After 1662, non-conformists of every stripe in England were persecuted with a new and ruthless zeal, but they always bounced back. Many schismatic sects, such as the Plymouth Brethren, became even more rigid in matters of piety than the Church of England or Catholics from whom they had split. Others were quite liberal in the interpretations of the Bible, particularly the Mosaic account of creation, thus allowing their followers to reconcile the new discoveries of science with their beliefs. As long as anyone insisted that Genesis remained the one unimpeachable source, however, the obvious result was confrontation and discord.
In 1696, all Europe was scandalised by the radical scepticism of John Toland, whose book Christianity not Mysterious33 was ordered to be burned by the public hangman in Ireland. Toland was born in Ireland and brought up as a Catholic, then became a Protestant and a free thinking rebel, eking out a living as a writer of highly polemical tracts and books and dodging from country to country just ahead of a host of would-be persecutors. (Among other accomplishments, he invented the term ‘pantheism’.) His writings exemplify what happened when free thinking and (even more dangerous) outspoken populists started to apply the pure reason of thinkers such as John Locke to a close study of the Bible. Toland thundered: ‘Whatever is contrary to Reason can be no Miracle, for it has been sufficiently prov’d already, that Contradiction is only another word for Impossible or Nothing.’ Toland dared to write what many felt, that it was absurd that the wine at the communion service should be thought literally to be transubstantiated into the blood of Christ. It was absurd that the disciples could have seen Christ walk on water. If you can believe in miracles, Toland argued, what is to prevent you from believing any nonsensical fiction? A church that depended on subjecting its adherents to the discipline of believing in miracles, and held its members in awe of the unknowable, was not worth belonging to. The precepts of the Church had to be understandable in material terms and expressed in plain words.
A hundred years later, the legacy of this free thinking made for a particularly dangerous time for the established Church of England. The Church was part and parcel, warp and weft, of the oligarchy; any threat to it threatened the very fabric of society. We must also remember that in 1802, Britain was at war with France. The threats from across the English Channel were not just the liberal intellectual challenges of the free thinking French Enlightenment, from Descartes and Buffon to Rousseau and Condorcet, but also the political challenges of the French Revolution, the material horrors of the Terror, and now the wars being waged by Napoleon. Riot and revolution, free thinking and self-improvement, tyranny, war and savagery were everywhere. One would readily be forgiven for wondering whether all this modernity was a good thing.
Paley therefore did not set out to write his proof of the existence and attributes of God in a world of certainty. There were enemies from without to be countered: materialist and rationalist enemies of the ineffable, scientists and philosophers from Britain and the Continent. And there were enemies from within: religion was beset by complex philosophical debates that threatened the whole basis of belief. Throughout it all, God’s purpose was becoming harder to read, certainly more difficult to proclaim. At the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment the problem had been to find a secure place for science in a religious world; by the end, the problem was exactly the opposite: if the world operates through Second Causes, where was the role of God? One solution was to insist on the literal truth of the biblical story of creation: but that necessarily represented a denial of the discoveries of science about the age of the earth (and universe) and the role of change.
Two issues, above all others, motivated William Paley: the biting scepticism of the philosophers John Locke and David Hume, and the nagging threat of a theory of matter consisting of space and atoms in random motion. By 1800 such theories had long since spawned versions of the ultimate atheism: evolution. Scepticism could be countered with logical argument, but a rival explanatory theory – especially a godless theory like atomism – was an even greater threat. We can measure the challenge that a self-ordering world, operating on independent laws and motions – and, above all, on chance – posed to received religion by the bitter rhetoric of the defenders of the orthodox. We can gauge how long-standing this threat had been – since Descartes at least – by the furious sarcasm of the Reverend Ralph Cudworth, Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge and Master of Christ’s College from 1654. Cudworth belonged to an old school of Platonist philosophers who were opposed to Descartes and any kind of empiricism. In a massive work attacking a range of heresies in splendid rhetoric he explained the difference between Epicurean views (‘Atomick Atheists’) and the arriviste hybrid theory of Descartes (‘mechanick Theists’) that attempted to marry atoms, space and chance to a godly view of creation. And dismissed them both:
God in the mean time standing by as an Idle Spectator of this Lusus Atomorum, this sportful dance of Atoms, and of the various results thereof. Nay these mechanick Theists have here quite outstripped the Atomick Atheists themselves, they being much more extravagant than ever those were. For the professed Atheists durst never venture to affirm that this regular Systeme of things resulted from the fortuitous motions of Atoms at the very first, before they had for a long time together produced many other inept Combinations, or aggregate Forms of particular things and nonsensical Systems of the whole, and they suppose also that the regularity of things in this world would not always continue such neither, but that some time or other Confusion and Disorder will break in again … But our mechanick Theists will have their Atoms never so much as once to have fumbled in these their motions, nor to have produced any inept System or incongruous forms at all, but from the very first all along to have taken up their places and ranged themselves so orderly, methodically and directly; as that they could not possibly have done it better, had they been directed by the most perfect Wisdom.34
Chance and design are like oil and water, or perhaps oil and fire. Cudworth continued more soberly:
There is no Middle betwixt these Two; but all things must either spring from a God, or Matter; Then this is also a Demonstration of the Truth of Theism, by Deduction to Impossible: Either there is a God, or else all things are derived from Dead and Senseless Matter; but this Latter is Impossible; Therefore a God. Nonetheless, that the Existence of a God, may be further Directly Proved also from the Same Principle, rightly understood. Nothing out of Nothing Causally, or Nothing Caused by Nothing, neither Efficiently nor Materially.
To which a natural theologian could only add; Amen.
The popularity of the argument from design, and the extraordinary success of Paley’s Natural Theology, gave wavering Christians a better answer than Cudworth’s to the threats of philosophers (deist and atheist) who challenged the basis of Christian beliefs. By dealing only with existence of God, without depending on assertions of the authority of God’s revelations (in the Bible and in miracles), Paley made an argument for the deist doubter and at the same time created (or at least strengthened) a philosophical context within which contemporary scientists could allay their religious doubts and make a space for their discoveries within orthodoxy. Although not universally admired by those theologians who placed their prime emphasis on revelation, the timeless appeal of the argument from design is shown in the fact that these same threats persist in even more pressing forms today, when our understanding of science has almost limitlessly