Читать книгу The Watch on the Heath: Science and Religion before Darwin - Keith Thomson - Страница 9

‘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?’

Samuel Clarke, Demonstration of the Being andAttributes of God, 1705

The central proposition of natural theology is what David Hume, in Dialogues, put in the mouth of Cleanthes (the most ‘accurate and philosophical’ of his protagonists):

[The world is] nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines … all these various machines, and even their most minute parts are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men … the curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance, of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence … By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.

This is the essence of an argument from design and a hundred years later, Paley’s watch analogy said the same thing: ‘As for the watch, so for nature there must exist a Creator.’ By extension, the same conclusion must apply to ‘every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design … in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.’ As the watch has a maker, so we have a Maker. As the watch exists for a purpose, so do we.

When Charles Darwin sat at the window of his rooms at Christ’s College in 1831 reading Natural Theology, he found the arguments ‘conclusive … the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door.’ Camped a year later in the Brazilian forest and seeing at first hand the biological riches of the tropics that the explorer-naturalist Humboldt had extolled, he wrote in his journal that ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind’.³⁵ A contemporary anonymous reviewer of the first edition of Paley’s book noted: ‘No thinking man, we conceive, can doubt that there are marks of design in the universe.’³⁶ Similarly, in 1876, that quintessentially Victorian critic Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) praised it – but as if trying not to get his hands dirty: ‘The book, whatever its philosophical shortcomings, is a marvel of skilled exposition. It states, with admirable clearness and in a most attractive form, the argument which has the greatest popular force and which, duly etherialised, still passes muster with metaphysicians.’³⁷ In 1996, the biochemist Michael Behe continued the argument seamlessly: ‘The reason for the conclusion [that the watch had been designed] is just as Paley implied: the ordering of separate components to accomplish a function beyond that of the individual components.’³⁸

The same anonymous reviewer of Natural Theology had also grumbled: ‘On the subject of Natural Theology no one looks for originality and no one expects to find it.’ Given Paley’s broadminded approach to borrowing other people’s sermons, we should not be surprised to learn that the great watch analogy originated elsewhere and that natural theology itself belonged to a long-standing tradition to which his book simply gave its greatest and most popular expression. Leslie Stephen acidly noted, ‘The argument is familiar, and probably has been familiar since the first days when it occurred to anyone to provide a logical basis for theology.’ Paley himself called the watch analogy ‘not only popular but vulgar’ and for contemporary readers it was so familiar an analogy that they would not have thought of attributing the idea exclusively to him. (Fifty years later, enough history had been forgotten that he was accused of plagiarism, the source of these suspicions no doubt lying in the fact that, in accord with the custom of the time, Paley did not supply footnoted references to his sources.) In fact, the watch analogy can be traced back a long way.

In Paley’s time, the most immediate exponents of the watch analogy may have been Baron d’Holback (The System of Nature or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World, 1770)³⁹ or Bernard Nieuwentyt (The Religious Philosopher, or the Right Use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator, 1709),⁴⁰ who wrote of a man ‘cast in a desert or solitary place, where few people are used to pass [coming upon] a Watch shewing the Hours, Minutes and Days of the month’. Hence the charge of plagiarism. Before Nieuwentyt’s quite explicit use of the analogy, it occurs in a host of works, including Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), which we shall visit in some detail in a later chapter. Burnet wrote: ‘For a thing that consists of a multitude of pieces aptly joyn’d, we cannot but conceive to have had those pieces, at one time or another, put together. ’Twere hard to conceive an eternal Watch, whose pieces were never separate one from another, nor ever in any other form than that of a Watch.’ Perhaps the earliest use of the analogy is in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum (one of the models for Hume’s Dialogues) where his Stoic philosopher asks: ‘Suppose a traveller to carry into Scythia or Britain the orrery recently constructed by our friend Posidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets … would any single native person doubt that the orrery was the work of a rational being?’⁴¹ In fact, as we go along, we will frequently see that several arguments of eighteenth-century scholars consist of little more than a reiteration of what various classical authors had said two millennia before.

One of the great assets of natural theology and the evidence it drew from the world of living animals and plants, is that it was understandable to a broad following who did not have to know code words of contemporary philosophy, or have mastered calculus and chemistry to follow the argument completely. Natural history enjoys a privileged position among the sciences both in its broad accessibility and in the extraordinary aesthetic pleasure inherent in the subject. This is obvious to amateur and professional alike, and only increases the more deeply one probes into the complexities of life. One has only to think of the mechanical perfection underlying the flowing grace of a cheetah in full stride, or the whorled mathematical perfection of a sunflower. It has therefore always had an extremely wide appeal, whether for a clergyman such as the Reverend Gilbert White who, with his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), defined the role of the careful observer of local nature in ways that had not been thought about since Virgil and Pliny, or for explorers to the far reaches of the globe like Joseph Banks who travelled with Captain Cook and brought back new natural wonders to test our grasp of the limits of creation.

Above all, nature is always fascinating for what seems to be the common sense, the transparent obviousness, of the fit of its forms to their functions. The elephant’s trunk, sometimes powerful, sometimes delicate, is a masterpiece of dexterity far exceeding that of the human hand. The sabre-tooth’s canine was a lethal weapon. The barn owl not only has huge forward-directed eyes for detecting its prey, it can also use its supersensitive ears to pinpoint the source of the slightest rustle of leaves caused by a mouse – in the dark. Some orchids have patterns on their petals that we cannot see, but a wasp, using ultraviolet light and seeing there a picture of another wasp, alights to try to copulate with it and thus unwittingly helps pollinate the flower. Charles Darwin, knowing of a flower with a particular shape, famously predicted that there must exist a kind of moth with a foot-long proboscis to feed deep within it: eventually it was discovered. This is but a tiny set of examples of the exquisite ways in which living organisms are ‘adapted’ to their environments and ‘fitted’ to particular ways of life. Such glories of nature have always been the principal evidence that natural theologians adduce for the existence of a creating God – the argument a posteriori that Hume allowed as the only possible proof. The vast bulk of writing in natural theology is taken up with elucidating and sermonising upon long lists of such examples from nature; they are the basic evidence for the prosecution’s case: such perfections of design and function appear to require us to conclude that a master creator has been at work.

Paley was a logician who lived by the cut and thrust of argument. He added the abstractions of philosophy to the science-versus-religion debate but, as in any great court battle, the case for natural theology was first grounded in hard evidence and that base had long since been constructed by John Ray (1627–1705), its founding father. In many ways Ray and Paley were complementary and opposite. While Paley, at the end of the Age of Reason, depended upon the tightness of his logic, Ray, at the beginning of the scientific revolution, was someone who revelled in facts – both in getting them straight and getting them in order. While Paley was a man who fitted somewhat awkwardly in the machinery of the Church of England, he was nonetheless a true churchman. John Ray was a man of his time – a dissenter.

For every person who is happy to conform, to belong, to submit to the group will, there is always at least one who will not compromise: someone who is sure enough of their own ground to stand apart independently, usually on a matter of principle. It is a great tradition, reinforced periodically by governments who try to force us into what the American poet Emerson called ‘a foolish consistency’ (‘the hobgoblin of feeble minds’). Such was John Ray. He was not just a dissenter; he was a Dissenter. In order to prepare for the Church, he had attended Cambridge in 1644 where his brilliance in science, languages and mathematics quickly showed. He was made a Fellow of Trinity College in 1649, Lecturer in 1651, and sub-Dean in 1658. In 1660 he was ordained as a priest. A stellar career as a Cambridge scholar seemed in prospect, with the living of a rural parish or two to support him and to provide the freedom to pursue his great interest, natural science. Happily for us, although he had already published his first book – a compilation of the plants of Cambridge – his timing was bad.

Those were tense years within the state religion and the state itself. The English Civil War was ended, but bitter ill-feelings persisted, particularly among those aristocratic, royalist Cavaliers and their supporters who had lost their lands to the regicide Puritan Roundheads (thus creating a new landed middle class). The broad church that Elizabeth I had carefully nurtured through dozens of compromises had been thrust aside in a passion of radical Puritanism. With the restoration of the monarchy (in the form of Charles II) and election of a reactionary, strongly Cavalier Parliament in 1661, the formal process of retribution began. The obvious target was Puritanism itself and legislation, rather than the sword, was the tool. The Act of Uniformity passed by Parliament in 1662 was not just religious; it was also political, restricting the civil and religious freedoms by codifying the nature of the Church of England and its practices and imposing severe sanctions on dissenters. Instead of a broad church that could tolerate a range of ways of practising Christianity, Parliament opted for conformity. Non-conformists became liable to severe sanctions, including prison or transportation.

All clerics and teachers (and most definitely all fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges) were obliged to conform. This meant that they had to worship according to the restored 1549 Book of Common Prayer and swear to the Thirty-nine Articles of 1571 that defined the core doctrines of the Anglican Church. Back in 1643, as a price for their support, Scottish Presbyterians had forced the Roundheads to swear the Solemn League and Covenant which, among other radical measures, abolished bishops and allowed individual congregations to ordain their own priests. The 1662 Act required all clerics of the Church of England to adjure this oath.

Ray had not sworn the oath and had in fact been ordained by a bishop. He was certainly comfortable with the Thirty-nine Articles. But he objected to the coercion; he could not agree that someone who had sworn a sacred oath should be forced to abandon it. At the same time he may already have been restive for greater independence to continue his scientific work. For reasons, particular or principled, that are now unclear, along with 2,000 others he refused to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity.⁴² With this, he gave up his fellowship at Cambridge and could no longer teach or preach, although he retained a lay membership of the Anglican Church.

Ray’s father was the village blacksmith at Black Notely in Essex, where Ray was born in 1627. Little else is known about his father, but we know that Ray’s mother was ‘a very religious and good Woman, particularly to her Neighbours that were lame or sick’. Elizabeth Ray was a herbalist healer, which required her to have an excellent working knowledge of botany. From her, Ray acquired a love of plants, of all nature, of enquiry, and above all an appreciation of the value of precise knowledge. For example, a herbal healer must be able instantly to tell the difference between two very similar looking plants, one edible, the other lethal: the wild parsnip and water hemlock. As Nicolas Culpepper described them in his famous 1652 herbal, The English Physitian or an astrologo-physiscal Discourse of the vulgar Herbs of this Nation, the former ‘easeth pains and stitches in the sides, and dissolveth wind both in the stomach and bowels’. The latter is ‘exceeding cold and dangerous, especially to be taken inwardly’.

If we look at Culpepper or another typical herbal of the period, John Gerard’s Historie of Plants (1597),⁴³ with its delightful prose and 1,800 woodcut illustrations, we can guess that John Ray had considerable command of a wide range of plants and their properties, medical and otherwise, even before he entered Cambridge. A lengthy recuperation from an illness in 1650 seems to have given Ray the leisure to explore the countryside and the world of plants more fully. ‘First I was fascinated and then absorbed by the rich spectacle of the meadows in spring time; then I was filled with wonder and delight by the marvellous shape, colour and structure of the individual plants.’ This soon grew into a systematic study of nature.⁴⁴

Ray’s first scholarly book was Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam, a synopsis of the plants of Cambridge published in 1660 while he was still at Trinity. The obvious next subject would be a botany of all England, an ambition in which he was encouraged by his former pupil and now close friend, Francis Willoughby. In 1662, in his new freedom, he poured himself into this work. His now independent career eventually took him beyond the countryside around Cambridge to further destinations, both geographically and intellectually, than he might otherwise have imagined. Willoughby, no mean naturalist himself and by now not only a friend but a benefactor, proposed a scientific tour of the Continent and in April 1662 Ray, Willoughby and two other Cambridge friends set off on a three-year journey that would take them through France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Austria and Italy. They collected, they discussed science with all the famous men of Europe, and they made notes and drawings of everything they saw and did. This journey set Ray’s career firmly on a course that would contribute to changing the religious as well as scientific world.

By 1660, the tightly circumscribed view of the richness and goodness of God’s creation as demonstrated by the natural history of Europe had begun to be overshadowed by the abundance of plants and animals brought in from the rest of the world by explorers and merchants. For Ray and his contemporaries across Europe, exploration in every corner of the globe had opened a Pandora’s box of nature. If this was God’s creation, suddenly it had unfathomable, incomprehensible depths of diversity. Noah’s ark could not have held a thousandth part of the living animals and plants with which natural philosophers were confronted, as travellers brought back to Europe every kind of unimagined creature – some real but improbable (like the kangaroo), others (like the mermaids and unicorns) fabulous yet all too believable. In the last half of the seventeenth century it was relatively easy to know at least eighty per cent of the plants of Britain and difficult but not impossible to know sixty per cent of the plants of western Europe. Ray thought that there were some 10,000 kinds of insects, 1,300 other kinds of animals and 20,000 species of plants in the world. By 1750, those estimates were debatable; by 1850 they were laughable. Today the worldwide total of known living species is 1.8 million and rising.

All of nature, whether an English woodland, the patch of Brazilian rainforest where Darwin sat to write his journal, or the biological diversity of a whole continent, is an apparently chaotic arrangement of organisms: flies next to birds next to worms, in trees, over grasses. In terms of ecological interactions – a kind of pattern or machine – they can be shown to make perfect sense. They constitute networks of spatial and temporal relationships behind which lie intertwining chains of cause and effect. With the discovery of order comes the possibility of finding lawfulness. For example, certain kinds of flowers (primroses, daffodils) grow in woodland and they ‘must’ flower before the leaves of the canopy emerge. Such flowers are almost invariably yellow and white, never red. Red flowers occur where levels of incident light are higher and they usually bloom in the open, later. Similarly, if one looks at physical structure (anatomy), which is what anyone sees first, an order appears. Of the birds in Britain or Europe or the world, all the woodpeckers fall together, separately from all the finches, the ducks and so on. It was perfectly obvious to every countryman that Queen Anne’s Lace, cow-parsley, wild parsnip and hemlock were all similar to each other, and different from celandines (which in turn seem closer to buttercups). If this is lawful, we can speculate about the causes.

Before anyone could make any sense out of the confused and confusing mass of new information about nature, the data had to be organised; what, for example, a woodpecker or a celandine is had to be defined. Let us imagine, for a moment, the contents of an automobile-parts warehouse dumped, thousands of different bits and pieces. You have to store them and then use them; the first steps must be to organise everything and put things on shelves where they can readily be found: all the brake pads in one place, the light bulbs in another. But cables would present a problem; whether to put brake cables with the other brake parts or with, say, the accelerator cables. There is probably no one perfect way to organise car parts.

Imagine, then, doing all this without any notion of what a car is. You couldn’t do anything logically unless you knew what the bits were for. You couldn’t discover what the bits were for until you had at least understood them enough to categorise them: a circle of ignorance. This was the problem for the natural philosophers who tried to categorise nature in order to understand it better and, not incidentally, to discover what it told them about the Creator. They had to create systems of classification that discovered patterns out of what would otherwise be a random arrangement of entities. For example, given a disassembled car one would quite easily work out from the external body panels that automobiles are bilaterally symmetrical, with a front and back, left and right. But then the five, rather than four, wheels with road tires would make no sense – that would require a new concept, that of the spare wheel. And the steering wheel would be baffling; one’s natural inclination to classify it with the other wheels would likely slow or even prevent any attempt to discover a different use for it. In the same way, when Aristotle made his first classifications of living things, he separated the whales from the other mammals: logical enough in a way. But he also correctly saw that whales were quite different from fishes, even though both lived in the sea. In any case, we can excuse Aristotle his errors, remembering the wise man who once said ‘never do anything for the first time’.

Ray’s passion to organise the facts of nature was not mere stamp collecting but a search for new, deeper truths. The patterns (classifications) that Ray and those following him established were philosophically powerful. A surprising depth of enquiry into the root causes of things is bound up in the apparently simple statement that the flightless dodo is related to the pigeon rather than the ostrich. Once one has found patterns in the distribution of different kinds of organisms in the world, one is naturally led to queries about the causes of those patterns. If God made them, then the patterns are a reflection of the symmetry and orderliness of God’s perfect mind. The sub-patterns might then be the result of God working out variations of different ideas – the idea of a worm, a woodpecker or a pigeon, for example. But this also depended on one of Ray’s greatest contributions, which was to establish the building bricks, or the least common denominators, out of which the great natural groupings of organisms are made. The early practice and theory of classification honoured the biblical practice of referring to distinct ‘kinds’ of creatures. We now call such entities ‘species’ and we are so used to the idea that each species of animal and plant is different from all others, and has its own name by which we distinguish it from its sisters, that we simply take for granted the concept of species itself, and even that names might be important. This concept of the species (‘species’ is the Greek for ‘kind’) was John Ray’s lasting contribution to natural science.

An instructive by-product of the identification of these patterns comes in the discovery of the very opposite. Because classifications aim to produce rational patterns, they prompt the investigator to query the apparently irrational that is also revealed. For example, many of the ‘natural’ groupings of animals and plants appear to have a geographical cause or at least a geographical consistency. This leads to new questions: Why, for example, are there no penguins in the Arctic, or polar bears in the Antarctic? One could understand why God might have created parrots for the tropics but why are hummingbirds only in the New World? Even more puzzling is the fact that Europe and North America each have eagles, kingfishers and woodpeckers – but different kinds. These inconsistencies (which dogged Darwin in his Cambridge and Beagle days and helped lead him to ideas of evolution) hinted of chance rather than purpose and any time the word ‘chance’ cropped up in 1800 (or 1700) it brought with it the possibility that the pattern was the result of contingencies in the underlying process, and particularly it raised the spectre of the ‘chance collisions of atoms’ and all the other Epicurean and Cartesian Second Causes.

Another difficulty slowly to emerge was that, with the identification of the species as the basic entity in classification, a circular argument had developed. On the one hand, one can only list and systematise discrete and fixed entities. One cannot systematise the constantly changing parts of a cloud or the molecules of steam escaping from a boiling kettle. On the other hand, the very fact of naming and classifying species established and reinforced their fixity. Immutability of species became both a necessary premise and a consequence of the science of classification. The very tools that opened up the world of biological diversity (by making it rational) tended to close off any discussions of its basis in fact (by denying the possibility of change). And of course this was a boon to theology. If they were created by the Almighty, the species of animals and plants on earth must today retain the individuality with which he originally endowed them. If God at creation ‘found them good’, that allowed (if it did not dictate) the logical conclusion that he made them fixed and immutable, unchanging and unchangeable. From then on, there was huge pressure to see species as real and immutable, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Those who argued the other case, as did fledgling evolutionists, a hundred years later were more easily dismissed. Even without attempts to interpret Genesis to that effect, the whole concept of God having created living organisms implied that they were perfect – a reflection of the perfection of God’s mind – and would not change. It must, therefore, have been more than a little disconcerting to the great eighteenth-century botanist Linnaeus and his contemporaries eventually to discover that species were not fixed after all. Indeed, the idea of fixed species flew in the face of common-sense experience with crossbreeding, both artificial and in nature. It was not consistent with the notion of discrete entities that they should be able to interbreed and produce what looked like new kinds of animals and plants. Hybridisation therefore became a worrying problem, both among the new breed of systematists who, like Linnaeus, could look to it as a mechanism by which at least some of the different species might have arisen, and also for those who believed that God had created each species perfectly, fixed for ever in time and space.

Throughout his extremely productive career as a natural scientist, scratching out a living from writing study after scholarly study elucidating the patterns of nature, John Ray remained all the while faithful and true to his religious beliefs, all the time devoted to the central premise that nature was the handiwork of God and that species were immutable. In thirty years of studies and travels he had revolutionised ‘natural science’ (botany and zoology), almost single-handedly moving it from a medieval to modern mode. And, while his religious life had been curtailed by his formal separation from the Church, his instincts as a teacher and preacher remained. Relatively late in his career he turned back to write out his philosophy as a Christian and a scientist. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation,45