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‘There are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, 5

If the Church found itself besieged by the discoveries of science, it found little support from metaphysics either, starting with Descartes, whose philosophy demanded new rigour and personal judgement in the search for proofs of what we know. In such a philosophy, mysteries like faith and revelation are unreliable guides to the truth. A very similar line was argued by John Locke (1632–1704) who, in his Essay on Human Understanding, also explored the very nature of knowledge. To what extent does reality exist outside of our perception of it? Knowledge involves the relations of ideas, but ideas do not exist outside of the mind and experience. Does the mind therefore contribute to the reality of things, or in fact remove them further from reality? In fact, Locke becomes rather confusing on the subject of matter, or substance, which in philosophical terms was recognised through its three essential properties of solidity, extension (property of occupying space) and action (motion). Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753), on the other hand, in his ‘immaterial hypothesis’, was quite emphatic on this subject: ‘No matter exists except in our perception.’ Other than our own persons, ‘all other things are not so much existences as manners of the existence of persons’. The great Dr Johnson (1709–1784), predictably enough, thought that the idea of the non-existence of matter was nonsense. ‘I refute it thus,’ he exclaimed, kicking at a stone (and giving it a distinctly Newtonian acceleration).

When John Locke taught that ‘Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything,’ he (along with continental philosophers such as Spinoza, Leibnitz and Gassendi) put his seal on the Age of Reason, and at the same time laid down a challenge. His philosophical system has no room for blind faith. ‘Faith is nothing but a firm assent of the mind: which, if it be regulated, as is our duty, cannot be afforded to anything but upon good reason … He that believes without having any reason for believing, may be in love with his own fancies; but neither seeks truth as he ought, nor pays the obedience due to his maker.’ In that case, a bishop’s (or a pope’s) say-so was definitely not a sufficient reason for believing anything. And nowhere was any philosophy more threatening than when it turned a hard-edged logic and the disciplined, unforgiving eye of reason onto the Bible itself, and particularly onto the miracles – those supernatural episodes in the life of Christ and the saints that form the very basis of Christian revelation. As Paley insisted in Evidences, for the Church the miracles are God’s way of vouchsafing to his people the authority of his purposes for them. Otherwise, God is materially unknowable; in all normal respects the Holiest of the Holy Ones is hidden from the people. The ‘breath’ and ‘hand’ of God are figurative, not literal. The special exceptions take the form of paranormal phenomena – a burning bush, or the sun standing still or moving backwards, for example. Later, he sent his Son to save the world, and the miracles of the New Testament (starting with the immaculate conception – ‘for behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear an son’ – and proceeding through the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the feeding of the five thousand, and ending with the Resurrection itself) are his way of demonstrating the Saviour’s bona fides. But throughout the eighteenth century, philosophers had secretly or openly questioned the reality of miracles, requiring that the miracles of Christ either be explained in material, scientifically understandable, terms or rejected (the raising of Lazarus, for example, looks exactly like an example of cardiopulmonary resuscitation).

One of the great joys of the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment was the freedom philosophers, scholars and ordinary people acquired to think for themselves. Hence the search for proofs of the unprovable, for the qualities of the ineffable, and for facts about the unknowable. Today we take this freedom for granted, and equally cheerfully slide over some deep philosophical difficulties. Not so for the Scottish philosopher David Hume, whose own epistemology has been no less influential than that of Descartes and Locke in shaping Western thought. Much of Hume’s philosophical writings are necessarily deep and abstract, but others are set in more familiar terms and deal with readily appreciated (if still dangerous) questions.

Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 and had early trained for the law – a subject that appealed to him about as much as medicine at Edinburgh later attracted Charles Darwin. His passion was for a wide learning based in philosophy, starting with the classics of Cicero and Virgil. He had been a delicate young man, in large part because of his intense studying and, evidently, hypochondria. To help recover from a depression or mental breakdown, he travelled to France, living as frugally as possible, and eventually spent two years at La Fleche in Anjou where he had access to the library of the Jesuit college. It was here that he wrote his monumental work, A Treatise of Human Nature (published between 1739 and 1740). At the college, the same institution where Descartes had studied, he heard a Jesuit teacher explaining a recent ‘miracle’ and immediately wrote out a rebuttal of the whole concept. For Hume, the miracles reported in the New Testament were ‘a contest of opposites … that is to say, a question whether it be more impossible that the miracle be true, or the testimony real’. For its day, that was almost as heretical as the present-day argument that some, if not all, of the miracles are mere fictions, constructed as a mythology around which to unite the fledgling first-century Christian Church.

Hume aimed to elevate moral philosophy to a science following the examples of Bacon and Newton in natural philosophy. A sceptic, he lost his faith very early, perhaps when a student at Edinburgh. The Treatise of Human Nature was the foundation of his later fame, even though the book earned little for him at first; in fact it was a commercial failure and a bitter disappointment, Hume wryly complaining that it ‘fell still-borne from the press’. Needing to earn a better living than his pen afforded, he spent a curious period first as a tutor to the insane son of the Marquis of Annandale and then as secretary and judge-advocate to General St Clair on an expedition against the French at Port Lorient, Guernsey, at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. While now relatively hale and hearty, the life of a man of action scarcely suited him, but attempts to procure a more suitable position, a chair at Glasgow then one at Edinburgh, failed.

Following the death of his mother he returned to the family home in Scotland and began a period of great productivity, during which, in 1751, he wrote two works that had special bearing on an evolving, perhaps revolutionised, view of religion. In his Natural History of Religion (1757) and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (only published after his death in 1779)³¹ he used all his powers of reason and argument to test the case for traditional revealed religion as opposed to the deist position, that everything that was important about religion could be (must be) derived by reason alone. In the Dialogues Hume carefully covered his tracks by laying out his arguments in the form of a conversation among three different philosophers. This was the familiar philosopher’s device that Galileo used in his Dialogue concerning the two major world systems (1632) – without fooling the Inquisition. Both Galileo and Hume were following the example of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, or On the Nature of the Gods (77 BC), which is set as a debate among Epicurean, Stoic and Academic philosophers.

Hume’s Dialogues did its damage not so much in the conclusions it reached as in daring to ask the awkward questions: What do we know that is true and independently verifiable about God, as opposed to what we are told? How do we know? Hume even asked the evolutionary question: Is it not more logical to assume that complex living creatures had their origins in simpler ones than via some miraculous creation by an infinitely powerful, but nonetheless unknowable, designing intelligence? Hume challenged everyone who thought they could find a rational basis for understanding God. He expressed the problem very simply: If we had never thought about there being a God in the first place, would objective, rational investigation and argument necessarily uncover his existence and define his nature? If we are already sure that God exists, it is not difficult to find seemingly rational arguments to support that notion and even to conclude that God must have certain specifiable ‘properties’, but if we were to start from scratch – if we were immigrants from some distant pagan shore or outer space – would objective study of the natural world and deep philosophical enquiry produce ineluctable proofs of God? Would there be miracles and signs, for instance, that could not be explained away rationally? Was Voltaire right when he said that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him?

And we always have to worry about the final ace that Hume has up his sleeve: logically, he says, anything that can be imagined as existing can also be imagined as not existing. For every piece of evidence we can find for the Creator, we have to allow the existence of equally powerful evidence against. Hence Paley’s dilemma.

As for religion itself, it would be wrong to think of it as having been a passive spectator at these feasts of the intellect. Indeed, the Church and the churches became their own best and worst friends. Ever since Martin Luther in 1517 nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg and unleashed a flood of independent thinking about forms of worship and modes of belief, it had become impossible for the Church to speak with one voice and proclaim one doctrine. Instead, many voices, doctrines and practices competed for people’s attention. A single original discipline had been opposed by a structureless freedom reaching to the heart of belief. Each group was defined on nuances of doctrine and separate routes to personal salvation, defended in the name of reason.

One such argument was between the theists and deists over the critical matter of revelation. For the Christian Church, revelation meant the events, especially the miracles, by which God had communicated with his chosen people, and it especially meant God’s self-revelation in the form of his son Jesus, sent for the redemption of our souls. Deists, however, insisted that revelation was just the public-relations machinery of a controlling priesthood. God was enough to stand on his own, with the vast panoply of nature itself forming the only necessary evidence of his Being. In the Age of Reason, therefore, rational study of the world alone could reveal the Unworldly One. As Thomas Paine (of American Revolution fame) was to write in his deist manifesto:

When the divine gift of reason begins to expand itself in the mind and calls man to reflection, he then reads and contemplates God and his works, not in the books pretending to revelation … The little and paltry, often obscene, tales of the bible sink into wretchedness when put in comparison with this mighty work. The deist needs none of those tricks and shows called miracles to confirm his father, for what can be a greater miracle than creation itself, and his own existence.³²

Trinitarians opposed Unitarians, Arians and dozens of other sects over the divinity of Christ and the identity of the Holy Ghost and ‘Christ with God’. Was Christ the same as God? (Sabellians); was God different from the Holy Ghost and again from Christ, who was his son? (Trinitarians); or was Christ (as the Socinians argued) merely another in the line of prophets? Then the Sub- and Infralapsarians opposed the Supralapsarians on the question of whether the Fall of Man was intended by God or only permitted after he saw man’s wickedness – an argument that parallels the dispute among the Armenians, Calvinists and others over the issue of the predestination of individual salvation. Many English sects dissented from the Thirty-nine Articles that defined the core precepts of the Church of England. Among them were the Occasional Conformists and Non-Jurant Schismatics, who otherwise remained true to the doctrines of the Church but rejected part or all of its discipline. And there were those who dissented against practices of worship and inclusion, the latter including the Baptists, Anabaptists and Paedobaptists, with their differing views on the issue of baptism and consent.

After 1662, non-conformists of every stripe in England were persecuted with a new and ruthless zeal, but they always bounced back. Many schismatic sects, such as the Plymouth Brethren, became even more rigid in matters of piety than the Church of England or Catholics from whom they had split. Others were quite liberal in the interpretations of the Bible, particularly the Mosaic account of creation, thus allowing their followers to reconcile the new discoveries of science with their beliefs. As long as anyone insisted that Genesis remained the one unimpeachable source, however, the obvious result was confrontation and discord.

In 1696, all Europe was scandalised by the radical scepticism of John Toland, whose book Christianity not Mysterious33 was ordered to be burned by the public hangman in Ireland. Toland was born in Ireland and brought up as a Catholic, then became a Protestant and a free thinking rebel, eking out a living as a writer of highly polemical tracts and books and dodging from country to country just ahead of a host of would-be persecutors. (Among other accomplishments, he invented the term ‘pantheism’.) His writings exemplify what happened when free thinking and (even more dangerous) outspoken populists started to apply the pure reason of thinkers such as John Locke to a close study of the Bible. Toland thundered: ‘Whatever is contrary to Reason can be no Miracle, for it has been sufficiently prov’d already, that Contradiction is only another word for Impossible or Nothing.’ Toland dared to write what many felt, that it was absurd that the wine at the communion service should be thought literally to be transubstantiated into the blood of Christ. It was absurd that the disciples could have seen Christ walk on water. If you can believe in miracles, Toland argued, what is to prevent you from believing any nonsensical fiction? A church that depended on subjecting its adherents to the discipline of believing in miracles, and held its members in awe of the unknowable, was not worth belonging to. The precepts of the Church had to be understandable in material terms and expressed in plain words.

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.