The Watch on the Heath: Science and Religion before Darwin. Keith Thomson
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.30
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
‘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