Introduction

During their history, the natural sciences have been invested with religious meaning, with antireligious implications and, in many contexts, with no religious significance at all. The object of this book is to offer some insight into the connections that have been made between statements about nature and statements about God. As we noted in the introduction, however, problems arise as soon as one enquires about the relationship between “science” and “religion” in the past. Not only have the boundaries between them shifted with time, but to abstract them from their historical contexts can lead to artificiality as well as anachronism.

How, for example, do we deal with that late nineteenth-century evolutionist Henry Drummond, who insisted that it was wrong to speak of reconciling Christianity with evolution since the two were one? In a glowing vision of The ascent of man (1894), Drummond acknowledged the Darwinian struggle for life, but he also referred to a struggle for the life of others. The former was essential to the evolutionary process, as individuals competed for resources. But, Drummond argued, so too was the latter: Once the human mind had evolved, self-sacrifice, cooperation, and maternal love would each contribute to the survival of societies in which those virtues were encouraged. Christianity and evolution were ultimately one because both denoted a method of creation; both had as their object the making of more perfect beings. Because altruistic love was germane to both, he could argue for a perfect union. Evolution embraced progress in spirit as well as in matter.

Introduction

The principal aim of this book has been to reveal something of the complexity of the relationship between science and religion as they have interacted in the past. Popular generalizations about that relationship, whether couched in terms of war or peace, simply do not stand up to serious investigation. There is no such thing as the relationship between science and religion. It is what different individuals and communities have made of it in a plethora of different contexts. Not only has the problematic interface between them shifted over time, but there is also a high degree of artificiality in abstracting the science and the religion of earlier centuries to see how they were related. As we saw in the opening chapters, part of what was meant by natural philosophy in the seventeenth century involved a discussion of God’s relationship to nature. Religious beliefs could operate within science, providing presupposition and sanction as well as regulating the discussion of method. They also informed attitudes toward new conceptions of nature, influencing the process of theory selection. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, despite vigorous attempts to separate scientific and religious discourse, the meaning attributed to scientific innovations continued to be reflected in the often conflicting social, religious, and political uses to which they were put. Part of the meaning of Darwin’s theory for T. H. Huxley lay in its potency as an antidote to what he saw as the poison of Roman Catholicism.

At first sight, this complicated story would seem to have reached a much simplified conclusion in the twentieth century. With the emergence of more pragmatic conceptions of truth, such as we have just observed in William James, it has been much easier to insist on the mutual irrelevance of scientific and religious discourse – each reflecting distinct practices and preoccupations. Scholars who have followed Wittgenstein in analyzing the functions of language have recognized the several levels on which it may operate: The world may be described in many different ways, without any one having to be reduced to another. On such a view it is possible, in principle, for science and religion to coexist without mutual interference.

The Challenge of Darwinism

Charles Darwin concluded his Origin of species (1859) with the proclamation that there was grandeur in his view of life. From a simple beginning, in which living powers had been “breathed into” a few forms or even one, the most beautiful and wonderful organisms had evolved. Because he used that Old Testament metaphor, and because he also referred to “laws impressed upon matter by the Creator,” it was possible to read into his conclusion a set of meanings and values associated with a biblical religion. His private correspondence suggests that this had not been his intention. He confided to the botanist J. D. Hooker that he had long regretted having truckled to public opinion by using the biblical term of creation, by which he had really meant “appeared by some wholly unknown process.” It was not that he had deliberately concealed an underlying atheism. Rather, in retrospect, he saw that he had invited the attribution of a particular meaning to his science with which he was uncomfortable – especially when writing to sterner naturalists than himself.

Darwin’s unease raises a point of general significance. Debates that have so often been interpreted in terms of the “conflict between science and religion” turn out, on closer inspection, to be debates in which rival claims are made for the “correct” meaning to be attached to scientific theories. Many of those who, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had constructed their distinctive accounts of the earth’s history felt themselves to be defending a particular set of social and religious values that they perceived to be under threat from the cosmologies of their opponents. During the period through which Darwin worked on his evolutionary theory there had, however, been signs of a shift in sensibility, with scientists themselves wishing to exclude cosmological debate from the practice of science. Charles Lyell, for example, had argued that geology would only become a science when it disentangled itself from biblical precepts, narrowed its scope to the reconstruction of the past in terms of forces known in the present, and deliberately excluded speculation about origins, purposes, and ultimate meanings. Darwin, too, came to share this view. There were questions that lay beyond the purview of current science. To admit them would be to reintroduce metaphysical and theological issues alien to the quest for positive scientific knowledge.

Introduction

Allied with Francis Bacon’s proposal that a properly organized and properly conducted science could increase the power of the English state was his observation that a new vitality in the sciences had coincided with the Protestant Reformation:

This was, of course, a Protestant view of the matter. But it raises the question whether a celebration of the sciences might have been one means of differentiating Protestant cultural values from those of Roman Catholicism. And if – as many historians have argued – there were connections between Protestantism, capitalism, and the rise of science, we have to ask what form these connections took. If the sciences were less subordinate to theology at the time of Newton than at the time of Copernicus, had the Reformation in religion created favorable conditions for a reformation in science?

Introduction

In his frontispiece to Gideon Mantell’s Wonders of geology (1838), the painter John Martin conjured up a terrifying picture of ferocious dinosaurs fighting each other in an ancient, prehuman, and tormented world. It was a far cry from the benign world of eighteenth-century natural theology, a nightmare that also shrieked against a straight reading of Genesis where the implication was that pain and death had not entered the world until Adam’s Fall. The integration of concepts drawn from astronomy, geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology was to result in reconstructions of the past, which not only transformed perceptions of man’s place in nature, but also contributed their own leaven to the growth of biblical criticism. And, irrespective of their implications for natural and revealed theology, the historical sciences could be perplexing, even wounding, to popular belief. Harmonious images of nature were shattered by new discords to which Cuvier had drawn attention in his Preliminary discourse (1812). Life on earth had often been disturbed by calamitous events, which, in the beginning, had penetrated the very depths of the earth’s crust. Countless beings had been the victims of these upheavals – some annihilated by floods, others perishing of thirst as the seabed suddenly rose. Entire species had vanished forever, leaving their enigmatic traces.

No wonder John Ruskin was to wish he could escape the din of the geologist’s hammer. No wonder the poet Tennyson associated the historical sciences with a sense of deprivation. Faced with the loss of a dear one, there had always been the consolation that nature, though careless of the individual, was careful of the type. But if entire species had vanished, even that solace was denied. No wonder the artist William Dyce, in his painting of Pegwell Bay (1858), chose to depict the futility of human life against the gloomy backdrop of comet and cliff, each of which spoke of aeons of time, dwarfing one’s ephemeral existence into insignificance. And such melancholy thoughts as these were often as nothing compared with the revulsion experienced by those who shared Ruskin’s horror of “filthy heraldries which record the relation of humanity to the ascidian and the crocodile.”

Introduction

In 1802 there appeared what was to be one of the most popular works of philosophical theology in the English language: William Paley’s Natural theology. Its author, an Anglican priest, claimed that there was proof of the unity of God. It came from the “uniformity of plan observable in the universe.” This uniformity was both assumed and confirmed by scientific inquiry. Reaffirming a Newtonian argument for the religious utility of science, Paley underlined his point: “One principle of gravitation causes a stone to drop toward the earth and the moon to wheel round it. One law of attraction carries all the different planets about the sun.” But Paley’s argument was more ambitious than this. It aimed to establish a God with personality – one whose goodness, for example, could be deduced from the fact that, to the necessity of eating food, He had superadded pleasure. Paley was particularly struck by the exquisite mechanisms discernible in the structure of living organisms. The human eye, for example, was so remarkable an instrument that it was as certain it had been made for vision as it was that the telescope had been made for assisting it.

Paley’s argument, that every part of every organism had been meticulously designed for its function, was not merely a piece of academic philosophy. It defined a way of looking at the world that was probably shared by the majority of his contemporaries. Some of his examples were presented in ways that strike us as decidedly quaint. So perfectly designed was the human epiglottis that no alderman had ever choked at a feast! His statement that “it is a happy world, after all,” may have alienated those less privileged than himself. Yet, despite the threat to established Christianity from deism, materialism, and agnosticism, the union between science and religion forged by arguments from design proved remarkably resilient. Hume may have emasculated the argument for the benefit of fellow skeptics; but the opinion of his fellow Scotsman Thomas Reid (1710–96) must also be taken into account. According to Reid, the design argument had always made the strongest impression on thinking minds. With the advance of scientific knowledge, it had gained in strength. Paley exuded that same confidence.

Introduction: A Historical Paradox

In 1704 a contributor to a French learned journal observed that a new style of scientific explanation had become all the rage. One heard of nothing else but mechanistic physics. Nor was the fashion confined to savants. Ladies familiar with the philosophy of Descartes would blithely reduce animals to machinery. “Please do not bring a dog for Pauline,” a certain Mme. de Grignan begged in 1690: “We want only rational creatures here, and belonging to the sect we belong to we refuse to burden ourselves with these machines.” The universe has become so mechanical, Fontenelle announced in 1686, that one might almost be ashamed of it.

This mechanization of the natural world became such a feature of late seventeenth-century science that historians have sometimes spoken of the death of nature, as organic analogies were displaced by images of clockwork. The impact of mechanical analogies varied from science to science, often proving premature in the study of living systems. In the long run, however, there was scarcely any branch of science that was not affected. Despite the revolution in physics, which in our own century has made the image of a rigidly deterministic universe less secure, the assimilation of natural processes to machinery continues to be a conspicuous feature of scientific investigation. The legacy of the seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy is apparent in such terms as genetic engineering and in the description of computers capable of simulating aspects of human intelligence.

Introduction: The Assault on Established Christianity

In his Dictionary of chemistry (1789), the entrepreneur James Keir (1735–1828) reported that a new spirit was abroad: “the diffusion of a general knowledge, and of a taste for science, over all the classes of men, in every nation of Europe.” Even allowing for exaggeration, that growing appetite for science contrasts with the leaner fortunes of certain religious institutions. Fifty years earlier in England it had not been uncommon to hear Anglican clergy bewailing a widespread notion that Christianity had been discredited. The contrast is striking. Between 1660 and 1793 the scientific world established itself with more than seventy official scientific societies (and almost as many private ones) in urban centers as far removed as St. Petersburg and Philadelphia. In France alone there were thirty. The established churches, however, often perceived themselves to be in danger, both from dissenting religious movements and from a ground swell of rationalism and ridicule. But what connections were there between the popularization of science and rationalist movements that threw Christian theologians on the defense? In this chapter, which is focused on the eighteenth century, we aim to find out.

Attacks on the power of the Christian churches, and of the Roman Catholic Church in particular, were launched by deists, who denied the authority of doctrines supposedly derived from revelation; by materialists, who denied a duality between matter and spirit; and by agnostics, who, like David Hume (1711–76), argued that it was impossible to know anything about the nature of God that need affect human conduct. The extent to which each of these critiques drew on the resources of science will be our principal concern.

In a classic discussion of the origins of modern science, the historian Herbert Butterfield drew a much-quoted parallel. Such was the impact of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution that the only landmark with which it could be compared was the rise of Christianity. In shaping the values of Western societies, science and the Christian religion had each played a preeminent part and made a lasting impression. Exaggerated or not, such comparisons raise an obvious question. What was the relationship between these powerful cultural forces? Were they complementary in their effects, or were they antagonistic? Did religious movements assist the emergence of the scientific movement, or was there a power struggle from the start? Were scientific and religious beliefs constantly at variance, or were they perhaps more commonly integrated, both by clergy and by practicing men of science? How has the relationship changed over time?

Such questions are easier to formulate than to answer. Since the seventeenth century every generation has taken a view on their importance without, however, reaching any consensus as to how they should be answered. Writing some sixty years ago, the philosopher A. N. Whitehead considered that the future course of history would depend on the decision of his generation as to the proper relations between science and religion – so powerful were the religious symbols through which men and women conferred meaning on their lives, and so powerful the scientific models through which they could manipulate their environment. Because every generation has reappraised the issues, if not always with the same sense of urgency, there has been no shortage of opinion as to what that proper relationship should be.

Introduction

In the creation of our modern world-view, few periods of Western history have been as decisive as the hundred fifty years that followed the publication, in 1543, of Copernicus’s sun-centered astronomy. During that period, what had been an earth-centered cosmos exploded into an infinite universe. The achievements in this age of genius have become legendary. In the physical sciences alone, there were momentous changes. When Kepler refined the Copernican system, he broke with centuries of tradition in suggesting that the planets moved in ellipses, not in circles. In his own colorful expression, he had laid a monstrous egg. Through his telescope Galileo observed more things in the heavens than had ever been dreamed of: moons of Jupiter and myriads of stars invisible to the naked eye. At a more technical level, the motion of bodies was subjected to mathematical analysis, concepts of inertia were formulated, and, as a fitting climax, Newton formulated his inverse-square law for gravity, which explained the planetary orbits. In the words of his contemporary Edmond Halley, he had penetrated the secret mansions of the gods.

We continue to speak of a scientific revolution because earlier systems of belief were emphatically overthrown. In the philosophy of Aristotle, which had dominated the intellectual life of Europe since the thirteenth century, there had been a clear division in the cosmos between the perfect spheres beyond the moon and the corrupt sublunar sphere at the center of which stood the earth. By the end of the seventeenth century, in Newton’s science, the terms of reference had changed. There was now a universal law of gravitation. Because it applied to all bodies everywhere, the universe had at last become a universe. To divide it into two parts, heaven and earth, might still be admissible, as it was for Newton, when discussing theological and political symbolism. But the closed, partitioned, and spherical cosmos had had its day.