilbert White, revered chronicler of English country life in the eighteenth. (Darwin’s cousin William Darwin Fox was also at Cambridge planning just such a career and soon achieved it, although his scholarly contributions from his quiet country parish were minor.) He may even have aspired to become a university don like his teachers in Edinburgh (Robert Jameson and Robert Grant) or his eventual Cambridge mentor the Reverend Professor John Stevens Henslow, a cleric, a brilliant teacher and a leading botanist and geologist. But if he were to take the route of training for the clergy, there was first the issue of faith.
Darwin had been brought up in the Midlands Unitarianism of his mother (the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood) while his father had long since taken the fashionable road to the Church of England. There is no question of Darwin having had a special ‘calling’ to be a clergyman. Indeed, when his father insisted that if he would not continue with medicine he must enter the Church, the eighteen-year-old had privately questioned whether he was sufficient of a believer honestly to start down that path, let alone to give witness to his belief in the pulpit.
(#litres_trial_promo) But he needed a respectable profession. Therefore, in the summer of 1827, in his calm, preternaturally rational way, he set out on a research programme to discover whether he could go through with it. Darwin carefully studied the Reverend John Pearson’s Exposition of the Creed (1659)
(#litres_trial_promo) with one question in mind, and ‘as I did not in the least way doubt the strict and literal truth of any word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted’. Satisfied at a minimal level that he was not being personally or intellectually dishonest, Darwin entered Cambridge.
Darwin failed to complete his clerical training, just as he earlier failed to complete his medical studies. In 1831, armed with a passing degree and financially secure from his mother’s estate, he went off for five years’ adventuring and discovery on HMS Beagle. His religious beliefs then were still quite conventional: ‘I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (although themselves orthodox) by quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.’ By the time he returned his career had taken a different direction, one in which the ceaseless questioning of science gradually replaced the sureties of revealed religion. But from very early on Darwin thought seriously about the developing conflicts between science and religion. As a student preparing to take holy orders, he knew of the challenges posed by early theories of evolution – particularly since one of them was the brainchild of his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Later he would be only too aware that his own theory of natural selection, which he began to formulate as early as 1838, would inevitably contribute to the growing crisis caused by scholars who discovered, behind the apparent miracles of nature, the operation of scientifically definable laws and processes. And the situation was the more personal after his marriage in 1839 to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, who for her whole life was a staunchly believing Christian. At the time of writing On the Origin of Species, Darwin had lost his faith as a Christian and thought himself a deist; he died an agnostic and, while we cannot be sure exactly when Darwin first faced the challenges presented to conventional faith by contemporary science, we know that he was well aware of the issues in 1831, because we know what books he read.
In the spring of 1831, the tall, shy, aspiring cleric, a paradoxical mixture of bookish intellectual and outdoorsman with a passion for field sports, found himself with some time on his hands. Although he had achieved a respectable tenth place among students not competing for honours, he would not technically be eligible to graduate. He had to complete his required period of residency before entering the final year of study that would complete his formal preparation for ordination and a career in the Church. There was no question of his joining the ‘fast set’ at Cambridge and wasting his time with gambling and women. Typically, his mentor the Reverend Henslow prescribed a programme of reading: as a prospective ordinand in the Church of England, the young man of course read theology; as a keen naturalist and collector, especially of beetles, he read in travel and natural science. In his autobiography, written some fifty years later, Darwin singled out books from this period that had been most influential on his intellectual development. These included John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy,
(#litres_trial_promo) a book on the scientific method and the nature of scientific ‘proof’, and Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative
(#litres_trial_promo) of scientific exploration in South America. He also read the Reverend William Paley’s Natural Theology
(#litres_trial_promo), a treatise on the use of science to prove the existence, and demonstrate the attributes, of God. These three books, although very different from each other in subject matter, each dealt in their own way with the logic, philosophy and methodology of discovery and proof. Humboldt, whose work on the variation of climate with altitude Darwin had read at Edinburgh, helped fire his passion for exploration and discovery, and showed how the natural world could be explained in terms of natural laws. Herschel outlined the essential elements of a rigorous Baconian scientific explanation for any phenomenon, and it has been argued that the structure of Darwin’s own On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, was composed following Herschel’s rules exactly. In Natural Theology William Paley applied rigorous logic and a broad knowledge of philosophy to a wide range of contemporary scientific data in order to attempt nothing less than a final proof of the nature of God. This was a work intended to bridge two worlds that had long been threatening to pull apart. It would resolve the conflict that we find still unresolved today between, on the one hand, the world of scientific explanation expressed in definable, measurable, physical properties and natural laws and, on the other, belief in a God who transcends the material world.
William Paley’s theological works were well known to all students at Cambridge, where the syllabus included formal study of two of his books. Darwin, who had a particular appreciation for finely argued logic and reason, was examined on Paley in 1830 and said,
I am convinced that I could have written out the whole of the Evidences [Paley’s A View of the Evidences of Christianity, 1794] with perfect correctness … the logic of this book and as I may add of his Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the Academical Course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was the most use to me in the education of my mind.
(#litres_trial_promo)
Paley’s last book, Natural Theology, was not a set book for Cambridge examinations.
(#litres_trial_promo) It aimed for a broader audience than theologians alone and has come to occupy a special place in the history of science and religion. The basic premise of the larger movement of the same name was that the glories and complexities of living nature were to be seen as prima facie evidence of the power of God’s creative hand. From this viewpoint, which owes its origins among others to the Five Ways of St Thomas Aquinas, there could be no more pious endeavour than to study nature. All the patterns, symmetries and laws of nature were simply the reflection of God’s mind. Therefore to study nature was to approach closer to God. Indeed, the deepest study of nature would provide confirmation of God’s very existence. Natural science and theology were not at odds, therefore, but complementary. In particular, any kind of evolutionary theory of the kind that had been growing for the previous hundred years – in which the study of nature pointed to different, material causes of life in all its magnificent diversity than the hand of God – would be negated. At the time the young Darwin studied for the Church at Cambridge, as for a hundred years before, natural theology offered a rationale for the reconciliation of what might have seemed to be opposed: the diverse worlds of science and of religion.
This argument has a strong following today among those who would oppose, or are agnostic about the theory of evolutionary change. But, curiously, a direct connection can be traced between Paley’s arguments against any kind of evolutionary theories (of which there were many, termed ‘transmutation’, or ‘development’ theories, long before Charles Darwin was even born) and the origins of modern scientific thinking in favour of evolutionary theory. Darwin’s reading of Natural Theology in 1831 therefore has a particular resonance for anyone today who is interested in the question of how the apparently separate subjects of science and religion can be made one and, indeed, anyone interested in the historical precedents and intellectual origins of modern evolution.
Although many of the driving intellects of the age were continental – and this particular version of the battle between science and religion was being fought out elsewhere than Britain – this is a story about a peculiarly English part of the phenomenon, set squarely within a long English tradition. Its Englishness was due in large part to the long tradition of the English cleric-naturalists whose science was based in empiricism: from their rural parishes they observed nature and tried to read the word of God in it. They belonged straightforwardly to the new critical age and applied its rules and procedures to their thinking in God’s service. With many Church of England livings conveniently tied to the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, they had security and access to nature on the one hand, and on the other were a direct arm of the intellectual work of learning and teaching. Under the influence of the Enlightenment, they preached, they taught, they observed, and they considered it all. William Paley’s summation of the arguments of natural theology comes at the end of a great period of learning and adventure, with its freedom to entertain heretical ideas and no little reactionary conservatism, in which the evidence of nature as revealed by science was used to argue for the existence and nature of God.
Naturally, not everyone in the mainstream Church or its many dissenting offshoots approved of natural theology and attempts to prove God through science. The traditional route to discovery of God was through the authority of the Bible, divine revelation and the life of Christ. It was built upon the constancy of faith rather than the shifting ground of science. The paradox and the strength of faith is that it is not susceptible to cold-eyed analysis. No one knows if his faith is the same as another’s; almost by definition it cannot be. At the heart of Judeo-Christian tradition, the Bible reveals to us – individually or through the exegesis of its spiritual leaders – all that we need to know about God. It tells us that God is the Creator, all-wise and all-good, and is full of internal proofs, one of the greatest being that written in Isaiah 7:10–14: ‘Moreover the Lord spake unto Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God; ask it either in the depth or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord.’ Then God promised the ultimate evidence: ‘The Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’ For evidence, there were the miracles, both the biblical miracles – especially those wrought by Jesus, healing the sick, raising the dead, as he prophesied in the name of God – and those performed by God through his saints on earth. And the most dramatic demonstration of God’s existence and power would have to be the resurrection of Jesus, who in turn gave another real proof when he allowed the doubting Thomas, after the resurrection, to fit his hand into the spear wound in his side. No other authority than these was needed and an unguarded or naive person attempting to find God through the objective evidences of science might risk challenging traditional modes of authority and even be seduced by material explanations of phenomena to an opposite, atheistical position.
One can imagine circumstances when an attempt to prove God’s existence would have been heretical. A group of scholars probing nature to see if they can winkle out secrets about God that have been hidden – if God exists, then deliberately hidden – for thousands of years, seems a dangerous idea. In the year 1200, for example, not only would it have guaranteed the Pope’s or a bishop’s punishment; any sensible person would fear that God himself might exercise a little discipline too; after all, the Bible says ‘Ye shall not tempt [test or prove] the Lord thy God’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Or, as St Luke wrote: ‘This is an evil generation: they seek a sign.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In any case, to frame a series of questions and statements about his existence, unless done carefully, would be to risk limiting him to the small compass that our understanding allows. It also risked provoking further challenges to the literal truth of the Bible, already a problem in Enlightenment times. Close study of the Bible showed some worrying inconsistencies – two different versions of the Flood, for example, and two of the creation of Woman, together with much that is in disagreement with the facts of modern science. And why was so dramatic a sign as Thomas’s encounter with the risen Jesus (John 20: 24–28) not mentioned in any of the other three gospels? There was great danger in holding the Bible up to the same scrutiny, the rigid tests of independence, as used in the accepted methods of science.
But Paley was a man living in an age of science and reason. What might in medieval times have been considered dangerous or blasphemous – to prove something that required no proof – was now both acceptable and necessary. Philosophers such as Locke and Hume had long since exposed the vulnerability of religion founded not in fact but belief or faith, growing out of intuition, inspiration, hopes, fears and even myths. And, when Paley wrote in the dedicatory preface to Natural Theology that more and different proofs were needed because of the ‘scepticism’ concerning the existence and attributes of God ‘with which the present times are charged’, he could easily have been writing of our own day. The strength of his natural theology was that it did not depend on divine revelations and demanded no leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief. Miracles are not mentioned in Paley’s book. Interestingly enough, neither is the Bible. Instead its argument depends upon a single, central argument in the form of a syllogism, summarised in his beautifully simple first paragraph. One can see instantly that someone like Darwin, who was attracted to logic and eager to see his inner doubts allayed, would be intrigued by this, the opening paragraph of Paley’s book:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever; nor would it perhaps be very easy to shew the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be enquired how the watch happened to be in that place … why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone? … For this reason, and no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive, (what we could not discover in the stone,) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the several parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order … none which would have answered the use, that is now served by it … This mechanism being observed, (it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it) … the inference, we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purposes, which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.
In this analogy the watch stands for all living organisms; the ‘who’, of course, is God. A modern wristwatch is a dull, efficient affair. Paley’s watch would have been a large hunter or repeater enclosed within a silver or gold case. The back would hinge open to reveal a world in miniature of revolving gears in shining brass, tiny oscillating devices, and a great central spring, perhaps even (if a repeater) tiny bells to signal the quarter hours. The mechanics alone would qualify as a work of art as well as artifice. Paley’s conclusion leaps from the page: the springs, gear wheels and all the other bits and pieces of the watch represent the heart, the muscles, nerves, joints and all the thousands of tissues that constitute a living creature. If the watch and all its precisely interacting parts are made for a purpose, we are forced to conclude that we humans and all of living nature are also made to accord with a particular vision.
On the face of it, Paley’s premise is incontrovertible. A watch could not have appeared out of thin air. It did not chip off something else, as the stone might have done. It did not grow out of the ground like the grass on the heathland. Any machine must be made; in the case of something so intricate as a watch, it requires a detailed plan and a craftsman of great skill. And, given that it has been made so carefully, even someone who had never seen a watch before would conclude that it must have some purpose, a function. Every machine of human invention, all its parts neatly functioning, precisely adapted to each other and to the whole, must exist for a purpose. (If you set out to make a machine that had no purpose, then that would then constitute its purpose.) From this it follows that the more we study natural organisms – the elegant ‘machines’ of nature – the more we will learn about and confirm the power, purpose and goodness of the Creator. Construed thus, science is an exercise in piety and the sciences dealing with life on earth provide an unending catalogue of arguments about the existence and benevolence of the Creator.
The concept of the body as a machine would have been as familiar to Paley’s readers as the clockwork universe. A machine analogy for natural phenomena had long been a consistent element in Enlightenment philosophy. Leonardo da Vinci and the anatomists of the sixteenth century had seen the mechanical elements of a machine in the levers and pulleys of the skeleton and William Harvey, with the discovery of the circulation of the blood, made the body a dynamic mechanism. When Robert Boyle asked him what had inspired his discovery,
[Harvey] answer’d me, that when he took notice that the Valves in the Veins of so many sevral parts of the Body, were so plac’d that they gave free passage to the Blood towards the heart but oppos’d the passage of Veinal Blood to the Contrary: He was invited to imagine, that so Provident a Cause as nature had not so Plac’d so many valves without Design: and no Design seem’d more possible than that … it should be Sent through the Arteries, and Return through the Veins
(#litres_trial_promo).
Having given the outline of his case, on the very second page of his book Paley moved summarily to dispose of some easily anticipated criticisms.
Nor would it, I apprehend, weaken the conclusion, that we had never seen a watch made … Neither, secondly, would it invalidate our conclusions, that the watch sometimes went wrong, or that it seldom went exactly right … It is not necessary that a machine be made perfect, in order to shew with what design it was made … Nor, thirdly, would it bring any uncertainty into the argument, if there were a few parts of the watch, concerning which we could not discover, or had not yet discovered, whether they conduced to the general effect.
These are the sorts of objections that any reader might raise, especially as, in 1802, the mysteries of reproduction were still just that, everyone fell ill at times (Paley was seriously ill as he wrote the book), scholars had long wondered about the uses of the apparently functionless appendix, and so on.
Paley was concerned with far deeper issues than this, however. He launched into a debate with all the leading ‘atheistic’ positions of the day. In Paley’s typically eighteenth-century prose and sharp argumentation, the reader discovers a set of special issues and opponents. He fires off shots at a whole range of philosophers and philosophies, from Descartes to Locke, from Buffon to Erasmus Darwin. Their challenges to the foundations of Christian belief are both the immediate and eternal reason for his book. His special preoccupation is with what he considered the ultimate heresies – evolutionary theories. If Paley’s arguments were framed in terms unfamiliar to modern readers it is because we have variously absorbed and discarded Locke on understanding and Cartesian/Epicurean atomism, and Buffon’s and Erasmus Darwin’s ideas about evolution were long ago rendered extinct by those of Charles Darwin.
William Paley devoted his life, and particularly his great skills as a thinker and writer, to God and will long be remembered as the man who set out nothing less than a proof of the ‘existence and attributes of the Deity’. Natural Theology was Paley’s last book, written in his old age. While even the most assertive or arrogant of intellectuals might have hesitated at attempting to produce a definitive proof of the existence of God – and Paley’s book certainly shows itself as the work of someone who is very confident – in life he was modest and quiet, a somewhat shy, shambling figure, built short and square, and by 1800 suffering terrible pain from what was probably abdominal cancer. The only known portrait shows a man with a smile to light up even the most dreary northern winter day. His deep, quiet voice – always too soft for a properly dramatic manner at the pulpit – was the voice of calm and reason. As a student, he had never dreamt of adopting the citified modes of speech of Cambridge and London. His rough-hewn manner allowed him to speak directly to his flock and no one criticised or mocked his outmoded coat, his old-fashioned hat or his wrinkled stockings. At his prime, his sermons persuaded, cajoled and inspired rather than insisted or threatened. Those sermons, like his life, were full of wit and wisdom and coloured with just enough liberal thinking to make his superiors uneasy. As for inspiration, he never hesitated to build upon the works of others, indeed he mischievously advised young clerics: ‘if your situation requires a sermon every Sunday, make one and steal five’. Towards the end of his life he walked with a broken, rolling, seaman’s gait and would stop occasionally to recite aloud snatches of poetry or to sing.
He was born in 1743, the first child and only son of William and Elizabeth Clapham Paley. His father was headmaster of Giggleswick School and his mother a fine, intelligent woman, noted for her thrift. From them he inherited a flair for mathematics and a love of argument. Fifty-five years before Charles Darwin, he too entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated first of his class (‘Senior Wrangler’) in 1763 and then stayed on as Fellow of the college, teaching philosophy and the Greek Testament. From the very first a brilliant and much-loved, if unconventional, teacher, he was ordained in 1767. But the celibate life of the university don was not for him and in 1776 he married Jane Hewitt of Carlisle and became a clergyman and writer. His teaching at Cambridge had been so successful that his friends pushed him to publish his lectures, some of which had formed the basis of his first book, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1768).
(#litres_trial_promo) This book alone would have earned him a place in history, enjoying some twenty editions in his own lifetime. Morals was followed by an influential study of St Paul and then, in 1794, Paley wrote a third book, arguably greater still. A View of the Evidences of Christianity12 set out to show, conclusively and incontrovertibly, proofs of the historical truth of Jesus and the truth of his revelations. In this book, Paley put aside the exhortations of the pulpit in favour of the forensic techniques of the courtroom lawyer – a style that came very naturally to him. After graduating from Cambridge, he had for a while taught at a school in London. There he spent his spare time equally at the theatre and the law courts. Both seem to have polished his rhetorical skills. He may even have been seriously tempted by the field of law and become a leading barrister at the Inns of Court; for his was a mind drawn naturally to logic, and to proofs and precision; instead he became a barrister for Christ.
In Evidences, he took the role of counsel for the prosecution, basing his case on evidence from four witnesses, the authors of the gospels. The lives, and not least the terrible deaths, of the Apostles and the other early martyred saints of the Church provided reason enough to believe, resoundingly answering the atheists’ jibe: ‘Either the Apostles could not write more intelligibly of the reputed Mysteries or they would not’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Paley also insisted upon the authenticity of miracles as the vehicle for God’s revelation of himself to man. They were an integral part of God’s design and the essential mode by which God could communicate with the works of his Creation. ‘Now in what way can revelation be made but by miracles? Consequently, in whatever degree it is probable or not very improbable that a revelation should be communicated to mankind at all, in the same degree it is probable or not very improbable that miracles should be wrought.’
Morals and Evidences brought Paley fame and a certain fortune and both became set books for examination of Cambridge students. (Remarkably enough, the last Cambridge students to be held responsible for the contents of Evidences sat warily down to their desks in 1920.)
(#litres_trial_promo) But he never attained the bishopric that would have seemed the natural preferment for so revered a teacher and preacher. His highest appointment was Archdeacon of Carlisle. While his parishioners loved him, his peers may have found him just a shade too brilliant and too free with his ‘almost too unlimited indulgence of wit and drollery’ – for example in that advice to young clerics over sermons.
(#litres_trial_promo) In Morals he had sided with Locke, whose work he had taught at Cambridge, over the right of people to revolt when their government failed in its responsibilities, a position he later abandoned in Natural Theology. And in one respect he was his own worst enemy – he refused to engage in ‘rooting’, his term for cosying up to people for influence. Nonetheless, the father of his great college friend John Law was Dr Edmund Law who, as Bishop of Carlisle, put a series of comfortable absentee livings his way, making sure that he had the security and contentment to write. The awkward man with his unfashionable accent and deep country manners was free to pour forth his brilliantly crafted texts, creating an intellectual achievement that has survived more than 200 years.
Evidences, with its insistence on the power of divine revelation, is obviously a mainstream Christian book, its goal to provide an independent line of support for the revelations that form the mainstay of Christian belief. It is often said of such books that their principal role is to comfort and confirm the believer rather than to persuade the atheist or sceptic, but in Paley’s case this would be a cheap sneer. His technique was not to appeal to faith but to reason. All Paley’s books are part of the maelstrom of ideas and movements that framed the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. His 1802 masterpiece on God, through the strict logic of its author with all its strengths and flaws, visits the science of the age and the countervailing resistance of the natural world to simple arguments and neat solutions. Its full title is Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature. When, with the customary deference of the day, he dedicated his book to his bishop, Paley was at pains to point out that the work was intended to form a whole with his others, ‘a system … the evidences of natural religion, the evidences of revealed religion, and an account of the duties that result from both’. In fact, in Natural Theology a different, more liberal, Paley emerges, carefully writing to persuade the deist or Christian alike. For an analytical reader like Darwin, the differences between Evidences and Natural Theology were striking.
The logical basis of Paley’s argument would have been familiar to Darwin. The watch analogy was a syllogism, depending on the first two ‘Rules of Reasoning’ that Newton had laid down in his Principia Mathematica of 1687, the foundation stone of modern science: ‘We are to admit of no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances [and] … Like effects proceed from like causes.’ Whether Paley can be thought truly to have abided by the first principle is debatable. What is true and sufficient is something to be determined, not taken for granted, in this debate. Newton’s second rule gives greater support to the argument: ‘Like effects [complexity] proceed from like causes [a maker].’ However, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, among others, had already given the case against this kind of thinking:
When we infer any particular cause from an effect, we must proportion the one to the other, and can never be allowed to ascribe to the cause any qualities, but what are exactly sufficient to cause the effect. And if we ascribe to it farther qualities, or affirm it capable of producing any other effect, we only indulge the licence of conjecture without reason or authority.
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Elsewhere he wrote: ‘There can be no demonstrative arguments to prove that those instances of which we have no experience, resemble those, of which we have had experience.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In other words, one cannot be confident in explaining what we do not know from what we do know, because we don’t know what it is we don’t know. Time and again we find the sciences, like other disciplines, exhibiting just this weakness, with false conclusions being drawn because of an incomplete vision of possible causes that in turn limits the imagination. It took Einstein, for example, to break the belief that light invariably travels in straight lines; he could conceive of something others could not (before it could be shown empirically).
The odd thing is that William Paley was not really a ‘scientist’ (a natural philosopher). He was not known as a naturalist, he did not collect insects or fossils as did so many of his colleagues, although he very much enjoyed angling. Although he had no training or experience in medicine, astronomy, chemistry or geology, the task he set himself was to turn the ploughshares of science into swords of religion. His dilemma, brilliantly resolved, was to find a way to use the contemporary fashion for rationality and science to make a case for God, when many scholars thought that philosophy and discovery were pointing in the opposite direction. He had not just to reconcile science and religion, but to use science to support, indeed to confirm, a belief in God; and not in some rearguard action, but a major offensive. For Paley, there was no luxury of time, however. Instead, there was a terrible urgency; he had to turn the scientists and philosophers against themselves before they could overwhelm his world. He had to affirm the existence of the Creator without getting caught up in contemporary arguments about biblical authority and the literal truth of every word of the book of Genesis. And he had to take on some of the greatest philosophers of the age.
Although they ended up on opposite sides of the issues of God, creation and life, Paley (in 1802) and Charles Darwin (starting around 1838) had to confront very similar problems. Both suffered the disadvantage of trying to make an incontrovertible case without the kind of irrefutable empirical evidence we usually describe as a ‘smoking gun’. They had to convince by argument because they could not ‘prove’, and therein lies a restatement of Paley’s dilemma: were his arguments founded on scientific fact or pious belief? Were they the long-sought-after proofs or only the familiar old assertions and appeals to faith? Darwin, in turn, could describe natural selection but no one had seen the origin of a new species actually happen. And for both men, the growth of scientific explanations of material phenomena conflicted directly with established beliefs and the teaching of the Church. For Darwin, having at least started to train for the Church, the burden of his discoveries was so great that it made him a physical invalid. He knew the consequences of his theory and the effect it would have on religion and thus the very fabric of society. It would set people against each other; it would set him against his own wife. If his theory proved too revolutionary, it would be rejected out of hand. He would become an outcast and all his efforts would be for nought. He delayed publication for more than twenty years until he thought the ground had been sufficiently prepared for his radical theory of an evolutionary mechanism that would cut the intellectual ground from under the feet of all the natural theologians.
Perhaps, then, there is a nice irony in the fact that when he went up to Cambridge and reported to the porter’s lodge just inside that great gate, the young Charles Darwin was assigned to the same rooms in Christ’s College that Paley had lived in seventy years before.
CHAPTER TWO An Age of Science, An Age of Reason (#ulink_d6175ac0-3198-5196-88ac-02cb43019018)
‘If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, “Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?” No. “Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence?” No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.’
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning HumanUnderstanding, 1748
‘No man’s knowledge can go beyond his experience.’
John Locke, Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding, 1690
Today we live – all too evidently sometimes – in an age of science. Science and its handmaiden, technology, shape every aspect of our lives. We might even envy people like Paley for having lived in much simpler times. But the turn of the nineteenth century was an immensely exciting time when both philosophy and science were stamping their mark on a broader cross-section of society than at any time since the Greeks. Already, the previous hundred years had been an age of discovery and experiment in everything from agriculture, blood transfusion and the discovery of oxygen, to inoculations against small pox, the first steam-powered carriages, and even calculating machines. People could now fly through the air in the Mongolfier brothers’ hot-air balloons. Meanwhile, Britain’s great mechanised mills (dark and Satanic) had begun to change the balance between countryside and town, agriculture and industry, self-sufficiency and reliance. In the process, both prosperity and poverty grew apace.
At its simplest, science (which in Paley’s time was called natural philosophy) is an accumulation of wisdom and argument, facts and hypotheses, about what is. More fundamentally, science is about discovering causes: the why and how of the knowable world. Above all, science seeks explanations that can be expressed in terms of universal laws and therefore establishes a world of lawful, predictable behaviour. Sometimes we harbour the fallacy put about by scientists in the 1960s and 1970s that science (as expressed in today’s extreme scientism) provides all the answers, and that it delivers certainty. Quite to the contrary, under science little stays the same. That is why it is so threatening to religious belief and socio-political authority. Science produces facts and laws but at its heart are questioning, testing and experiment, finding new explanations for old phenomena, finding new phenomena for old explanations, changing ideas and changing certainties. Religion, in contrast, is principally built upon certainties, authority and stability. ‘A mighty fortress is our God’ – a fortress against the surges of change that science and philosophy and, above all, independent thinking generate. Of course, ‘religion’, perhaps especially the Christian religion, is no monolith, any more than is ‘science’. We use the words as shorthand for two kinds of intellectual and personal ‘systems’. As a practice conducted by humans both may often fall short of the ideal and for the last 250 years they have been more opposed to each other than united.
In principle, science owes allegiance to no higher authority; as a wind of change, it bloweth where it listeth. Science is equally as dangerous for pointing out what is still unknown as it is for showing us new reliable facts. Science begets change and change always threatens the status quo ante, whether in rival fields within science or in religion. But orthodoxy, whether religious or political (or indeed scientific), depends upon commonly received opinions and often makes it heretical or treasonous to think otherwise. For all its innate conservatism, science always produces change. No scientist ever became famous for reporting that what we knew in 1870 or 1940 was best.
William Paley did not reveal what doubts he might have felt in the privacy of his study, but it seems unlikely that someone so well versed in science and so ready to do battle with the philosophical giants of his age could have failed to stare up at the stars in quiet moments with a niggling doubt about who else was out there. He would surely have pondered how to explain to his congregation that even something as reliable as the sun was not what it seemed. That the sun appears to orbit around the earth, disappearing each night and coming back up on the other side each morning, was one of the very first apparently reliable observations humans made about the universe we inhabit. It is far more ‘obvious’ than the notion that the earth is flat, for one can stand at the ocean-side and see that the horizon curves, and every sailor knows that when a ship appears from over the horizon, the tip of its mast shows before the hull. But nothing seemed more certain than the sun’s movement and, unsurprisingly, the Bible is unequivocal about the fact that it ‘goeth forth in his might’ (Judges 5:30). That it was the sun moving, not the earth, was surely also explicit in the biblical story that, at Joshua’s request, God made the sun stand still (Joshua 10:12–14). For Isaiah, God even made the sun move ‘ten degrees backward’ (II Kings 20:11).
Although some of his Greek contemporaries had doubts about the sun’s movement, Aristotle – the great authority through the Middle Ages – had had none. He held two powerful theoretical positions about the geocentric cosmos: that the ideal shape was a sphere, and that the ideal motion was circular. From this he built up the view that the sun, moon and planets were each harnessed to a different revolving, perfect, crystal sphere, one inside the other, with the imperfect earth stationary at the centre. The ultimate expression of this system of spheres was in Ptolomey’s Almagest or The Great Syntaxis (circa AD 160), on the strength of which Aristotelian cosmology reigned supreme for 1,500 years, until new astronomical calculations in the Renaissance, driven by the need for accurate, predictive star maps for navigation, began to force the creation of new explanatory models.
Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543) in his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (published the year he died), forced the world to consider the heliocentric model in which not only does the earth revolve around the sun, but it also rotates on its own axis every 23 hours and 56 minutes. (Alternative models had proposed that, for example, the sun and planets stay still and the earth revolves, or that the sun and moon go round the earth and everything else goes around the sun.) Precise measurements made by Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) helped Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) make a new kind of astronomical sense. The movements of the planets – one of the great mysteries of the universe – could be boiled down to three very simple laws, all depending on the fact that their orbits were not circles but ellipses, all around the sun, except for the moon, which orbits the earth. The central consequence of Copernicus’s revolution is only too obvious to us today. Not only had the earth been displaced from the centre of the universe, it had become merely a tiny speck of matter in the immensity of space, no more or less perfect than the rest.
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Copernicus died in 1543, leaving others to take up his work. Galileo Galilei was born in 1564 and acquired an immortal place in history for being forced by the Inquisition in 1633 to recant his belief in Copernicus’s heliocentric universe. When he made his first telescope in 1609 and looked at the moon, he had started another revolution, discovering that it is not the ideal body that the ancient Greek philosophers had believed and every poet had romantically declaimed; instead, it was ugly and broken, pockmarked with craters and rifts. Perhaps even worse, he saw that the sun, which from time immemorial had been seen as a perfect sphere giving light and life to the earth, was also imperfect. In the Bible, it forms one of the great metaphors for the coming Messiah: ‘The sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in his wings’ (Malachi 4:2).
(#litres_trial_promo) Galileo discovered that the sun is blemished, with dark spots that move, apparently randomly, about its face. (His opponents argued that since these spots could only be seen with the telescope they must have been artefacts of the lenses.) Shortly afterwards Galileo observed that Jupiter has its own planets and that Venus shows itself in phases, like our moon. He realised that, beyond the visible planets and fixed stars, there were millions of other stars, not visible to the naked eye, and who could guess what lay beyond those. In this new concept of the heavens, the earth and its inhabitants really were minor in significance. Perhaps there were even other worlds such as ours, with other sentient beings, and we were not alone in inhabiting the cosmos.
Although he was surely as complex a character as any other haunting the corridors of power and influence in seventeenth-century Italy, Galileo has become one of the more sympathetic characters in scientific history, an honest man cruelly oppressed by the enforcers of religious and intellectual orthodoxy.
(#litres_trial_promo) Isaac Newton, on the other hand, presents much more of an enigma; a brilliant scientist whom we very much want to admire, but also a dark, brooding man, his personality seemingly pinched and bare. It is odd that such a profound intellect should have been so insecure about money and position, so temperamental and suspicious. While his ideas on motion have endured, his works on alchemy and vitalism have not. And he managed to gather about himself a host of eager rivals and competitors and suffered cruelly from the common problem that major discoveries seem to come in bursts, often being developed quite independently by more than one person at the same time. Many a schoolchild has damned Newton for inventing the accursed calculus (which he called ‘fluxions’) that he and Leibnitz invented independently. Newton was not helped by his great brooding sulks; he would start work on a subject, become dissatisfied because the answer didn’t satisfy his own high standards, and then put it aside for a few years. Meanwhile others would be closing in on a solution.
England’s greatest scientist, Newton was born in 1642, the year that Galileo died. He took over the science of Galileo’s time and created a new intellectual sphere, a new world of mechanical laws with which we are still far more comfortable than we are with the modern world of quantum physics, where Einstein’s relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty reign. The ancients, particularly Aristotle, had thought that all matter was naturally at rest unless acted on by another force. This is again a weighty piece of common sense: when we see a stone on the ground, it does not move until we kick it. The question is, why does it then slow down and stop? Newton rewrote the science of motion and mechanics in a masterpiece of uncommon sense and mathematical precision.
(#litres_trial_promo) He showed that all matter is in uniform motion (constant velocity, including a velocity of zero) unless acted on by an external force. Exactly opposite to Aristotle’s view of motion, Newton showed that an object will remain still or continue to move at a constant speed in the same direction unless some external force changes things. A moving stone slows down because a force of friction has slowed it, not because it somehow wants naturally to come to rest. A thrown stone describes a parabola through the air, not because it naturally tends to progress in a perfect theoretical circle, but because a force – gravity – has diverted it from the direction in which we threw it. Single forces always act in straight lines, not circles. Any trajectory other than a straight line must be the result of multiple forces acting together.
One of Newton’s most brilliant insights (with the assistance of Robert Hooke) was that the mechanism that keeps the planets in their elliptical orbits around the sun according to the rigid rules discovered by Kepler is the same as that which controls the fall of an apple from a tree, or shapes the trajectory of an arrow shot from a bow. From this he could predict that a projectile fired into the sky at a high enough velocity would continue indefinitely straight out into space. But one fired at some lower velocity would be attracted back to the earth by the opposing force of the earth’s gravity, and if the two sets of forces balanced, then the projectile would settle into orbit around the earth – just as the earth and the other planets orbit the sun, and just as the moon and communication satellites orbit the earth.
Nothing would be the same after Newton’s strict mathematics. Not even the simplest aspect of daily life on earth could be considered immune from the laws of science and the probing of scientists. Kepler’s laws of planetary motion might be glossed over as remote and literally other-worldly but Newton’s laws of motion touched every intimate detail of existence and were correspondingly subversive. Newton accelerated one of the great movements in science – which is to take the mystery out of everything. He also helped to explain some of the contemporary puzzles in the heliocentric model of the universe. If the earth is hurtling through space at many thousands of miles per second, why are we not all blasted off by the wind? If the earth revolves, and those in the northern hemisphere are standing up, why don’t the upside-down Australians fall off? The answer is that gravity holds our atmosphere in place, so there is no cosmic gale, and it holds the Antipodeans in place too. For everyone, ‘down’ is towards the centre of the earth. Science had given nature a new uncommon sense. And, in addition to the technical importance of Newton’s mathematics, the concept of a ‘balance of forces’ keeping the moon circling the earth and the earth in orbit around the sun, very quickly became a valuable metaphor for the description and explanation of a wide range of secular phenomena, including Malthus’s ideas about population growth being held in check by negative factors and Darwin’s ideas on evolution.
Newton’s emphasis on matter and motion related centrally to the Epicurean school and their theories of the nature of matter itself. These ideas had been revised and extended in more modern times by the great French philosopher Descartes (René des Cartes, 1596–1650) whose physical theories Newton in turn largely supplanted. Beyond Galileo’s collision with the Inquisition, if any one man could be said to have started the fields of science and religion on their course of conflict (or perhaps simply of divergence), it is Descartes. By sheer force of intellect and powerful original thought, he created a whole new approach to philosophy, brilliantly turning upside down the old, classical authorities to which the Church turned for support during the Middle Ages. Born in France and educated at the Jesuit college at La Fleche in Anjou, Descartes was Galileo’s younger contemporary and a philosopher who wrote about everything from pure mathematics to human physiology, from the origins of the solar system to the fundamentals of human understanding. All his philosophy started with rejection of previous authority, none of which could be as reliable as one’s own senses and intuition. Every schoolchild knows (or should know) his dictum: ‘Cogito, ergo sum.’ These three words, translated as ‘I think, therefore I am,’ represent his last resort after having rejected everything else in an attempt to find an incontrovertible reality – a truth – upon which to base a philosophical system.
The rigour of his methods was grounded first in mathematics: ‘Those who are seeing the strict way of truth should not trouble themselves about any object concerning which they cannot have a certainty equal to arithmetical or geometrical demonstration.’ Galileo, in one of his most famous passages, had put things even more eloquently: ‘Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our gaze – I mean the universe – but we cannot understand if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in the mathematical language … without the help of which it is impossible to conceive a single word of it, and without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.’
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As a young man Descartes wandered the capitals of Europe before settling in Holland in 1628. From the beginning he thought intensely about epistemology: the question of how we know, and especially how we can find ultimate, objective ways of knowing what is right and true. Again this turns on his basic premise, ‘Cogito, ergo sum.’ In his Meditations he turned this into a long argument for why God must exist, why God is perfect, and why God has made man in his own image. In considering the workings of the human body, he drew a firm line between animals and ourselves. Humans alone have a dual nature – a material body and an immaterial soul – and that distinguishes us from the rest of creation. This was a distinction that carried far into the nineteenth century even as people began to discover the workings of the nerve impulse and the brain and as they delved into the nature of consciousness; until they began to find that the old line between animals and humans was as blurred in this regard as in every other. Descartes’ physics of the universe was based on the idea that the planets were suspended in a total void and that their motions described a series of vortices. Like Newton’s mathematics of forces acting in straight lines, which replaced them as a description of the cosmos, vortices had a strong metaphorical as well as actual ring to them. But Descartes did not believe that bodies could influence each other except when in contact. By dismissing ‘action at a distance’, and therefore phenomena such as gravity, while having moved ideas forward mightily, he failed to create a truly modern physics.
In his cosmology, Descartes began with an Epicurean physics, seeing the world arising out of atoms in motion. Democritos (c. 460–371 BC), in perhaps one of the most prescient pieces of pure intellect, had taught that: ‘Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinions.’ In this atomic theory, all the various kinds of matter differ only in the size, shape and motion of their infinitesimally small atomic constituents. In Descartes’ atomic-deist theories, creation was originally a series of events during which order condensed out of this random atomic behaviour. All matter – whether rocks, trees or monkeys – is merely the combinations of these atoms churning through space, driven by chance. God then had been relegated to the maker of the atoms and the formulator of the broad rules of their motion. By Paley’s time, despite the failure of the theory of vortices, Descartes was popular with deist scientists trying to find new truths about the cosmos in the spirit of the Enlightenment and Age of Reason, but was dismissed by traditional theologians as one of the ‘ancient sceptics who have nothing to set against a designing Deity, but the obscure omnipotency of chance, and the experimental combinations of a chaos of restless atoms’.
In parallel with such philosophical approaches to knowledge itself and new theories about the very state of matter, a fresh style of experimental science flowered in the modern intellectual environment. Deep thought and practical experimentation fed off each other; as one scholar probed into how we know, another tinkered with new devices for observation and discovery. One man in particular helped launch this empirical renaissance. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in his Advancement of Learning of 1605 and Novum Organum (1620), laid out a template for science to proceed by the accumulation of facts and by the framing of rational, testable hypotheses. This empirical approach was based on the revolutionary notion that truths about the material world should be discovered rationally through experiment, observation and analysis rather than derived from a set of classical philosophical abstractions or presented as a matter of divine revelation. In Novum Organum he wrote: ‘There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axiom … The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.’
Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the new spirit of empiricism that flourished in the second half of the seventeenth century than the experiments of Robert Boyle and his colleague Robert Hooke, two of the most brilliant natural philosophers of their age, who worked together as equals but in origins and personal style were as different as they could be. This was the first generation of natural philosophers who could be considered ‘scientists’ as we understand the word. The Honourable Robert Boyle was the wealthy son of the even more wealthy 1st Earl of Cork; Hooke came from a family of more modest means: his father was a parson who died young. Boyle, educated at Eton, did not attend university. From an early age he had been an avid reader and after schooling at Eton was tutored privately, first in England and then, from the age of fourteen, in Geneva. Back in England at eighteen, he took up chemistry and then settled in Oxford where he built a laboratory and hired the young Hooke to assist him. In pictures painted in his middle age, he looks a magnificent rich dandy, tall, haughty and remote, but in reality he was a frail man, often ill, with a stammer and a mild, kind, generous and refined intellect, to whom many potential honours, including a peerage, were offered. After leaving Oxford for London, in part to take a greater role in the Royal Society, his intellectual interests ranged well beyond the laboratory to philosophy and particularly to the promotion of religion. If anyone of his age had the right to be called a true philosopher of nature, it was Boyle. He never married but lived most of his adult life with his sister Lady Ranelagh. When she died in 1691, he died just a week later.
Robert Hooke, born in 1627, was eight years younger than Boyle. He was born on the Isle of Wight, where his father was vicar of Freshwater. He soon showed an advanced ability in drawing and everything mechanical, but had to make his own way in the world at thirteen, following the death of his father. A small inheritance allowed him to become an apprentice to the painter Sir Peter Lely in London but Hooke soon decided that he had enough skill in that direction without the drudgery of apprenticeship. He entered Westminster School, where he demonstrated an amazing ability to master languages, learnt ‘the six books of Euclid in one week, mastered the organ in twenty lessons, and invented thirty ways of flying’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He became an undergraduate at Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1653 where, essentially penniless, he was forced to earn his way as a servant to another student. Nevertheless, he soon made his abilities known to all the scientific luminaries of the age including Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle.
Boyle and Hooke made a superb team, with complementary skills and an equal commitment to the new-fangled Baconian idea that the truth could be found through direct observation and experiment.
(#litres_trial_promo) During the twelve years they worked together at Oxford between 1656 and 1668, Boyle and Hooke’s ideas led in every direction. They became particularly famous for investigating the properties of air, which in classical and medieval times was one of the four ‘elements’ (air, earth, fire and water). Using their own version of the air pump that had been invented by Otto von Guernicke, they measured the elasticity of air and found the mathematically precise, inverse relationship between the volume and pressure of a body of air. This is one of the first physical laws to be enunciated and is still known today as Boyle’s law. Boyle’s air pump, built and operated by Hooke, was also intended to show that Aristotle was wrong when he taught that a vacuum was impossible in nature. Attached to their pump (which often broke down) was a glass chamber inside which they could create both high pressure and a (partial) vacuum. They proved that when the air was removed from the chamber, sound could not be transmitted, although light could. A whole mini-revolution was seeded by what might seem to us a very simple piece of apparatus when they also used it to conduct some elementary experiments on the effect of the air on living organisms, putting a bird or mouse into the chamber and evacuating the air. As it was withdrawn, the animal became listless; if the air was restored, it revived. If enough air was withdrawn, the creature died: all commonplace stuff to us, but revolutionary then. They had discovered that there must be some ‘vital essence’ in the air that makes life possible. This, and the eventual discovery of oxygen by Lavoisier, Joseph Priestley and others, launched an investigation into the material (physiological) basis of life itself, a subject with enormous metaphysical implications given that it had always been thought that life was something breathed into creatures by God, not just another property of matter in motion.
Linguist, microscopist, artist, mathematician, mechanical experimenter and inventor, palaeontologist, surveyor – Hooke’s accomplishments were long overshadowed by the fame of the two other geniuses (Boyle and Christopher Wren) with whom he worked. With Boyle he was the master experimenter and inventor – for example of the universal joint, essential to so many modern machines.
(#litres_trial_promo) With Wren he was the great engineer. When Wren was made architect for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, Hooke was the chief surveyor; and as Hooke the engineer he gave Wren the parabolic formula for the great dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.
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For a period after Boyle left Oxford, he continued to employ Hooke, who became the ‘curator of experiments’ for the Royal Society and therefore found himself (or made himself) for the rest of his life at the centre of every scientific discovery of the age. Sadly, few people seem really to have liked Hooke, whose childhood kyphosis steadily worsened so that as an adult he became a twisted hunchback. Something of a miser and a misanthrope, and never one to avoid a fight or to allow someone else to take credit for his own discoveries, he became extremely litigious. He contested bitterly with Christian Huygens over the invention of the spring-regulated mechanism that made a pocket watch (and thus Paley’s famous metaphor) possible, and he argued bitterly with Newton over optics and cosmology. When Newton took over from Hooke as President of the Royal Society, Hooke’s portrait mysteriously disappeared from the society’s rooms.
The combination of Newtonian mechanics, Baconian methods, and the new experimental empiricism that propelled eighteenth-century science was also reflected in the Industrial Revolution and is exemplified in the extraordinary career of William Paley’s contemporary, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). This Darwin, grandfather of Charles, was a successful doctor in the city of Lichfield and at the same time a member of the famous Lunar Society of the industrial Midlands. Darwin, Watt, Boulton, Wedgwood – all the great names of British inventiveness – met once a month and created a new kind of intellectual centre outside the universities.
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Erasmus Darwin was not just a brilliant doctor, a trencherman (he weighed some eighteen stone) and sensualist (fathering fourteen children, at least two out of wedlock), he was also a remarkable inventor. Designs for steering mechanisms and sprung wheels for carriages, a steam-driven carriage, improvements to steam engines, a horizontal windmill, the canal lift, hydrogen balloons to carry mail, a clockwork-driven artificial bird, a copying machine, a turbine engine, a multi-mirrored telescope, a water closet, devices for improving gardening, new kinds of spinning machines – all flowed from his pen. Furthermore, he was also a poet and radical philosopher who used his poetry, tending to the epic in style and volume, as the vehicle for his most dangerous ideas.
One of the themes of Erasmus Darwin’s immensely popular works concerned what we now call evolution, a subject more commonly associated with his grandson. Like so many of his century, Erasmus Darwin was fascinated by fossils and the extraordinary record they presented of life and death over the ages. Darwin saw that they were evidence of the life and death of legions of organisms never seen alive by man: extinct forms about which the Bible is totally silent. Fossils were evidence of a whole ancient world waiting for scientific explanation. Without knowing how much time might have been involved, and ignoring the biblical narrative of creation, Erasmus Darwin proclaimed a world of gradual change over the aeons; change from simple creatures to more complex; life arising out of chemistry, driven by the forces of the environment:
Earths from each sun with quick explosion burst,
And second planets issued from the first.
Then, whilst the sea at their coeval birth,
Surge over surge, involv’d the shoreless earth, Nurs’d by warm sun-beams in primeval caves,
Organic life began beneath the waves …
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth.
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‘Without parent’! No amount of argument could make that idea compatible with ‘God the father’ and the most honoured of all words in the Old Testament, the first verses in Genesis, which state that God created the world exactly as we know it, in six days. Erasmus Darwin had issued a challenge in the style of a dictum of Descartes, who had once said: ‘The nature of physical things is much more easily conceived when they are beheld coming gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state.’ Other scholars in France and England shared this vision of a changing world, but ‘gradual’ and ‘chemistry’ were not in the Church lexicon. Paley read Erasmus Darwin, recoiled, and reached for his pen.
Even more threatening to Paley’s world view was the quickly growing sciences of the earth, brilliantly synthesised by James Hutton, a Scottish doctor, farmer, philosopher and geologist who, in 1795, published a two-volume Theory of the Earth.
(#litres_trial_promo) If any single book captured the challenges posed by the new science, it was this. Genesis says that the physical world was created in three days and populated by animals and plants by the sixth. Learned clerics had even devised elaborate schemes to decode the histories recorded in Genesis to arrive at a date for this great event – 4004 BC. But dozens of equally learned men who had been investigating the nature of the earth itself had produced a different kind of authority in new empirical data as well as theory. Hutton distilled the results of a hundred and fifty years’ enquiry into the structure of the earth and the processes that shaped it, and dared to suggest a totally different conclusion: that the world was unknowably old.
In fact, the possibility of an ancient earth had been proposed and dismissed many times before Hutton, even by Aristotle. A preoccupation of many eighteenth-century writers about the earth had been to counter theories, like Aristotle’s, of an eternal earth having neither a beginning nor an end. The authority of Genesis must be greater, they insisted: the world must have had a Beginning and was proceeding to a definite End. But Hutton supported his new ideas both with solid empirical evidence and an underlying theory based on a Newtonian balance of forces. He saw a pattern in the history of the rocks: gradually worn down by erosion, washed into the seas, accumulating as sediments, raised up as new dry land, only to be eroded again. Not the linear narrative of Creation to Final Conflagration that the Bible foretells, but something cyclic, balanced, timeless, unending. Hutton also openly espoused Erasmus Darwin’s ideas about organic change; they helped explain the successions of life that had inhabited his recycling globe. And the threat that Hutton’s geological science posed was the greater because, where Erasmus Darwin had a wild-eyed hypothesis, he had a cold, sober theory.
The strength of Hutton’s case made science and a literal interpretation of biblical creation virtually irreconcilable. Now too many of the central, commonsensical dogmas of religion had been replaced by theories that were not just difficult to understand and to prove, but also challenged the central core of established belief. Little wonder, then, that someone was needed to respond to all these challenges from the side of organised religion.
Writing in 1802, however, Paley had greater challenges to face even than these. While natural philosophy was concerned with the definition, description and material causes of natural phenomena, Paley also had to engage with moral philosophy, which is concerned with values, meaning and purposes, and metaphysics, which probes the ultimate nature of what is, and how we know. Science is all about causes: what causes the apple to fall from the tree? What caused the apple to become separated from the tree so that it could fall? What caused the apple to ripen? What caused the apple tree to flower and the bee to pollinate it? What caused the tree? But in a religious context, cause and its metaphysical counterpart ‘purpose’, look very different. For a theologian in Paley’s time, as today, God was always referred to as the First Cause. Then there are Second Causes, which are due to the inherent nature of matter and material systems and the operation of natural laws. Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, Kepler’s laws of celestial mechanics, the laws of thermodynamics, gravity, the laws of chemistry (for example, the valency of atoms), and (in our time) the coded and coding sequences of amino acids in the DNA molecule, are all formal expressions of Second Causes. In turn they depend on further nested sets of causes in nuclear, atomic and quantum mechanics, and so on. In a sense, all of science – which is a system of investigation based wholly in material properties and processes – is the discovery of Second Causes.
If these Second Causes shape and drive the daily economy of the earth and its cycles of life and death, we are presented with a dichotomy. Now there are two rival views of God: one (more or less the Christian God) is a creator who is also the endless, continuous, loving God who has counted every hair on our heads and sees the fall of every sparrow. This God not only created but continually directs his Second Causes. The daily business of the world matters to this God, and particularly to his son Jesus. The alternative is a more distant (deist’s) God who created the world and then set it to run like a giant cosmological train set or clock. All its processes and phenomena – orderly and predictable, contingent and occasionally random, from the movements of the heavens to the physiological bases of diabetes, and by which the cosmos has changed over millions of years – all these are the results of Second Causes, flowing inevitably from the nature of matter itself. In this case, once God had created the conditions for Second Causes and the rules of their operation, he made it unnecessary to have a direct hand in every single act of man and nature.
The dilemma created by the new scientific philosophies was therefore the potential relegation of God from all-powerful to first power only, and the acknowledgement that other scientific (Second) causes drove the world day by day, year by year. The consequent and even greater dilemma was that, once one admitted Second Causes, it was only a simple extrapolation to all the processes of life being definable in terms of such causes. In the process, the need for a First Cause would simply fade away. There would be no room – no need – for God at all. All causation might ultimately be, as Erasmus Darwin put it, ‘without parent’, nothing more than the result of chance collisions of atoms in empty space, as proposed first by Democritos and the Epicureans. Indeed, Descartes had even suggested that, if one could know the nature and precise motion of all the atoms in the universe at a single moment, one could predict their future arrangements; in other words, one could predict the future (Although if the future were simply the inevitable extrapolation of the present movements of atoms, it would also mean there was no such thing as free will).
Beyond First and Second Causes, there is the Final Cause – the purpose that God purportedly had in having created the world, and the end goal of all its daily operations, summed up over the millennia. Traditional Christians, with their emphasis on the Trinity, on Revelation, and on the promise of Redemption, naturally believe in the concept of Final Cause – purpose. Putting it simply, God has in mind a purpose for each of us and for the whole world he created. That is why, even though Second Causes may be operating, he still steers the ship. This is not a God who has set the world going like some autonomous machine; the Christian’s God is one who will eventually, through his Son, redeem all our sins. First Cause, Second Cause, Final Cause – all (relatively) easy to believe in, difficult to live up to, and hard to prove.
If there is no God, then there is no purpose. And the reverse might be true: if there is no purpose, there is no God. In Paley’s time, the ‘death of God’ was a very distant, if still fearful, prospect. God’s role as First Cause and Final Cause was, for the moment, reasonably secure, even among the most radical of philosophers such as Descartes. As Robert Boyle wrote in an early classic essay:
Epicurus, and most of his Followers … Banish the Consideration of the Ends of Things; because the world being, according to them, made by Chance, no Ends of Things can be suppos’d to have been intended. And, on the contrary, Monsieur Des Cartes, and most of his followers, supposed the Ends of God in Things Corporeal to be so Sublime, that ’twere Presumption in Man to think his Reason can extend to Discover them.
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But there is a telling passage in the work just quoted. It reveals what a scientist sees as an unacceptable inconsistency but a theologian sees as evidence of God’s omnipotence. Boyle had to allow: ‘Nor is this Doctrine [of Final Cause] inconsistent with the belief of any True Miracle; for it supposes the ordinary and settled course of nature to be maintained [while] the most Free and powerful Author of Nature is able, whenever he thinks fit, to Suspend, Alter, or Contradict those Laws of Motion, which He alone at first establish’d and which need his perpetual Concourse to be upheld.’ This seems to be playing both ends against the middle. If God can do anything he likes (as in causing the sun to move backwards), why has he bothered to set nature going as a system according to the strict laws he gave it? In science, the exception never proves the rule.
Final Cause is rather difficult for a scientist to come to grips with. It is rather like the soul, belonging outside the material and the natural. Science is particularly the opposite of everything supernatural; its very nature is to challenge and explain away anything that smacks of a paranormal world. At its harshest, science would deny that such realms exist; at its most charitable it would say that such things must be studied by some other logic. In any case, whatever a reader in 1800 thought of ‘purpose’ in nature and in philosophy, the cosmologists had long since reset the terms of intellectual engagement: the universe now had to be seen as moving according to precise laws; Newton had reduced the laws of cosmology so brilliantly expounded by Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo to the laws of everyday existence. The moon is held in orbit around the earth, and the earth (and moon) around the sun, by the same force that causes the apple to drop four feet from the tree. In the process, natural philosophy had produced some conflicting and dangerous new truths and consequences. On the one hand, the cosmos might have been created by God in an instant of time, remaining fixed and unchanging until he sees the need to destroy it and to redeem his people. On the other hand, the world might be imagined as coalescing out of a whirling mass of fiery atoms, now cooling. The latter world was one of continuous change rather than the traditional series of fixed points along a preordained path: Beginning, Fall, Deluge, Final Conflagration. In such a world of material causes, people had – if they dared look – a new view of free will, predestination and, perhaps more subversive than anything else, change. No wonder most societies had previously kept literacy and learning for a very few, with only the controlling seers being allowed to contemplate the eternal mysteries. For ordinary mortals (to paraphrase), a little knowledge would be an extremely dangerous thing. Once Pandora’s box was opened and a new, lesser, role ascribed to God, who could predict where matters would end?
CHAPTER THREE Problems at Home (#ulink_96234652-3c87-5d45-a5e7-e290e7031506)
‘There are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, 5
If the Church found itself besieged by the discoveries of science, it found little support from metaphysics either, starting with Descartes, whose philosophy demanded new rigour and personal judgement in the search for proofs of what we know. In such a philosophy, mysteries like faith and revelation are unreliable guides to the truth. A very similar line was argued by John Locke (1632–1704) who, in his Essay on Human Understanding, also explored the very nature of knowledge. To what extent does reality exist outside of our perception of it? Knowledge involves the relations of ideas, but ideas do not exist outside of the mind and experience. Does the mind therefore contribute to the reality of things, or in fact remove them further from reality? In fact, Locke becomes rather confusing on the subject of matter, or substance, which in philosophical terms was recognised through its three essential properties of solidity, extension (property of occupying space) and action (motion). Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753), on the other hand, in his ‘immaterial hypothesis’, was quite emphatic on this subject: ‘No matter exists except in our perception.’ Other than our own persons, ‘all other things are not so much existences as manners of the existence of persons’. The great Dr Johnson (1709–1784), predictably enough, thought that the idea of the non-existence of matter was nonsense. ‘I refute it thus,’ he exclaimed, kicking at a stone (and giving it a distinctly Newtonian acceleration).
When John Locke taught that ‘Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything,’ he (along with continental philosophers such as Spinoza, Leibnitz and Gassendi) put his seal on the Age of Reason, and at the same time laid down a challenge. His philosophical system has no room for blind faith. ‘Faith is nothing but a firm assent of the mind: which, if it be regulated, as is our duty, cannot be afforded to anything but upon good reason … He that believes without having any reason for believing, may be in love with his own fancies; but neither seeks truth as he ought, nor pays the obedience due to his maker.’ In that case, a bishop’s (or a pope’s) say-so was definitely not a sufficient reason for believing anything. And nowhere was any philosophy more threatening than when it turned a hard-edged logic and the disciplined, unforgiving eye of reason onto the Bible itself, and particularly onto the miracles – those supernatural episodes in the life of Christ and the saints that form the very basis of Christian revelation. As Paley insisted in Evidences, for the Church the miracles are God’s way of vouchsafing to his people the authority of his purposes for them. Otherwise, God is materially unknowable; in all normal respects the Holiest of the Holy Ones is hidden from the people. The ‘breath’ and ‘hand’ of God are figurative, not literal. The special exceptions take the form of paranormal phenomena – a burning bush, or the sun standing still or moving backwards, for example. Later, he sent his Son to save the world, and the miracles of the New Testament (starting with the immaculate conception – ‘for behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear an son’ – and proceeding through the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the feeding of the five thousand, and ending with the Resurrection itself) are his way of demonstrating the Saviour’s bona fides. But throughout the eighteenth century, philosophers had secretly or openly questioned the reality of miracles, requiring that the miracles of Christ either be explained in material, scientifically understandable, terms or rejected (the raising of Lazarus, for example, looks exactly like an example of cardiopulmonary resuscitation).
One of the great joys of the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment was the freedom philosophers, scholars and ordinary people acquired to think for themselves. Hence the search for proofs of the unprovable, for the qualities of the ineffable, and for facts about the unknowable. Today we take this freedom for granted, and equally cheerfully slide over some deep philosophical difficulties. Not so for the Scottish philosopher David Hume, whose own epistemology has been no less influential than that of Descartes and Locke in shaping Western thought. Much of Hume’s philosophical writings are necessarily deep and abstract, but others are set in more familiar terms and deal with readily appreciated (if still dangerous) questions.
Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 and had early trained for the law – a subject that appealed to him about as much as medicine at Edinburgh later attracted Charles Darwin. His passion was for a wide learning based in philosophy, starting with the classics of Cicero and Virgil. He had been a delicate young man, in large part because of his intense studying and, evidently, hypochondria. To help recover from a depression or mental breakdown, he travelled to France, living as frugally as possible, and eventually spent two years at La Fleche in Anjou where he had access to the library of the Jesuit college. It was here that he wrote his monumental work, A Treatise of Human Nature (published between 1739 and 1740). At the college, the same institution where Descartes had studied, he heard a Jesuit teacher explaining a recent ‘miracle’ and immediately wrote out a rebuttal of the whole concept. For Hume, the miracles reported in the New Testament were ‘a contest of opposites … that is to say, a question whether it be more impossible that the miracle be true, or the testimony real’. For its day, that was almost as heretical as the present-day argument that some, if not all, of the miracles are mere fictions, constructed as a mythology around which to unite the fledgling first-century Christian Church.
Hume aimed to elevate moral philosophy to a science following the examples of Bacon and Newton in natural philosophy. A sceptic, he lost his faith very early, perhaps when a student at Edinburgh. The Treatise of Human Nature was the foundation of his later fame, even though the book earned little for him at first; in fact it was a commercial failure and a bitter disappointment, Hume wryly complaining that it ‘fell still-borne from the press’. Needing to earn a better living than his pen afforded, he spent a curious period first as a tutor to the insane son of the Marquis of Annandale and then as secretary and judge-advocate to General St Clair on an expedition against the French at Port Lorient, Guernsey, at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. While now relatively hale and hearty, the life of a man of action scarcely suited him, but attempts to procure a more suitable position, a chair at Glasgow then one at Edinburgh, failed.
Following the death of his mother he returned to the family home in Scotland and began a period of great productivity, during which, in 1751, he wrote two works that had special bearing on an evolving, perhaps revolutionised, view of religion. In his Natural History of Religion (1757) and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (only published after his death in 1779)
(#litres_trial_promo) he used all his powers of reason and argument to test the case for traditional revealed religion as opposed to the deist position, that everything that was important about religion could be (must be) derived by reason alone. In the Dialogues Hume carefully covered his tracks by laying out his arguments in the form of a conversation among three different philosophers. This was the familiar philosopher’s device that Galileo used in his Dialogue concerning the two major world systems (1632) – without fooling the Inquisition. Both Galileo and Hume were following the example of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, or On the Nature of the Gods (77 BC), which is set as a debate among Epicurean, Stoic and Academic philosophers.
Hume’s Dialogues did its damage not so much in the conclusions it reached as in daring to ask the awkward questions: What do we know that is true and independently verifiable about God, as opposed to what we are told? How do we know? Hume even asked the evolutionary question: Is it not more logical to assume that complex living creatures had their origins in simpler ones than via some miraculous creation by an infinitely powerful, but nonetheless unknowable, designing intelligence? Hume challenged everyone who thought they could find a rational basis for understanding God. He expressed the problem very simply: If we had never thought about there being a God in the first place, would objective, rational investigation and argument necessarily uncover his existence and define his nature? If we are already sure that God exists, it is not difficult to find seemingly rational arguments to support that notion and even to conclude that God must have certain specifiable ‘properties’, but if we were to start from scratch – if we were immigrants from some distant pagan shore or outer space – would objective study of the natural world and deep philosophical enquiry produce ineluctable proofs of God? Would there be miracles and signs, for instance, that could not be explained away rationally? Was Voltaire right when he said that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him?
And we always have to worry about the final ace that Hume has up his sleeve: logically, he says, anything that can be imagined as existing can also be imagined as not existing. For every piece of evidence we can find for the Creator, we have to allow the existence of equally powerful evidence against. Hence Paley’s dilemma.
As for religion itself, it would be wrong to think of it as having been a passive spectator at these feasts of the intellect. Indeed, the Church and the churches became their own best and worst friends. Ever since Martin Luther in 1517 nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg and unleashed a flood of independent thinking about forms of worship and modes of belief, it had become impossible for the Church to speak with one voice and proclaim one doctrine. Instead, many voices, doctrines and practices competed for people’s attention. A single original discipline had been opposed by a structureless freedom reaching to the heart of belief. Each group was defined on nuances of doctrine and separate routes to personal salvation, defended in the name of reason.
One such argument was between the theists and deists over the critical matter of revelation. For the Christian Church, revelation meant the events, especially the miracles, by which God had communicated with his chosen people, and it especially meant God’s self-revelation in the form of his son Jesus, sent for the redemption of our souls. Deists, however, insisted that revelation was just the public-relations machinery of a controlling priesthood. God was enough to stand on his own, with the vast panoply of nature itself forming the only necessary evidence of his Being. In the Age of Reason, therefore, rational study of the world alone could reveal the Unworldly One. As Thomas Paine (of American Revolution fame) was to write in his deist manifesto:
When the divine gift of reason begins to expand itself in the mind and calls man to reflection, he then reads and contemplates God and his works, not in the books pretending to revelation … The little and paltry, often obscene, tales of the bible sink into wretchedness when put in comparison with this mighty work. The deist needs none of those tricks and shows called miracles to confirm his father, for what can be a greater miracle than creation itself, and his own existence.
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Trinitarians opposed Unitarians, Arians and dozens of other sects over the divinity of Christ and the identity of the Holy Ghost and ‘Christ with God’. Was Christ the same as God? (Sabellians); was God different from the Holy Ghost and again from Christ, who was his son? (Trinitarians); or was Christ (as the Socinians argued) merely another in the line of prophets? Then the Sub- and Infralapsarians opposed the Supralapsarians on the question of whether the Fall of Man was intended by God or only permitted after he saw man’s wickedness – an argument that parallels the dispute among the Armenians, Calvinists and others over the issue of the predestination of individual salvation. Many English sects dissented from the Thirty-nine Articles that defined the core precepts of the Church of England. Among them were the Occasional Conformists and Non-Jurant Schismatics, who otherwise remained true to the doctrines of the Church but rejected part or all of its discipline. And there were those who dissented against practices of worship and inclusion, the latter including the Baptists, Anabaptists and Paedobaptists, with their differing views on the issue of baptism and consent.
After 1662, non-conformists of every stripe in England were persecuted with a new and ruthless zeal, but they always bounced back. Many schismatic sects, such as the Plymouth Brethren, became even more rigid in matters of piety than the Church of England or Catholics from whom they had split. Others were quite liberal in the interpretations of the Bible, particularly the Mosaic account of creation, thus allowing their followers to reconcile the new discoveries of science with their beliefs. As long as anyone insisted that Genesis remained the one unimpeachable source, however, the obvious result was confrontation and discord.
In 1696, all Europe was scandalised by the radical scepticism of John Toland, whose book Christianity not Mysterious33 was ordered to be burned by the public hangman in Ireland. Toland was born in Ireland and brought up as a Catholic, then became a Protestant and a free thinking rebel, eking out a living as a writer of highly polemical tracts and books and dodging from country to country just ahead of a host of would-be persecutors. (Among other accomplishments, he invented the term ‘pantheism’.) His writings exemplify what happened when free thinking and (even more dangerous) outspoken populists started to apply the pure reason of thinkers such as John Locke to a close study of the Bible. Toland thundered: ‘Whatever is contrary to Reason can be no Miracle, for it has been sufficiently prov’d already, that Contradiction is only another word for Impossible or Nothing.’ Toland dared to write what many felt, that it was absurd that the wine at the communion service should be thought literally to be transubstantiated into the blood of Christ. It was absurd that the disciples could have seen Christ walk on water. If you can believe in miracles, Toland argued, what is to prevent you from believing any nonsensical fiction? A church that depended on subjecting its adherents to the discipline of believing in miracles, and held its members in awe of the unknowable, was not worth belonging to. The precepts of the Church had to be understandable in material terms and expressed in plain words.
A hundred years later, the legacy of this free thinking made for a particularly dangerous time for the established Church of England. The Church was part and parcel, warp and weft, of the oligarchy; any threat to it threatened the very fabric of society. We must also remember that in 1802, Britain was at war with France. The threats from across the English Channel were not just the liberal intellectual challenges of the free thinking French Enlightenment, from Descartes and Buffon to Rousseau and Condorcet, but also the political challenges of the French Revolution, the material horrors of the Terror, and now the wars being waged by Napoleon. Riot and revolution, free thinking and self-improvement, tyranny, war and savagery were everywhere. One would readily be forgiven for wondering whether all this modernity was a good thing.
Paley therefore did not set out to write his proof of the existence and attributes of God in a world of certainty. There were enemies from without to be countered: materialist and rationalist enemies of the ineffable, scientists and philosophers from Britain and the Continent. And there were enemies from within: religion was beset by complex philosophical debates that threatened the whole basis of belief. Throughout it all, God’s purpose was becoming harder to read, certainly more difficult to proclaim. At the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment the problem had been to find a secure place for science in a religious world; by the end, the problem was exactly the opposite: if the world operates through Second Causes, where was the role of God? One solution was to insist on the literal truth of the biblical story of creation: but that necessarily represented a denial of the discoveries of science about the age of the earth (and universe) and the role of change.
Two issues, above all others, motivated William Paley: the biting scepticism of the philosophers John Locke and David Hume, and the nagging threat of a theory of matter consisting of space and atoms in random motion. By 1800 such theories had long since spawned versions of the ultimate atheism: evolution. Scepticism could be countered with logical argument, but a rival explanatory theory – especially a godless theory like atomism – was an even greater threat. We can measure the challenge that a self-ordering world, operating on independent laws and motions – and, above all, on chance – posed to received religion by the bitter rhetoric of the defenders of the orthodox. We can gauge how long-standing this threat had been – since Descartes at least – by the furious sarcasm of the Reverend Ralph Cudworth, Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge and Master of Christ’s College from 1654. Cudworth belonged to an old school of Platonist philosophers who were opposed to Descartes and any kind of empiricism. In a massive work attacking a range of heresies in splendid rhetoric he explained the difference between Epicurean views (‘Atomick Atheists’) and the arriviste hybrid theory of Descartes (‘mechanick Theists’) that attempted to marry atoms, space and chance to a godly view of creation. And dismissed them both:
God in the mean time standing by as an Idle Spectator of this Lusus Atomorum, this sportful dance of Atoms, and of the various results thereof. Nay these mechanick Theists have here quite outstripped the Atomick Atheists themselves, they being much more extravagant than ever those were. For the professed Atheists durst never venture to affirm that this regular Systeme of things resulted from the fortuitous motions of Atoms at the very first, before they had for a long time together produced many other inept Combinations, or aggregate Forms of particular things and nonsensical Systems of the whole, and they suppose also that the regularity of things in this world would not always continue such neither, but that some time or other Confusion and Disorder will break in again … But our mechanick Theists will have their Atoms never so much as once to have fumbled in these their motions, nor to have produced any inept System or incongruous forms at all, but from the very first all along to have taken up their places and ranged themselves so orderly, methodically and directly; as that they could not possibly have done it better, had they been directed by the most perfect Wisdom.
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Chance and design are like oil and water, or perhaps oil and fire. Cudworth continued more soberly:
There is no Middle betwixt these Two; but all things must either spring from a God, or Matter; Then this is also a Demonstration of the Truth of Theism, by Deduction to Impossible: Either there is a God, or else all things are derived from Dead and Senseless Matter; but this Latter is Impossible; Therefore a God. Nonetheless, that the Existence of a God, may be further Directly Proved also from the Same Principle, rightly understood. Nothing out of Nothing Causally, or Nothing Caused by Nothing, neither Efficiently nor Materially.
To which a natural theologian could only add; Amen.
The popularity of the argument from design, and the extraordinary success of Paley’s Natural Theology, gave wavering Christians a better answer than Cudworth’s to the threats of philosophers (deist and atheist) who challenged the basis of Christian beliefs. By dealing only with existence of God, without depending on assertions of the authority of God’s revelations (in the Bible and in miracles), Paley made an argument for the deist doubter and at the same time created (or at least strengthened) a philosophical context within which contemporary scientists could allay their religious doubts and make a space for their discoveries within orthodoxy. Although not universally admired by those theologians who placed their prime emphasis on revelation, the timeless appeal of the argument from design is shown in the fact that these same threats persist in even more pressing forms today, when our understanding of science has almost limitlessly expanded the realm of Second Causes and a materialist society has put ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ onto the defensive.
Francis Bacon had written, in his essay Of Atheism: ‘A little philosophy makes men atheists: a great deal reconciles them to religion.’ By Paley’s time, the reverse seemed true. Conventional religious beliefs could be upheld only if one did not probe too far into their philosophical underpinnings. Paley needed to change all that. He knew that he had the gift of reasoning and persuading. And so he set out his proof of God with all the urgency and dedication of a Crusader knight taking arms in defence of Jerusalem. The battleground would have to be all of science and philosophy. In what follows, we must insist on one caveat: it is not fair to judge Paley’s evidence (or Cudworth’s vitriol) by what we know now. It is fair to judge his conclusions by such a standard, however, if his arguments are to have any long-standing merit.
CHAPTER FOUR John Ray: Founding Father (#ulink_cd8c3f1d-1695-5d92-96cc-9bb804b994ef)
‘When you look at a sun-dial or a water clock, you consider that it tells the time by art and not by chance; how then can it be consistent to suppose that the world, which includes both the works of art in question, the craftsmen who made them, and everything else besides, can be devoid of purpose and of reason.’
Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 77 BC
‘If the number of Creation be so exceedingly great, how great nay immense must needs be the Power and Wisdom of him who Form’d them all.’
John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Worksof Creation, 1691
‘What absolute Necessity [is there] for just such a Number of Species of Animals or Plants?’
Samuel Clarke, Demonstration of the Being andAttributes of God, 1705
The central proposition of natural theology is what David Hume, in Dialogues, put in the mouth of Cleanthes (the most ‘accurate and philosophical’ of his protagonists):
[The world is] nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines … all these various machines, and even their most minute parts are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men … the curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance, of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence … By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.
This is the essence of an argument from design and a hundred years later, Paley’s watch analogy said the same thing: ‘As for the watch, so for nature there must exist a Creator.’ By extension, the same conclusion must apply to ‘every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design … in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.’ As the watch has a maker, so we have a Maker. As the watch exists for a purpose, so do we.
When Charles Darwin sat at the window of his rooms at Christ’s College in 1831 reading Natural Theology, he found the arguments ‘conclusive … the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door.’ Camped a year later in the Brazilian forest and seeing at first hand the biological riches of the tropics that the explorer-naturalist Humboldt had extolled, he wrote in his journal that ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind’.
(#litres_trial_promo) A contemporary anonymous reviewer of the first edition of Paley’s book noted: ‘No thinking man, we conceive, can doubt that there are marks of design in the universe.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Similarly, in 1876, that quintessentially Victorian critic Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) praised it – but as if trying not to get his hands dirty: ‘The book, whatever its philosophical shortcomings, is a marvel of skilled exposition. It states, with admirable clearness and in a most attractive form, the argument which has the greatest popular force and which, duly etherialised, still passes muster with metaphysicians.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1996, the biochemist Michael Behe continued the argument seamlessly: ‘The reason for the conclusion [that the watch had been designed] is just as Paley implied: the ordering of separate components to accomplish a function beyond that of the individual components.’
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The same anonymous reviewer of Natural Theology had also grumbled: ‘On the subject of Natural Theology no one looks for originality and no one expects to find it.’ Given Paley’s broadminded approach to borrowing other people’s sermons, we should not be surprised to learn that the great watch analogy originated elsewhere and that natural theology itself belonged to a long-standing tradition to which his book simply gave its greatest and most popular expression. Leslie Stephen acidly noted, ‘The argument is familiar, and probably has been familiar since the first days when it occurred to anyone to provide a logical basis for theology.’ Paley himself called the watch analogy ‘not only popular but vulgar’ and for contemporary readers it was so familiar an analogy that they would not have thought of attributing the idea exclusively to him. (Fifty years later, enough history had been forgotten that he was accused of plagiarism, the source of these suspicions no doubt lying in the fact that, in accord with the custom of the time, Paley did not supply footnoted references to his sources.) In fact, the watch analogy can be traced back a long way.
In Paley’s time, the most immediate exponents of the watch analogy may have been Baron d’Holback (The System of Nature or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World, 1770)
(#litres_trial_promo) or Bernard Nieuwentyt (The Religious Philosopher, or the Right Use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator, 1709),
(#litres_trial_promo) who wrote of a man ‘cast in a desert or solitary place, where few people are used to pass [coming upon] a Watch shewing the Hours, Minutes and Days of the month’. Hence the charge of plagiarism. Before Nieuwentyt’s quite explicit use of the analogy, it occurs in a host of works, including Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), which we shall visit in some detail in a later chapter. Burnet wrote: ‘For a thing that consists of a multitude of pieces aptly joyn’d, we cannot but conceive to have had those pieces, at one time or another, put together. ’Twere hard to conceive an eternal Watch, whose pieces were never separate one from another, nor ever in any other form than that of a Watch.’ Perhaps the earliest use of the analogy is in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum (one of the models for Hume’s Dialogues) where his Stoic philosopher asks: ‘Suppose a traveller to carry into Scythia or Britain the orrery recently constructed by our friend Posidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets … would any single native person doubt that the orrery was the work of a rational being?’
(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, as we go along, we will frequently see that several arguments of eighteenth-century scholars consist of little more than a reiteration of what various classical authors had said two millennia before.
One of the great assets of natural theology and the evidence it drew from the world of living animals and plants, is that it was understandable to a broad following who did not have to know code words of contemporary philosophy, or have mastered calculus and chemistry to follow the argument completely. Natural history enjoys a privileged position among the sciences both in its broad accessibility and in the extraordinary aesthetic pleasure inherent in the subject. This is obvious to amateur and professional alike, and only increases the more deeply one probes into the complexities of life. One has only to think of the mechanical perfection underlying the flowing grace of a cheetah in full stride, or the whorled mathematical perfection of a sunflower. It has therefore always had an extremely wide appeal, whether for a clergyman such as the Reverend Gilbert White who, with his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), defined the role of the careful observer of local nature in ways that had not been thought about since Virgil and Pliny, or for explorers to the far reaches of the globe like Joseph Banks who travelled with Captain Cook and brought back new natural wonders to test our grasp of the limits of creation.
Above all, nature is always fascinating for what seems to be the common sense, the transparent obviousness, of the fit of its forms to their functions. The elephant’s trunk, sometimes powerful, sometimes delicate, is a masterpiece of dexterity far exceeding that of the human hand. The sabre-tooth’s canine was a lethal weapon. The barn owl not only has huge forward-directed eyes for detecting its prey, it can also use its supersensitive ears to pinpoint the source of the slightest rustle of leaves caused by a mouse – in the dark. Some orchids have patterns on their petals that we cannot see, but a wasp, using ultraviolet light and seeing there a picture of another wasp, alights to try to copulate with it and thus unwittingly helps pollinate the flower. Charles Darwin, knowing of a flower with a particular shape, famously predicted that there must exist a kind of moth with a foot-long proboscis to feed deep within it: eventually it was discovered. This is but a tiny set of examples of the exquisite ways in which living organisms are ‘adapted’ to their environments and ‘fitted’ to particular ways of life. Such glories of nature have always been the principal evidence that natural theologians adduce for the existence of a creating God – the argument a posteriori that Hume allowed as the only possible proof. The vast bulk of writing in natural theology is taken up with elucidating and sermonising upon long lists of such examples from nature; they are the basic evidence for the prosecution’s case: such perfections of design and function appear to require us to conclude that a master creator has been at work.
Paley was a logician who lived by the cut and thrust of argument. He added the abstractions of philosophy to the science-versus-religion debate but, as in any great court battle, the case for natural theology was first grounded in hard evidence and that base had long since been constructed by John Ray (1627–1705), its founding father. In many ways Ray and Paley were complementary and opposite. While Paley, at the end of the Age of Reason, depended upon the tightness of his logic, Ray, at the beginning of the scientific revolution, was someone who revelled in facts – both in getting them straight and getting them in order. While Paley was a man who fitted somewhat awkwardly in the machinery of the Church of England, he was nonetheless a true churchman. John Ray was a man of his time – a dissenter.
For every person who is happy to conform, to belong, to submit to the group will, there is always at least one who will not compromise: someone who is sure enough of their own ground to stand apart independently, usually on a matter of principle. It is a great tradition, reinforced periodically by governments who try to force us into what the American poet Emerson called ‘a foolish consistency’ (‘the hobgoblin of feeble minds’). Such was John Ray. He was not just a dissenter; he was a Dissenter. In order to prepare for the Church, he had attended Cambridge in 1644 where his brilliance in science, languages and mathematics quickly showed. He was made a Fellow of Trinity College in 1649, Lecturer in 1651, and sub-Dean in 1658. In 1660 he was ordained as a priest. A stellar career as a Cambridge scholar seemed in prospect, with the living of a rural parish or two to support him and to provide the freedom to pursue his great interest, natural science. Happily for us, although he had already published his first book – a compilation of the plants of Cambridge – his timing was bad.
Those were tense years within the state religion and the state itself. The English Civil War was ended, but bitter ill-feelings persisted, particularly among those aristocratic, royalist Cavaliers and their supporters who had lost their lands to the regicide Puritan Roundheads (thus creating a new landed middle class). The broad church that Elizabeth I had carefully nurtured through dozens of compromises had been thrust aside in a passion of radical Puritanism. With the restoration of the monarchy (in the form of Charles II) and election of a reactionary, strongly Cavalier Parliament in 1661, the formal process of retribution began. The obvious target was Puritanism itself and legislation, rather than the sword, was the tool. The Act of Uniformity passed by Parliament in 1662 was not just religious; it was also political, restricting the civil and religious freedoms by codifying the nature of the Church of England and its practices and imposing severe sanctions on dissenters. Instead of a broad church that could tolerate a range of ways of practising Christianity, Parliament opted for conformity. Non-conformists became liable to severe sanctions, including prison or transportation.
All clerics and teachers (and most definitely all fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges) were obliged to conform. This meant that they had to worship according to the restored 1549 Book of Common Prayer and swear to the Thirty-nine Articles of 1571 that defined the core doctrines of the Anglican Church. Back in 1643, as a price for their support, Scottish Presbyterians had forced the Roundheads to swear the Solemn League and Covenant which, among other radical measures, abolished bishops and allowed individual congregations to ordain their own priests. The 1662 Act required all clerics of the Church of England to adjure this oath.
Ray had not sworn the oath and had in fact been ordained by a bishop. He was certainly comfortable with the Thirty-nine Articles. But he objected to the coercion; he could not agree that someone who had sworn a sacred oath should be forced to abandon it. At the same time he may already have been restive for greater independence to continue his scientific work. For reasons, particular or principled, that are now unclear, along with 2,000 others he refused to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity.
(#litres_trial_promo) With this, he gave up his fellowship at Cambridge and could no longer teach or preach, although he retained a lay membership of the Anglican Church.
Ray’s father was the village blacksmith at Black Notely in Essex, where Ray was born in 1627. Little else is known about his father, but we know that Ray’s mother was ‘a very religious and good Woman, particularly to her Neighbours that were lame or sick’. Elizabeth Ray was a herbalist healer, which required her to have an excellent working knowledge of botany. From her, Ray acquired a love of plants, of all nature, of enquiry, and above all an appreciation of the value of precise knowledge. For example, a herbal healer must be able instantly to tell the difference between two very similar looking plants, one edible, the other lethal: the wild parsnip and water hemlock. As Nicolas Culpepper described them in his famous 1652 herbal, The English Physitian or an astrologo-physiscal Discourse of the vulgar Herbs of this Nation, the former ‘easeth pains and stitches in the sides, and dissolveth wind both in the stomach and bowels’. The latter is ‘exceeding cold and dangerous, especially to be taken inwardly’.
If we look at Culpepper or another typical herbal of the period, John Gerard’s Historie of Plants (1597),
(#litres_trial_promo) with its delightful prose and 1,800 woodcut illustrations, we can guess that John Ray had considerable command of a wide range of plants and their properties, medical and otherwise, even before he entered Cambridge. A lengthy recuperation from an illness in 1650 seems to have given Ray the leisure to explore the countryside and the world of plants more fully. ‘First I was fascinated and then absorbed by the rich spectacle of the meadows in spring time; then I was filled with wonder and delight by the marvellous shape, colour and structure of the individual plants.’ This soon grew into a systematic study of nature.
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Ray’s first scholarly book was Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam, a synopsis of the plants of Cambridge published in 1660 while he was still at Trinity. The obvious next subject would be a botany of all England, an ambition in which he was encouraged by his former pupil and now close friend, Francis Willoughby. In 1662, in his new freedom, he poured himself into this work. His now independent career eventually took him beyond the countryside around Cambridge to further destinations, both geographically and intellectually, than he might otherwise have imagined. Willoughby, no mean naturalist himself and by now not only a friend but a benefactor, proposed a scientific tour of the Continent and in April 1662 Ray, Willoughby and two other Cambridge friends set off on a three-year journey that would take them through France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Austria and Italy. They collected, they discussed science with all the famous men of Europe, and they made notes and drawings of everything they saw and did. This journey set Ray’s career firmly on a course that would contribute to changing the religious as well as scientific world.
By 1660, the tightly circumscribed view of the richness and goodness of God’s creation as demonstrated by the natural history of Europe had begun to be overshadowed by the abundance of plants and animals brought in from the rest of the world by explorers and merchants. For Ray and his contemporaries across Europe, exploration in every corner of the globe had opened a Pandora’s box of nature. If this was God’s creation, suddenly it had unfathomable, incomprehensible depths of diversity. Noah’s ark could not have held a thousandth part of the living animals and plants with which natural philosophers were confronted, as travellers brought back to Europe every kind of unimagined creature – some real but improbable (like the kangaroo), others (like the mermaids and unicorns) fabulous yet all too believable. In the last half of the seventeenth century it was relatively easy to know at least eighty per cent of the plants of Britain and difficult but not impossible to know sixty per cent of the plants of western Europe. Ray thought that there were some 10,000 kinds of insects, 1,300 other kinds of animals and 20,000 species of plants in the world. By 1750, those estimates were debatable; by 1850 they were laughable. Today the worldwide total of known living species is 1.8 million and rising.
All of nature, whether an English woodland, the patch of Brazilian rainforest where Darwin sat to write his journal, or the biological diversity of a whole continent, is an apparently chaotic arrangement of organisms: flies next to birds next to worms, in trees, over grasses. In terms of ecological interactions – a kind of pattern or machine – they can be shown to make perfect sense. They constitute networks of spatial and temporal relationships behind which lie intertwining chains of cause and effect. With the discovery of order comes the possibility of finding lawfulness. For example, certain kinds of flowers (primroses, daffodils) grow in woodland and they ‘must’ flower before the leaves of the canopy emerge. Such flowers are almost invariably yellow and white, never red. Red flowers occur where levels of incident light are higher and they usually bloom in the open, later. Similarly, if one looks at physical structure (anatomy), which is what anyone sees first, an order appears. Of the birds in Britain or Europe or the world, all the woodpeckers fall together, separately from all the finches, the ducks and so on. It was perfectly obvious to every countryman that Queen Anne’s Lace, cow-parsley, wild parsnip and hemlock were all similar to each other, and different from celandines (which in turn seem closer to buttercups). If this is lawful, we can speculate about the causes.
Before anyone could make any sense out of the confused and confusing mass of new information about nature, the data had to be organised; what, for example, a woodpecker or a celandine is had to be defined. Let us imagine, for a moment, the contents of an automobile-parts warehouse dumped, thousands of different bits and pieces. You have to store them and then use them; the first steps must be to organise everything and put things on shelves where they can readily be found: all the brake pads in one place, the light bulbs in another. But cables would present a problem; whether to put brake cables with the other brake parts or with, say, the accelerator cables. There is probably no one perfect way to organise car parts.
Imagine, then, doing all this without any notion of what a car is. You couldn’t do anything logically unless you knew what the bits were for. You couldn’t discover what the bits were for until you had at least understood them enough to categorise them: a circle of ignorance. This was the problem for the natural philosophers who tried to categorise nature in order to understand it better and, not incidentally, to discover what it told them about the Creator. They had to create systems of classification that discovered patterns out of what would otherwise be a random arrangement of entities. For example, given a disassembled car one would quite easily work out from the external body panels that automobiles are bilaterally symmetrical, with a front and back, left and right. But then the five, rather than four, wheels with road tires would make no sense – that would require a new concept, that of the spare wheel. And the steering wheel would be baffling; one’s natural inclination to classify it with the other wheels would likely slow or even prevent any attempt to discover a different use for it. In the same way, when Aristotle made his first classifications of living things, he separated the whales from the other mammals: logical enough in a way. But he also correctly saw that whales were quite different from fishes, even though both lived in the sea. In any case, we can excuse Aristotle his errors, remembering the wise man who once said ‘never do anything for the first time’.
Ray’s passion to organise the facts of nature was not mere stamp collecting but a search for new, deeper truths. The patterns (classifications) that Ray and those following him established were philosophically powerful. A surprising depth of enquiry into the root causes of things is bound up in the apparently simple statement that the flightless dodo is related to the pigeon rather than the ostrich. Once one has found patterns in the distribution of different kinds of organisms in the world, one is naturally led to queries about the causes of those patterns. If God made them, then the patterns are a reflection of the symmetry and orderliness of God’s perfect mind. The sub-patterns might then be the result of God working out variations of different ideas – the idea of a worm, a woodpecker or a pigeon, for example. But this also depended on one of Ray’s greatest contributions, which was to establish the building bricks, or the least common denominators, out of which the great natural groupings of organisms are made. The early practice and theory of classification honoured the biblical practice of referring to distinct ‘kinds’ of creatures. We now call such entities ‘species’ and we are so used to the idea that each species of animal and plant is different from all others, and has its own name by which we distinguish it from its sisters, that we simply take for granted the concept of species itself, and even that names might be important. This concept of the species (‘species’ is the Greek for ‘kind’) was John Ray’s lasting contribution to natural science.
An instructive by-product of the identification of these patterns comes in the discovery of the very opposite. Because classifications aim to produce rational patterns, they prompt the investigator to query the apparently irrational that is also revealed. For example, many of the ‘natural’ groupings of animals and plants appear to have a geographical cause or at least a geographical consistency. This leads to new questions: Why, for example, are there no penguins in the Arctic, or polar bears in the Antarctic? One could understand why God might have created parrots for the tropics but why are hummingbirds only in the New World? Even more puzzling is the fact that Europe and North America each have eagles, kingfishers and woodpeckers – but different kinds. These inconsistencies (which dogged Darwin in his Cambridge and Beagle days and helped lead him to ideas of evolution) hinted of chance rather than purpose and any time the word ‘chance’ cropped up in 1800 (or 1700) it brought with it the possibility that the pattern was the result of contingencies in the underlying process, and particularly it raised the spectre of the ‘chance collisions of atoms’ and all the other Epicurean and Cartesian Second Causes.
Another difficulty slowly to emerge was that, with the identification of the species as the basic entity in classification, a circular argument had developed. On the one hand, one can only list and systematise discrete and fixed entities. One cannot systematise the constantly changing parts of a cloud or the molecules of steam escaping from a boiling kettle. On the other hand, the very fact of naming and classifying species established and reinforced their fixity. Immutability of species became both a necessary premise and a consequence of the science of classification. The very tools that opened up the world of biological diversity (by making it rational) tended to close off any discussions of its basis in fact (by denying the possibility of change). And of course this was a boon to theology. If they were created by the Almighty, the species of animals and plants on earth must today retain the individuality with which he originally endowed them. If God at creation ‘found them good’, that allowed (if it did not dictate) the logical conclusion that he made them fixed and immutable, unchanging and unchangeable. From then on, there was huge pressure to see species as real and immutable, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Those who argued the other case, as did fledgling evolutionists, a hundred years later were more easily dismissed. Even without attempts to interpret Genesis to that effect, the whole concept of God having created living organisms implied that they were perfect – a reflection of the perfection of God’s mind – and would not change. It must, therefore, have been more than a little disconcerting to the great eighteenth-century botanist Linnaeus and his contemporaries eventually to discover that species were not fixed after all. Indeed, the idea of fixed species flew in the face of common-sense experience with crossbreeding, both artificial and in nature. It was not consistent with the notion of discrete entities that they should be able to interbreed and produce what looked like new kinds of animals and plants. Hybridisation therefore became a worrying problem, both among the new breed of systematists who, like Linnaeus, could look to it as a mechanism by which at least some of the different species might have arisen, and also for those who believed that God had created each species perfectly, fixed for ever in time and space.
Throughout his extremely productive career as a natural scientist, scratching out a living from writing study after scholarly study elucidating the patterns of nature, John Ray remained all the while faithful and true to his religious beliefs, all the time devoted to the central premise that nature was the handiwork of God and that species were immutable. In thirty years of studies and travels he had revolutionised ‘natural science’ (botany and zoology), almost single-handedly moving it from a medieval to modern mode. And, while his religious life had been curtailed by his formal separation from the Church, his instincts as a teacher and preacher remained. Relatively late in his career he turned back to write out his philosophy as a Christian and a scientist. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation,45
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