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

A hundred years later, the legacy of this free thinking made for a particularly dangerous time for the established Church of England. The Church was part and parcel, warp and weft, of the oligarchy; any threat to it threatened the very fabric of society. We must also remember that in 1802, Britain was at war with France. The threats from across the English Channel were not just the liberal intellectual challenges of the free thinking French Enlightenment, from Descartes and Buffon to Rousseau and Condorcet, but also the political challenges of the French Revolution, the material horrors of the Terror, and now the wars being waged by Napoleon. Riot and revolution, free thinking and self-improvement, tyranny, war and savagery were everywhere. One would readily be forgiven for wondering whether all this modernity was a good thing.

Paley therefore did not set out to write his proof of the existence and attributes of God in a world of certainty. There were enemies from without to be countered: materialist and rationalist enemies of the ineffable, scientists and philosophers from Britain and the Continent. And there were enemies from within: religion was beset by complex philosophical debates that threatened the whole basis of belief. Throughout it all, God’s purpose was becoming harder to read, certainly more difficult to proclaim. At the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment the problem had been to find a secure place for science in a religious world; by the end, the problem was exactly the opposite: if the world operates through Second Causes, where was the role of God? One solution was to insist on the literal truth of the biblical story of creation: but that necessarily represented a denial of the discoveries of science about the age of the earth (and universe) and the role of change.

Two issues, above all others, motivated William Paley: the biting scepticism of the philosophers John Locke and David Hume, and the nagging threat of a theory of matter consisting of space and atoms in random motion. By 1800 such theories had long since spawned versions of the ultimate atheism: evolution. Scepticism could be countered with logical argument, but a rival explanatory theory – especially a godless theory like atomism – was an even greater threat. We can measure the challenge that a self-ordering world, operating on independent laws and motions – and, above all, on chance – posed to received religion by the bitter rhetoric of the defenders of the orthodox. We can gauge how long-standing this threat had been – since Descartes at least – by the furious sarcasm of the Reverend Ralph Cudworth, Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge and Master of Christ’s College from 1654. Cudworth belonged to an old school of Platonist philosophers who were opposed to Descartes and any kind of empiricism. In a massive work attacking a range of heresies in splendid rhetoric he explained the difference between Epicurean views (‘Atomick Atheists’) and the arriviste hybrid theory of Descartes (‘mechanick Theists’) that attempted to marry atoms, space and chance to a godly view of creation. And dismissed them both:

God in the mean time standing by as an Idle Spectator of this Lusus Atomorum , this sportful dance of Atoms, and of the various results thereof. Nay these mechanick Theists have here quite outstripped the Atomick Atheists themselves, they being much more extravagant than ever those were. For the professed Atheists durst never venture to affirm that this regular Systeme of things resulted from the fortuitous motions of Atoms at the very first, before they had for a long time together produced many other inept Combinations , or aggregate Forms of particular things and nonsensical Systems of the whole, and they suppose also that the regularity of things in this world would not always continue such neither, but that some time or other Confusion and Disorder will break in again … But our mechanick Theists will have their Atoms never so much as once to have fumbled in these their motions, nor to have produced any inept System or incongruous forms at all, but from the very first all along to have taken up their places and ranged themselves so orderly, methodically and directly; as that they could not possibly have done it better, had they been directed by the most perfect Wisdom. 34

Chance and design are like oil and water, or perhaps oil and fire. Cudworth continued more soberly:

There is no Middle betwixt these Two; but all things must either spring from a God , or Matter ; Then this is also a Demonstration of the Truth of Theism , by Deduction to Impossible : Either there is a God, or else all things are derived from Dead and Senseless Matter ; but this Latter is Impossible; Therefore a God. Nonetheless, that the Existence of a God , may be further Directly Proved also from the Same Principle, rightly understood. Nothing out of Nothing Causally , or Nothing Caused by Nothing , neither Efficiently nor Materially.

To which a natural theologian could only add; Amen.

The popularity of the argument from design, and the extraordinary success of Paley’s Natural Theology , gave wavering Christians a better answer than Cudworth’s to the threats of philosophers (deist and atheist) who challenged the basis of Christian beliefs. By dealing only with existence of God , without depending on assertions of the authority of God’s revelations (in the Bible and in miracles), Paley made an argument for the deist doubter and at the same time created (or at least strengthened) a philosophical context within which contemporary scientists could allay their religious doubts and make a space for their discoveries within orthodoxy. Although not universally admired by those theologians who placed their prime emphasis on revelation, the timeless appeal of the argument from design is shown in the fact that these same threats persist in even more pressing forms today, when our understanding of science has almost limitlessly expanded the realm of Second Causes and a materialist society has put ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ onto the defensive.

Francis Bacon had written, in his essay Of Atheism : ‘A little philosophy makes men atheists: a great deal reconciles them to religion.’ By Paley’s time, the reverse seemed true. Conventional religious beliefs could be upheld only if one did not probe too far into their philosophical underpinnings. Paley needed to change all that. He knew that he had the gift of reasoning and persuading. And so he set out his proof of God with all the urgency and dedication of a Crusader knight taking arms in defence of Jerusalem. The battleground would have to be all of science and philosophy. In what follows, we must insist on one caveat: it is not fair to judge Paley’s evidence (or Cudworth’s vitriol) by what we know now. It is fair to judge his conclusions by such a standard, however, if his arguments are to have any long-standing merit.

‘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 ?’