The Watch on the Heath: Science and Religion before Darwin. Keith Thomson
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.27
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.28
‘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.29 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.