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

Newton’s emphasis on matter and motion related centrally to the Epicurean school and their theories of the nature of matter itself. These ideas had been revised and extended in more modern times by the great French philosopher Descartes (René des Cartes, 1596–1650) whose physical theories Newton in turn largely supplanted. Beyond Galileo’s collision with the Inquisition, if any one man could be said to have started the fields of science and religion on their course of conflict (or perhaps simply of divergence), it is Descartes. By sheer force of intellect and powerful original thought, he created a whole new approach to philosophy, brilliantly turning upside down the old, classical authorities to which the Church turned for support during the Middle Ages. Born in France and educated at the Jesuit college at La Fleche in Anjou, Descartes was Galileo’s younger contemporary and a philosopher who wrote about everything from pure mathematics to human physiology, from the origins of the solar system to the fundamentals of human understanding. All his philosophy started with rejection of previous authority, none of which could be as reliable as one’s own senses and intuition. Every schoolchild knows (or should know) his dictum: ‘Cogito, ergo sum.’ These three words, translated as ‘I think, therefore I am,’ represent his last resort after having rejected everything else in an attempt to find an incontrovertible reality – a truth – upon which to base a philosophical system.

The rigour of his methods was grounded first in mathematics: ‘Those who are seeing the strict way of truth should not trouble themselves about any object concerning which they cannot have a certainty equal to arithmetical or geometrical demonstration.’ Galileo, in one of his most famous passages, had put things even more eloquently: ‘Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our gaze – I mean the universe – but we cannot understand if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in the mathematical language … without the help of which it is impossible to conceive a single word of it, and without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.’ 22

As a young man Descartes wandered the capitals of Europe before settling in Holland in 1628. From the beginning he thought intensely about epistemology: the question of how we know, and especially how we can find ultimate, objective ways of knowing what is right and true. Again this turns on his basic premise, ‘Cogito, ergo sum.’ In his Meditations he turned this into a long argument for why God must exist, why God is perfect, and why God has made man in his own image. In considering the workings of the human body, he drew a firm line between animals and ourselves. Humans alone have a dual nature – a material body and an immaterial soul – and that distinguishes us from the rest of creation. This was a distinction that carried far into the nineteenth century even as people began to discover the workings of the nerve impulse and the brain and as they delved into the nature of consciousness; until they began to find that the old line between animals and humans was as blurred in this regard as in every other. Descartes’ physics of the universe was based on the idea that the planets were suspended in a total void and that their motions described a series of vortices. Like Newton’s mathematics of forces acting in straight lines, which replaced them as a description of the cosmos, vortices had a strong metaphorical as well as actual ring to them. But Descartes did not believe that bodies could influence each other except when in contact. By dismissing ‘action at a distance’, and therefore phenomena such as gravity, while having moved ideas forward mightily, he failed to create a truly modern physics.

In his cosmology, Descartes began with an Epicurean physics, seeing the world arising out of atoms in motion. Democritos ( c . 460–371 BC), in perhaps one of the most prescient pieces of pure intellect, had taught that: ‘Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinions.’ In this atomic theory, all the various kinds of matter differ only in the size, shape and motion of their infinitesimally small atomic constituents. In Descartes’ atomic-deist theories, creation was originally a series of events during which order condensed out of this random atomic behaviour. All matter – whether rocks, trees or monkeys – is merely the combinations of these atoms churning through space, driven by chance. God then had been relegated to the maker of the atoms and the formulator of the broad rules of their motion. By Paley’s time, despite the failure of the theory of vortices, Descartes was popular with deist scientists trying to find new truths about the cosmos in the spirit of the Enlightenment and Age of Reason, but was dismissed by traditional theologians as one of the ‘ancient sceptics who have nothing to set against a designing Deity, but the obscure omnipotency of chance, and the experimental combinations of a chaos of restless atoms’.

In parallel with such philosophical approaches to knowledge itself and new theories about the very state of matter, a fresh style of experimental science flowered in the modern intellectual environment. Deep thought and practical experimentation fed off each other; as one scholar probed into how we know, another tinkered with new devices for observation and discovery. One man in particular helped launch this empirical renaissance. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in his Advancement of Learning of 1605 and Novum Organum (1620), laid out a template for science to proceed by the accumulation of facts and by the framing of rational, testable hypotheses. This empirical approach was based on the revolutionary notion that truths about the material world should be discovered rationally through experiment, observation and analysis rather than derived from a set of classical philosophical abstractions or presented as a matter of divine revelation. In Novum Organum he wrote: ‘There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axiom … The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.’

Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the new spirit of empiricism that flourished in the second half of the seventeenth century than the experiments of Robert Boyle and his colleague Robert Hooke, two of the most brilliant natural philosophers of their age, who worked together as equals but in origins and personal style were as different as they could be. This was the first generation of natural philosophers who could be considered ‘scientists’ as we understand the word. The Honourable Robert Boyle was the wealthy son of the even more wealthy 1st Earl of Cork; Hooke came from a family of more modest means: his father was a parson who died young. Boyle, educated at Eton, did not attend university. From an early age he had been an avid reader and after schooling at Eton was tutored privately, first in England and then, from the age of fourteen, in Geneva. Back in England at eighteen, he took up chemistry and then settled in Oxford where he built a laboratory and hired the young Hooke to assist him. In pictures painted in his middle age, he looks a magnificent rich dandy, tall, haughty and remote, but in reality he was a frail man, often ill, with a stammer and a mild, kind, generous and refined intellect, to whom many potential honours, including a peerage, were offered. After leaving Oxford for London, in part to take a greater role in the Royal Society, his intellectual interests ranged well beyond the laboratory to philosophy and particularly to the promotion of religion. If anyone of his age had the right to be called a true philosopher of nature, it was Boyle. He never married but lived most of his adult life with his sister Lady Ranelagh. When she died in 1691, he died just a week later.