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

The odd thing is that William Paley was not really a ‘scientist’ (a natural philosopher). He was not known as a naturalist, he did not collect insects or fossils as did so many of his colleagues, although he very much enjoyed angling. Although he had no training or experience in medicine, astronomy, chemistry or geology, the task he set himself was to turn the ploughshares of science into swords of religion. His dilemma, brilliantly resolved, was to find a way to use the contemporary fashion for rationality and science to make a case for God, when many scholars thought that philosophy and discovery were pointing in the opposite direction. He had not just to reconcile science and religion, but to use science to support, indeed to confirm, a belief in God; and not in some rearguard action, but a major offensive. For Paley, there was no luxury of time, however. Instead, there was a terrible urgency; he had to turn the scientists and philosophers against themselves before they could overwhelm his world. He had to affirm the existence of the Creator without getting caught up in contemporary arguments about biblical authority and the literal truth of every word of the book of Genesis. And he had to take on some of the greatest philosophers of the age.

Although they ended up on opposite sides of the issues of God, creation and life, Paley (in 1802) and Charles Darwin (starting around 1838) had to confront very similar problems. Both suffered the disadvantage of trying to make an incontrovertible case without the kind of irrefutable empirical evidence we usually describe as a ‘smoking gun’. They had to convince by argument because they could not ‘prove’, and therein lies a restatement of Paley’s dilemma: were his arguments founded on scientific fact or pious belief? Were they the long-sought-after proofs or only the familiar old assertions and appeals to faith? Darwin, in turn, could describe natural selection but no one had seen the origin of a new species actually happen. And for both men, the growth of scientific explanations of material phenomena conflicted directly with established beliefs and the teaching of the Church. For Darwin, having at least started to train for the Church, the burden of his discoveries was so great that it made him a physical invalid. He knew the consequences of his theory and the effect it would have on religion and thus the very fabric of society. It would set people against each other; it would set him against his own wife. If his theory proved too revolutionary, it would be rejected out of hand. He would become an outcast and all his efforts would be for nought. He delayed publication for more than twenty years until he thought the ground had been sufficiently prepared for his radical theory of an evolutionary mechanism that would cut the intellectual ground from under the feet of all the natural theologians.

Perhaps, then, there is a nice irony in the fact that when he went up to Cambridge and reported to the porter’s lodge just inside that great gate, the young Charles Darwin was assigned to the same rooms in Christ’s College that Paley had lived in seventy years before.

‘If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, “Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?” No. “Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence?” No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.’

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , 1748

‘No man’s knowledge can go beyond his experience.’

John Locke, Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding , 1690

Today we live – all too evidently sometimes – in an age of science. Science and its handmaiden, technology, shape every aspect of our lives. We might even envy people like Paley for having lived in much simpler times. But the turn of the nineteenth century was an immensely exciting time when both philosophy and science were stamping their mark on a broader cross-section of society than at any time since the Greeks. Already, the previous hundred years had been an age of discovery and experiment in everything from agriculture, blood transfusion and the discovery of oxygen, to inoculations against small pox, the first steam-powered carriages, and even calculating machines. People could now fly through the air in the Mongolfier brothers’ hot-air balloons. Meanwhile, Britain’s great mechanised mills (dark and Satanic) had begun to change the balance between countryside and town, agriculture and industry, self-sufficiency and reliance. In the process, both prosperity and poverty grew apace.

At its simplest, science (which in Paley’s time was called natural philosophy) is an accumulation of wisdom and argument, facts and hypotheses, about what is. More fundamentally, science is about discovering causes: the why and how of the knowable world. Above all, science seeks explanations that can be expressed in terms of universal laws and therefore establishes a world of lawful, predictable behaviour. Sometimes we harbour the fallacy put about by scientists in the 1960s and 1970s that science (as expressed in today’s extreme scientism) provides all the answers, and that it delivers certainty. Quite to the contrary, under science little stays the same. That is why it is so threatening to religious belief and socio-political authority. Science produces facts and laws but at its heart are questioning, testing and experiment, finding new explanations for old phenomena, finding new phenomena for old explanations, changing ideas and changing certainties. Religion, in contrast, is principally built upon certainties, authority and stability. ‘A mighty fortress is our God’ – a fortress against the surges of change that science and philosophy and, above all, independent thinking generate. Of course, ‘religion’, perhaps especially the Christian religion, is no monolith, any more than is ‘science’. We use the words as shorthand for two kinds of intellectual and personal ‘systems’. As a practice conducted by humans both may often fall short of the ideal and for the last 250 years they have been more opposed to each other than united.

In principle, science owes allegiance to no higher authority; as a wind of change, it bloweth where it listeth. Science is equally as dangerous for pointing out what is still unknown as it is for showing us new reliable facts. Science begets change and change always threatens the status quo ante , whether in rival fields within science or in religion. But orthodoxy, whether religious or political (or indeed scientific), depends upon commonly received opinions and often makes it heretical or treasonous to think otherwise. For all its innate conservatism, science always produces change. No scientist ever became famous for reporting that what we knew in 1870 or 1940 was best.

William Paley did not reveal what doubts he might have felt in the privacy of his study, but it seems unlikely that someone so well versed in science and so ready to do battle with the philosophical giants of his age could have failed to stare up at the stars in quiet moments with a niggling doubt about who else was out there. He would surely have pondered how to explain to his congregation that even something as reliable as the sun was not what it seemed. That the sun appears to orbit around the earth, disappearing each night and coming back up on the other side each morning, was one of the very first apparently reliable observations humans made about the universe we inhabit. It is far more ‘obvious’ than the notion that the earth is flat, for one can stand at the ocean-side and see that the horizon curves, and every sailor knows that when a ship appears from over the horizon, the tip of its mast shows before the hull. But nothing seemed more certain than the sun’s movement and, unsurprisingly, the Bible is unequivocal about the fact that it ‘goeth forth in his might’ (Judges 5:30). That it was the sun moving, not the earth, was surely also explicit in the biblical story that, at Joshua’s request, God made the sun stand still (Joshua 10:12–14). For Isaiah, God even made the sun move ‘ten degrees backward’ (II Kings 20:11).