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

       CHAPTER FOUR John Ray: Founding Father

      ‘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’.³⁵ 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.’³⁶ 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.’³⁷ 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.’³⁸

      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)³⁹ or Bernard Nieuwentyt (The Religious Philosopher, or the Right Use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator, 1709),⁴⁰ 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?’⁴¹ 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