Thoughts in a Haystack

A thought:

It has not always been necessary to choose between one side or the other: science or religion, reason or mystery. In the age before Darwin, many powerful clerics were also notable scientific scholars and leading scientists were often at least conventionally pious. For them, science and religion could share a common philosophical basis with the premise that a careful, rational study of nature, instead of denying God, would confirm that all life is, after all, the product of God's unique creation. Natural Theology and its counterpart in the geological context, Physico-Theology, provided an intellectual framework that both embraced science and kept it at bay. Indeed, natural theologians believed that a study of God's handiwork constituted a proof of the very existence of God. Believers who were scientists welcomed natural theology because it gave their endeavours a framework within which to operate. Deist and Christian alike could find much to favour in a movement that sought to discover God through rational study without depending on a belief in miracles or insisting on the literal truth of the Bible. Some theologians naturally worried that this new movement would risk flirting too seductively with material explanations of the world and preferred to remain with the relative safety of the authority of the Bible and revelation. Nonetheless, in one form or another, natural theology has maintained a currency to the present day. Its last and greatest expression was in the classic work of 1802 by Reverend William Paley, usually known by the short version of its title, Natural Theology. Paley's arguments have never really been improved upon. His book affords a starting point from which to trace a story that reaches from the ancient Greeks to Descartes and to the intellectual environment of the seventeenth and eighteenth century from which Darwin sprang.

- Keith Thomson, Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature

Labels: Thomson: Before Darwin

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 3:07 PM 1 comments

Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888) was an interesting figure in the history of science and its intersection with Natural Theology. Anyone more than a little familiar with the disputes between creationists and supporters of evolutionary science will have probably heard of Omphalos -- if nothing else, as an epithet used against creationist arguments about the Earth being created with an "appearance of age" or starlight being created "already in transit." Gosse, if not the actual source of such arguments, systematized and presented them with a gloss of science.

But Gosse was not some ignorant pseudo-scientist. As Keith Thomson tells the tale in his Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature, Gosse was a brilliant naturalist:

He occupies a treasured and honoured place in British intellectual history, writing about science and about his travels in Canada and Jamaica. He was the first to introduce to a popular audience the life of the seashore, the fragile world of exquisite beauty and strength that lies just a few inches beneath the surface of the sea and in the rocky pools of the coast. Before Gosse, all this was largely unseen. Gosse single-handedly created marine biology and home aquaria, and became one of the great chroniclers of the intricate worlds revealed by the microscope.

Once Lamarck and Chambers had made it possible (even necessary) to take evolution seriously, and after his meeting with Charles Darwin had shown how powerful was the extent of the challenge to his fundamentalist beliefs, Gosse felt called to respond; as a Plymouth Brother and as a scientist, it was his responsibility, just as it had been [William] Paley's and before Paley John Ray's or Thomas Burnet's.

By the mid-nineteenth century, there were really only three ways in which natural theologians could deal with the growing evidence that the earth was very old, that it was recycling inexorably beneath their feet, and that life on earth had constantly changed over millions of years. They could ignore it, they could accommodate it to the biblical accounts of history by more or less denying the literal truth of Genesis, or they could explain it all away.

In a classic example of ad hoc reasoning, he explained away all this appearance of change in a book entitled Omphalos, the Greek for 'navel', and in that one word is contained the core of Gosse's argument. It is the old conundrum: did Adam have a navel? If God created Adam as the first man out of nothing, Adam would have had no need for a navel, since he had never been connected by an umbilical cord to a mother. ...

Gosse simply asserted that at the moment of creation, just as God made Adam with a navel, he also made the earth with all its complex layers, its faults, every one of its fossils, volcanoes in mid-eruption and rivers in full spate carrying a load of sediment that had never been eroded from mountains that had never been uplifted. Similarly, at that instant, every tree that had never grown nevertheless had internal growth rings; every mammal already had partially worn teeth. He created rotting logs on the forest floor, the rain in mid-fall, the light from distant stars in mid-stream, the planets part-way around their orbits . . . the whole universe up and running at the moment of creation: no further assembly required.

Such an argument, of course, can never be beaten. ... Equally, of course, a theory that explains everything explains nothing. Omphalos is untestable and therefore one cannot concur rationally with its argument; you must simply close your eyes and believe. Or smile.

Victorian England not only rejected it, they laughed at it cruelly. Gosse became overnight a broken man, his reputation as a scientist in shatters.

Labels: Thomson: Before Darwin

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 5:24 AM 5 comments

For a bit more on Keith Thomson's Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature, this discussion of Thomas Burnet's 1681 Telluria Theoria Sacra, (or A Sacred Theory of the Earth) is worth considering. Burnet is generally accounted among the villains in orthodox histories of geology but he has already been the subject of a major "rehabilitation" effort by Stephen Jay Gould, in his Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Gould sees Burnet as a rationalist who was more strongly committed to the rule of natural law over miracle than that icon of science, Isaac Newton.

Burnet's account of the history of the Earth is too complicated to go into here (besides, you should go and get Gould's and Thomson's books for your own good) but, as Thomson says:

Burnet's sacred theory was exciting, dynamic and dramatic. For all its faults, it tried to make study of the earth compatible with biblical authority. But it was dangerously close to blasphemy in places. It contradicted the Bible and invoked Decartes too often. ...

Burnet had created a great enigma and a quandary. His sacred theory struck a little too close to some cherished beliefs; but the underlying science was not quite good enough to overcome the reservations of orthodoxy.

[Burnet] opened his sacred theory, however, on very safe grounds with a diatribe against Aristotle. This might seem odd, but it was part of a complex strategy. Burnet had to create as orthodox a theory as possible in order to gain acceptance for his big heretical idea, which was the very modern notion that instead of remaining unchanged since creation (except for the effects of the Flood), the earth was actually in flux and subject to powerful, continually acting forces. As Burnet could scarcely challenge the Bible head-on, he chose everyone's favourite lateral target, Aristotle, who, although the one true source of nonbiblical authority in medieval times, now stood for the Dark Ages.

If I was to describe [the earth] as an Oratour, I would suppose it a beautiful and regular Globe, and not only so, but that the whole Universe was made for its sake; that it was the darling and favourite of Heaven, that the Sun shin'd only to give it light, to ripen its Fruit, and make fresh its Flowers; and that the great Concave of the Firmament, and all the Stars in their several Orbs, were ere design'd only for a spangled cabinet to keep this jewel in.

But a philosopher that overheard me, would either think me in jest, or very injudicious . . . this, he would say, is to make the great World like one of the heathen temples, a beautiful and magnificent structure, and of the richest materials, yet built only for a brute Idol, a Dog, or a Crocodile, or some deform'd Creature, plac'd in a corner of it. We must therefore be impartial where the Truth requires it, and describe the Earth as it is really in its self; . . .'tis a broken and confus'd heap of bodies, plac'd in no order to one another, nor with any correspondency or regularity of parts: And such a body as the Moon appears to us, when 'tis look'd upon with a good Glass, rude and ragged . . . a World lying in its rubbish.

Labels: Thomson: Before Darwin

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 8:58 AM 0 comments

A book I'm reading now and finding both interesting and well written is Keith Thomson's Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature. It is a treatment of the arguments leading up to the clash between William Paley's view of natural history and the increasingly secular science that was crowned by Darwin's evolutionary theory. Much of it is familiar territory to a buff like me but it is well told and will be a good primer for the less obsessed.

One item I knew in general but which is better detailed by Thomson is the unoriginality of Paley's watch analogy:

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) or Bernard Nieuwentyt (The Religious Philosopher, or the Right Use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator, 1709) 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) ... 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.'

But the earliest is by Cicero, in his De Natura Deorum in 77 BCE:

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.

While Thomson leads me to think that it may be unfair to Paley to compare ID creationists to him (as I have often done), it's true that his approach was unapologetically rhetorical. As such, it is hardly surprising that he'd gladly reuse an effective trope.
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Labels: Thomson: Before Darwin

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 5:07 AM 4 comments