In what must be one of the most succinct statements of scientific reductionism, the political radical Richard Carlile declared in the late 1820s that ‘all known effects are compounds of gases’.1 Coupled with this chemical creed was an assault on theistic belief. In his sixpenny weekly, the Lion, Carlile roared at the defenders of natural theology. ‘With the doctrine of intelligent deity’, he wrote, ‘it is presumption to attempt anything toward human improvement. Without the doctrine, it is not any presumption.’2 Carlile appears to be suggesting that a natural theology cannot comfortably coexist with any human programme of improving upon nature. It is as if arguments for divine wisdom require this to be the best of all possible worlds, with the corollary that attempts at improvement would be both sacrilegious and ineffective.

As atheistic arguments go, this one from Carlile is rather crude. We saw in chapter 7 how Hugh Miller could envisage collaboration between humanity and God in the improvement of the world. Because Miller shared the same aesthetic sensibilities with his Maker, the two minds could work together in perfecting nature through art. But for all its crudity, Carlile's dig at physico-theology may provide a clue in solving an historical puzzle. In histories of natural theology we often hear of physico-theology, astro-theology, even insect-theology. But how many of us have encountered a chemico-theology? In this chapter we shall find that they have existed but that there have been peculiar and instructive reasons why they have not enjoyed a high profile.

Some reasons may immediately spring to mind. Chemistry, for much of its history, suffered in comparison with celestial mechanics, which revealed the precision of the divine mathematician; and it suffered in comparison with anatomy and physiology, which brought one face to face with final causes. As the science of material change, chemistry was more earthbound. Much of its appeal has surely been sensual rather than cerebral. How many initiates have been drawn to it by vivid colours and vile smells. Even the public loved it when Humphry Davy dished out laughing gas at the Royal Institution. The effect was described by one observer among much chortling and babbling, some put up their hands, some left the room; but one young man tried to kiss all the women. It was subsequently suggested that the man in question had not partaken of the gas and knew full well what he was about.3

Chemistry also satisfied other senses. As the science perhaps most dependent on delicate manipulation and techniques of analysis it could offer tactile pleasures in the pursuit of material refinement. Chemistry was idiosyncratic in other respects. Newton's physics, after all, described how the world is. So, too, did anatomy and physiology. Scientific analysis could terminate in contemplation. But this was less so in chemistry where ambitions to change the world were often rife. Chemistry has been the science of process, the science that has sought to improve upon creation. From ancient alchemical dreams of a gold better than the mundane to the industrial chemistry of the twentieth century, when the anti-hero of that cult film The Graduate was told that the key to the future lay in the one word ‘plastics’, chemistry has played a central role in creating what past chemists called an ‘artificial philosophy’. Did Carlile, after all, have a point Did chemistry, with its pretensions to improve the world disqualify itself from systems of natural theology? In his attack on the Paracelsian chemists of the sixteenth century, the Lutheran humanist Andreas Libavius had registered the charge of impiety against their claims to be perfecting nature.4 The implication that nature had generated imperfect things was unacceptable. Indeed in advising a young pupil to steer clear of it, Libavius had dubbed chemistry the occupation not of philosophers, but of reprobates.

In this chapter we explore the space between chemistry and natural theology because, to our knowledge, it has not been examined before. The idea is to use the history of chemistry to illuminate the broader question of how the applied sciences and technology might affect conceptions of divine Providence. We shall bring out the ingenuity with which chemists did make connections with religious discourse. But we shall also argue that chemistry, perhaps more than any other science, has created problems for natural theology by problematising the natural. By breaking down the barriers between nature and art, chemistry has closed certain doors that other science might have left open. But we shall also suggest that it may not have closed the door completely on the kind of process theology typified by Hugh Miller when he spoke of collaboration between man and God.

Alchemical Visions

We might begin with the alchemical dream from which chemistry itself emerged. An ancient Egyptian recipe conjures up the image most of us have of a typical alchemical recipe:

Take 28 leaves from a pithy laurel tree and some virgin earth and seed of wormwood, wheat meal and the herb calf's snout… pounded together with… the liquid of an ibis egg and made into a uniform dough and into a figure of Hermes wearing a mantle, while the moon is ascending… Let Hermes be holding a herald's staff. And write the spell on hieratic papyrus or on a goose's windpipe… and insert it into the figure for… inspiration. [Put the spell] at the feet of Hermes… and recite as on the altar you burn incense.5

Cynics might wonder at the misfortune of those who could find only twenty-seven laurel leaves, or who could not project themselves into the right spiritual state. But at least the ingredients of our problem are here. There is the wish to control nature, whilst success is contingent on a form of piety. Hermes is addressed as ‘the prophet of events… who send[s] forth oracles by day and night’. He is said to ‘cure all pains of mortals with… healing cares’. Finally he is summoned to guarantee the result: ‘Hither, O blessed one… both graciously appear and graciously render the task for me, a pious man’.6

Alchemy was to pass through many transmutations before a modern science of chemistry emerged from it. But there was often more to it than making a fast buck. There was the lure of gold, but also of medical cures, of immortality. There was even a theoretical rationale of a kind. If all metals were ultimately composed of the same units of matter, then transmutation was perfectly possible in principle. European alchemists would stress that they were not on a wild goose chase: they were aiming to imitate a process that already occurred in nature. They shared the belief that in subterranean veins, baser metals grew naturally into gold. Alchemists claimed simply to be expediting this natural process, often seeding their concoctions with a little gold by way of encouragement. In Renaissance iconography the alchemist is depicted as following in the footsteps of nature. He is lagging behind but, because he wants to accelerate a natural process, he might be said to be improving on nature—or at least trying to. In fact three images of the alchemist often co-existed: he was the imitator of nature, the improver of nature and, as in Ben Jonson's satirical play, the ‘smoky persecutor of nature’.7 He was, of course, often considered a fraud.

Our question was whether the presumption of the chemist to improve on nature was inherently sacrilegious. Among the more dedicated alchemists this would have come as a hard saying. A life of piety and austerity was often considered a prerequisite of success.

Plates from alchemical texts such as Heinrich Khunrath's Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae. (1598) show the laboratorium and the oratorium placed side by side. As one recent commentator has observed, ‘the alchemists saw their relationship with God as having a distinctive character and frequently included prayers in their works to express this relationship’.8 A parallel would sometimes be drawn between the creation of the soul by God and the creation of the Philosopher's Stone by the alchemist. The alchemist was a creator, too, working with the matter God had provided. Even at this early stage in the history of chemistry a process theology was the most auspicious kind of theology for the alchemist to embrace. He participated in God's creative activity and for that reason considered his art sacred. As the fourteenth-century alchemist Bernard Trevisan explained: ‘It is clear from many irrefutable and uncontestable testimonies that nature by itself procreates and prepares seed-bearing creatures whereas the art [of alchemy] works together with them toward the end which nature creates.’9

The art of the alchemist could clearly be presented as sacred, but it could also be seen as suspect. Was it appropriate for sinful man to assume the role of co-creator? One classic alchemical text, the Summa Perfectionis attributed to Geber, provided a justification. Here it was argued that the ability to improve on nature was part of human nature. The alchemist's task was no different in kind from the farmer's use of grafting to improve his stock. In such a vision of art outdoing nature we see one of the roots of the Western technological dream.10 But when alchemists presented their work as a mirror of God's work in creation, how controversial were they being?

It is difficult to generalise about this. Luther, for example, said In-liked the science of alchemy ‘very well’. This was ‘not only for the profits it brings in melting metals, in decocting, preparing, extracting, and distilling herbs’ but also ‘for the sake of the allegory and secret signification, which’, he added, ‘is exceedingly fine, touching the resurrection of the dead at the last day’.11 As the earthly alchemist purified through fire, leaving the dregs in the furnace, so, at the Day of Judgement, the divine alchemist would separate all things through fire, the righteous from the ungodly.

A recent study of Jesuit reactions suggests a greater ambivalence among those who took an interest.12 As one would expect, however, they were able to make some fine distinctions. Martin Del Rio, who flourished at the end of the sixteenth century, distinguished between natural magic and alchemy and was happy to accept that human art could speed up the natural process of ripening metals. He maintained that alchemical transmutation need not necessarily imply the presence of demonic agents. He also distinguished between natural and chemically produced gold. Thus he thought the state was justified in prohibiting the use of artificially-produced gold in commerce and medicine. The artificial gold did not have the same weight as the natural and it contained noxious qualities arising from the mercury used in us production. Del Rio also addressed that crucial question: the spiritual temperament of the adept. There were some who did, but emphatically some who did not, have the right moral attributes of piety and humility. There were clearly limits to his tolerance. He took exception to those who pretended the Bible was an alchemical text to be de-coded and to those who hid their chemical secrets under the cloak of biblical imagery.

For the Jesuit commentators secrecy was out because it might smack of diabolical participation. They made yet more distinctions. Athanasius Kircher had no qualms about the technician's claim to imitate nature. He even wanted alchemical apparatus to imitate the shapes of the caverns, veins and rivers of the underground world.13 He nevertheless insisted on a difference between metallurgical alchemy and transmutatory alchemy. The latter really was devilish in its allure. Even finer distinctions emerge: Kircher was less censorious of lower types of transmutation, for example the conversion of iron into copper. He also elaborated a distinction between accidental and substantial transmutation as one would expect of a good Aristotelian. At the Jesuit College in Rome, Kircher lived over his pharmaceutical laboratory and explored with relish that category of preternatural effects which would appear supernatural only to those ignorant of the means of their production.14

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the alchemist's dream was causing problems. When Paracelsus claimed that, given the right recipe, it was possible to create a human being, revulsion was not confined to the Jesuits. At the same time, the imitation of nature, if properly hedged with the right qualifications, could be accommodated. The kind of theology to which alchemy gave rise was, however, a process theology not a simple natural theology. One was working with divine resources to improve the world. It was more a theology of practice than of contemplation.

Paracelsus and the Redirection of Chemistry

In histories of chemistry the iconoclastic figure of Paracelsus invariably has a high profile. This is because he gave chemistry a boost by making it the handmaid of medicine. Whereas earlier alchemists could be charged with what appeared to be a selfish quest for gold, Paracelsus redirected chemical techniques towards the relief of human suffering.15 In so doing he challenged traditional concepts of disease, provoking political controversy wherever he went. Modesty was certainly not his strong suit. ‘Let me tell you this,’ he railed: ‘every little hair on my neck knows more than all your scribes, and my shoe-buckles are more learned than your Galen and Avicenna, and my beard has more experience than all your high colleges.’16

Whereas Galen had taught that disease arose from an internal imbalance of the four humours, Paracelsus recognised a greater specificity in the site of disease and its origins. Specific agents invading the body from outside could set up specific diseases in specific organs. The organs in turn were under the aegis of particular planets: Venus for the kidneys, Jupiter for the liver, Mars for the bile. His medical reforms required chemistry to provide the remedies appropriate to each condition. This would involve working with metals and making extracts from herbs.

To some extent this was an extension of folk-medicine and a challenge to the learned physicians. In self-justification Paracelsus complained that the medical experts were too prone to make excuses when they were powerless to help. They were inclined to say that for certain ailments there was no cure. By contrast Paracelsus presented himself as the truly Christian alchemist who would never give up the search. In mercy, God had provided resources to cure all diseases.17 Through the sweat of our brow we should search them out. Through magic signs God had indicated the therapeutic properties of specific plants. ‘Behold the Satyrion root’, he urged in a well-known passage:

Is it not formed like the male privy parts? No one can deny this. Accordingly magic discovered and revealed that it can restore a man's virility and passion. And then we have the thistle; do not its leaves prickle like needles? Thanks to this sign the art of magic discovered that there is no better herb against internal prickling.18

Paracelsian therapy, unlike the Galenic, required the treatment of like with like, not neutralisation with an opposite.

In Paracelsus there certainly is a chemico-theology. The redirection of alchemy is justified with reference to a divine precedent the example of Christ as healer. Only through chemical processes such as distillation, can the good be extracted from the bad, the efficacious from the dross.

There is a sense in which the chemist has a redemptive mission: to redeem nature itself through the hard labour of chemical practice. Alchemy in its Paracelsan formulation, writes one commentator, was the ‘perfecting of natural bodies by the separation of their essences’.19

Here again we seem to have a blurring of the natural and the artificial in the improvement of nature. But Paracelsus had no difficulty in sanctifying his programme. The Creation of the world had itself been a chemical process. At least Genesis could be read that way, with the divine Chemist separating the elements from a primordial water.20 Since redemption carried connotations of restoration, there was also a sense in which the improvement of nature would not be sacrilegious. It was all within a providential framework. There were even echoes of the Fall narrative in the chemists' toil and sweat. ‘They devote themselves diligently to their labours’, Paracelsus affirmed. ‘They put their fingers to the coals, the lute, and the dung, not into gold rings.’21

Paracelsian chemistry was hugely controversial. Its adversarial character meant that advocates sought the protection of courtly patrons, or, like Paracelsus himself, kept on the move. The chemical cures were themselves contentious. Prescribing mercury to clarify the spleen could induce splenetic reactions. It is also clear that, among the Paracelsians, the rhetoric of redeeming nature could provoke unease. Thus the Calvinist Oswald Croll felt obliged to add some qualifications. In the last analysis God alone could make all things new.22 It cannot be denied, though, that chemistry was closely integrated with theology within the Paracelsian tradition. The conventional wisdom of Aristotle and Galen would be stigmatised as pagan, as unchristian. Yet the blurring of the natural and the artificial might be thought to preclude a simple natural theology. The image, again, is of the chemist as collaborator in processes requiring time. When Paracelsus spoke of the last stage of the alchemical process, the tincturing of a substance to change its colour, he stated that it ‘makes all imperfect things perfect, transmutes them into their noblest essence’.23

The ‘Indulgent Creator’ of Robert Boyle

For our next snapshot of chemical history we turn to Robed Boyle who promoted the science during the second half of the seventeenth century. Observing that it was often demeaned as the preserve of sooty empirics, Boyle gave chemistry intellectual stature as the science that both corroborated a corpuscular theory of matter and exposed the limits of a reduction to pure mechanics.24 Yet he was not blind to its utility in other respects. He trusted his own chemical remedies more than he trusted his physician. And he had ‘much rather, that the physician of any friend of mine, should keep his patient by powerful medicines from dying, than tell me punctually when he shall die, or show me in the opened carcase why it may be supposed he lived no longer’.25

According to his contemporary Roger North, when Boyle woke in the morning he would consult his ceiling compass to see from which direction the wind came. He would then open his cupboard of chemical cordials to take the appropriate antidote. So, North continued, if the wind were often to change direction, Mr Boyle was wont to become drunk.26 As a sober theorist Boyle explored the possibility that chemical properties and chemical reactions might be explained by reference to the architecture of small particles, their shape, texture, arrangement and motion. An acid was conceivably an acid because it was composed of particles with sharp points. That would explain the unpleasant sensation they produced on the tongue. Because chemical reactions might be rationalised in terms of the decomposition and recomposition of corpuscular structures, the scholastic concept of homogeneous substantial forms could be attacked. In this process the distinction between nature and art was blurred through chemical practice.27

There was an ulterior sense in which the ‘mechanical philosophy’ itself assimilated nature to art. One of the mechanists, Henry Power, spoke of nature as full of ‘narrow engines’ in which there was much ‘curious mathematics’. In his own words: ‘the architecture of these little fabrics more neatly set forth the wisdom of their maker’. In Power's account of the mechanical philosophy, causes are deduced by reconstructing nature and all things are artificial because ‘nature itself is nothing else but the art of God’.28

This was the standard argument for design, which Boyle greatly prized.29 To see nature as the art of God was far from disturbing. But Boyle's chemistry was a challenge to other ways of looking at the relationship between nature and art. For example, could the chemist imitate natural products that according to Aristotle's philosophy possessed a distinctive, homogeneous and inimitable form? If so, this would also dissolve a traditional distinction between nature and art. The artificial production of gems made an excellent test case. Boyle was drawn to the study of gems partly because of claims for their magic power, but also because of their exquisite beauty.30 His hypothesis was that they were possibly formed from fluids and consequently contained heterogeneous mineral or metallic traces with which they had been impregnated. A key question was whether the exquisite uniformity ‘so admired in gems’ might not require a seminal and geometrising principle. At this point we begin to see a tension in Boyle himself. For religious reasons he wanted to celebrate such wondrous workmanship; on the other hand it helped his hypothesis to stress the diversity of configuration rather than any architectonic principle. Hence his rather tortured conclusion:

though also I willingly allow their shapes to deserve from us a delightful wonder at the curiousness of nature's, or rather her author's, workmanship, yet, upon a more attentive surveying of them, I do not find the uniformity to he near so great as is wont to be imagined; but have rather met with such diversities, as agree well with our hypothesis about their figuration.31

Boyle's theorising at this point had a genuinely mechanical aspect: ‘In several transparent gems, it seemed manifest enough to me… that the shape was, in great part, due to the figure of the womb, or mould, wherein the matter, whilst liquid or soft, happened to settle.’32 In these remarks there is equivocation on at least three points: whether there is evidence of design in gems, whether it is appropriate to speak of the workmanship of nature, and whether the mould might still be described in organic terms as a womb.

It is revealing that Boyle's equivocation surfaced in this context of the artificial imitation of nature. Yet he, as with the other chemists we have considered, found ways of making his chemistry theologically respectable. He would almost certainly have believed that the chemists' powers were but a pale imitation of ‘nature's, or rather her author's’. It was a long way from the simulation of crystals to the simulation of living organisms. Thus there was no compelling reason to dampen an enthusiasm for chemistry, which in Boyle's case was almost akin to a religious enthusiasm. He had confessed in 1649 that his laboratory had become a ‘kind of Elysium’, so ‘transported and bewitched’ had he been by Vulcan's power.33 Chemistry, as with natural philosophy, promised the improvement of the mind and that was itself a theological justification. The gratification of a pious curiosity far outweighed the delusory pleasures of fame, bags, bottles and mistresses.34

There was one further consideration that completely over-rode any sense in which the improvement of creation might be thought presumptuous. An anthropocentric conception of Providence allowed Boyle to stress that creation had been designed for human benefit. In seeking to show that even the most despicable of God's creatures might furnish something for the empire of knowledge, Boyle confessed that he had dissected even rats and mice. That he was prepared to experiment on fellow men, hiring one to be bitten by a viper, required no apology.35 And if, as Bacon had said, nature was to be put on the rack, chemistry provided the instruments of torture. Out of the tails of scorpions it could extract an oil that promised relief from kidney stones and, Boyle added, to ‘remedy divers other mischiefs, besides those that scorpions can do’.36 Improving therapy through chemical research would not have struck Boyle as sacrilegious. He simply spoke of ‘assisting nature’ in the arrest of disease.37 And that ultimately meant assisting the author of nature.

Once again we have come full circle to the image of a collaborative process. Boyle's theory of matter forged a link between chemistry and a limited process theology. As a contemporary John Beale told him in 1666, ‘you will conduct the two rivulets of mechanism and chemistry into the ocean of theology’.38 The emphasis was, however, rather different from a contemplative natural theology. It required Boyle to seek the Creator's indulgence. To change God's creatures, to improve upon nature, was in Boyle's own words, a ‘great honour, that the indulgent Creator vouchsafes to the naturalist’. If only Adam could return to inspect Boyle's laboratory, how he would admire the ‘new world’ added by human industry.39

Boyle's incorporation of chemistry into a providential scheme would be echoed by Isaac Newton, who found chemistry alluring because it offered the means to imitate the work of a subtle spirit responsible for processes of growth in nature. Newton distinguished between two kinds of action in nature: the vegetable and the purely mechanical. Vulgar chemistry, as he called it, was concerned with the imitation of mechanical changes. The art of inducing vegetation, by contrast, was ‘a more subtile secret and noble way of working’.40 The latter was, of course, Newton's way of working. But might it not be considered presumptuous in that one was seeking access to the agency of God? Newton certainly pondered the question. Some notes he made on an alchemical text refer to a paradox in the concurrence of alchemy and theology, the one seeming merely human and the other divine.41 But the paradox was instantly removed by presenting the Creator as the divine Alchemist. The biblical image of the spirit of God moving on the primordial waters was crucial, the water signifying an ‘indigested chaos’. Alchemical processes of extraction, separation and sublimation had all been involved in giving God's creatures the spirit of life.

The claim to be imitating divine alchemy could be seen as either presumptuous or pious, depending on one's point of view. Newton, like Boyle, favoured an indulgent God whose power was enhanced rather than demeaned by the use of creatures in the execution of the divine Will. Newton wrote:

If any think it possible that God may produce some intellectual creature so perfect that he could, by divine accord, in turn produce creatures of a lower order, this so far from detracting from the divine power enhances it; for that power which can bring forth creatures not only directly but through the mediation of other creatures is exceedingly, not to say infinitely greater.42

We presumably count among these creatures so the problem is resolved through our being mediators of divine power. Such reasoning creates the space for God's ongoing activity in the world of matter. The practice of chemistry is a form of collaboration: it is part of the story of God's activity in the natural world just as historical events constitute the story of God's ongoing activity in the moral world.43

Process, Progress and Priestley

For our next snapshot we move to the end of the eighteenth century when Joseph Priestley was expanding the number of gases and isolating what Lavoisier would call oxygen. In histories of chemistry Priestley has sometimes had a bad press because he clung to the concept of phlogiston. This was a principle common to all metals and was used to explain their common properties. It was given off when a metal burned in air and was also exhaled in the process of breathing. A mouse would die in a closed container because the air was eventually too phlogisticated to support respiration. The gas that Lavoisier called oxygen Priestley called dephlogisticated air because it supported both respiration and combustion better than ordinary air.

As a polemicist, Priestley resisted Lavoisier's chemistry because it looked like a bid on the part of the French to take over the science by re-naming every compound in accord with the new oxygen theory.44 But as a polemicist Priestley was most prolific in the sphere of Christian theology. A unitarian critic of established Christianity, he pressed the principles of rational religion as far as they would go. In Priestley's Christianity, as in Newton's, the doctrine of the Trinity has gone. So has the doctrine of original sin, which he considered too severe on those who were not to blame for Adam's sin. Gone, too, was the Calvinist doctrine of election, which he found impossible to reconcile with a God whose love for mankind was supposed to be impartial. The notion that God acted directly on individual minds he dismissed as vulgar superstition. In short, he turned his face against any feature of creation that could be construed as arbitrary.45

It was Priestley's happy belief that nature, as a system, had been constructed to promote human happiness. This meant that he had to construct a formal theodicy in which the presence of evil could be rationalised. It is tempting to think that, having jettisoned such doctrines as the Fall and the Atonement, he would be in some difficulty over the improvement of creation. Improvement could no longer be construed in the Paracelsan sense of redemption or in the Baconian sense of restoration. If this is already the best of all possible worlds what role could the sciences have in improving it? But in Priestley's theodicy this was not a problem. Evil was integral to the system because it promoted a greater good. Providence had even allowed the corruption of Christianity because a greater good would be effected through its subsequent purification. One is reminded of Adam Smith's insistence that interference in nature could be perfectly consonant with a beneficent Providence in that agricultural improvement could be construed as redressing an error due to bad stewardship.46

Priestley had a keen sense of the dynamics of history in which actions for the worse invariably provoked reactions for the better. Thus the clergy of the established Church were contributing to their own downfall by supporting a war against America which enlarged the national debt. They would contribute to their downfall, too, if they became more grasping in extracting tithes, particularly from dissenters like himself. Consequently, although this is the best of all possible worlds, at any one time there will be scope for improvement. Science has a strategic role to play in this historical process because it can eliminate superstition, promote human welfare and explode the political pretensions of arbitrary power. Consequently Priestley scholars have spoken of his process theology, in which Britain's industrial growth took place at God's behest, not behind His back.47

How did chemistry fit the scheme? There would seem to be at least two respects in which it directly supported his theology and two others in which the support was indirect. Directly, chemistry promised progress. And progress implied a beneficent provision. Announcing the properties of his dephlogisticated air, Priestley immediately considered its medical uses. He was concerned lest healthy individuals, by breathing too much of it, might, like a candle, burn themselves out. But he made no secret of his hopes that it might prove a ‘fashionable article in luxury’.48 Every gas was to have its use. Art could improve on nature in the preservation of food. As he wrote excitedly to Alessandro Volta in June 1777: ‘Yesterday we ate a pigeon which I had kept in nitrous air near six weeks. It was perfectly sweet and good… [though] the water in which it had stood was very putrid.’49

The second respect in which Priestley's chemistry served his theology had to do with atmospheric restoration. A beneficent system required that there be some mechanism in nature for replenishing the air. Priestley was bent on finding it. In August 1771 he reported that he had ‘long been in quest of… that process in nature by which air, rendered noxious by breathing, is restored to its former salubrious condition’.50 Experiments with aquatic plants, involving his nitrous air test, showed that purification was the work of vegetation. The results of this research lent themselves to a fine public speech. When Sir John Pringle presented him with the Copley medal in November 1773, he drew the comforting conclusion that ‘no vegetable grows in vain’.51

Indirectly, chemistry came to the aid of Priestley's theology because it provided examples of economy in nature. There was economy in that a single principle, phlogiston, conferred common properties on all the metals. He even speculated that water might be a common ingredient in all the gases. But there was a more subtle sense, too, in which chemistry found its way into Priestley's polemics. By containing and manipulating his gases he could argue that traditional references to ‘spirits’ could finally be expunged from a chemical vocabulary. Since he believed that both Christianity and chemistry had been infected by ‘spirits’, to excise them from the scientific domain set a good precedent for their extermination in theology. Souls and spirits were dispensable for Priestley because he favoured the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, rather than human immortality. In rationalising the details, chemistry once again intruded: ‘Death, with its concomitant putrefaction and dispersion of parts, is only a decomposition; and whatever is decomposed, may be recomposed by the being who first composed it.’52 By collapsing the distinction between matter and spirit, he reinforced his critique of those established religions in which a dualistic ontology had run riot.

Priestley's chemico-theology was profoundly controversial as were his political sympathies with the French Revolution. His chemical account of a bodily resurrection, for some critics, was going too far. One satirist asked the pointed question: what, in Priestley's view would happen to a poor fellow who sank in the Thames to be eaten by eels? And suppose the eels were then devoured by a high-living politician:

Poor Thomas in the Thames was drowned

And though long sought could not be found…

At the last trumpet's solemn sound.

How mangled will poor Tom be found!53

An association between chemistry and political radicalism, epitomised by Priestley, drew acerbic comments from Edmund Burke. In his reflections on the French Revolution, Burke accused the republicans of defying the processes of nature like an ‘alchymist and empiric’.54 This is a revealing remark, because it shows how the blurring of nature and art could be read as interfering with or defying nature. It is clear that a purely contemplative natural theology was not possible for Priestley. Indeed his discovery of ‘oxygen’ symbolised that fact. He was taken aback himself to discover that then was a gas that could support respiration better than normal, natural air. It seemed to symbolise the view that what Providence had provided could be improved. The same symbolism might be seen in his over-estimating the restorative effect of shaking noxious airs with water, which he had wanted to believe simulated a natural and beneficent Interaction between atmosphere and sea.55 In one's experiments a presumed imitation of nature could let one down. But this did nothing to undermine his confidence in a theology of process. The chemist, collaborating with the deity, could promise a bright future in which science and rational Christianity would fight side by side against all forms of superstition.

Fighting Against Materialism: The Chemistry of Humphry Davy

In the early years of the nineteenth century it was Davy who made science fashionable in London.56 In his public lectures at the Royal institution he, like Priestley, stressed the usefulness of chemistry. ‘I am glad to find you agog for chemistry’, wrote John Herschel to Charles Babbage in 1813: ‘By the Lord, I think we may turn Peterhouse into a Furnace, Trinity into a laboratory… I should like as a first experiment to make a party for breathing the nitrous oxide.’57 It was Davy who had dispensed his laughing gas at the Royal Institution, but he had also had the more serious task of persuading the gentry in his audience of the value of chemistry.… in agricultural reform.58 In the context of debates about population growth and agricultural output, Davy promoted his chemistry by promising the improvement of infertile land. The chemical analyst was indispensable because only he could expose the hidden constituents of the soil. It was given to the scientific expert to alter and re-constitute nature. And so the question arises again as to how concepts of improvement were incorporated into theological discourse.

The presence of divine purpose in the laws of nature was a conspicuous theme in Davy's lectures. A chemico-theology was not only possible but an integral part of his technique for cultivating his audience. Contrary to Carlile's notion that improving the world was incompatible with religious sentiment, Davy saw in the love of improvement a moral virtue ultimately grounded in reverence towards an intelligent deity. In Davy's opinion, obstruction to the diffusion of knowledge came not from religion but from ignorance or selfishness.59 The principle of the conservation of matter might be used by the radical press to attack the supernatural; but, for Davy, as for seventeenth-century Platonists, the indestructibility of matter implied the indestructibility of the soul.60

One of the defects of Lavoisier's chemistry, as Davy perceived it, was that it had elevated one element, oxygen, at the expense of others. Following Lavoisier, the Swedish chemist Berzelius would say that oxygen was the centre around which the whole of chemistry turned. It was not so for Davy. One of the reasons why he was so pleased when chlorine, fluorine and iodine were proved to be elements was that they were all acid-producers, like Lavoisier's oxygen. They had the effect of destroying the uniqueness of oxygen.61 Consequently they confirmed Davy's impression that there were what he called ‘chains of resemblance’ between different elements and compounds. In other words a natural classification of chemical species should prove possible. There were divinely ordained ‘chains of being’ in chemistry as in plant and animal taxonomy.

Exemplifying a rhetorical strategy that we analysed in chapter 6, Davy constructed chemical arguments against French materialism at a time when it was politically necessary to do so.62 His main argument was that the properties of compounds can be shown not to depend exclusively on some property-bearing material component. Lavoisier's oxygen theory of acidity was materialistic in the sense that the oxygenic principle conferred the property of acidity on those compounds within which it was bound. The more oxygen they contained the mote acidic they should be. Such chemical materialism, in Davy's view, could be defeated by chemistry itself. After all, two very different substances, charcoal and diamond, were made of the same element carbon. This seemed to show that such properties as transparency and hardness did not exclusively depend on a material component. The arrangement of matter by additional powers was an important variable. Compounds containing the same two elements could also differ remarkably. To inhale nitrous oxide was a recipe for laughter; to inhale nitrogen dioxide was a recipe for disaster as one choked to death on brown fumes. But the material components were identical. As the lesser chemist but greater poet Samuel Coleridge insisted, a chemical synthesis was a true synthesis—not simply a physical rearrangement of particles.

As for the additional powers, Davy made the forces of electricity his own, turning Volta's battery against the French. Decomposing the alkalis, sodium and potassium hydroxide, he showed that they contained oxygen. He could therefore quip that the principle of acidity of the French chemists could just as easily be termed the principle of alkalinity. But more significantly, Davy's electrochemical researches showed that the reactivity of a chemical agent could be changed simply by giving it a positive or negative charge. There was no way that chemical properties inhered in material particles. In a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution in 1812, the transmutation of chemistry into a chemico-theology was explicit and direct:

Active powers must be considered as belonging to matter; but it is not necessary to suppose them inherent in it. [Matter] may be regarded… as inert; and all effects produced upon it as flowing from the same original cause, which, as it is intelligent, must be divine.63

From Elements to Compounds: The Natural Theology of William Prout

In the work of William Prout we at last meet a systematic attempt to construct a chemico-theology. It is worth discussing because it Reveals in a compelling way the difficulty of the problem, the ingenuity of the solution, and the necessity of a process theology in which the chemist was collaborator with a providential God. Prout was asked to author a Bridgewater Treatise that would deal with chemistry and the process of digestion. Writing in the 1830s, he suffered at the hands of a later generation who wished to set science in opposition to religion. In his preface to a posthumous fourth edition, John Tyndall said that he would have thought more highly of Dr Prout had he not read his book. It had clearly been written for the money.64 But Tyndall, like T. H. Huxley and others of that later generation, had an axe to grind. To criticise a work of natural theology was one way of affirming scientific autonomy.65

Tyndall was unduly severe on Prout. The chemistry he popularised was both topical and original in the 1830s. We still remember Prout's hypothesis today. Struck by the fact that so many atomic weights appeared to be whole numbers, he had speculated in an ultimate unity of matter with hydrogen as the primary unit. This belief in an underlying unity of matter he shared with Davy. Prout was also well-versed in the study of digestion, having identified hydrochloric acid in the gastric juice. His treatise reflects the burgeoning science of organic chemistry. Far from lacking depth, his essay in natural theology made an original contribution. He developed a molecular theory of matter, transcending the atomic theory of John Dalton. Prout was one of the few chemists of the first half of the nineteenth century to develop the concept that we associate with Avogadro and Ampere—that the molecules of elementary gases are divisible into two or more identical submolecules.66 A degree of submolecularity allowed Prout to explain Gay-Lussac's law of gaseous combination, and in particular how two volumes of hydrogen would react with one of oxygen to produce two of water.

Prout began his Bridgewater Treatise by considering the objection that chemistry might not help the religious apologist. He knew that William Paley had preferred physical mechanisms and anatomical structures to chemical processes. But there was a reply. Many mechanical devices helped to promote chemical change. In the circulatory system a complicated mechanical apparatus, the lungs, was employed for a simple chemical purpose: to oxygenate the blood. To disqualify chemistry from natural theology would therefore be arbitrary.67

Not that the task of constructing a chemico-theology was straightforward. The most direct route to design was through the utility of the chemical elements. The medical uses of iodine showed how a newcomer to the family of elements could be co-opted for altruistic purposes.68 But there was a problem. What was to be done with the more poisonous elements? Prout's answer was: turn them into compounds! Here, the role of the chemist in improving creation was inscribed in the very text of natural theology. If there were uncomfortable connotations, Prout had a formula to disperse them. It was the properties of compounds, rather than elements, that the deity had envisaged. The secondary properties of the elements themselves had been ‘left to be determined as the more general laws of matter might decide’.69 The objection that the Creator could have chosen to make all the elements innocuous Prout was obliged to accept. The deity could have so chosen; but was there not more wisdom displayed in arranging for refractory elements to be processed for higher purposes?70

This may sound silly and one may begin to sympathise with Tyndall's reaction. But the argument does bring out that sense of collaboration to which we have referred. The chemist worked to complete or perfect creation. Prout did have other arguments for design. His reference to laws of matter is indicative of a trend in nineteenth-century natural theology that we observed in an earlier chapter: scientific advances would be celebrated as disclosures of the Creator's laws. The shift was from divine contrivance to divine legislation. By exposing the laws of matter chemistry, according to Prout, pointed to divine wisdom. And chemistry did now have some laws of its own. Prout could capitalise on Dalton's law of definite proportions, on Gay-Lussac's law of gaseous combination and on the generalisation he claimed as his own: ‘all gaseous bodies under the same pressure, and temperature, contain an equal number of sell repulsive molecules’.71 As ‘delegated agencies’, such laws pointed to the ‘Great First Cause’.72

In the new science of organic chemistry, Prout found further, if indirect, support for his natural theology. Crucially, his treatment of living systems was structured by a proposition he had found in Paley. In his discussion of the self-imposed limitation of divine power, Paley had written: ‘it is as though one Being should have fixed certain rules; and, if we may so speak, provided certain materials; and afterwards have committed to another being, out of these materials, and in subordination to these rules, the task of drawing forth a creation’. This proposition has attracted attention because it shows how easily natural theology could dig its own grave. When Darwin substituted a personified natural selection for Paley's second being, natural theology graduated into a thoroughgoing naturalism.73

Prout could not have foreseen that development and so welcomed Paley's admission of an agency mediating between God and nature. It allowed him to construct a vitalist physiology in which living systems were controlled by powers having a faculty ‘little short of intelligence’.74 As Prout's biographer has pointed out, this vitalism did not obstruct chemical enquiry. One could study the dynamics of disgestion without doubting that metabolic processes were under the control of an agent that was not itself the product of organisation.75 It was a vitalism that did, however, set limits to what the chemist might achieve in the imitation of nature. The synthesis of an organic compound might be possible, but not a living organism. In fact the efforts of the chemist threw into relief the limitation of his powers. In the very act of imitating nature, the superiority of nature's art was clarified. The point had been made by Coleridge: ‘The powers of chemistry are beginning to show us that no force, not even mechanical’ power, can make life.76 Prout was able to embroider the point because, if anything, the artificial synthesis of organic compounds reinforced rather than destroyed his vitalism. The extreme conditions required by the chemist only served to highlight the subtlety and silence of nature's powers. Friedrich Wöhler might have synthesised urea in 1828, but not by a method that truly imitated the process in vivo.77

This integration of vitalism and scientific research meant that chemistry could give indirect support to natural theology. Prout drew special attention to the refractory nature of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen—the four elements from which living systems had been constructed. Three were invisible gases, one of which—nitrogen—was relatively inert. And as for carbon, it was that unprepossessing stuff encountered as charcoal or soot. Amidst the wonders of creation, Prout exclaimed, ‘it is perhaps difficult to say what is most wonderful; but we have often thought, that the Deity has displayed a greater stretch of power, in accommodating to such an extraordinary variety of changes, a material so unpromising and so refractory as charcoal, and in finally uniting it with the human mind; than was requisite for the creation of the human mind itself’.78 Chemists might improve on nature, but within well defined limits. In the imitation of creative power their very success underscored the limits of the possible.

Not surprisingly, Prout's marriage of vitalism and natural theology was controversial. On the one hand critiques of vitalism could be urged on theological grounds. Did it not detract from divine Sovereignty to celebrate the role of intermediate agents between God and his Creation?79

And from the scientific side, there can be irritation when limits are placed on the future scope of science. It is therefore instructive to turn to a critique of chemico-theology that belongs to the next generation when T. H. Huxley argued for the physical basis of life.

Chemistry in the Service of Reductionism

In his defence of Darwinism, Huxley would have no room for a chemico-theology.80 In fact chemistry became a crucial resource as he argued for the physical basis of life. That catchphrase—the physical basis of life—was the title of one of Huxley's most celebrated ‘lay sermons’.81 He preached it in Edinburgh in 1868 and it helped to make protoplasm a household word. It even found its way into Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado. Against vitalist theories of life and against the kind of chemico-theology we have seen in Prout, Huxley drew on physical principles akin to the conservation of energy to make his case. There could be no vital spark or extra-mechanical agent beyond the conversion of protoplasm into work. Even the mental activity of a lecturer, Huxley ruefully observed, depended on the loss of bodily substance.82 But it was chemistry that furnished a crucial argument for Huxley's reductionist philosophy. His argument was that the physical basis of life lay in the protoplasm of the cell. His ace card was that all forms of protoplasm so far analysed contained the same four chemical elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.83 All forms of protoplasm appeared to behave similarly when subjected to chemical reagents, electric shock or heat. Crucially, in all living things, there was an underlying unity of composition. For Huxley, chemistry had penetrated the mystery of life. Unity of composition implied common ancestry in a single evolutionary process. The argument was a cruder version of what we often hear today—that there is much in common between the DNA of chimpanzees and humans.

The critical question again was whether the chemist might imitate nature, so breaking down the barriers between nature and artifice. By the time Huxley was preaching, the metaphor of the chemical laboratory was commonly used to refer to living organisms. Huxley broke the barriers down by describing plants as ‘fine chemists’.84 As with earlier inroads into the nature/art dichotomy the case was highly controversial. Huxley's critics bounced back by driving a wedge between what the chemist could do and what occurred in vivo. His fiercest critic, Lionel Smith Beale, objected that Huxley's line on the chemical nature of protoplasm was flawed because, after analysis, one could not call protoplasm the living substance. There was something of Wordsworth's ‘we murder to dissect’ in his position. In fact Beale advised Huxley that he should really call nerve, muscle and bone the physical basis of death. Against Huxley's reductionism he protested that the really significant fact was the multiplicity of differences of structure and property associated with similarity of composition. That, for Beale, implied a vital power which lay beyond the hounds of the chemist.

One of the things that makes historical research so rewarding is that controversies of this kind often conceal other issues that, once recovered, add spice to the whole debate. In this case Huxley had been a candidate for the Chair at King's College London that Beale had won. But their differences were rooted more deeply. Beale set himself up as custodian of a conventional morality that had been threatened by Darwinism. He is usually described as a broad churchman who treated the differences between humans and animals as absolute.85 He later laced his scientific works with attacks on atheism, materialism, agnosticism and monism—all those ‘-isms’ with which the Darwinians were apt to flirt. In short, what may seem a small matter of chemical analysis could be at the heart of an immensely complex debate concerning the limitations of scientific analysis. Huxley certainly did not have it all his own way. When he was elected Rector of Aberdeen in the 1870s he was lampooned in a volume entitled Protoplasm, Powheads, Porwiggles; and the Evolution of the Horse from the Rhinoceros: illustrating Professor Huxley's scientific mode of getting up the Creation and Upsetting Moses: a Guide for Electors in choosing Lord Rectors.86

In the debate between Beale and Huxley the question whether chemists could reconstruct vital processes was clearly central. Beale, for example, took special exception to a remark of W. R. Grove who had spoken of the electric battery and its effects as ‘the nearest approach to a man-made organism’. Beale pounced on what he took to be an extraordinary show of ignorance: ‘everything that lives—every so-called living machine—grows of itself, builds itself up, and multiplies, while every non-living machine is made, does not grow, and does not produce machines like itself’.87 Beale inevitably sounds like a reactionary, but his attacks on the notion of an intercellular substance gives him a significant place in revisions of cell theory, whilst his claim that Huxley was using the word ‘protoplasm’ indiscriminately was very much to the point.

Meanwhile in France, chemistry was pressed into the service of both reductionism and positivism by the scientific guru of the Third Republic, Marcellin Berthelot. His goal was to perfect methods of organic synthesis that showed, once and for all, that the chemist could match natural processes. His new synthetic methods allowed him to produce in the laboratory acetylene, ethyl alcohol, formic acid and many complex derivatives. He was arguably the first to accomplish the direct synthesis of organic compounds from their elements. When he synthesised formic acid (which came from ants) in November 1855, he did so directly from carbon monoxide and steam—compounds that were themselves immediate products of their elements. Berthelot's science of organic chemistry based on synthesis carried an unmistakable message: ‘in reality and without reservation’, the chemical forces that govern organic matter are the same as those governing inorganic matter.88 He could pride himself on having removed the space for vital forces and any chemico-theology based upon them. His case was, however, over-stated; for, as Louis Pasteur observed, the chemist could not yet control the centres of asymmetry in a complex organic molecule.89

The Chemical Interventionism of Eleanor Ormerod

For our last historical example we return to England and to a context in which there were economic incentives to apply chemical knowledge. The issue concerns the early use of pesticides and their advocacy by a Victorian spinster, Eleanor Ormerod. As a technological scientist Ormerod makes a revealing case-study because here was a woman penetrating a male domain.90

Ormerod was a member of the gentry who, in May 1882, became Honorary Consulting Entomologist to the Royal Agricultural Society. Her interventionist approach to insect control stands in sharp contrast to principles derived from a conservative natural theology. The earlier entomologist William Kirby held providentialist views on the balance of nature which dissuaded him from chemical controls.91 For similar reasons, the Quaker Edward Newman had wished to rely only on insect predators—a form of biological control. ‘You see’, he explained, ‘Providence has foreseen that the earth might at any time be desolated, or totally unpeopled, by the natural increase of many kinds of animals, and He has provided against it.’92 There were clergymen who had no doubt that insects should be killed when they make a nuisance of themselves. Ormerod's campaign is striking because of the seemingly masculine way in which she wished to dominate nature with her chemicals. A pioneer in the use of ‘Paris green’ she has been described as having ‘implored farmers to drench Nature in a slurry of poison’.93 There was poignancy in her career in that she created a niche of expertise that she herself could not fully occupy precisely because she was a woman. In 1889 the University of Edinburgh decided to establish a chair in economic entomology. Ormerod's response is revealing:

Who ever is to take the position of lecturer? I am complimented by the expression of a wish from the authorities who have the election in hand that I should take it: but then Lady Professors are not admitted in Scotland… I think I could do all that is wanted, but then, oh! Shades of John Knox!94

To some observers, Ormerod transgressed both the etiquette of natural theology and of womanhood. Appalled by her unfeminine crusade against God's creatures one clergyman reminded her, ‘how far nobler is the crusade against sin and fashion, which are the real and awful causes of misery, suffering and poverty.… I would to God that you, madam, would turn your great talents in the truest interests of the poor.’ She was put in her place with the request that she should not ‘steel’ her ‘compassionate, womanly heart’ with her scientific studies.95 This could certainly be described as male chauvinism at its worst, but we need to know that what had incited the Revd J. E. Walker's reproach was Miss Ormerod's campaign to annihilate house sparrows, which she believed were a menace.

The use of pesticides was clearly controversial for many reasons. At the end of the nineteenth century there was, however, a rhetoric to justify this aspect of chemical industry. Agricultural practices were themselves artificial in that they interfered with nature. The concentration of crops in one area was not nature's method. The price was the concentration of insect pests that would otherwise be denied so convenient a livelihood. The argument therefore was that the use of pesticides was helping to restore the natural balance, which had been upset by the simple expediency of growing food. We are back again with the blurring of the natural and the artificial in more ways than one. Ormerod herself maintained that the unwelcome hordes of house sparrows had resulted from the destruction of their natural enemies. She wanted a counterbalance—a ‘legal and economic, rather than a natural, balance’.96

Conclusion

One reason for offering these chemical snapshots is that they expose some of the difficulties that arose in integrating an interventionist science with a contemplative natural theology, but also how the difficulties were overcome. In contexts where the meaning and scope of ‘nature’ became progressively blurred, so the scope of a natural theology would become increasingly problematic. But what we have also seen is that one kind of theology might survive—the kind that sees in the alleged improvement of nature a collaboration between human beings and their Maker. It is nevertheless striking how heavily this argument hinged on the subservience of chemistry to medicine. In the Scottish universities of the eighteenth century chemistry was both institutionalised within and eventually emancipated from medicine, becoming an academic discipline in its own right,97 as also happened in France where Lavoisier famously used physical principles in his analysis of chemical composition. In gaining its independence, it perhaps became less propitious as a resource for religious reflection. Throughout the nineteenth century it continued to promise improvements to the world, especially in the domain of agriculture. And it would be wrong to say that it completely lost touch with religious discourse. The great German chemist Justus von Liebig would argue that to ignore the natural laws that governed fertility was to sin against God and humanity. It was the abuse of the land, milking it for excessive profit, the refusal to use chemical fertilisers, that represented an ‘interference in the divine world order’.98 As we have just seen, those who favoured pesticides would appeal to a similar logic.

What might a future historian make of our fin de siècle techniques? The chemist is still around, claiming, through biotechnology, to improve upon nature. Looking back on the 1990s one would recognise new techniques, including the freezing of embryos, that allowed women the freedom to have their children when they wanted, even when past the menopause. A future historian would also note that the gene for the ageing process was about to be isolated, with the prospect of a pill that would add fifty years to life expectancy. She or he might wryly observe that the alchemists' dream lived on. There would surely be comment, too, on experiments in genetic engineering that had led to the patenting of pigs and mice. In the production of such transgenic animals, our future historian might well see a near-final collapse of all distinction between nature and art. In the 1990s it was, after all, a requirement for the award of a patent that the animal be deemed an invention, a novelty, something that nature alone could not produce. Our future historian might even chance upon a copy of GenEthics News for October 1995, where the patenting of animals was indeed seen as a qualitative change in the human enclosure of nature. ‘Now’, wrote one concerned observer, ‘we are not merely dominating nature, but claiming intellectual origination’.99 The historian would find the same observer adding that ‘from the point of view of anyone who believes in God(s) [the claim to have invented an animal] is simply claiming to be God’.

An historian familiar with the text of this chapter might pause to consider whether such a view was correct. Did it not overlook the model of collaboration that had been the precarious concomitant of chemico-theologies? But the qualitative change would be perceived as real enough and of great concern to the public. In the 1990s the instincts of those who practised transgenic experiments were telling them that there would be a revulsion threshold beyond which the public would be intolerant. The unlimited replacement of genetic material in pigs with human DNA would surely become offensive. But in 1995 then was little philosophy helping to define the limits.

All this would be clear to our future historian who would no doubt be intrigued by the rhetoric of today's scientists. In the context of patent law it was the artifice that had to be stressed. In the pursuit of invention there seemed to be nothing to check the scientist from doing all that it was practically possible to do. But, in the context of public relations, there was the check of audience concern, however inarticulately expressed. And when the name of the game was reassuring the public, a quite different rhetoric surfaced—not then the rhetoric of invention but the rhetoric of a secularised natural theology. It exhibited a form similar to that seen in earlier chemico-theologies.

Genetic engineers, for example, were saying in the 1990s that they were not doing anything essentially different from earlier breeders who had dedicated themselves to the improvement of plant and animal stocks. They were collaborating with nature, not violating her. In justifying experiments on surplus human eggs, it was sometimes suggested that nature in its prodigality legitimated the practice because so many eggs are rejected in normal reproductive processes. Locating a dialogue on this very issue, our future historian would find one contributor rejecting the argument but still affirming that ‘if we consider ourselves as part of nature, it might be reasonable to consider research as treating the eggs with respect, and to view selections made by us as part of the natural selection process’.100 This naturalising of what we do had evoked a sympathetic response from the theologian Gordon Dunstan:

I believe that scientific intervention at this point is precisely to increase selectivity in an evolutionary process in which what to us is waste is in fact a selection for biological, evolutionary ends. We are, in a way, aligned with a selective force against what appears to be an otherwise wasteful use of material.101

What will our future historian make of such references to alignment with a force beyond ourselves? Were there still reputable scholars in the late twentieth century who would interpret that alignment as alignment with the purposes of God? Or was the rhetoric of a secularised natural theology totally and invariably secular? Our future historian would find that theological essays on the subject had not dried up. Books with titles such as Cosmos as Creation were still appearing in university libraries, containing essays entitled ‘The evolution of the created co-creator’.102 In these one would encounter the argument that guiding principles are necessary for interventionist technologies—principles that recommend the maximizing of opportunities for greater love and greater freedom. Whether such high ideals actually meshed with the complexities of decision making would be a moot point. Freezing embryos might give women greater freedom, but the question was being asked whether the choice of motherhood late in life would be the most loving in relation to the child? Transgenic animals might enrich medical resources, in tracking diseases, in facilitating organ transplants and in replacing dysfunctional genes. But how were the benefits to be weighed against the threat both to animal welfare and to existing eco-systems?103

To future observers, the idealism of the theologian might also seem strangely out of tune with economic and political realities that in 1995 appeared to be riding roughshod over those concerned with defining limits. There would be evidence from the USA of resistance to moratoria on transgenic experiments—a resistance based on the fear that US biotechnology might lose its leadership in the field.104 But there would still be evidence of countervailing trends. Perhaps the most visible transcultural animal of the 1990s would be the ethics committee, so many of which had sprouted in response to biotechnology.105 Looking back on this phenomenon, the historian might reflect that by the 1990s moral theologians had come to occupy a smaller niche than they once did, but that there was still a space in which they could collaborate with moral philosophers and scientists themselves.106 That future historian might finally discern the most radical agenda yet for the reconstruction of nature—the changing of human nature itself through genetic manipulation. But, by then, what would that historian's own nature have become?