A few years before London was scourged by plague and fire, a young Cambridge scholar privately recorded the sins of his youth. This present soul had, it seems, made a mousetrap on the sabbath, had swum in a tub on the Lord's Day and lied about a louse. More disturbingly perhaps, he confessed to ‘unclean thoughts words actions and dreams’. His less than happy relations with his mother and stepfather were reflected in another wicked thought: that he might ‘burn them and the house over them’.1

Twenty-five years later something rather more public appeared in Cambridge: a magisterial book on mechanics. According to the astronomer Edmond Halley, its author had penetrated the mansions of the gods and scaled the heights of heaven.2 Reconstructing nature in mathematical terms, he had solved a great mystery: what kept moons and planets in their orbits? For some it may come as a surprise to learn that the penitent sinner of 1662, who had threatened to destroy his family home, was the same Isaac Newton who professed to rebuild the world with his gravitational forces and his laws of motion. But why juxtapose the confession with the profession? What has searching the soul to do with searching the cosmos?

In the case of Newton the answer is a great deal. His religious commitment profoundly affected the way he thought about nature—how it had been set up and how it worked.3 Although historians have often spoken of a ‘scientific revolution’ in the seventeenth century, the term ‘natural philosophy’ remained in use for the study of motion and other physical problems. What we may think of as a natural science was then regarded as a branch of philosophy, which would often be discussed in relation to broader philosophical issues. In the second edition of his Principia Newton wrote that ‘to discourse of [God] from the appearances of things does certainly belong to natural philosophy.’ It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that his religious sensibilities were prompted only by feelings of guilt. God was to be feared but also to be celebrated—in love, thanks and praise.4 There could be such a celebration because, in Newton's own words, ‘this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being’.5

Newton is one among many creative thinkers who have reconstructed nature and seen beauty in their construction. But what does it mean to speak of reconstructing nature? Surely nature is nature? And yet it is not so simple. When we think of ‘nature’ we may be thinking of many things. It might be of a beautiful Scottish landscape or, dreaming of an exotic holiday, an unspoilt tropical beach. The word ‘nature’ might equally conjure up things one would hope not to meet in paradise: a mosquito perhaps or a flea. For an artist, the image might be quite different: of nature captured in a still life painting—‘nature morte’, as the French would say. A work of art might show other facets of nature, conveying a sense of the sublime as in a Turner landscape, or a sense of violence as when John Martin depicted the writhing monsters of prehistoric times. Scientists as much as artists have their images of nature. For Galileo, a pictorial representation of the moon's surface was vital as he reported the results of his telescopic observations.6 In the sciences, nature may be conceived in more abstract terms, as when Descartes depicted the heavens replete with swirling vortices of subtle matter—a far cry from the blue sky of the travel brochures. Descartes actually thought of nature as a huge piece of clockwork with the great clock of Strasbourg serving as a model. An even more abstract conception can be illustrated from Newton's Principia, where ‘nature’ was to be grasped in geometrical terms and where Newton gave his proof of an inverse square law of gravity governing the elliptical orbits of planets. An example from the twentieth century would be the double helix model for DNA, which encapsulated one of the most remarkable features of organic ‘nature’—the coding of the reproductive process.

Each of these pictures could claim to represent nature. But the point is not just that ‘nature’ can be endowed with many different meanings. In every picture there is the hidden human hand. How carefully the photographer positions the camera to capture perfect reflections in the Scottish loch. We might even say that in every case nature is being idealised. This is perfectly explicit in the case of the tropical beach. In the purple prose of one tout operator's brochure, we see ‘an oriental Eden where creature comforts leave nature undisturbed’.7 The magnified flea in Robert Hooke's Micrographia reminds us that in this case two processes at least intervene to determine what we actually see: the magnification produced by a scientific instrument and the human hand in the drawing.8 In works of art an emotional response can be evoked by exaggerating mountain grandeur, arcadian vistas or clashing tormented beasts. We are dealing in short with constructions of nature. John Martin even entitled his picture: ‘The Country of the Iguanodon Restored’. The restoration was his and it was to illustrate a geological text.9

In the world of science, as in art, nature is apprehended through idealisation. It is not encountered, as it were, in the raw. Indeed, one meaning of the word ‘nature’ is that which is untouched by human hand. Where scientific enquiry involves interference with phenomena there can even be a sense in which the scientist denatures nature. An element of idealisation is visible in Galileo's picture of a magnified moon, which was no perfect replica of what he had seen: it was designed to spotlight the craters and mountains that would persuade his readers of its surface imperfections. Thus he allowed his engraver to exaggerate the crater lying on the lower portion of the picture.10 In Descartes's model of the heavens there were vortices of subtle matter that no-one could see, not even Descartes. When nature was modelled on the great clock of Strasbourg, it was a construction based on a construction. More recently the path that led Francis Crick and James Watson to their double helix for DNA was a path strewn with models they had constructed, dismantled and reconstructed.11 This may help to explain why we have chosen ‘Reconstructing Nature’ for our title. It is what scientists do and always have done. It is what Newton was doing with his mathematical models to explain the planetary orbits.

The mathematical analysis of nature had, for Newton, transcendental implications. The skill with which God had calculated the tangential component of each planet's velocity, to ensure that it went into a closed orbit, implied a deity no less brilliant than Newton himself, one ‘very well skilled in mechanics and geometry’.12 It is striking that in one of the great lights of the ‘scientific revolution’ there was such an engagement of science and religion. In Newton's case we seem to have an ‘engagement’ almost in the sense in which one might speak of two people engaged to be married. There is the promise of intimacy, commitment to the good of each, of mutual support and the prospect of union. Indeed one historian has claimed that in seventeeth-century natural philosophy, and in Newton par excellence, we see not the separation of science from religion but an unprecedented fusion.13

We chose for the sub-title of our lecture series ‘the engagement of science and religion’ because the richness and ambiguity of the word engagement helps to capture the many different ways in which the relationship between the two has been presented. If we turn from a great British scientist of the seventeenth century to one of the most familiar of the nineteenth, another sense of engagement may seem more apposite. Charles Darwin once wrote that he could not see how anyone could wish Christianity to be true. Its doctrine of eternal damnation for those outside the fold was itself a damnable dot trine.14 When champions of his theory of evolution found themselves berated by bishops, the engagement was surely an engagement in battle? We must all have heard of that celebrated occasion in 1860 when the British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Oxford. The local bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, tried to score a point against the Darwinian T. H. Huxley by asking whether he preferred to think of himself as descended from an ape on his grandmother's or grandfather's side. Huxley, so the legend goes, emerged triumphant with a devastating riposte, effectively implying that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop—certainly than a person who used his high position to pronounce on matters of which he was ignorant.15 It is not so long since that occasion in Edinburgh when Richard Dawkins and the then Archbishop of York, John Habgood, had their action replay. It led to a memorable headline in the press: ‘Apes have souls too, says primate’.16 When Dawkins compares religious belief to a self-perpetuating computer virus, the engagement of science and religion becomes—well, engaging!

Which leads to a third sense of engagement. We may speak of an engaging personality or of an idea that engages our attention. The sense here is of a fascination with an idea or person. The mutual bearings of science and theology have often been of this kind. Innovations in one domain make an impression in the other. A modern example might be the manner in which new models of scientific rationality have been adopted to explore the rationality or otherwise of discourse about God.17 But the links can be stronger than this. When referring to a mechanical system it is not unusual to speak of one part engaging another. The connection, here, will be so light that movement in the one part induces movement in the other. Such an interlocking of science and theology has occurred in the past. The interleaving of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology in the early modern period is an obvious example. The interlocking was sometimes so strong that threats to the authority of Aristotle would be read as threats to the Catholic Church.18

It is not our intention to resuscitate every meaning of engagement listed in dictionaries. But it would be a pity to overlook one archaic usage. Here, to engage meant to ‘win over, as an adherent or helper’. This may remind us that scientific knowledge has often been a resource for religious apologists, as it was for Newton's correspondent Richard Bentley. Conversely to gain the approval of religious authorities was once a necessity for scientific thinkers, even if it has become less so today. One of our aims is to show that engagement in each of these senses has featured in debates about ‘science and religion’. We should certainly not think only of marriage, of divorce or of war. Examples of contact are legion and they are remarkably diverse.

In chapter 1 we shall explore something of this diversity, drawing attention to the inadequacy of popular accounts that have routinely constrained discussion by imposing master-narratives on historical data. We shall argue that there are many stories to be told and that they cannot correctly be reduced to over-arching schemata, such as those based on conflict or harmony. Arguments for the value of an historical approach will be presented, with particular reference to the insights made possible by different styles and methods of historical scholarship. One consequence of such an analysis is that it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the historian to sympathise with projects designed to uncover the essence of ‘science’, the essence of ‘religion’ and therefore of some timeless, inherent ‘relationship’ between them.19 In chapter 2 this point is developed by showing just how problematic the terms ‘science’ and ‘religion’ really are. The ‘scriptural geologists’ of the early nineteenth century will be introduced to show the difficulties that may arise in circumscribing ‘science’; Auguste Comte's highly influential positivist philosophy, with its attendant Religion of Humanity, will serve a similar purpose for the discussion of ‘religion’.

A critique of the master-narratives is developed further in chapters 3 and 4. In recent years a version of the history of science favoured by prophets of ‘New Age’ persuasion has achieved a certain popularity. Our purpose in chapter 3 is to see how well it stands up to serious examination. The older, but still enduring, narratives of an essential ‘conflict between religion and science’ would always feast off those well-known episodes in which the freedom of scientific enquiry was stifled by ecclesiastical authorities.20 In chapter 4 we therefore examine perhaps the most famous case of all: the trial and condemnation of Galileo by the Roman Catholic Church. We shall try to show that the best historical scholarship presents a very different picture from that of popular mythology. The value of an historical approach is also underlined by showing how each generation has reinterpreted the affair in the light of its own interests and perceptions.

At the heart of the book are chapters 5–7, which discuss the erstwhile theme of the Gifford Lectures—natural theology—from different but largely complementary points of view. In chapter 5 we provide some general perspectives on the engagement of natural theology and the natural sciences. In accord with recent practice in the history of science, chapter 6 is devoted to the rhetorical strategies deployed by scientists and theologians. Here we show how, in Britain, the design argument was elaborated in order to convince the waverer and thus provide a bulwark against the enemies of Christianity. These two chapters are intended to enrich an understanding of natural theology by exposing the contexts in which, and the purposes for which, it was used. This is in contrast to standard philosophical approaches which tend to focus on the logical structure of the classic arguments for God's existence. In chapter 7, however, we adopt a more philosophical approach in order to comment on a feature of natural theology that might be said still to survive. This is the appeal to elegance and beauty in descriptions both of nature and of scientific theory. Historically, statements Concerning the hidden beauties disclosed by scientific effort have often graduated in theistic discourse. In some constituencies they still do. In providing a commentary on this phenomenon, we also suggest that, in the history of natural theology, there is support for what has been called the ‘religious ambiguity’ of the universe.21

In chapters 8 and 9 two very different historical techniques are brought to bear on the engagement of science and religion, those of the biographer and the social historian. An advantage of the biographical approach is that it can expose the issues as they were perceived and worked out in the life of an individual. Instead of concentrating on abstract relations between ideas, there is value in seeing how lives were affected by religious experience and the experience of sometimes threatening scientific innovation. By contrast with a focus on the individual, historians have sometimes asked whether particular religious communities might have had distinctive attitudes towards the value of the sciences. In a celebrated and much criticised thesis, Robert Merton argued that the Puritan movement in seventeeth-century England made a distinctive contribution to the expansion of the practical sciences.22 Because we believe there is value in studying social groups with distinctive practices, the reader will find in chapter 9 a case-study based on the Quakers and their involvement in science—particularly those elected to the Royal Society.

In chapter 10 we adopt a different method again, examining the changing relations between just one science and the religious sensibilities it could arouse. Of all the sciences, chemistry has had perhaps the lowest profile in the history of natural theology. With ambitions to imitate (even to improve upon) nature, chemists have been in the forefront of blurring distinctions between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’. In this way they have made their distinctive contribution to a problematising of the ‘natural’ which has, in turn, had implications for the survival of natural theology. Nevertheless, chemico-theologies have existed and their character as process-theologies invites some concluding reflections on what a future historian might make of our bio-technology and the public anxieties it has occasioned.