To encounter a picture of the kind illustrated in colour is almost certainly to raise the question: is this a work of art? An affirmative reply might not seem out of place. Another, actually more correct, answer might be that it is neither a work of art nor of science. Yet, in the production of the image, science played a crucial role because we are looking at penicillin crystals through the privileged ‘eye’ of an electron microscope. If nature itself were ‘seen’ as a work if art, then the answer would be even more complex; for the image might then be said to be both a work of art and of science.

We are perhaps more familiar with attempts to introduce sharper lines of demarcation between art and science. In George Steiner's book Real Presences there was an explicit contrast between scientific and aesthetic discourse. He wrote of the latter that ‘no interpretative-critical analysis, doctrine or programme is superseded, is erased, by any later construction’. In science it is otherwise: ‘The Copernican theory did correct and supersede that of Ptolemy. The chemistry of Lavoisier makes untenable the earlier phlogiston theory.’1 This contrast is one of several that Steiner drew between science on the one hand; poetry, music and art on the other. What he called the gravity and constancy at the heart of major forms of art were even said to be religious in that they enact ‘a root-impulse of the human spirit to explore possibilities of meaning and of truth that lie outside empirical seizure or proof’.2 The tacit contrast with the scientific effort was again obvious. Modelling in science, according to Steiner, aims at mastery and ownership. In aesthetic appreciation we are put in touch with the transcendent, ‘with matters “undreamt of” in our materiality’.3

It is a nice question whether Steiner was not perhaps caricaturing science in order to sustain his antithesis. What about the role of aesthetic appreciation within science itself? What of the claims of the Copernican astronomers to be offering a more elegant picture of the cosmos than was possible with the Ptolemaic system? The argument of this chapter is that an uncovering of beauty in nature and an appreciation of beauty in the scientist's constructions of nature have been prominent goals of scientific enquiry, with edifying, humanising effects. Statements about beauty in nature have also graduated into religious discourse, not least because analogies between the natural world and works of art, music or literature have been frequently used to elucidate what it means to speak of divine activity in the world. The practice of science was edifying for many of its founders precisely because it helped to bring out harmonies and beauties in nature that might otherwise be missed.

It is important to stress that we are not thinking primarily of references to simplicity. There is a complexity in nature that has dashed many theories premised on criteria of simplicity. Indeed, philosophers of science have produced cogent reasons why we should not expect the simplest organising principles to deliver truths about the natural world.4 But the lure of an aesthetic vision can survive that inconvenience. There is a longed-for elegance and beauty in the reconstruction of nature that has often been at the heart of scientific endeavour. A beautiful theory may be discarded as a fantasy, only to be replaced by another in which an unexpected beauty gleams. With what reluctance did Kepler abandon circular motion for the planets. To lose the music of the spheres was an intolerable deprivation, Playing with oval curves for the planetary orbits Kepler compared them to a cart-load of ‘dung’.5 And yet he could not believe that nature was so foul. In due course he was rewarded with the elegance of the ellipse—new music to his ears and a new music of the spheres.6

There would seem to be a kind of methodological aestheticism in the pursuit science. The quest for economy, elegance and beauty may often be frustrated, may often be a poor guide to the merits of a particular theory; but the quest is always there, regulating scientific enquiry and the construction of theories. For many scientists this would have no transcendental implications. For others it has. In other worlds there is an issue here that belongs to the discussion of science and religion. There are several constituencies for whom the aesthetic dimensions of science are of topical interest. Among some philosophers of religion there has been renewed concern to find a way of speaking of the beauty of God. In Patrick Sherry's Spirit and Beauty, attention is drawn to the fact that the word ‘beautiful’ is not used of material things alone. It is also predicated of the immaterial, of ideas, of scientific theories.7 At a more popular level, religious writers have sought to recapture the domain of artistic appreciation, determined that it should not be the exclusive preserve of a surrogate religion. In Richard Harries's discussion of Art and the Beauty of God, there are echoes of John Keble: in earthly beauty may be discerned the glow of the divine.8 Resurrecting an old association between beauty and wisdom, Harries places the patterns disclosed by the scientist alongside those of the artist, both displaying characteristics of beauty, order and rationality.9 References to the tantalising quality of beauty and the longing it may evoke have also appeared in essays that deal explicitly with the theme of ‘science and religion’. In 1993 Anthony O'Hear wrote that science and religion should not be seen as conflicting discourses.10 Because he wrote as a non-believer his remarks on the relationship between aesthetic and religious experience are particularly striking. The religious impulse, he suggested, might be seen as a ‘response to the experience of a natural object or work of art as beautiful: in which we see a thing not just as [a] “fragment of nature” (in Wittgenstein's phrase), but as something which mediates between our own longing for perfection and some other world in which that perfection is actually realised’.11 He also admitted to a ‘transcendent sense of rightness one sometimes has in the experience of something beautiful’.12

Philosophers of science have been particularly active in reappraising the role of aesthetic considerations in scientific argument. In his book The Scenes of Inquiry, Nicholas Jardine has given perhaps the best account to date of the different ways in which aesthetic arguments can function in the sciences. His thesis is that ‘aesthetic appeal and response are… deeply involved in all aspects of inquiry in the sciences: in the marshalling and deployment of evidence; in the promotion of new methods and practices; in the presentation and adjudication of factual and theoretical claims’.13

A useful feature of Jardine's analysis is a taxonomy that distinguishes three types of aesthetic appraisal. Type 1 covers the direct ascription of an aesthetic virtue to a theory or hypothesis and is extremely common in scientific discourse, where adjectives such as ‘economical’, ‘harmonious’, ‘elegant’ are applied to explanatory schemes. This must, however, be distinguished from type 2 where a theory may be favoured if it ‘brings out’ certain aesthetic virtues in the phenomena it purports to explain. A familiar example would be the retrograde motion of the planets, which took on a very different aspect when viewed through the lens of Copernican theory. If the earth is not a stationary observatory but moves with the other planets around the sun, then the wayward motion of Mars becomes less so because its apparent backtracking simply reflects its being ‘overtaken’ by the observer on a faster inside track. Jardine himself suggests that one's experience of the night sky just after sunset, and of the configuration of the planets in particular, can be directly enhanced by visualising their orbits fixed on the sun rather than the earth.14 A third type of aesthetic appraisal refers to the visual language of science—to the rhetoric inscribed within diagrams, maps and illustrations. Here the scientist opts for theories or hypotheses that bring out certain virtues in representations of the phenomena they explain. In the representation of phenomena analysed by scientific methods, art and science have frequently come together, sometimes to remarkable effect. The large circular cavity in Galileo's depiction of the moon assisted his case for an imperfect, mountainous surface, but also tempted Kepler to speculate that so arresting a circle must imply the abode of extra-terrestrial life.15

If there is a rekindled interest in the aesthetic dimensions of science we can certainly ask whether historical analysis has anything distinctive to offer. At the very least it can furnish examples to support and perhaps even extend the kind of taxonomy that Jardine has proposed. How often, for example, has the scientist's first interest in an object been awakened by its captivating beauty? Robert Boyle was entranced by the beauty of gem-stones; Hugh Miller by the beauty of fossil forms. The historian will also recognise a kind of theory appraisal that measures virtue in terms of consistency with other prevailing theories or with metaphysical expectations. We shall return to this type towards the end of the chapter.

By bringing out the aesthetic elements in scientific creativity the historian can also correct uninformed and unsympathetic perceptions of science.16 One sometimes wonders how many youngsters are put off by presentations that deliberately leave out the very elements that make scientific enquiry so rewarding. The lifeblood of science, the wrestling with a problem, the personal involvement in finding a solution, the creative imagination that this requires, and the aesthetic experience that may convince us that we are on the right track—all these features of a life in science must be reaffirmed. The historian can help to recover them, and to focus on the aesthetic is one way of doing so. In a famous series of Gifford Lectures, Michael Polanyi drew on history as well as personal experience to emphasise the human rather than the de-personalising aspects of science. In his book Personal Knowledge an intimacy between beauty and truth was a recurring motif: the affirmation of a great theory, he wrote, ‘is in part an expression of delight’. Such a theory has ‘an inarticulate component acclaiming its beauty, and this is essential to the belief that the theory is true’.17

Whether we can today so readily speak of ‘truth’ in such contexts is a difficult issue but, as Polanyi recognised, aesthetic considerations often carried weight in the past because they mediated between statements about nature and statements about God. It is this phenomenon that invites further investigation. Among innumerable examples would be Tycho Brahe's resistance to Copernican astronomy as he contemplated the great chasm between the furthest planet and the nearest star that the absence of stellar parallax would imply. Insisting that ‘decent proportion’ had to be preserved, Tycho explained that this was ‘because God, the author of the universe, loves appropriate order, not confusion and disorder’.18 There used to be a debate between those who saw seventeenth-century science as a form of ascetism and those who saw in it an expression of hedonism.19 As a form of pious hedonism the aesthetic pleasure derived from natural philosophy could transcend that dichotomy. For some students of nature that may even have been part of its appeal.

If we take seriously the role of aesthetics in the ‘Scientific Revolution’, there are important consequences. In reconstructions of the path to modernity the new astronomy of Copernicus and the mechanical philosophy of Descartes are routinely coupled to explain how humanity came to be dethroned. A population explosion among extra-terrestrials, of the kind envisaged by Giordano Bruno, has also been invoked to give the explanation an extra air of plausibility.20 But a strong case can be mounted against the usual line on the dethronement of humanity. Because many of the grounds on which such decentring might be asserted were ultimately aesthetic prominently so in the defence of Copernicanism, they served to exalt rather than diminish what was distinctive in humankind. This was not only the ability to reason but also to appreciate the beauty and scope of Creation.

The point stands out in one of the early treatments of physico-theology—Walter Charleton's Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature (1652). Having enthused about the ‘exquisite’ beauty of nature Charleton observed that it would be to no purpose were it not for man to admire.21 As for the intuitive view that Copernican astronomy must have relegated man from the centre of creation, the argument could as easily go the other way. At the centre of the Aristotelian cosmos humankind was at the centre of corruption, living in a garbage bin—the sink of all refuse, as Galileo put it.22 To be placed in the heavens along with the planets could be a kind of promotion. In an exegesis of Psalm 115, the Dutch pastor and Copernican Philip Lansbergen insisted that to be placed in the central planetary orbit was to occupy the ‘most dignified place of the first heaven’.23 In important respects the human race was not dethroned by the ‘Scientific Revolution’. For those able to appreciate the new theories the status of the aesthete, privileged to reinterpret God's creation, was enhanced.

Aesthetic Preference and the ‘Scientific Revolution’

One of the principal tasks of the astronomer, according to Copernicus, was to reveal the order and symmetry of God's Creation. In the Preface to his great book of 1543 he suggested that he had done so more successfully than his predecessors. His was a system in a way that Ptolemy's was not. His predecessors had been unable to discern what Copernicus called the principal thing, namely the ‘design of the universe and the fixed symmetry of its parts’. It was ‘as though one were to gather various hands, feet, head and other members, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body, and since they in no way match each other, the result would be monster rather than man’.24 He felt justified in using such rhetoric because, in the Ptolemaic scheme, the planetary orbits would be treated separately. They could be independently scaled in size. But in his system the relative sizes of the planetary orbits were fixed with respect to each other in a unified whole.25 Within this new system was real order and symmetry because there was a clear relationship between the period of a planet and the size of its orbit. The further the planet from the sun, the greater its period. There was a harmony here that Kepler later captured in precise mathematical terms.

When speaking of aesthetic preference there is always the question ‘Whose aesthetics?’ In the case of Copernicus, an answer has been given. His image of current astronomy as a monstrous body is reminiscent of a classical text on the art of poetry. This was the Ars Poetica of Horace, which, in Italy, was attracting extensive commentary during the first half of the sixteenth century. The opening lines of Horace also speak of a monstrous body: ‘If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse… and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favoured with a private view, refrain from laughing?’26 That reference to ‘my friends’, to an audience, indicates a central theme in Horace: it is that which moves, delights or persuades an audience that makes for good poetry. Copernicus's Preface was a similar exercise in rhetoric addressed to the Pope. In supporting the claim that Copernicus drew on the aesthetic canons of Horace, Robert Westman has said that ‘the central theme emphasized by Horace and noticed by his Renaissance commentators was the principle of “fittingness” or “belongingness”. Style must in its characters; characters must preserve decorum, appropriateness.’27 He can then say that ‘Copernicus tacitly transferred the Horatian ideal of good poetry into the domain of astronomical practice.’28 The argument of Copernicus was that his heliostatic system was the more appropriate, the more fitting for a system made by God.

Taking the sun, not the earth, as the fixed point of reference created such harmony for both Copernicus and Kepler that new epistemological claims seemed appropriate. A true knowledge of the celestial order was, after all, possible.29 But it was only possible because of the shift of vantage point, the shift of perspective. And here another connection with Renaissance mannerism has been made. The shift in vantage point that turned monstrosity into elegance was a prominent theme in contemporary theory and practice of art.30 References to symmetry in Copernicus relate to the unified body that the heliocentric planetary system now became and have therefore invited comparison with the symmetry explored by the painter Albrecht Dürer in his drawings of the human body.31 As Fernand Hallyn has put it: ‘if the Renaissance artist is often called a god, Copernicus's God creates like a Renaissance artist’.32

In both Copernicus and Kepler there is a sense of excitement at the disclosure of a hidden beauty. This does not mean that their only arguments for the earth's motion were aesthetic.33 Once there was a grasp of an orderly system of planets focused on the sun, causal connections could be made between planetary motions and the sun as their motor. Kepler would think in terms of magnetic spokes radiating from a rotating sun. Among the Copernicans different balances were struck between aesthetic and physical arguments.34 But the aesthetic were always prominent. This was because different aesthetic nuances were applicable to different aspects of the theory. There was economy in that a rotating earth saved the gigantic heavens from turning. There was unification in that the planetary orbits could be analysed in relation to each other, rather than separately as in the Ptolemaic scheme. There was the aesthetic purchase Copernicus gained from his exclusion of a technical device of Ptolemy—the equant—which violated the ancient precept of uniform circular motion. There was the elegance with which an orbiting earth could account for the retrograde motions of the exterior planets; and there was harmony in the correlation of planetary periods with planetary distances from the sun. England's first Copernican, Thomas Digges, echoed precisely these virtues. Once recognise the correlation between orbital period and orbital size and ‘the orderly and most beautiful frame of the heavens doth ensue’.35

For Kepler this harmony was music to his intellect if not to his ears. Each planet had its own melody as it orbited the sun. The more slowly it moved the lower the pitch. As it approached the sun and accelerated so it sang a higher note. The combined choir might not make a wonderful sound now, but at the time of the Creation all was perfection. Kepler even thought it might be possible to determine the age of the world. One would simply extrapolate each planet's motions backwards in time until that perfect consonance was recovered.36 In such arguments there was graduation from aesthetic preference into theological discourse. The aesthetic appreciation of a work of art has often been described as a dwelling in the mind of its creator.37 In appreciating the artistry within nature, the mathematical structure within the world, Kepler effectively claimed that he was thinking God's thoughts after him.

Routine accounts of the decentring of humanity usually combine the Copernican innovation with a dehumanisation of nature that accompanied the mechanical philosophy. In chapter 3 we have already criticised the way this move is made in New Age historiography. It will complement that critique if we reflect on the role of aesthetic argument in the mechanical construction of nature. At first sight the mechanical philosophies of Gassendi and Descartes, of Charleton, Boyle and Hooke, would seem to be poor soil for the cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities. It was the corpuscularian ontologies that would later bring down the wrath of Romantics who accused them of removing all splendour from the world.38 It was surely difficult to celebrate the beauty of the real world when that world was redefined in terms of the primary qualities of microparticles that were not even visible. As Joseph Glanvill put it in his Scepsis Scientifica (1665), ‘we cannot profound into the hidden things of Nature, nor see the first springs and wheeles that set the rest agoing’.39

It would be difficult perhaps to find a stronger objection to the primacy of aesthetic considerations—unless we could uncover a shift in sensibility that conferred some kind of beauty on the arrangement of particles. Joseph Needham used to remark on the peculiar fondness for particles in Western natural philosophy compared with the resistance to them in the organic philosophies of China.40 What is it that makes one fond of particles? In the case of Robert Boyle they allowed him to speak of economy and simplicity in the workings of nature.41 And when he listed the virtues of his mechanical philosophy, he included some that might be applied to the evaluation of a work of art: clarity, intelligibility and the kind of comprehensibility that comes from visual representation.42

To explain an upsurge in popularity of the mechanical philosophies it would be insufficient to invoke a new aesthetic sensibility. Historians have been careful to avoid giving too intellectualist an explanation for a process that arguably had its social roots in a renegotiation of the relationships between mathematical practitioners, instrument makers and philosophers of nature.43 The diversity of purpose to which mechanical metaphors were put also makes it impossible to find a unilateral explanation for their new prevalence. At one extreme they would be used by deists and other radicals who wished to mechanise the soul. At the other, they would be used to reconstruct the boundaries of a natural order, allowing genuine miracles to stand out.44 For the English Catholic Thomas White, the success of philosophers in giving naturalistic accounts of nature's machinery was part of his case against a sceptical philosophy that called all knowledge claims into question.45

Notwithstanding such diversity in the contexts of use, we can see certain trends in the expression of a new aesthetic sensibility. Two of these demand our attention and can, in the first instance, be contrasted. In one the stress fell on the grandeur of the cosmic machinery. As with Darwin in the nineteenth century, an aesthetic of grandeur could have secular connotations, especially when joined with the view that not everything was made for humankind alone. The less secular aesthetic might be called one of precision rather than grandeur, in that one could celebrate the filigree work of the divine mechanic. In both these trends it would be possible to detect a liberation from anthropocentric theologies; but an alternative reading must also be considered. Even the more secular trend encouraged anthropocentric views to survive. As the perceivers of grandeur humans were ennobled. ‘Do you think you have humbled me’, asks the Marquise in Fontenelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, ‘by telling me the Earth moves around the Sun?’. ‘I swear to you’, says the lady to the philosopher, ‘I don't have any less self-esteem.’ And the philosopher replies: ‘Good Lord, no madame!… I know full well that people are less jealous of their place in the universe than in a drawingroom.’46

In the second half of the seventeenth century an aesthetics of precision was clearly facilitated by the microscope. In Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665) there was explicit reference to the beauty of the microscopic world.47 As unpromising a subject as the scale of a fish turned out to be remarkably fine, prompting Hooke to comment that ‘here in fishes, as well as other animals, nature follows its usual method, framing all parts so, as that they are both useful and ornamental in all its composures’.48 Beauty was mingled with utility but not yet derived from it Compared with the filigree precision of nature, human artifacts made a sorry sight: ‘the more we see of their shape’, Hooke observed, ‘the less appearance will there be of their beauty’.49 The edge of a razor, when magnified, was observed ‘to be of all kinds of shapes, except what it should be’.50 The argument was not entirely perfect. Ladies examining their skin under the microscope were not usually delighted with what they saw.51

Nevertheless nature's invisible realm did possess a beauty that natural philosophers created for it. The architecture of matter was patterned on what was known of visible micro-structures—many of high perfection. A snow crystal might not look perfect by the time it landed on one's sleeve; but Hooke was sure these ‘pretty figured stars of snow, when at first generated might be… very regular and exact’.52 Boyle, following Gassendi, came to believe that external crystal shape was built up by a pleasingly regular arrangement of angular particles.53 Nehemiah Grew even had plant forms constructed from angular saline particles.54 Several years before Hooke tickled his audience with magnified fleas, Charleton had already discussed their proboscis. There was more industry ‘in its delicate and sinuous perforation, than all the costly aqueducts of Nero's Rome’. In fine ‘the meanest piece of nature throws disparagement and contempt upon the greatest masterpiece of art’.55 Yet this did little to diminish human significance. Charleton insisted that the deity ‘adorned the universe’ principally for man's sake—not exclusively, for there was always the question of God's own Glory.56

There was, potentially at least, a less sacred aesthetic in Descartes's philosophy. There was still beauty in his mechanised world. The Cartesian vortices put into pictorial form a fact that Newton would find pleasing in itself—that the planets orbited the sun in the same direction and almost the same plane. In his Principles of Philosophy (1644) Descartes explicitly introduced aesthetic terms. A grand conception of the Creator's power should eliminate any fear that we imagine his works to be ‘too vast, too beautiful, too perfect’.57 And the grandeur of the universe did mean that we must not think too proudly of ourselves. Modesty required that we should not imagine everything to have been created for our sake. It also meant that we should not presume to know the ends that God had in view. A letter written from the Hague in June 1647 shows again how the grandeur of the universe could be a vehicle of release: ‘We may say that all created things are made “for us”, inasmuch as we can derive some utility from them; but I do not see that we are obliged to think man is the end of creation.’58

The contents of this letter can be seen as a perfect summation of Descartes' critique. He even allows for the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence as a further signal. But his argument does not pull in one direction only. In fact he makes an important distinction that leads, in the end, to an elevation of the human self. His distinction is between ‘those advantages which can be diminished through others' enjoying similar ones, and those which cannot’.59 Virtue, knowledge, and health, for example, are in no way lessened in ourselves because they might be found in others. The same could be said of aesthetic sensibility. In this respect we are not diminished in the Cartesian universe: dethronement in one sense meant re-enthronement in another. As Descartes put it himself: ‘if we love God and for his sake unite ourselves in will to all that he has created, then the more grandeur, nobility and perfection we conceive things to have, the more highly we esteem ourselves, as parts of a whole that is a greater work’.60 This almost holistic identification with the immensity of creation shows perhaps a rather different side to Descartes than the customary profile of a detached spectator and exploiter of nature. It chimes with our earlier remarks about the inadequacy of much New Age historiography. The twin facets of Descartes's position were neatly captured by Fontenelle. The narrator observes that most people admire nature only because they believe she has a kind of magic at her command: the minute they begin to understand her she loses all their respect. But not so the Marquise who registers a ‘much higher regard’ for nature once she knows the world is like a watch.61

It was, of course, with Newton rather than Descartes that the scientific movement of the seventeenth century reached its climax. The ancient Pythagorean correlation of musical tones with the lengths and tensions of strings meant that for Newton, as for Kepler, references to the harmony of creation were not merely metaphorical. Enthralled by the problem of dividing the octave, Newton appears to have relished a correlation between the seven tones of the scale, the seven colours of his spectrum and the seven planets of the solar system.62 Newton also believed that the elegance of his inverse-square law of gravitation had been known to Pythagoras for whom the pursuit of cosmic harmony had been a means of spiritual purification.63 Instead of separating out Newton's interests according to modern criteria, the historian cannot ignore the connections that, for Newton himself, bound them together. There was a holistic character to Newton's interests because ‘a true understanding of the uses of language enabled [him] to introduce astronomical calculation into his chronological writings, and to complete his mathematical arguments with theological references’.64 In one of his theological manuscripts Newton chose to recall the Wisdom of Solomon: the omnipotent God had ‘in ye beginning of his divine wisdom created ye things of the heaven & of ye earth in weight number and measure, depending upon most wonderful proportions & harmony to serve ye time wch he hath appointed’.65 Aesthetic considerations and their grounding in a primitive theism were not embellishments of Newton's science. They were at the heart of his understanding of the world and of his role in it.

Science and the Dethronement of Humanity

When Keith Thomas published his Man and the Natural World in 1983, he could say that the late-seventeenth-century dethronement of man represented one of the great revolutions in modern western thought, but one to which historians had scarcely done justice. Both in detail and sweep he then gave an illuminating account. A charming detail came from the Civil War sectary who affirmed that God ‘loved toads as well as the best saints’.66 Symbolising the sweep was John Ray's remark in his Wisdom of God: ‘It is a generally received opinion that all this visible world was created for Man [and] that Man is the end of the Creation, as if there were no other end of any creature but some way or other to be serviceable to man. But though this be vulgarly received, yet wise men nowadays think otherwise.’67

We have been hinting in this chapter that there was also a counterpoint to this theme. The aesthetic grounds on which wise men now thought otherwise only served to highlight the uniqueness of man as an aesthete. A not dissimilar point was made by Polanyi in his Personal Knowledge: ‘Copernicus gave preference to man's delight in Distract theory, at the price of rejecting the evidence of out lenses… In a literal sense, therefore, the new Copernican system was is anthropocentric as the Ptolemaic view, the difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affection.’68 The reflexivity whereby the appreciation of beauty reflected back on human self-perception is not just an ingenious invention. It can be found in the primary sources. One of the ironies is that Ray could accuse the Cartesians of being too anthropocentric: ‘Those philosophers indeed, who hold man to be the only creature in this sublunary world, endued with sense and perception, and that all other animals are mere machines or puppets, have some reason to think that all things here below were made for man.’69

It is by no means clear, however, that Ray's position was as radical as it seems. In the Wisdom of God, as in most of the primary sources that Keith Thomas cited, the form of words is that not everything was made for man alone.70 ‘For my part’, Ray declared, ‘I cannot believe, that all the things in the world were so made for man, that they have no other use.’71 This formula can be read as an invitation to consider the more radical possibility that some things were not made for man at all. That may even have been the intention of some who used it.

But it is not what the formula says. In fact when Ray clarifies his position, the balance shifts in favour of a more conservative resolution. Objects that appear to be of no human use now, may well be to future generations. It remained true that ‘all the creatures in the world may be some way or other useful to us’.72 At the very least they exercised our wits and, by contemplating them, one was led to admire their Maker. Ray did make room in his universe for angels and other rational beings, but there was a profound sense in which a plurality of worlds did not entail human diminution. To say that other worlds had been made for their inhabitants both reflected and reinforced the assumption that this earthly world was made for us. It was still a long way to Thomas Hardy's deduction in Two on a Tower that because the invisible stars were not made for us, nothing was. Indeed the choicest symbol of a surviving anthropocentrism occurred at the front of the very book which, at a popular level, might have done most to deflate it. As late as 1821, an edition of Fontenelle's Conversations appeared, duly updated to include the planet Uranus. But when the curtains were rolled back, there, still centre stage, was our own sun.73

The reconstruction of nature that we associate with the seventeenth century did not leave humanity displaced. As the aesthetes who could appreciate the grounds on which the reconstruction had been achieved the natural philosophers were still in touch with their Maker. It is not clear that they felt compelled to assume an objectivist view of beauty. In his Boyle lectures, Richard Bentley could sound strangely relativistic: ‘All pulchritude is relative; and all bodies are truly physically beautiful under all possible shapes and proportions.’74 This was, however, immediately qualified with the conditions that they must be ‘good in their kind’ and ‘fit for then proper uses and ends’. To describe mountains as barren and misshapen was to neglect their use in making the plains fertile—an argument that still worked for John Ruskin one hundred and fifty years later.

For Newton, the harmony of creation as revealed by physical theory was decidedly a divine gift—the pivot on which a discourse of natural philosophy could become one of moral philosophy.75 Another gift, still intact, was its beauty as perceived by the senses. Whether the beauty was of colour, sound or human architecture, Newton clearly believed there were underlying mathematical ratios. He advised the Oxford student John Harington to pursue then because such an exercise would ‘exemplify the simplicity in all the works of the Creator’.76 Newton was inclined to believe that ‘some general laws of the Creator prevailed with respect to the agreeable or unpleasing affections of all our senses; at least the supposition does not derogate from the wisdom or power of God’.77 Divinely ordained laws were involved in the perception as well as the structure of all that was beautiful. Creature and Creator were still tied by the very possibility of appreciating beauty. This was a form of anthropocentrism that science would find it hard to abolish because there was a sense in which it depended upon it.

The Scientist as Aesthete

During the Enlightenment there were many attacks on established religion, but among natural philosophers a sense of the artistry in creation was rarely lost. The discovery of economy or beauty in nature did not always point beyond itself but in many instances it did. In astronomy James Ferguson was prepared to populate comets because their paths provided ever changing vistas on the beauty of creation.78 In the life sciences, the conviction of a natural order that could be displayed through taxonomic categories remained strong, even when it proved elusive. The art of classification certainly had a transcendental meaning for Linnaeus who was nicknamed the second Adam because of his penchant for naming new species. In chapter 6 we showed how natural theology could function as an apology for science or for religion. In Linnaeus it did both. Because humans alone were able to appreciate the economy and beauty in nature he concluded that they had been made ‘for the purpose of studying the Creator's works that [they] may observe in them the evident marks of divine wisdom’.79 For most of his life Linnaeus believed that one mark of that divine wisdom was the fixity of species. It is therefore tempting to suppose that when the first evolutionary theories came along, there would be inevitable damage to aesthetic sensibilities. Yet some of the earliest evolutionary schemes were premissed on a gradual ascent up the ‘great chain of being’, one of the most durable and aesthetically pleasing of all taxonomic ideals.80 Charles Darwin's earliest drafts of his evolutionary theory would embrace the aesthetically pleasing notion that evolution was nature's way of preserving adaptation to a changing environment.81

Even in chemistry—the science of material change—aesthetic sensibilities continued to find expression and, in striking cases, with religious overtones. Early in the nineteenth century Humphry Davy used Lavoisier's new, anti-phlogistic chemistry more, he said, for its beauty than its truth.82 A belief in the ultimate unity of matter was aesthetically so attractive to Davy that he resisted Dalton's indivisible atoms in the hope of reducing a burgeoning list of elements. It was his peculiar misfortune to keep discovering more; but this did nothing to dampen his spirits. As his most recent biographer has observed, ‘God for Davy was the guarantor of a simple, harmonious and ultimately intelligible world, making science a reasonable activity, as it would not be if the world were governed by pure chance.’83

What of the earth sciences, which in the nineteenth century did so much to shake the foundations of popular Christian belief? Even here there were expressions of awe and wonder, an appreciation of grandeur and beauty that were not always secular in tone. Hugh Miller loved to talk about the beauty of fossil forms and their resemblance to human architecture. The interior arches of an ammonite shell reminded him of the ‘groined ribs of a Gothic roof’. Amid the coal measures he found the ornately carved columns of the Sigillaria, examples of delicate work more exquisite in their finish than those of Westminster Abbey or Canterbury Cathedral. Every human design that had proved to be pleasing had been anticipated in previous organic structures. Miller's point was not that architects had consciously imitated nature but that the same architectonic principles were visible in their work and that of their Maker. They evidently shared the same aesthetic sensibilities. For Miller this was evidence that man had been made in the image of God. And because they were of like mind they could work together on the improvement of nature.84

The graduation of aesthetic into theistic discourse has been a recurrent theme with many variations. But the historian should be the last to suggest that there has been no modulation and no negation of the theme. It is clear from the post-Darwinian controversies that an emphasis on utility and natural selection did, for some, strip the world of beauty. Structures that Hugh Miller had found captivating were seen in a new light. It was their usefulness in the struggle for existence that accounted for their form. An anonymous contributor to the Monthly Journal of Science, writing in April 1879, expressed the sadness that would afflict a sensitive mind when the woods and fields no longer offered a ‘soothing contrast to the exchange, the workshop, or the battlefield’. Neither lavish, nor liberal, ‘Dame Nature’ had become ‘more penurious than the wife of the thriftiest peasant-proprietor in rural France’. The reduction of beauty to utility, orchestrated by the Darwinians, marked the passing of an era: ‘Those colours which so fascinated the poet or artist, and which seem to be spread in such royal lavishment over copse and meadow and heath, have all their purpose to fulfil; they have to serve as an attraction to insects which effect the fertilisation of the flower.’85

It would be tempting to conclude that Darwin killed the beautiful and the sublime. Late in life he complained of the atrophy of an aesthetic sensibility in himself.86 But those who have studied his writing carefully have concluded that he had preached a ‘naturalist reconciliation of the sublime and the beautiful’.87 His famous image of a tangled bank was part of a theodicy of landscape. Certainly he had not been insensitive to the sublime. As a young man he had been lured by images of the Brazilian rain forest. When he finally arrived, his language, too, had graduated from the aesthetic to the religious: ‘Twiners entwining twiners,… tresses like hair—beautiful lepidoptera—Silence—hosannah’.88 Later, when he had a theory to promote, he still spoke of a ‘grandeur’ in his vision of nature where the production and extinction of species were due to secondary causes. The laws that governed their operation were still ascribed, albeit ambiguously, to a Creator.89 The experience of the sublime was not for Darwin an acceptable argument for the existence of God any more than the powerful feeling; excited by music.90 But he did acknowledge that the state of mind which ‘grand scenes’ had excited in him had been ‘intimately connected with a belief in God’.91

In twentieth-century physical science, references to the harmony and beauty disclosed by theoretical structures have been no less prominent than in previous centuries. When Einstein announced his field equations in 1915 he wrote of a ‘magic’ that was inescapable for anyone who fully understood his theory—a magic which consisted in the harmonious coherence of its mathematical structure.92 A respected biographer of Einstein has written that an ‘overriding urge for harmony’ directed his scientific life as much as it did that of Max Planck.93 Einstein's famous quip that ‘when judging a physical theory, I ask myself whether I would have made the Universe in that way had I been God’94 was too presumptuous for Niels Bohr and may indeed go beyond the pantheism that Einstein himself professed. One must also allow for the jocular. Nevertheless, Einstein was surely earnest in saying that the emotional state which enables great scientific achievements to be made is ‘similar to that of the religious person or the person in love’.95 One facet of that state could be resistance to the ugly. Reminiscing about Einstein, Hermann Bondi said that ‘when I put down a suggestion that seemed to me cogent and reasonable, he did not in the least contest this, but he only said, “Oh, how ugly.” As soon as an equation seemed to him to be ugly, he really rather lost interest in it.… He was quite convinced that beauty was a guiding principle in the search for important results in theoretical physics.’96 There was certainly nothing intrinsically ugly about e = mc².

The achievements of modern physics have been associated with an ethereal beauty that can be experienced only by the mathematically literate. There have even been references to the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ in elucidating the structure of the physical world. Elaborating what he meant by ‘unreasonable’, Eugene Wigner even used the word ‘miracle’: ‘The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift that we neither understand nor deserve.’97 Responses to this sense of a ‘gift’ have varied enormously, but there is one that is not uncommon. It surfaced in a remark made by the physicist Frank Close when asked to describe the most thrilling moment his work had given him. His reply was ‘the first time an experiment confirmed my theory and I felt humbled by having “caught Nature at it”’.98 The fact that Nature already ‘knew’ about his equations was ‘an eerie and mystical experience’. It was an ‘incredible surprise that quarks were for real!’ And so from the interviewer cam the inevitable question: ‘Do you believe in a god?’ To which came the conventional reply: ‘Not in a conventional sense.’ The stuff we are made of might be merely flotsam on a sea of dark matter. And yet this could itself evoke a sense of awe, an experience that Close was prepared to describe as ‘religious’.

Some Exegetical Problems

The graduation from aesthetic appreciation into religious discourse could be illustrated with many more examples. Werner Heisenberg spoke of a spirit of humility in which one had to accept the gift of ‘an incredible degree of simplicity’ in the mathematical abstractions of physical theory. These beautiful interrelationships could not be invented: ‘they have been there since the creation of the world’. His wife recorded that he had once said to her: ‘I was lucky enough to look over the good Lord's shoulder while He was at work.’99 To interpret such remarks is, however, a difficult matter. It would be surprising were the religious apologist not to seize them because they seem to show a congruity between the practice of science and some kind of belief in the transcendent. Press such claims too hard, however, and they are likely to burst. There are problems with this kind of apologetic and the historian is in a good position to assess them.

Thus it might be objected that the only tests that ultimately carry weight are those concerning the fruitfulness of a theory, the control it gives, and its ability to withstand attempts at falsification. It is not always obvious that a beautiful theory is any the less beautiful after being slain. Nor could anyone conversant with the history of science possibly pretend that beauty (or simplicity for that matter) is a guarantor of truth. In the case of simplicity or economy, there is the pragmatist's objection that the simpler a theory is, the simpler it is to use. Relationships apparently elected for their simplicity may also turn out to be grounded in some other theoretical constraint, invisible to the superficial glance.100 To complicate matters still further, the idea that aesthetic criteria may arbitrate between contending theories fails to recognise that each may have its own distinctive appeal, with a resulting impasse if the aesthetic components provide the sole criterion for choice.

How serious are these complications for the religious apologist seeking to capitalise on perceptions of beauty in scientific work? The problem of the impasse if aesthetic criteria alone are given weight is perhaps more hypothetical than real given that they are rarely deployed in isolation from other constraints.101 As we have noted, Tycho Brahe had aesthetic objections to the expanded Copernican universe because it created an unseemly chasm between the outermost planet and the nearest star. But he also had physical and biblical objections to a moving earth, eventually focussing his attack on the alleged inadequacy of Copernicus's observations.102 An apologist might also refer to those celebrated cases where a theory has withstood attempts at falsification, has proved fruitful, and, as in the case of general relativity, has retained an elegance on which there seems to be consensus. In such cases the survival of the aesthetic component may, for some scientists, if not a majority, generate a sense of contact with those verities not of their making and which, in Heisenberg's phrase, have been there since the creation of the world. If there is consensus on the beauty of relativity theory this also suggests that prescriptions can be given that would allow an aesthetic experience to be shared, thereby nullifying the objection that it would be confined to the first moment of formulation or ‘discovery’.103 Religious apologists might, therefore, feel that they are not thwarted by the obvious objections. Writing as both physicist and Christian theologian, John Polkinghorne provides an excellent example of how a response to beauty can mediate between the practice of science and the affirmation of a religious orthodoxy. For Polkinghorne the abstract beauty of a scientific theory does more than convert into an argument for scientific realism. It also points to a mystery beyond itself. In his terms, it is the Creator's joy in creation which lies behind the human experience of beauty.104

This kind of affirmation clearly survives; but the question may still remain whether the pages of history are not littered with beautiful delusions. Much of Kepler's work, for example, appears to have been inspired and sustained by what, in retrospect, was the forlorn hope of correlating the arrangement and spacing of planetary orbits with what they would be if they were wrapped around the regular Greek solids. It may also be correct to speak of delusions when referring to Newton's belief in a unified harmonic theory of light and colour, or Faraday's belief in the interconvertibility of gravitational and electrical forces, or even Einstein's refusal to admit the implications of the indeterminacy principle as interpreted by Heisenberg and Bohr. But in each case the belief in some kind of unity and harmony in nature had inspired brilliant work of enduring significance.

It therefore seems appropriate to ask whether the historically-based objection adds up to anything more than that science is a fallible process? It would surely only do so if it could be shown that conjectures based on aesthetic considerations had, on balance, been more fallible historically than those in which such considerations had played no part. When discussing the role of guiding principles in science a distinction is usually drawn between treating them as dogmas and as methodological prescriptions. It is a distinction that has often been made when discussing the scope of ‘reductionist’ models in the life sciences, and indeed in other academic disciplines.105 Reductionism as a research strategy can be distinguished from reductionism as an epistemological claim. The attempt to analyse wholes in terms of the behaviour of their parts does not commit one to the claim that the concepts, theories or laws applicable to one level of analysis can be derived from those that pertain to another. Nor does reductionism as a principle of method commit one to the kind of ontological reductionism assumed in claims that a living system is ‘nothing but’ a collection of physical and chemical processes. But if we may speak of ‘methodological reductionism’ there seems no good reason to exclude a category of ‘methodological aestheticism’. Delusion—and success—have accompanied both. The distinction might even be of service to the apologist. It would allow one to say that the quest for economy, elegance and beauty does usually regulate scientific enquiry without denying that it has produced fantasies as well as facts.

A rather different objection to the apologetic moves might, however, arise at this point. When scientists speak of harmony and beauty in their maps of the natural world, is not this a rhetorical ploy in the specific context of communicating with a wider audience? This is a pertinent objection because insufficient attention is generally paid to the kind of text in which such terms are used. As we observed in chapter 1, scientists undoubtedly do adopt different conventions when writing for their peers and for the general populace. Yet it would surely be wrong to suggest that affirmations of elegance and beauty are merely an affectation.106 They may be an attractive way of engaging an audience, of making science seem more like an art form. But there is more to it than this. There is ample evidence that words like beauty and elegance are heard within laboratories and not merely in works of popularisation. A physical chemist might speak of beautiful spectra, of the internal harmony of a molecular crystal, of the resemblance between polymer structures and minimalist music.107 Whether the scientist in question be Faraday, Darwin or Einstein, aesthetic motives in the quest for a unified theory were a driving force and not an excrescence.108 It might be objected that the intellectual coherence achieved by Darwin's theory, its imposition of order on a complex web of biogeographical and paleontological data, cannot offer the same kind of aesthetic experience as the mathematical formalism of relativity theory. But no-one could pretend that the aesthetic experience derived from an immersion in the Ring cycle of Wagner is of the same kind as that derived from a finely spun melody of Bellini.

We are still left with the most powerful objection with which a religious apologist has to contend. This concerns the move from aesthetic appreciation to theistic reference. Surely any inference from the nature of the finite to the nature of the transcendent remains susceptible to Hume's critique? The objection may also take a theological as well as a philosophical turn in that the experience of beauty, either directly in nature itself or through the mediation of scientific theory, may lack potency in drawing those affected to the kind of deity favoured by the apologist. Writing in the nineteenth century, when the beauties of creation had been extolled by the nature poets as never before, Thomas Chalmers noted, with regret, that to be so moved was not necessarily to be moved in the right direction.109 There is a thesis that the emotional states associated with aesthetic experience are closely allied to those accompanying the awareness of a trans-temporal reality. But a more recent critic than Chalmers has recalled the aphorism that many have mistaken the vibrations of a 32-foot organ pipe for the witness of the Holy Spirit.110 Joking apart, the issues here are exceedingly subtle. No one could have been more forceful than Karl Barth in renouncing attempts to reason from the harmonies of creation to the existence and attributes of the deity.111 Yet in Mozart's music Barth claimed to hear harmonies analogous to the harmony of God's good creation and parables of God's free grace.112 It must be clear that there is no kind of ‘proof’ that would take one from aesthetic experience to a transcendent deity. A compatibility of aesthetic with religious experience is, however, another matter, as it clearly was for Barth.

Theologising about the experience of beauty in science (or in the arts) has finally to contend with a mundane problem. Apologetic inferences may be too narrowly conceived if they gloss over alternative secular philosophies of science in which the appreciation of elegance or beauty becomes an end in itself. The intellectual pleasure derived from science certainly can be a form of hedonism; and the pleasure itself can be intensified if plausible scientific models happen to fit a metaphysical preference. The conformity of scientific discovery to a metaphysical expectation offers an experience that has itself been called aesthetic.113 This is an important point because it means that scientific naturalists, atheists and materialists have had their pleasure too. Think what delight T. H. Huxley took in Darwin's theory when he realised that it conformed to his hope and expectation. His hope had been that a theory would emerge to displace the recourse to divine intervention. He could therefore celebrate Darwin's Origin of Species as a triumphal fulfilment of the metaphysical principles of nature's continuity and uniformity.114

The Conformity of Science to Metaphysical Expectation

Michael Polanyi spoke of Neo-Darwinism as a theory that ‘beautifully fits into a mechanistic system of the universe’.115 This was a tacit acknowledgement that the accordance of theories with general metaphysical principles can indeed be a source of aesthetic satisfaction. The question then becomes whether the theist, who sees in certain scientific advances a corroboration of theism, enjoys an essentially different experience from the materialist who might make a similar claim. A topical example comes from modern cosmology. In the fine-tuning of the universe, theists may discover features of their world that bring intense pleasure: they conform to what one would expect if the universe had been in some sense planned.116 But it is always open to the sceptic or atheist to protest that our universe may be only one of whole families of universes, perhaps the only one which, by chance, had the necessary parameters to survive.117

For the sceptic or atheist this extension of Darwinian natural selection to universes themselves can surely yield a comparable pleasure. To judge from some reviews of Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, this is emphatically the case. Dennett's discussion of the cosmological theory that whole families of universes have been ‘born’ out of black holes is described by one reviewer as ‘deliciously up to date’.118 It is that word ‘deliciously’ that catches the eye. There is evidently pleasure to be had when a topical theory rebuffs the claim that only by reference to a designer God can one possibly explain the propitious features of our universe. The theist may claim, as Richard Swinburne continues to do, that a monotheistic explanation for the unity of the universe is objectively the simplest as well as the most pleasing.119 But that does not settle the matter because of comparable meta-level pleasures available to the sceptic on the basis of alternative schemata. Thus we find Richard Dawkins, in a vehement reply to Swinburne, complaining that a deity who keeps a billion fingers on a billion electrons is about the most complicated hypothesis one could envisage.120

The historian finds such exchanges arresting precisely because, in the past, the debate has not always revolved around easily categorised scientific advances, some favourable to theism others to atheism. Historically it has often been the same advances that have given solace to both parties.121 Polanyi's reference to a ‘mechanistic system of the universe’ may conceal the fact that a system, initially conceived as a way of reinforcing Christian theism, in later hands became an instrument of aggression against the Christian Churches.122 The fact is that such key terms in the reconstruction of nature as ‘mechanism’, ‘law’, ‘power’, ‘conservation’, natural ‘selection’, and many more, are metaphors susceptible of competing meanings—some theistic, some entirely naturalistic.123

There is an example of this susceptibility in recent discussions of evolutionary theory. Writers prepared to embrace a form of theistic evolution often dwell on the creative interplay of law and chance. This is true of Arthur Peacocke who has given special weight to the disclosure from thermodynamics that organic molecules have the bower to organise themselves. In this discovery is seen a reinforcement of theistic evolution, in that it is what one might expect to find if some kind of creative evolution had been intended.124 John Bowker has made the same point:

We have now moved in a short space from near zero probability to inevitability in the origin of life. Although the former might seem to offer the clearest opportunity to invoke the agency of God (as one who is necessary to bring about the near-impossible), that is simply another instance of the ‘God-of-the gaps’ argument. It is the latter—the very fact of regularity which compels the argument to search (successfully) for inevitability—which supplies the most powerful illustration of the coherence of the appeal to personal agency.125

But would not the materialist claim a similar coherence? If matter has within itself the powers that have made evolution possible, if there has been a form of necessity endemic in the process, why need there be an appeal to a deity at all? Certainly in the seventeenth century, the notion of such self-organising matter was eschewed by Christian writers precisely because it was thought to imply the autonomy of nature.126 Conversely, the contingencies in the evolutionary process have been harnessed for both theistic and atheistic purposes.127 Where the theist might celebrate elements of spontaneity in a process of continuous creation, the atheist rejoices in the opportunity to ascribe our presence in the world to ‘chance’.

To sample the satisfaction of the atheist we might consider an address to the South Place Ethical Society given by the Oxford chemist Peter Atkins. In polemical vein he spoke of the simplicity discoverable through the sciences as epitomising a cultural goal in opposition to the complexities of religion and superstition.128 It is not a little ironic that extremes appeal to come together in that both Atkins and Swinburne favour an objectivist account of simplicity. The greatest aesthetic satisfaction, according to Atkins, should come from the revelation, through science, of the unity and simplicity of nature. His diatribe against ‘religion’ (as so often reduced to a thing) concludes with an antithesis typical of a rationalist sermon: ‘Religion regards human intelligence as too puny to master understanding, and urges us to resort to elaborated superstition. Science, in contrast, respects the power of human comprehension and shows the supreme power and joy of rational, public testable investigation.’129

When he claims that ‘religion emerged from magic’ Atkins seems not to know that the same could be said of science.130 When he says that philosophers have contributed little to our understanding of nature, he seems to forget that Newton would have called himself a philosopher. When he says that theologians have contributed nothing, he neglects that distinguished lineage of theologians who have been advocates of science. The original architect of the natural sciences tripos at Cambridge was one: William Whewell, whom we met in earlier chapters. When Atkins speaks of the unity and simplicity of nature as if these terms belong to scientific discourse alone, he seems not to know that they have been constitutive of an extensive literature of natural theology in which the beauty of the world pointed beyond itself. It was the unity of the world both presupposed and revealed in Newtonian mechanics that helped persuade William Paley and his predecessors of the case for monotheism. It was the unity of the evolutionary process that in the nineteenth century persuaded Asa Gray and Frederick Temple of the plausibility of theistic evolution.

The effect of Atkins' dogmas is to create a cultural dichotomy: science, high on its pedestal; the arts down and out on the floor. One would have hoped that his awareness of aesthetic sensitivity within the sciences might have encouraged greater subtlety. If scientists have frequently studied nature as if it were a work of art, the dichotomy is surely too crude. When Einstein gave a memorial address in honour of the physicist Karl Schwarzschild, he perfectly captured this aspect of scientific endeavour: ‘The mainsprings of Schwarzschild's motivations in his restless theoretical quests seem less from a curiosity to learn the deeper inner relationships among the different aspects of Nature than from an artist's delight in discerning delicate mathematical patterns.’131 By contrast, when scientific rationalists declare, as Atkins does, that ‘science appears to be omnicompetent’, that scientists ‘see further into truth than any of their contemporaries’,132 this may not be the most tactful way of promoting the public understanding of science. It is certainly not the most effective because it fuels expectations of infallibility which controversy between experts then belies.

For those like Atkins who wish to pit science against religion the crucial goal appears to be an explanation of how the universe came out of absolutely nothing. But it is very doubtful whether such an explanation would have the desired effect because religious beliefs are not simply substitutes where scientific knowledge is lacking. They provide resources, myths and symbols that, for many, give inspiration and meaning to life in the here and now. How something might have come out of nothing before there was time is an enthralling question but is likely to remain tangential to our existential and moral concerns. Nor is it clear that theists would have to admit defeat if it could be shown that universes are born out of black holes or nothing at all. They might argue that explanations given within the terms of the natural sciences cannot escape certain ‘givens’.133 References to the quantum fluctuation of a vacuum, for example, still presuppose what were once called laws of nature and a reality that behaves accordingly. The atheist's response might be to say that it is inappropriate to speak in this way because the laws came with the universe and the task is to explain why they were as they were. But in the theory that might finally give the rationalists what they want, is it not likely that others will find an elegance, a beauty even, that will continue to beckon to that unfathomable beyond?

It is not our contention that theology can do any better than silence when probing these ‘limit questions’. Our examination of aesthetic discourse within the sciences nevertheless lends support to what John Hick has called the ‘religious ambiguity of the universe’.134 Arguments drawn from nature, and from nature as reconstructed through the sciences, simply cannot decide the question between theism and naturalism. The choice has to be made on other grounds but, once made, may affect in the deepest way possible the meaning seen in nature's powers. As historians we find ourselves drawn to Hick's conclusion, which is not as negative as it may seem. At the very least it stands in judgement over excessive and misplaced dogmatism of the kind one finds in both popular religious and scientistic affirmation.