The Royal Society

The Royal Society was set up in 1660 to study the natural world. That was the interest of its members. That was its charter. It was not to be a society for theological discussion. From the earliest days, then, there was general agreement. Whatever one wanted to do outside the meetings, the Royal Society met for the purpose of natural philosophy. The aim was to search into the secondary causes of things, to discover the mechanisms of how things worked in the world. It was not to matter whether the members were Puritans or Anglicans, a very important consideration given that the entire country had recently suffered civil war over that issue. “As for what belongs to the Members themselves, that are to constituted the Society: It is to be noted, that they have freely admitted Men of different Religions, Countries and Professions of Life.”¹¹ Theology was not to be a topic of discussion: the members of the society “meddle no otherwise with Divine things, than only as the Power, and Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator, is display’d in the admirable order and workmanship of the Creatures.”¹²

As the latter part of this quotation reveals, the decision not to discuss theology was hardly because of atheism. On the contrary, although members might differ about church politics, they would have considered themselves Christians. It was typical of their scientific publications to talk overtly of God and that they were bringing about a better understanding of the glory of God’s handiwork. Their focus, however, was on the created things, even if they never forgot the creator, and in practice it was better to restrict their discussions to theories of mechanism rather than politically touchy subjects that theological discussion could easily arouse.

In other words, the Royal Society was going to study (in Bacon’s terms) secondary causes, not first causes. It was assumed that God did things in ways that did not involve frequent miracles but in ways that would proceed in an orderly and understandable fashion. The secondary causes, then, were the ones open to experimentation.¹³

This should have been a straightforward matter. There is nothing in investigating God’s secondary means of doing things that provides any rivalry to God as the origin of all action. Certainly most of the famous scientific writings of the time, and for more than a century later, gave clear recognition to God as the one who actually made the things that science was investigating. Another writer from the seventeenth century, however, might have been able to give a warning.

William Perkins

William Perkins (1558–1602) is hardly heard of these days, being one of those much maligned individuals known as the Puritans, but in his time he was a widely published author and popular preacher at Cambridge. He was not a scientist, nor did he write much on the natural world. However he was against superstition, and in one work he argued that astrology is a waste of time. Students interested in astrology should rather employ themselves studying God’s real works, not imagined things like astrological influence.

Even in his time, however, Perkins was well aware of what might happen when enthusiastic students started thinking that understanding the natural world was all they needed to know.

This thy dealing is like unto the folly of that man, who having a costly clock in his home, never extolleth or thinketh on the wit and invention of the clockmaker, but is continually in admiration of the spring or watch of the clocke, by whose means all the wheels have their swifter or slower, their backward or forward motions, and by which the whole clock keeps its course. Wherefore I think that in a Christian commonwealth, those only books should be published for thine use, which might beat into thine head, and make thee every hour and moment to think on the providence of God: which being once settled in thy mind, the consideration of the means, which God useth, will follow of itself. Contrarywise, to tell thee the means which God doth use, to thunder out the aspects and constellations of Stars, and seldom to mention of his providence, maketh thee to fear, and admire, and love the means, quite forgetting the work of God in the means.¹⁴

It was a timely warning. It is an excellent thing to study the works of God. Even non-scientists such as Perkins warmly recommended it. Nonetheless, he knew the tendency of human hearts. It is all too easy to become so enchanted with the means that God uses to forget that it is God who is using them.

William Paley

For many throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Perkins’ warning might have seemed utterly unnecessary. Virtually no one with any intellectual credibility doubted God. Certainly the study of the natural world was no reason for doing so. On the contrary, the workings of the natural world were taken as one of the most convincing reasons to believe in a creator God. This was the premise of a highly influential book written in the eighteenth century that served as a university text well into the nineteenth: Natural Theology by the English theologian William Paley (1743–1805).

Paley’s work might be seen as a grand argument for the reality of first causes. His argument was that God’s hand was seen clearly in the design apparent in nature. We can know that nature is the work of God because each detail is so carefully crafted to fit its end. Again, we find the example of clockwork (in this case, a watch):

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive—what we could not discover in the stone—that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g., that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. . . . This mechanism being observed—it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood—the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker—that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.¹⁵

The argument is simple: if you find a watch, it is obvious that someone made the watch. Paley will go on to argue that all sorts of things in the natural world are just as complex and as intricate as a watch. We should, therefore, conclude that the natural world also had a maker.

This sounds a lot like Perkins’s argument about the clock. However, there is a major difference. For Perkins knew perfectly well that the natural world is God’s creation. He did not need to study it in order to find out; he knew because the Bible had told him. Paley’s work, on the other hand, is operating from a different premise. He argues in the opposite direction: we know that there is a creator by reason of the intricacy of creation. Instead of the creator explaining the creation, the argument is now being used the other way around. We are being asked to believe in the creator because of creation because there is no other suitable explanation.¹⁶

Let us put this in terms of Bacon’s first and secondary causes. Paley argued that God’s existence is more probable, given the way the world works. That is, secondary causes on their own are not sufficient to explain the world as it is. One needs first causes as well. In Paley’s day, this was generally considered a very strong argument. It did seem inexplicable that the living world could contain such intricate and interdependent structures unless a designer God had made it that way. This is precisely what a young student, studying to be a clergyman at Cambridge in the 1820s, thought of Paley’s work: “I did not at the time trouble myself about Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust, I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation.”¹⁷

The problem with an argument for God’s existence based on the intricacy of the natural world is that it depends on the human’s evaluation of how good the secondary causes are. If a human viewer decides that, actually, the secondary causes look pretty convincing on their own, then that person may well decide that there is no need for a first cause. The ‘first cause’ becomes not a cause at all, but an unnecessary speculation.¹⁸

With William Paley, scientific theism was alive and well. It might seem that God was firmly part of the understanding of the natural world. Paley’s argument, however, effectively restricted and reduced the role that the creator was understood to have. What is a true statement of the Bible (God has created a world in which parts work together ingeniously) was turned around into an argument (we know God exists because we can observe a world in which parts work together ingeniously). This was then promoted, in many people’s minds, to a single, knock-down argument (the main, perhaps the only, reason we know God exists is that we can observe a world in which parts work together ingeniously), and it set up God, not as the known creator, but as an explanatory theory. This was not what Paley intended, but it was the way many people took the argument and the way many restate it now.¹⁹ In this sense, Paley set up the challenge that there is no other way to explain a world in which parts work together ingeniously, except by the deliberate design of a creator God.

The stage was set for Charles Darwin. He was the Cambridge theology student mentioned above who at first was totally convinced by Paley’s argument. He was also to be the one who provided an alternative explanation for the evidence of apparent design that Paley had described so carefully. His account of secondary causes would come to be seen as so thorough and complete that, for many people, there was no longer a need for a first cause at all.