Perhaps, then, there is a nice irony in the fact that when he went up to Cambridge and reported to the porter’s lodge just inside that great gate, the young Charles Darwin was assigned to the same rooms in Christ’s College that Paley had lived in seventy years before.
CHAPTER TWO An Age of Science, An Age of Reason
‘If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, “Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?” No. “Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence?” No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.’
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748
‘No man’s knowledge can go beyond his experience.’
John Locke, Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding, 1690
Today we live – all too evidently sometimes – in an age of science. Science and its handmaiden, technology, shape every aspect of our lives. We might even envy people like Paley for having lived in much simpler times. But the turn of the nineteenth century was an immensely exciting time when both philosophy and science were stamping their mark on a broader cross-section of society than at any time since the Greeks. Already, the previous hundred years had been an age of discovery and experiment in everything from agriculture, blood transfusion and the discovery of oxygen, to inoculations against small pox, the first steam-powered carriages, and even calculating machines. People could now fly through the air in the Mongolfier brothers’ hot-air balloons. Meanwhile, Britain’s great mechanised mills (dark and Satanic) had begun to change the balance between countryside and town, agriculture and industry, self-sufficiency and reliance. In the process, both prosperity and poverty grew apace.
At its simplest, science (which in Paley’s time was called natural philosophy) is an accumulation of wisdom and argument, facts and hypotheses, about what is. More fundamentally, science is about discovering causes: the why and how of the knowable world. Above all, science seeks explanations that can be expressed in terms of universal laws and therefore establishes a world of lawful, predictable behaviour. Sometimes we harbour the fallacy put about by scientists in the 1960s and 1970s that science (as expressed in today’s extreme scientism) provides all the answers, and that it delivers certainty. Quite to the contrary, under science little stays the same. That is why it is so threatening to religious belief and socio-political authority. Science produces facts and laws but at its heart are questioning, testing and experiment, finding new explanations for old phenomena, finding new phenomena for old explanations, changing ideas and changing certainties. Religion, in contrast, is principally built upon certainties, authority and stability. ‘A mighty fortress is our God’ – a fortress against the surges of change that science and philosophy and, above all, independent thinking generate. Of course, ‘religion’, perhaps especially the Christian religion, is no monolith, any more than is ‘science’. We use the words as shorthand for two kinds of intellectual and personal ‘systems’. As a practice conducted by humans both may often fall short of the ideal and for the last 250 years they have been more opposed to each other than united.
In principle, science owes allegiance to no higher authority; as a wind of change, it bloweth where it listeth. Science is equally as dangerous for pointing out what is still unknown as it is for showing us new reliable facts. Science begets change and change always threatens the status quo ante, whether in rival fields within science or in religion. But orthodoxy, whether religious or political (or indeed scientific), depends upon commonly received opinions and often makes it heretical or treasonous to think otherwise. For all its innate conservatism, science always produces change. No scientist ever became famous for reporting that what we knew in 1870 or 1940 was best.
William Paley did not reveal what doubts he might have felt in the privacy of his study, but it seems unlikely that someone so well versed in science and so ready to do battle with the philosophical giants of his age could have failed to stare up at the stars in quiet moments with a niggling doubt about who else was out there. He would surely have pondered how to explain to his congregation that even something as reliable as the sun was not what it seemed. That the sun appears to orbit around the earth, disappearing each night and coming back up on the other side each morning, was one of the very first apparently reliable observations humans made about the universe we inhabit. It is far more ‘obvious’ than the notion that the earth is flat, for one can stand at the ocean-side and see that the horizon curves, and every sailor knows that when a ship appears from over the horizon, the tip of its mast shows before the hull. But nothing seemed more certain than the sun’s movement and, unsurprisingly, the Bible is unequivocal about the fact that it ‘goeth forth in his might’ (Judges 5:30). That it was the sun moving, not the earth, was surely also explicit in the biblical story that, at Joshua’s request, God made the sun stand still (Joshua 10:12–14). For Isaiah, God even made the sun move ‘ten degrees backward’ (II Kings 20:11).
Although some of his Greek contemporaries had doubts about the sun’s movement, Aristotle – the great authority through the Middle Ages – had had none. He held two powerful theoretical positions about the geocentric cosmos: that the ideal shape was a sphere, and that the ideal motion was circular. From this he built up the view that the sun, moon and planets were each harnessed to a different revolving, perfect, crystal sphere, one inside the other, with the imperfect earth stationary at the centre. The ultimate expression of this system of spheres was in Ptolomey’s Almagest or The Great Syntaxis (circa AD 160), on the strength of which Aristotelian cosmology reigned supreme for 1,500 years, until new astronomical calculations in the Renaissance, driven by the need for accurate, predictive star maps for navigation, began to force the creation of new explanatory models.
Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543) in his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (published the year he died), forced the world to consider the heliocentric model in which not only does the earth revolve around the sun, but it also rotates on its own axis every 23 hours and 56 minutes. (Alternative models had proposed that, for example, the sun and planets stay still and the earth revolves, or that the sun and moon go round the earth and everything else goes around the sun.) Precise measurements made by Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) helped Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) make a new kind of astronomical sense. The movements of the planets – one of the great mysteries of the universe – could be boiled down to three very simple laws, all depending on the fact that their orbits were not circles but ellipses, all around the sun, except for the moon, which orbits the earth. The central consequence of Copernicus’s revolution is only too obvious to us today. Not only had the earth been displaced from the centre of the universe, it had become merely a tiny speck of matter in the immensity of space, no more or less perfect than the rest.18
Copernicus died in 1543, leaving others to take up his work. Galileo Galilei was born in 1564 and acquired an immortal place in history for being forced by the Inquisition in 1633 to recant his belief in Copernicus’s heliocentric