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

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 Now too many of the central, commonsensical dogmas of religion had been replaced by theories that were not just difficult to understand and to prove, but also challenged the central core of established belief.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. 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. 30