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SCIENCE AND RELIGION
200 Years of Accommodation
Can science and religion be reconciled?
That is a perennial question,
and one I doubt will ever be definitively
answered. After all, we first need to
ask, which science? which religion? And
even then the parties involved
often can’t be neatly sorted into
two contending camps.
For the 17th-century founders
of modern science—especially
those in England such as Robert
Boyle, John Ray, and Isaac
Newton—the pertinent question
was not whether science and religion
could be reconciled. It was
whether science and atheism
could be reconciled, and the
answer seemed to be a definitive
no. The theistic beliefs of Boyle
and his contemporaries predicted
a rational order beneath the
apparent chaos of nature, and, lo,
that was what they found. We
The reviewer is the author of The Seashell on the
Mountaintop, a biography of Nicholas Steno. E-mail:
ahcutler@aol.com
Alan Cutler
Before Darwin
Reconciling God
and Nature
Keith Thomson
Yale University Press,
New Haven, CT, 2005.
328 pp. $27. ISBN 0-
300-10793-5.
The Watch
on the Heath
Science and Religion
Before Darwin
HarperCollins, London,
2005. £20. ISBN 0-00-
713313-8.
moderns cannot easily imagine the emotional
and intellectual impact this must have had on
these already religious men. At the sight of the
intricate structure of an insect eye under his
newfangled microscope, even the not especially
pious Robert Hooke was moved.
Anyone stupid enough to think such things
were “a production of chance,” he wrote, must
be “extremely depraved” or “they did never
attentively consider and contemplate the
works of the Almighty” (1).
Thanks to Charles Darwin, we now can
explain biological complexity in terms of a
theory that does, in fact, rely on a measure of
chance. But before Darwin, no such explanation
was available. That nature reflected divine
wisdom seemed obvious, at least among those
who attentively considered and contemplated
it, and out of this idea came a hybrid of science
and religion called “natural theology.” Natural
theology is sometimes depicted as religion’s
desperate attempt to cling to the coattails of
science. Although that description may fit in
some cases, a little perspective is in order. At
the time when Hooke peered through his
microscope, what we now call science had
produced few if any tangible benefits to society.
Its virtuosos were more often satirized
than lionized. (Hooke was mercilessly lampooned
on the London stage as “Dr.
Gimcrack.”) Through the early years of modern
science, the link with religion helped legitimize
the investigation of nature as a serious
and worthwhile endeavor.
Jacopo Tintoretto’s Creation of the Animals (c. 1550).
In Before Darwin: Reconciling
God and Nature, Keith
Thomson chronicles the changing
fortunes of natural theology
from its first flowering in the
work of John Ray to its fatal (or,
depending on your point of view,
near-fatal) encounter with
Darwinian evolution. Thomson,
an emeritus professor of natural
history at the University of
Oxford, focuses particularly on
the work of English cleric
William Paley. It is an apt choice
not only because Paley’s book
Natural Theology is generally
considered the definitive work in
the genre, but because of the
book’s impact on one of its readers: the young
Charles Darwin (2).
Although Paley was no scientist, he was a
skilled logician and a zealous compiler of biological
facts. He is most famous for the analogy
of the watch, which appeared in the introduction
of his book. Suppose one happened to
find a watch upon the ground, he wrote. Would
not its intricate mechanism imply “that the
watch must have had a maker…who comprehended
its construction, and designed its use”?
Nature, so the argument went, is vastly more
complex and perfect than any human contrivance.
(Hooke’s microscope had already
revealed how pathetically crude even the
finest needles were compared to the
appendages of a common flea.) Reason leads
us to the inevitable conclusion that nature must
also have a maker, but one infinitely wiser and
more skilled than a human watchmaker. In
other words, not just a creator, but a Creator.
This is the argument from design, which
philosophers have generally found unconvincing.
But if Darwin, who encountered
Paley’s book as a student, was typical, most
readers found the logic ironclad. “Natural
Theology gave me as much delight as did
Euclid,” confessed Darwin in his autobiography.
His enthusiasm was to fade, of
course, with momentous consequences.
What Paley saw as the biggest threat to his
brand of natural theology, Thomson notes,
were the atheistic theories of evolution
bandied about by Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s
grandfather) and other unorthodox thinkers.
Paley’s dispute with them did not exactly constitute
a clash between science and religion,
because these mystical ideas were scarcely
more scientific than Paley’s. And when
Charles Darwin came up with a theory of evolution
that did meet the standards of science,
he probably borrowed as much from Paley as
from previous evolutionists. Thomson argues
persuasively that Darwin likely first encountered
Thomas Malthus’s grim statistics on
population growth in Paley’s book. But where
Paley saw the weeding out of unfit variants as
a force of stability, Darwin saw it instead as a
mechanism of evolutionary change.
According to Thomson, it was principally
Darwin’s theory that, by removing the necessity
of a designer, doomed natural theology. In
this sense, Before Darwin is a fairly conventional
Darwin-versus-the-theologians account
www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 309 2 SEPTEMBER 2005 1493