William Paley’s theological works were well known to all students at Cambridge, where the syllabus included formal study of two of his books. Darwin, who had a particular appreciation for finely argued logic and reason, was examined on Paley in 1830 and said,
I am convinced that I could have written out the whole of the Evidences [Paley’s A View of the Evidences of Christianity, 1794] with perfect correctness … the logic of this book and as I may add of his Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the Academical Course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was the most use to me in the education of my mind.6
Paley’s last book, Natural Theology, was not a set book for Cambridge examinations.7 It aimed for a broader audience than theologians alone and has come to occupy a special place in the history of science and religion. The basic premise of the larger movement of the same name was that the glories and complexities of living nature were to be seen as prima facie evidence of the power of God’s creative hand. From this viewpoint, which owes its origins among others to the Five Ways of St Thomas Aquinas, there could be no more pious endeavour than to study nature. All the patterns, symmetries and laws of nature were simply the reflection of God’s mind. Therefore to study nature was to approach closer to God. Indeed, the deepest study of nature would provide confirmation of God’s very existence. Natural science and theology were not at odds, therefore, but complementary. In particular, any kind of evolutionary theory of the kind that had been growing for the previous hundred years – in which the study of nature pointed to different, material causes of life in all its magnificent diversity than the hand of God – would be negated. At the time the young Darwin studied for the Church at Cambridge, as for a hundred years before, natural theology offered a rationale for the reconciliation of what might have seemed to be opposed: the diverse worlds of science and of religion.
This argument has a strong following today among those who would oppose, or are agnostic about the theory of evolutionary change. But, curiously, a direct connection can be traced between Paley’s arguments against any kind of evolutionary theories (of which there were many, termed ‘transmutation’, or ‘development’ theories, long before Charles Darwin was even born) and the origins of modern scientific thinking in favour of evolutionary theory. Darwin’s reading of Natural Theology in 1831 therefore has a particular resonance for anyone today who is interested in the question of how the apparently separate subjects of science and religion can be made one and, indeed, anyone interested in the historical precedents and intellectual origins of modern evolution.
Although many of the driving intellects of the age were continental – and this particular version of the battle between science and religion was being fought out elsewhere than Britain – this is a story about a peculiarly English part of the phenomenon, set squarely within a long English tradition. Its Englishness was due in large part to the long tradition of the English cleric-naturalists whose science was based in empiricism: from their rural parishes they observed nature and tried to read the word of God in it. They belonged straightforwardly to the new critical age and applied its rules and procedures to their thinking in God’s service. With many Church of England livings conveniently tied to the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, they had security and access to nature on the one hand, and on the other were a direct arm of the intellectual work of learning and teaching. Under the influence of the Enlightenment, they preached, they taught, they observed, and they considered it all. William Paley’s summation of the arguments of natural theology comes at the end of a great period of learning and adventure, with its freedom to entertain heretical ideas and no little reactionary conservatism, in which the evidence of nature as revealed by science was used to argue for the existence and nature of God.
Naturally, not everyone in the mainstream Church or its many dissenting offshoots approved of natural theology and attempts to prove God through science. The traditional route to discovery of God was through the authority of the Bible, divine revelation and the life of Christ. It was built upon the constancy of faith rather than the shifting ground of science. The paradox and the strength of faith is that it is not susceptible to cold-eyed analysis. No one knows if his faith is the same as another’s; almost by definition it cannot be. At the heart of Judeo-Christian tradition, the Bible reveals to us – individually or through the exegesis of its spiritual leaders – all that we need to know about God. It tells us that God is the Creator, all-wise and all-good, and is full of internal proofs, one of the greatest being that written in Isaiah 7:10–14: ‘Moreover the Lord spake unto Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God; ask it either in the depth or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord.’ Then God promised the ultimate evidence: ‘The Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’ For evidence, there were the miracles, both the biblical miracles – especially those wrought by Jesus, healing the sick, raising the dead, as he prophesied in the name of God – and those performed by God through his saints on earth. And the most dramatic demonstration of God’s existence and power would have to be the resurrection of Jesus, who in turn gave another real proof when he allowed the doubting Thomas, after the resurrection, to fit his hand into the spear wound in his side. No other authority than these was needed and an unguarded or naive person attempting to find God through the objective evidences of science might risk challenging traditional modes of authority and even be seduced by material explanations of phenomena to an opposite, atheistical position.
One can imagine circumstances when an attempt to prove God’s existence would have been heretical. A group of scholars probing nature to see if they can winkle out secrets about God that have been hidden – if God exists, then deliberately hidden – for thousands of years, seems a dangerous idea. In the year 1200, for example, not only would it have guaranteed the Pope’s or a bishop’s punishment; any sensible person would fear that God himself might exercise a little discipline too; after all, the Bible says ‘Ye shall not tempt [test or prove] the Lord thy God’.8 Or, as St Luke wrote: ‘This is an evil generation: they seek a sign.’9 In any case, to frame a series of questions and statements about his existence, unless done carefully, would be to risk limiting him to the small compass that our understanding allows. It also risked provoking further challenges to the literal truth of the Bible, already a problem in Enlightenment times. Close study of the Bible showed some worrying inconsistencies – two different versions of the Flood, for example, and two of the creation of Woman, together with much that is in disagreement with the facts of modern science. And why was so dramatic a sign as Thomas’s encounter with the risen Jesus (John 20: 24–28) not mentioned in any of the other three gospels? There was great danger in holding the Bible up to the same scrutiny, the rigid tests of independence, as used in the accepted methods of science.
But Paley was a man living in an age of science and reason. What might in medieval times have been considered dangerous or blasphemous – to prove something that required no proof – was now both acceptable and necessary. Philosophers such as Locke and Hume had long since exposed the vulnerability of religion founded not in fact but belief or faith, growing out of intuition, inspiration, hopes, fears and even myths. And, when Paley wrote in the dedicatory preface to Natural Theology that more and different proofs were needed because of the ‘scepticism’ concerning the existence and attributes of God ‘with which the present times are charged’,