In December 1815 a precocious Cambridge student, writing home to a schoolmaster friend, confessed to ‘certain yearnings after the whole circle of the sciences, certain ecstatic aspirations after universal knowledge, certain indefinite desires to approximate to something like omniscience’. To be fair, he recognised that ‘not much good would be likely to come to me if I were to remain in such an all-reading, all-learning mood for ever’.1 But he was wrong. Son of a Lancaster carpenter, William Whewell was to become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. It was he who first coined the word ‘scientist’ in the 1830s and of whom it was famously quipped that science was his forte, omniscience his foible.2 Omniscience and popularity are not the most natural of partners and when England's polymath underestimated Scottish pride, he had a rude awakening. Whewell's three large tomes on the history of science fell into the hands of David Brewster, well known for his work in optics. But to read Whewell's History one might not think so. As Brewster studied his review copy he searched in vain for his name and for those compliments that would have boosted his self-esteem. Worse was to follow. When he wrote his review he concluded that one successful generalisation, and one alone, had Whewell pursued: ‘the gross neglect of the claims of the philosophers and authors of Scotland’.3 Whewell was flabbergasted by Brewster's review. ‘He says… that I even hate Scotchwomen. I think this last charge is hard, but what can I say?’4

One of Whewell's more interesting claims was that each of the sciences had depended for its progress on a distinctive leading idea that had regulated thinking about nature. His fundamental idea was that there are ‘fundamental ideas’ peculiar to each science. In crystallography, for example, the idea of symmetry had played a crucial role. Or consider the case of chemistry. In Whewell's day the neutralisation of acids by bases to give a salt was a model being applied to all chemical reactions. The mechanism was thought to be electrical, as opposite charges were neutralised. Accordingly, Whewell identified the idea of polarity as the fundamental idea governing chemical progress. His thesis was that for science to be possible there had to be a constant interplay between the mind and experimental data. It was through these fundamental ideas, their unfolding and refinement, that scientific understanding was achieved.5

What has this to do with natural theology? For Whewell, everything—because the way the mind worked in gaining scientific knowledge was, in his view, evidence of Providential design. The very possibility of scientific progress implied the existence of a deity.6 This association between natural science and natural theology was even more intimate. Whewell claimed that the great discoveries in biology had been made by asking questions about purpose. William Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood by asking what purpose was served by valves in the veins. In living systems, the idea of function or purpose was so fundamental that it was inescapably involved in the analysis of organic structures.7 Whewell pointed to a creature not that common in Cambridge: the kangaroo. When the baby first starts to take milk from its mother, it is so small that it cannot suck. Accordingly nature has provided a special muscle in the adult female that allows the milk to be injected into the baby's mouth. Whewell's point was that this muscle must be a special contrivance, designed for that purpose. And from there it was not a kangaroo jump to statements about the foresight shown by the Creator.8 Natural science and natural theology were once again joined. The possibility of gaining knowledge through the mediation of fundamental ideas pointed to design. And a specific fundamental idea, that of final cause, pointed directly to a Designer. It was a case of wheels within wheels—one might almost say Whewells within Whewells.

The question we wish to raise in this chapter is whether historians have anything distinctive to say about this kind of natural theology in which scientific knowledge was turned into arguments for design. We have used the past tense because this habit of mind, as Whewell would have called it, had its heyday in the English-speaking world from the second half of the seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth. But the use of the latest physics to affirm some kind of intelligence behind the universe is a practice that still continues. We hear of a universe so finely tuned that if the forces unleashed during the first few seconds of the Big Bang had been even minutely different, human life could never have evolved. And we hear of a universe that chaos theory has shown to be so delicately balanced that future events have become less predictable than a mechanistic determinism might once have suggested.9

Because arguments for the existence of God have so often been the staple diet in courses on the philosophy of religion, there has been a preoccupation with the logical structure of the design argument and its imperfections. Our aim is not to cast doubt on the value of such analysis. But it has encouraged the ransacking of classic texts in order to furnish examples of philosophical argument that are then made grist to the mill. For the historian this is a constrictive approach to historical texts because there are so many more questions that need to be asked. There is a sense in which ‘we murder to dissect’ if we extract the bare bones of an argument from the intellectual project of which it formed a part. The historian will want to recapture the larger project in so far as it is possible. The absorbing question then becomes: why did a particular project become urgent at a particular time and place?

Projects of Time and Place

To illustrate what may be lost in extracting a theistic ‘proof’ from its context we might consider a distant example from another cultural tradition. Had we been a student of law in eleventh-century Baghdad, we might have been taught by a scholar who still attracts interest today as a mystic, saint and theologian. Al-Ghazali became professor of law in 1091 at an institution set up to neutralise the power of extremist and sectarian groups within Islam. In setting down the fundamentals of Muslim belief Ghazali had recourse to a theistic ‘proof that we recognise as a form of the cosmological argument. It is self-evident to human reason’, he began, ‘that there must Be a cause for the origination of anything originated. Since the universe is originated, it follows that there was a cause for its origination.’10 It may be tempting to treat this syllogism as a proof devised to convince sceptical philosophers that atheism is not a rational option. But that would be to misrepresent Ghazali, who clearly stated that a reasoned proof for the existence of God is superfluous. It was not needed because the testimony of the Qur'an and the wonders of creation were sufficient grounds in themselves. Within the Muslim culture of his time, he could take it for granted that one lived by a sacred text. What then was the purpose of his argument about origins? In the last analysis it had to do with how the sacred text was to be read. The threat came from within Islam itself, from Shi'ites who were gaining ground politically at the expense of Sunni ‘orthodoxy’. According to a recent study, Ghazali had a very specific worry: ‘the insinuation of Greek and Hellenistic ideas into Islam through the more speculative of the Shi'ites’.11 These ideas included the Aristotelian notion of a world that had existed from eternity. To accept such a view required a non-literal interpretation of the sacred text. Ghazali turned his face against these tendencies. What at first glance looks like a classic theistic proof was actually serving a quite different purpose. His argument was directed against Muslim philosophers, notably Ibn Sina, who in Ghazali's view were guilty of erroneous belief. Their denial that the world was created ex nihilo was only one of several errors. Those who had favoured the immortality of the soul rather than the resurrection of the body were also censured. Ghazali's project was not the construction of a natural theology independent of his cultural heritage. He argued about origins in order to protect that heritage from an enemy within. In a created universe one could speak of the Will of a personal God, as Islamic belief required. In an Aristotelian universe one could not.

There are many comparable examples from the history of Christendom, suggesting that to abstract what may look like ‘proofs’ of God's existence from their contexts misses the significance that such arguments had within specific religious communities. Thus the ontological argument of Anselm, commonly abstracted as a theistic proof, acquires a different meaning when relocated in its own place and time—the Benedictine community of Bec in the eleventh century. For Anselm, God was a being whose non-existence cannot be conceived. But this was not intended as a piece of natural theology, independent of faith. His intention was to guide other monks towards a fuller knowledge of God. This required the recognition that God was not only that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought, but something greater than that which can be thought.12 This assertion of the radical otherness of God contrasts sharply with anthropomorphic images of the deity permeating much of later natural theology.

Shifting time and place, we might arrive in London in the 1660s, shortly after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. For historians of science this is a significant time because the first two enduring scientific societies were established: the Royal Society of London, and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. It was also a time when in England natural theology gained a higher profile. Robert Boyle was comparing the natural philosopher with a priest in the temple of nature and rebuking Descartes for his neglect of the design argument.13 If Ghazali had been worried by threats from within Islam, Boyle had been concerned by divisions within Christendom. The proliferation of puritan sects during the Interregnum had posed a particular threat because each had claimed some medal illumination. The danger was that the Christian faith would lose all credibility. ‘Let a man come to London’, Boyle had written, ‘and he shall come near to losing his faith.’14 Consequently there had been pressures to reaffirm the rational foundations of faith in order to deactivate the many hot lines to God.

The threat to Christianity did not only come from within. In Restoration comedies Christian virtues and the sanctity of marriage were under attack, cuckolds abounded, and a pervasive air of frivolity smacked of practical atheism.15 Bishops were not amused. John Wilkins, founder member of the Royal Society and a bishop, complained of living in a ‘degenerate age… miserably over-run with scepticism and infidelity’.16 His project for that time and place was to ‘establish the great principles of religion, the Being of God, and a future state; by showing how firm and solid a foundation they have in the nature and reason of mankind’.17 In London in the 1660s a spectacular new resource had become available. Robert Hooke, curator of experiments at the Royal Society, had published his Micrographia (1665). This was an illustrated guide to a new world—the world under the microscope. The fact that life had been packed into the minutest mite was a stupendous marvel. Hooke himself drew attention to the exquisite forms visible under the new instrument. But the new resource was the contrast he drew between human artifacts and the works of nature.18 The best that we could do looked like a botched job under the microscope. But look at the eye of a fly or even a snowflake and there was no trace of imperfection. The perfection of nature's art, and by implication the work of the Creator, was thrown into even sharper relief.

We shall return to this argument in chapter 7. Boyle, Wilkins, and the naturalist John Ray all used it in their defence of Christianity. During the eighteenth century, however, yet another project took shape—not the defence of Christianity, nor that of any revealed religion. There were moves in different parts of Europe to construct a ‘natural religion’ to which all rational persons could subscribe. For many this was an attractive project because it offered the prospect of transcending party lines. The doctrinal disputes that had led to bloody wars could be discarded. In their place would be a simpler creed, famously recited by Voltaire:

When reason, freed from its chains, will teach the people that there is only one God, that this God is the universal father of all men, who are brothers; that these brothers must be good and just to one another, and that they must practise all the virtues; that God, being good and just, must reward virtue and punish crimes; rarely, my brethren, men will be better for it, and less superstitious.19

This was natural religion, grounded in human nature, in natural reason. It is well known that in his campaign against the Catholic Church, Voltaire found an ally in the God of Newton, or more correctly in what he took to be Newton's God. Natural religion and natural science came together in a new combination, and with tangible results. It was Voltaire who ensured that the elements of Newton's philosophy were available in French.20

The attempt to construct a consensual rational religion that would render all others obsolete was an Enlightenment project that ultimately failed. As failed projects go, it was nevertheless pretty successful. Apologists for a distinctively Christian religion, such as Joseph Butler in his Analogy of Religion (1736), found themselves conceding that ‘natural religion’ was the foundation and principal part of Christianity, even if it was not the whole.21 One of the more enduring legacies of the quest for an independent natural religion, so it has been argued, has been the modern practice of isolating theistic proofs from their original contexts in order to offer independent rational evaluation.22 But this is precisely the tendency that the historian seeks to avoid.

For a telling example we migrate again—to Scotland in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is particularly instructive because it shows how, in a context of faith, David Hume's critique of natural theology was not only indecisive but ingeniously contested. It is January 1852 and Hugh Miller is giving his Presidential address before the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh. Miller was that remarkable ‘stonemason of Cromarty’ who became the populariser of geology without equal. He was editor of the Free Church newspaper, The Witness, to which he contributed a mere ten million words between 1840 and 1856.23 He had become a household name in Scotland in part because of his political stand on the issue of Non-Intrusion that had led, in 1843, to the Disruption.24 Miller was keenly aware that geology was often held in suspicion by religious writers and he sought to remove their scruples. As an evangelical he would attack the moderates with every means at his disposal, including condescension towards their science. Writing of the Disruption itself, when the ‘fatal die’ was cast, Miller reported: ‘On the one side we saw Moderate science personified in Dr Anderson of Newburgh—a dabbler in geology, who found a fish in the Old Red Sandstone, and described it as a beetle, we saw science, not moderate, on the other side, represented by Sir David Brewster.’25 Miller was embattled on other fronts. Popular sciences, like phrenology, had been woven into manifestos fir secular education as in George Combe's Essay on the Constitution of Man (1828);26 and perhaps worse still, it was from Edinburgh that Robert Chambers had launched another best seller: his anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Miller's verdict on the latter, which proposed a theory of species transformation, could not have been more succinct: ‘one of the most insidious pieces of practical atheism that has appeared in Britain during the present century’.27

In response to all these pressures Miller produced an argument for his Edinburgh audience that was a masterpiece of ingenuity. It took the form of an explicit critique of Hume. Could anything be known about the cause of the universe? Hume had said not. He had also said that nothing could be known about the creation of worlds because no-one had experience of it. Nor could one argue for the infinite qualities of a deity based on a natural world whose qualities were finite. To do so was to violate what Hume had considered to be a cardinal principle of reasoning—that causes should always be proportioned to their effects. In Miller's reply, an evangelical faith was fused with an enthusiasm for geology to deprive Hume of the last word. The fossil record revealed new forms of life as one passed from each great epoch to the next. To study them was to enjoy that experience of creations that Hume had deemed impossible.

More ingeniously, Miller pointed out that to base one's conception of creative power on the evidence of the first epoch would, on Hume's principles, lead to a false result. This was because each succeeding epoch revealed a progressively greater complexity of form. To follow Hume one would have had to surmise that the creative force was limited to fishes—only to discover that reptiles were within its power. And likewise in the progression from reptiles to mammals to men. In retrospect the producing Cause had, in Miller's words, been working ‘greatly under its strength’.28 Where faith still burned, natural theology could most certainly survive and in the most intimate union with the sciences. The form that it took and, viewed in retrospect, its vulnerability to future developments were both rooted in time and place. Only two years elapsed between the publication of Miller's Testimony of the Rocks (1857) and Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859).

Natural Theology and the Promotion of Religion

Historians who have reflected on the use of the design argument in religious apologetics have often reached conclusions that can only be described as unsympathetic.29 A sympathetic assessment is not helped by the prevalence of arguments that seem worse than quaint. In one of the classic texts of physico-theology, William Derham observed that five feet was just the right height for the human race. If we had been much smaller we would have been food for birds; much larger and we would have been tyrants in creation, treading on everything else.30 To the suggestion that this might sound naive to later ears, Derham would have replied that we do at least have ears, that they are in the right place, and that there are two of them, in case one should go wrong.31

But the case for an unsympathetic assessment rests on more than this. It is often said that the eighteenth-century vogue for physico-theology diverted attention from God the Redeemer to God the Creator. Echoing Pascal, the objection is that arguments for a personal God based on impersonal forces were bound to lead to a bankrupt religion. The more Christian apologists implied that the existence of God could be established independently of revelation, the more they encouraged the deists in their belief that revelation could be dispensed with altogether. A negative evaluation would stress still other respects in which natural theology might dig its own grave. Arguments for divine wisdom based on the intricate designs of organic structures, the perfect design of a woodpecker's beak or a kangaroo's throat, were the arguments that would prove most vulnerable to the Darwinian critique.32 Strategies to highlight a sense of the sacred in nature were often the very ones to backfire.33 In common with Boyle, Newton employed an old analogy to make belief in an active deity seem reasonable. If our minds are able to move and control our limbs, if mind can act on matter in this way, why should not God be able to move and control the matter of the universe?34 More sophisticated variants of this analogy are still in use;35 but it could imply that the universe is the body of God and one would then be on a slippery slope to pantheism. What these and many similar examples show is that arguments used to render divine activity credible can all too easily invite their own refutation. In retrospect we can see only too clearly the kind of circularity that such arguments involved.

Apologists would sometimes appeal to the universality of Newton's law of gravitation to establish the unity of the universe and thence the unity of the Creator, oblivious of the fact that Newton had already grounded the universality of his law in a monotheistic, voluntarist theology.36 Newton's premise had been that space was to be regarded as the sensorium of a God who immediately perceived all things in it. Presupposing that the laws of motion arose from the will of this same God, Newton had concluded that they may be of universal extent.

It may, nevertheless, seem hard on physico-theology to blame it for generating atheism. That it did so has, however, been argued with some subtlety by Michael Buckley.37 He insists that atheism takes its meaning from the particular form of theism it rejects. This dialectical relationship is nicely captured in the remark of the atheist Charles Bradlaugh who once declared: ‘I am an Atheist, but I do not say that there is no God; and until you tell me what you mean by God I am not mad enough to say anything of the kind.’38 One consequence of taking this dialectical relationship seriously is that to understand the origins of modern atheism it is no good looking only at the history of atheism. It is also essential to examine the history of theism. Only then can we find the kind of theism to which modern atheism was an appropriate response. Buckley finds it in the theism of those who, as advocates of physico-theology, had ostensibly reduced the deity to an architect and craftsman. Buckley's point is how easy it was for physico-theology to engender atheism. It happened with Diderot, who in his Pensées had already said that a physico-theology provided the only road to God. With the collapse of that one road there was simply nothing left.39

But was the use of natural theology to promote religious belief as disastrous as such negative verdicts suggest? We might ask whether Christian apologists did routinely present the design argument as if it were the only one worth considering. Critics of natural theology would isolate it in this way; deists might adopt such a stance; but the few Boyle lecturers who did use the design argument, such as William Whiston and Samuel Clarke, were not so reductionist. The perfect exemplar for Buckley's thesis would be the character of Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues. Hume makes Cleanthes say that it is by the design argument, the argument a posteriori, ‘and by this argument alone’ that ‘we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence’.40 And as if to anticipate Buckley's thesis, Hume has Demea reply: ‘What! No demonstration of the Being of a God! No abstract arguments! No proofs a priori.’ Surely, Demea continues, ‘by this affected candour, you give advantage to Atheists’. Even Demea in this context fails to mention arguments that the Boyle lecturers had in fact used in their defence of Christianity. Whiston, for example, had replied to the deists' assault on revelation by pointing, as Newton had, to the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. The beauty of this argument was that fulfilled prophecies ‘seemed to demonstrate God's continuing agency in nature without—apparently—involving him in disrupting it’.41

It seems a little hard on Newton and the Boyle lecturers that Buckley should blame them for a welling up of atheism which undoubtedly had many springs. The transfer to nature of powers and predicates traditionally reserved for God had preceded the efforts of the Boyle lecturers to put a stop to monistic and materialistic schemes. For example, Giordano Bruno's translation of the infinity of God into the infinity of nature had preceded them by a hundred years.42 A predisposition towards deism and atheism could be engendered by internal strife within the churches, by moral revulsion against the intolerance of established religions and by the perception that political expediency often lay behind the adoption of religious positions.43 Moreover, it would be inaccurate to suggest that either Newton or the Boyle lecturers had reduced the Christian religion to the design argument. Their apologias were richer and far more diverse than this. Newton publicly warned that to reject the prophecies of Daniel was to reject the Christian religion: ‘For this religion is founded upon his Prophecy concerning the Messiah.’44 Newton did not say that it was founded on the evidence for design.

The use of science in religious apologetics can take a quite different form. It is sometimes necessary to counter the criticism that a particular scientific theory destroys the credibility of belief. The typical riposte might be that even if the theory were true it would not have the implications for belief that the sceptic or atheist maintains. In this way one pulls the teeth of one's attacker. Some of the excessive burden placed on the sciences arose in this way. Once this is recognised a more sympathetic account than Buckley's becomes possible. The old adage that no-one had doubted the existence of God until the Boyle lecturers undertook to prove it will not really do. To some extent it was they who were reacting to a series of existing challenges, of which deism was certainly one. Deists such as Anthony Collins and the republican John Toland were using Newton's science in a manner that appeared subversive of Christianity. Collins saw in Newton's gravitational force proof that matter had its own source of Activity. Toland took a similar view, drawing on the heretical naturalism of Bruno. Toland conceded that, by making gravity an innate property of matter, he was interpreting it differently from Newton.45

Once the issue became how the new science was to be interpreted, it was difficult for Christian apologists to ignore the challenge of deistic and other subversive interpretations. William Whiston, in common with Newton and Samuel Clarke, had unorthodox views on the Trinity, but he would not let the deists get their way. The gravitational force had to be the interposition of God's ‘general, immechanical, immediate power’.46 A heavy burden was placed on the sciences because Christians and their critics fought over their implications. A dialectical process could cut both ways. In ascribing the origins of modern atheism principally to an act of negation made possible by a new theistic stance, Buckley might also be criticized for glossing over the social and political changes that conferred different elements of power on particular groups of protagonists. On a dialectical explanation alone, it is not clear why Paris rather than London should have experienced the most concentrated assault on the sacred.

Another important consideration is that arguments for design, despite the bad press they have today, had a long career because they were not always overstated. To present them as a decisive proof, akin to a geometrical demonstration, would be asking for trouble. But among more sophisticated advocates, such as the Bridgewater Treatises authors Thomas Chalmers and William Whewell, their limitations were freely acknowledged.47 A modest and qualified natural theology had the capacity to survive and for reasons that the historian can perhaps uncover.

We suggested earlier that it can be a mistake to isolate the theistic proofs from the contexts in which they served the interests of a particular religious group. The sermons of Whewell make an interesting case-study because they reveal a commitment to natural theology, but within an Anglican Christian piety that also committed him to qualifications. A natural theology, whether based on science or not, would always have subordinate status because, in his words, ‘the end of our wisdom is to make us wise to salvation’.48 No amount of scientific knowledge could produce that kind of wisdom. In a devotional context, reflection on the wonders of nature had real value, not to produce belief, but to confirm and enhance a preexisting faith. As he put it, scientific pursuits could ‘feed and elevate… devotion when it exists’.49 To trace law and order in the natural world was a way of confirming more general notions of law and order that were applicable in the moral sphere.

Whewell certainly did not believe that rational argument opened the portals of belief. ‘Demonstration’, he declared, ‘produces a result far short of its claims.’ Men and women were brought to God through the ‘foolishness of preaching’ not through invincible argument.50 If the arguments were invincible what place was left for the initiative of God? Whewell was perfectly aware that the sciences were being overburdened if they were supposed to provide proof. There was even a practical defect in demonstrative appeals to nature. The uncomfortable fact was that the more one grew accustomed to the regularities of nature, the greater the danger of spiritual indifference. Whewell made the point in a sermon of 1849, just after Cambridge had been smitten with cholera. Dining the previous epidemic in 1832, it had still been common for Low Churchmen and Methodists to see divine judgement visiting inebriates and reprobates with stiletto precision. But since the Master of Jesus College had just died, that was hardly an option for Whewell. Instead he observed that ‘the very frequency and regularity of the occurrences which should speak to us of God's providence produces upon us a contrary effect’.51 He could then account for the pestilence. It was an ‘extraordinary’ visitation designed to heighten a waning sense of dependence.

The example of Whewell shows that we should avoid denigrating the design argument, as if it always appeared without qualification. Evidence for the coherence of nature could raise questions to which a Christian theism gave what Whewell considered the best answer. The intricacy of organic structures illustrated the wisdom and skill of their Maker but, in his own words, ‘they suggest nothing as to a moral author of the world’.52 If design arguments survived well into the nineteenth century it was because they could be useful, even whilst lacking demonstrative pretensions. They could be used as a source of edification, to evoke a sense of wonder, to confirm an existing faith.53 As we shall see in chapter 6, they were used rhetorically to win over the waverer. They could be used apologetically to combat claims like that of the French materialist La Mettrie who had said that the study of nature made only unbelievers. A natural theology could help to control deviancy within a specific religious tradition and, in a missionary context, offered the prospect of common ground between one religious culture and another. These are all functions within the domains of religious practice and it is possible to add more.54 But there was another informal role that design arguments could play. This was in the promotion not of religion but of science.

Natural Theology and the Promotion of Science

The pursuit of experimental science has not always been applauded. Those who know their Gulliver's Travels may recall Jonathan Swift's satire of the scientific Academy:

The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and heard long, ragged and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt and skin were all of the same colour. He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, that he should be able to supply governors' gardens with sun-shine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low, and intreated me to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers. I made him a small present, for my Lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them.55

In eighteenth-century England, public lecturers on science could put on a good show of electrical sparks but they too attracted criticism from censorious High Churchmen. From the city of dreaming spires an eventual bishop of Norwich, George Horne, complained in 1753 about the ‘stupid admiration’ shown to those making experiments that degraded ‘the philosopher into the mechanic’.56 His specific target was the experimental philosophy of the Newtonians. Another anti-Newtonian was Andrew Michael Ramsay, who from 1721 was tutor to the Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart. Ramsay particularly lamented the solace given by Newton and Clarke to the deists: ‘Some… deny there is a God, laugh at virtue and vice, call them only political inventions to impose on the mob; and pretend that all religion is a cheat. Others assert that spirit and matter are the same, that man is composed of ten yards of gut, and that his supreme felicity consists in filling and emptying them by turns.’ Still others ‘spend all the force of their mind in the speculations of Algebra and geometrical curves, or in metaphysical quibbles… so as to forget the great end of their creation’.57 In such remarks we can see how particular forms of natural science and their practitioners could easily be held in suspicion. The design argument was not confined to the defence of religious belief. It could assist the promotion of innovative science in the face of religious suspicion.58

This happened in Scotland in the late eighteenth century when James Hutton published his Theory of the Earth (1795). Hutton was concerned with the physical processes that were pre-conditions for the support of life. At rock bottom there had to be soil, and this ultimately came from the erosion of mountains. But the processes of erosion were continuous and this implied that over millions of years there would have to be mountain building as well as decay. The power house for the elevation of land came from the earth's subterranean heat, of which volcanoes were evidence. Hutton used teleological language in his book. It was as if the system had been designed. But his recurring cycles carried a time bomb.

In his own famous words, he could find no evidence of a beginning, no prospect of an end. Those who liked to see Revelation confirmed by science greeted Hutton's scheme with suspicion. In the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution it was easy to accuse his geology of subversion. One of his most vicious critics, Richard Kirwan, did exactly that. Kirwan wanted a geology that in his own words established ‘the credit due to Moses on mere philosophic grounds’.59 In such circumstances Hutton needed friends. He had one in the Revd John Playfair, professor of mathematics and later of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Was Hutton's system atheistic? Absolutely not, said Playfair. To deny that geology could supply evidence of a beginning or prospect of an end was not to deny either beginning or end. It was simply good scientific practice not to exceed the limits of an inductive method. Hutton had not discussed ultimate origins because that question was off limits. The crucial point, however, is Playfair's recourse to natural theology in order to grant Hutton his reprieve. Had not natural theology been strengthened by Newton's understanding of the cyclic motions in the heavens? The same was surely true of the Huttonian cycles. Mutton's own references to the wisdom and economy of nature allowed Playfair to insist on an overtly theistic reading. He claimed that what Hutton himself had valued most in his system was the new evidence for design. It was this addition to our knowledge of final causes that he had ‘contemplated with greatest delight’.60

It is probably true to say that until Darwin published his Origin of Species (1859), geology was the science most likely to generate suspicion. In certain contexts it became imperative to allay the fears. From the second decade of the nineteenth century William Buckland had the delicate task of promoting geology in Oxford. There is no doubting his enthusiasm for the science. It was said that he carried his hammer up his sleeve ‘in order not to shock the feelings of the Scotchmen on Sunday’.61 In order to avoid shocking feelings in Oxford he set out to vindicate his science from the charge of irreligion. One of his best known strategies was to argue for a universal flood. The phenomena, such as smooth U-shaped valleys, that we Explain with reference to a recent ice age Buckland explained with reference to a recent deluge. Far from destroying the credibility of Revelation, geology confirmed the Mosaic flood.62 The reconstruction of fossil species provided another route to the affirmation of design. As cumbersome a beast as the giant sloth might not look like the perfect example of divine panache. But when the British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Oxford, Buckland kept his audience almost to midnight as he waxed eloquent on the animal's design.63 The forelimbs might look grotesque, but for a sloth they were just the thing for digging up roots and other food.

The sciences were decidedly overburdened in having to maintain the fabric of design, but one reason for the burden was the need to avert suspicion. In contexts where this was imperative, an overstatement of the argument was often the result. In 1819 Buckland had claimed that geology would have required a universal flood even if Genesis had not.64 It was that sort of exaggerated claim that would soon prove embarrassing. Buckland's opposite number in Cambridge, Adam Sedgwick, was offering his own recantation as early as 1831.65

There was, however, another attraction of natural theology: it could be discussed without necessarily compromising religious doctrines.66 In fact this may be another reason why it survived in polite society. It could provide a common discourse in which it was not necessary to probe more deeply into contentious doctrinal or political matters.67 This was especially true in face-to-face encounters. A recent study of the London ‘season’ of 1845 has shown how the subjects of Creation and natural law were acceptable conversational gambits.68 The anonymity of Robert Chambers' Vestiges, only recently published, added a certain spice. Even the young Florence Nightingale discussed it at a polite dinner party at which the Nightingale family was introduced to a leading Tory diplomat, Baron Ashburton, and his American wife. Florence recorded her conversation with Anne Louisa: ‘She is an American, and we swore eternal friendship upon Boston.… She has a raspberry-tart of diamonds upon her forehead worth seeing. Then Mesmerism, and when we parted, we had got up so high into Vestiges that I could not get down again, and was obliged to go off as an angel.’69 Natural theology could be the medium for this kind of elevation.

The role of natural theology in the popularisation of science is particularly conspicuous in the success enjoyed by the Bridgewater Treatises. This series of eight books published in the 1830s all made reference to design and in most cases possessed a high scientific content. Chalmers, Buckland and Whewell were among the authors, as were the anatomist Charles Bell, the physiologist Peter Mark Roget, the entomologist William Kirby and the chemist William Prout. The Treatises have often been discussed as the last feeble flowering of the argument for design. But to treat them as the epitome of a moribund theology is to miss their historical significance. As the author of a recent study reminds us, they rank among the scientific best-sellers of the early nineteenth century.70 In Henry Brougham's campaign for popular education, the natural theology helped to counter the politically militant elements within working class radicalism. But it was the science itself in which so much hope was placed by many educational reformers. The hope in Brougham's circle was that if the working classes were given a scientific education they would be drawn out of shallowness and sensuality into placid and upright citizens.

The success of the Bridgewater Treatises as scientific texts may have surprised some of the authors. But it would not have disappointed them. Even the most evangelical among them, Thomas Chalmers, valued the edifying role of science itself. Writing on popular education he had held that there ‘obtains a very close affinity between a taste for science, and a taste for sacredness’. They were both ‘refined abstractions from the grossness of the familiar and ordinary world’. The mind that relishes either has ‘achieved a certain victory of the spiritual or the intellectual, over the animal part of our nature’. His conclusion was that ‘the two resemble in this, that they make man a more reflective and less sensual being, than before’.71 We are a long way here from the use of design arguments to construct a formal proof of God's existence. The relevance of science to religion is more subtle. It is argued in terms of taste, of intellectual parallels and of convergent paths towards moral refinement.

There is a conclusion here that is difficult to escape. We must be suspicious of the claim that arguments for design were rendered obsolete by the philosophical critiques of Hume and Kant. Until their diplomatic functions were compromised they had a continuing role in the promotion of science itself.72 A full analysis would have to explore their political connotations as well. There can be no doubt that natural theology was a vehicle by which the clerical scientists of Oxbridge tried to slam the door on political agitation. William Whewell explicitly associated political instability with those countries that had failed to bring science and religion into union, where superstition had given way to irreverence.73 Without respect for the divine Mind there would be no respect for human authority. We saw in chapter 1 how Adam Sedgwick preached resignation to some three or four thousand colliers on Tynemouth beach in 1838 when the British Association was in town.74 In his Easter sermon for 1848, and now installed as Dean of Westminster, William Buckland put the matter in a nutshell: ‘equality of mind or body, or of worldly condition, is as inconsistent with the order of nature as with the moral laws of God’.75 A fortnight earlier every precaution had been taken to protect the Abbey from a potentially unruly Chartist meeting.

Examples of this kind might encourage the view that there was a direct correlation between natural theology and political sentiment. The exciting work of Adrian Desmond has gone a long way towards endorsing that view.76 A natural theology redolent of Oxbridge values could easily become the butt of satire when radical agitators and reformers of scientific as well as political institutions had their say. Thomas Wakley, his face set against the nepotism of the Royal College of Surgeons, would lampoon powerful figures of the old guard. He was merciless in his mimicry of the Bridgewater Treatise author Charles Bell, who ‘never touches a phalanx and its flexor tendon, without exclaiming, with uplifted eye, and reverentially-contracted mouth, “Gintilmin, behold the winderful eevidence of desin”’.77 In 1826 Wakley had attacked another surgeon, Sir Anthony Carlisle, who had proclaimed that same ‘winderful eevidence’ in the anatomy of an oyster. Wakley's report was a devastating retort: ‘whilst tearing asunder its bivalves, lacerating its ligaments, and inflating its rectum, [he] piously observed, that the benevolence of an omnipotent power is exhibited in all the works of nature’. Wakley considered the remark at least ill-timed and added: ‘we are inclined to believe that had the oyster spoken, it would have given a flat denial of the Orator's proposition’.78

The political complacency of many texts on natural theology certainly invited radical censure. The map is not, however, as simple as it may seem. Some eighteenth-century champions of natural theology had been anything but conservative. The Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley is a striking example, given his sympathies with American independence and the French Revolution.79 Yet by the 1830s, natural theology may have become an emblem of political conservatism. The Scotsman Robert Knox dubbed the Bridgewater Treatises ‘Bilgewater Treatises’,80 a sentiment that was repeated in radical literature. But it would be wrong to interpret it as inherently or invariably conservative and there are many shades of conservatism. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz has observed how systems of religious symbols can be either models of or models for social systems.81 In line with that distinction it is possible to distinguish between a quiescent and a prophetic strain within references to natural order.82 In the quiescent strain, current social and political structures are naturalised by reference to the transcendent. But in the prophetic strain the status quo is seen as a deviation from the natural, thereby legitimating reform.

Priestley's natural theology had been of the prophetic type. Once the Trinitarian obstacle had been removed, Priestley had envisaged a rational dialogue between Christianity and Islam, that would, as a matter of fact, lead to the triumph of his rational Christianity. It is a measure of his optimism that he thought ‘less than a century’ might suffice.83 A simple polarity between natural theology and radical reform can miss the prophetic use of alternative concepts of the ‘natural’. As editor of the Poor Man's Guardian, James O'Brien protested in 1833–4 that the current distribution of wealth was anything but natural. ‘Fellow countrymen!’, he exclaimed:

Turn with scorn from the selfish hypocrites who connect the name of God with the present cannibal system, with a view to reconcile you to its abominations. If… He who created us had ordained that one part of the human race should grow rich and fat on the sighs and sufferings, the tears, the toil and the blood of the other, then should we bend the knee to our fate…; but we deny—utterly deny—the blasphemous doctrine.84

This forthright denial was not grounded in atheism or in materialistic forms of science but in a natural theology that celebrated the bounties of nature. A beneficent deity had ordained that there was enough to go round, that there need not be poverty, if only wealth and property were more evenly distributed. It was the status quo that was unnatural.

There are other reasons why attempts to correlate natural theology with political preferences can be frustrated. One is that, irrespective of their intentions, authors could lose control of how their texts were read. There is a striking example in Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise. The author went to great pains to explain why a great age for the earth need not jeopardise the Genesis text and therefore the authority of his Church. But he could not prevent readings in which this was seen as infidelity in disguise. Buckland carefully explained how geology and Christianity were still in harmony, but he could not prevent the atheist William Chilton from using him to exemplify the ‘cowardice and dishonesty of scientific men’. Buckland's account of progressive creation made it perfectly clear that a Creator had been Involved in replacing lost species with new ones, but he could not prevent the Owenite ‘Shepherd’ Smith from welcoming his book as a boon to pantheism. Buckland had insisted that progressive creation was a pious alternative to theories of organic transmutation. But he could not prevent Robert Chambers from using his book and his name to further exactly that subversive programme.85 Reactions to Chambers's own book also reveal the contingency of relations between natural theology and politics. In the months following the publication of Vestiges it was great sport to speculate on the identity of the anonymous author. The striking point is that two of the prime suspects were poles apart in the political spectrum. One was the arch-Tory Sir Richard Vyvyan, who had led the opposition to the Reform Bill of 1832. The other was Byron's daughter, Countess Ada Lovelace, who was known to move in liberal Whig circles.86

Given the political uses of natural theology, it would be surprising if there were not divisions between exponents of the design argument.87 And these divisions could be reflected in divergent forms of the argument itself. In fact it is possible to distinguish at least four different constructions of nature in the 1850s, each susceptible of a teleological interpretation. Paley's argument was still to be found, even in the changed and changing world revealed by the study of fossil forms. One could still argue, as Buckland had, that each species had been well adapted for the conditions in which it had endured. For Robert Chambers and the young Charles Darwin, the teleology took the form of designed laws. These were laws that had the purpose of producing the highest good, which Darwin identified with the development of complex organic forms.88 The third kind of teleology was that advanced by Whewell and Richard Owen as they contemplated the suitably modified instantiations of a skeletal archetype. There was in their view a pattern common to the skeletons of all vertebrates. This represented an idea in the Mind of the Creator who had modified it for the needs of each species.89 In the 1850s a fourth construction was offered by Hugh Miller who focused on the beauty of fossil forms and how they anticipated human architecture.90 We shall return to this aesthetic argument in chapter 7. For the moment, the crucial point is that, largely as a result of developments within science itself, the argument for design had diversified before the Darwinian blow was struck.91

The Darwinian Challenge to Natural Theology

Darwin himself recognised the challenge his theory posed to orthodox Christian belief. Man may see himself as worthy the attention of a creator, Darwin wrote, but it is more accurate and more humble to recognise his continuity with the animals.92 The damaging implications for religious belief were often made the basis of humour. Apes at the London Zoo allegedly asked, ‘Am I my keeper's brother?’ Darwin's theory did show how nature could counterfeit design, and sensitive Christian analysts saw the point only too clearly.93 The Princeton theologian Charles Hodge described neither Darwin himself nor evolutionary theories in general as atheistic. But the specific mechanism proposed by Darwin he had to conclude was effectively atheistic, in that it left no room for design.94

It would, of course, be bizarre to suggest that Darwin's theory was not a profoundly disturbing revelation. There were feats for the stability of society if men and women were encouraged to behave like animals. Satirical cartoons, showing the loss of a monkey's tail, cashed in on the prospects for the animals: ‘cut it off short Tim; I can't afford to await developments before I can take my proper position in Society’.95 At a more sophisticated level there would seem to be at least three major shifts that symbolise what has become known as the Darwinian revolution.

One was the breakdown of any kind of consensus on how scientific and religious beliefs were to be related and integrated. Members of the same religious tradition would lead in widely differing ways. At Princeton James McCosh became an advocate of theistic evolution despite the reservations voiced by Hodge.96 When Henry Drummond presented his scheme of theistic evolution to a Northfield conference in 1893, his evangelical audience was not amused. ‘Many fell upon me and rent me’, he complained.97

A second shift was the often painful process of readjustment to the idea that apes and humans have a common ancestor. Scientists could be as sensitive on this matter as theologians. Neither Charles Lyell, the eminent geologist, nor Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's co-founder of the theory of natural selection, could finally accept that the powers of the human mind were adequately explained by natural selection.

A third shift concerned the character of scientific texts. By the end of the nineteenth century it would be extremely rare to find references to divine design, direction or control in scientific texts on evolution. Peter Bowler has observed that, although Darwin's mechanism of natural selection was itself involved in a struggle for survival by the end of the nineteenth century, the theoretical alternatives under discussion had all the appearance of being completely naturalistic.98 This had not been the case in the middle years of the century. Even Darwin had used what he described as Pentateuchal language in the concluding section of the Origin.99

Does it make sense then to say that with Darwinism came the death of God? In fact it would be fairly easy to show that the Darwinian theory was not an efficient murder weapon. After all, Darwin never presumed to explain the ultimate origins of the earth or even of the first living forms. But his theory undoubtedly was effective in adding to the burden of qualifications with which the concept of a divine being was lumbered. The issue as seen by Darwin's disciple George John Romanes was how one could possibly square the goodness and omnipotence of God with a creative process that involved such carnage and extinction.100 Conversely, one might claim, as did Asa Gray, to see more clearly how waste and suffering were part and parcel of all creative processes. Gray wrote that ‘Darwinian teleology has the special advantage of accounting for the imperfections and failures as well as for successes.… It explains the seeming waste as being part and parcel of a great economical process.’101 For Gray there was no inconsistency between natural selection and natural theology because, without competing multitudes, there would have been no ‘survival of the fittest’, and, without that, no progression from lower to nobler forms.

Given such diversity of response, it may be more rewarding to ask not whether Darwin's theory demanded the death of God, but how it affected images of the deity. If we pursue this more subtle question it soon becomes clear that two images of God took a beating. One was that of the magician who had conjured up new species out of the mud. Such a deity was clearly rendered obsolete. We should note, however, that the death of this God could be a cause for celebration. The Christian socialist Charles Kingsley was one of the first clergymen to give an appreciative response to Darwin's work. There had once been an interfering God who made all things. But now there was a God so much wiser who could make things make themselves.102 Kingsley even claimed to see the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice underwritten by Darwinian naturalism.103

The image of God as artisan or mechanic also took a beating. This had had its classic formulation in Paley who had marvelled at the craftsmanship in the human eye. The epiglottis, too, was a wonderful contrivance. How few aldermen had choked at feasts! With good reason Darwin insisted that this watchmaker God had been made redundant by his theory.104 He had, after all, provided an alternative account of how such adaptations had come about by gradual refinement over immense periods of time. It is not clear, however, that the loss of this watchmaker God was a theological disaster. There had always been those who thought that the God of physico-theology looked a bit too much like a God created in the image of man, and of British industrial man to boot.105 Paley's construction of nature invited one to look on the bright side. It was, in his own words, a happy world after all. Long before Darwin's theory appeared, he had been attacked by Christian writers for insensitivity to the poor and suffering.106 His mechanistic models of nature had another disadvantage: they had certainly been compatible with a deism in which a remote clockmaker was preferred to the demanding God of Christian theism.

In post-Darwinian natural theology there is a gradual death of the artisan God; but a re-birth perhaps of God the artist. Instead of seeing nature as a great machine, it was seen by some commentators as a great canvas on which many creative strokes were discernible. This image left room for an evolving landscape as it were, with the artist enjoying an ongoing and intimate relationship with that which was being created. One scholar who would develop this analogy between the work of Providence and the work of an artist was the Jesuit modernist George Tyrrell. Writing in the early years of the twentieth century, Tyrrell found it hard, just as Darwin had, to see some single overriding cosmic purpose working itself out through nature. Natural disasters, such as the earthquake that hit Southern Italy in 1908, could not be slotted into a single all-embracing end. But if the universe were conceived as a canvas or a keyboard, then each picture or each melody might have a worth in itself, apart from all the rest.

We might not like the idea, but it shows that we are not seeing so much the death of God as a recasting of images. For Tyrrell, the Darwinian metaphor of a branching tree was turned to theological advantage. He wanted to say that the alternative to a single cosmic purpose was not blind materialism:

Rather [the universe] teems with aims and meanings, although it has no one aim or meaning. It is like a great tree, that pushes out its branches, however and wherever it can, seeking to realize its whole nature… in every one of them, but aiming at no collective effort. This is its play, this is its life, this is, if you will, its end.107

There is a further respect in which it would be misleading to say that God and evolution became mutually exclusive. Darwin's achievement was to show how the process of speciation could be understood as a natural process obeying the same kinds of law that operated in any branch of the sciences. This is why another casualty was the god-of-the-gaps who had traditionally survived in the crevices of scientific ignorance, only to be squeezed out as scientific knowledge increased. But this was not enough to annihilate the God of the monotheistic religions because their God was pre-eminently a law-giver. Everything hinged on the interpretation placed on the law metaphor.108 There was of course the problem whether the law of natural selection is the kind of law one would have chosen if one had been God. But popular religious writers could still look on the bright side if they wished. Nature might be red in tooth and claw, but for Henry Drummond, the fact remained that it was better to have lived and been eaten than never to have lived at all. When discussing the problem of waste in nature, Darwin could even come to one's aid. Frederick Temple, who eventually became Archbishop of Canterbury, could argue that ‘the inevitable operation of this waste, as Darwin's investigation showed, has been to destroy all those varieties which were not well fitted to their surroundings, and to keep those that were’.109 As early as 1860 Temple had jettisoned a god-of-the-gaps in favour of an extension of natural law. The establishment of natural laws made the existence of moral laws more, not less, credible.110

Darwinism has often been credited with turning the Creator into a remote and distant figure who at most designed the initial swirl of cosmic dust so that it would eventually produce such a universe as we inhabit. T. H. Huxley, for all his agnosticism, could not take exception to such a ‘wider teleology’, as he called it, because it was ‘actually based upon the fundamental proposition of Evolution’.111 This was that ‘the whole world, living and not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed’.112 But the striking point is that, for less secular minds, the name of Darwin was sometimes invoked to support the image of a more immediate God, constantly working through the laws of nature. For some theologians at least, traditional images of a totally transcendent God had been overdrawn. Their view was that the notion of an immanent God—a God involved within the world—was actually rendered more plausible by Darwinian evolution.

A late-nineteenth-century exponent of this view was Aubrey Moore, a contributor to a collection of theological essays with the title Lux Mundi. Moore wrote the striking words that, under the guise of a foe, Darwin had done the work of a friend. He had made it impossible to accept the image of an absentee landlord who interfered on rare occasions. This was a kind of semi-deism no longer sanctioned by science. Darwin, to his credit, had sharpened up the choice: it was a question now of all or nothing. God was an active participant, immanent in the world, or completely absent. It is no coincidence that Moore and other contributors to Lux Mundi were committed to a theology that stressed the importance of the Incarnation in Christian theology: a God who dwelled with humanity in the person of Christ and who shared in earthly suffering.113

In early drafts of his theory Darwin himself had retained teleological language. We even catch a glimpse of a new theodicy. Darwin was deeply sensitive to the more gruesome features of creation. What a book, he exclaimed, might be written by a devil's chaplain on the horribly cruel and wasteful processes of nature.114 He had in mind such gory examples as the insects that lay their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars. But might the deity be spared immediate responsibility if such creatures were by-products of an evolutionary process that had not been predetermined in all its details? Darwin entertained though did not systematically develop such a theodicy. Later theologians did.

The idea sat quite comfortably with other developments in late-nineteenth-century Christian theology, especially an exploration of what it meant to say that God's power had been deliberately limited in the context of relations with humanity. The most celebrated example of this nuance was in the context of Christology where Charles Gore spoke of kenosis: in becoming man God the Father had relinquished certain powers and qualities.115 A similar idea could work in the context of a creative role in nature: God might have deliberately set limits to omnipotence by choosing to work through natural agencies rather than override them. It might then be possible to refer to incidental features of a creative process that God, in self-limitation, had chosen not to nullify.116 This was how the Cambridge philosopher and theologian F. R. Tennant developed the argument in the early years of the twentieth century. In a manner reminiscent of the early Darwin, Tennant suggested that ‘many of the details accompanying the execution of the plan are not essential parts of it but only necessarily incidental’.117 Earthquakes, floods, the indiscriminate distribution of disease and other ills, all had to be possible in the kind of world in which it had also been possible for sensitive and intelligent life to emerge. The influence of Darwinism on theology was an issue that Tennant specifically discussed and it certainly left its mark on his own. Thus he took strong exception to the view that every form of suffering had been a premeditated means to a particular end. To suggest that it had been would be to attribute devilishness to the deity.118 That was precisely the dilemma that Darwin had addressed.

Epilogue

Our theologies today tend to be less theocentric than they were in the second half of the nineteenth century. But concerns about the environment or about the status of animals are, for many, ultimate concerns that carry ideological freight as did the concerns of nineteenth-century theists. A question sometimes arises concerning the implications of Darwinism for our attitude towards animal suffering. The answer is far from straightforward. On the one hand Darwin stressed our kinship with the animal creation: ‘we are all netted together’, he wrote in a famous jotting in his transmutation notebooks.119 For those who like to set up an antithesis between an anthropocentric and a biocentric view of nature, Darwin's authority seems to help. On the other hand, the mechanism of natural selection sets one species against another and its own members against each other. Extinction almost becomes a way of life. And if it is part of the natural order, why get sentimental about it? The question ‘Why should animals be treated with respect?’ cannot therefore be given an unequivocal answer in Darwinian terms. A sense of the mutuality of living things was arguably more in evidence in earlier, pre-evolutionary, constructions of natural history where a sense of divine design did prevail.120 But an argument, recently aired by the philosopher Alan Holland, suggests that the God of pre-Darwinian natural theology is still alive, or at least walking as a ghost.

The argument goes that one ground on which animals might be respected would be if they truly were God's creatures, separately designed and created in just the way Darwin denied. It is acknowledged that for most philosophers such a justification will not do because, for them, such a God is dead. But then comes the subtle move: it is of the very essence of the Darwinian theory that it explains why animals appear as if they had been so meticulously designed. Even if organisms are not fixed but are dynamically changing, they still appear as if they were designed by a God it only such a God were there.121

This is not as phoney as it may sound. Even the most ruthlessly Darwinian authors find it difficult to avoid the language of design. Daniel Dennett has remarked that the brain of Johann Sebastian Bach was ‘exquisitely designed as a heuristic program for composing music’.122 He is as adamant as Richard Dawkins that the design does not imply a designer. But the argument we are considering for clemency towards animals does not require that it should. That they are as finely wrought as if they had been designed may be sufficient, so it is argued, to persuade us that they are intrinsically precious and to be valued.123 They are the kind of thing God would have designed had there been such a God to do it.

Because this chapter has been devoted to natural theology and the history of science, we have said nothing about the complex relations between the natural sciences and the ‘science’ of biblical criticism. But here is another story waiting to be told. However one interprets Genesis, it tells of human sinfulness in throwing nature out of joint. In the context of environmental concerns some have found a resurrection of meaning in the text. Have we not, through human greed, polluted the world? In the writing of another contemporary philosopher of biology is to be found this striking passage:

The biologist is sure that whatever nature is in itself, today and for millennia past, its fundamental character has nothing to do with human sinfulness. Yet the biologist, in consensus with the theologian, now does fear that human sin can henceforth throw nature out of joint. Both can agree that nature does now need to be redeemed on that account. Sin pollutes the world. An ancient insight is breaking over us anew. We had almost thought that geology, biology and anthropology had drained the truth out of the Genesis stories. But then we discover that these stories contain a profound myth of aboriginal community and the human fall from it.124

What the text tells us, on this account, is that ‘we are made for fellowship at multiple levels: with God, with persons, with the Earth. When that sense of community breaks, the world begins to fall apart.’ Such sentiments may help us to understand why, in the USA at least, there can be a ‘Joint Appeal from Religion and Science’ on behalf of the environment.125