Newton’s theory stands (for all time), but has been modified in two directions. First, in 1915, Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity reformulated the concept of gravity to allow for space to be ‘elastic’, so that a star like our sun could curve and stretch the space around it – and the bigger the star, the greater the effect. Matter, Einstein showed, warps space. This takes care of the more bizarre phenomena in the universe, such as ‘black holes’, that capture even the weightless particles of light – but for all that the profound Newtonian mystery of how gravity exerts its force through the vacuum of space remains unresolved.
Next, it has emerged that Newton’s gravitational force is not alone, being just one of four (similarly non-material) forces, including those that bind together the atomic particles of protons and neutrons – whose disruption generates the prodigious energy of an atomic explosion. In the twentieth century, the conundrum of the non-materiality of those gravitational forces was compounded when it emerged that their strength is precisely tuned to permit the consequent emergence of life and ourselves. If the force they exert were, for example, ever so slightly stronger, then stars (like our sun) would attract more matter from interstellar space, and being so much bigger would burn much more rapidly and intensely – just as a large bonfire outburns a smaller one. They would then exhaust themselves in as little as ten million years, instead of the several billion necessary for life to ‘get going’. If, contrariwise, the force of gravity were ever so slightly weaker, the reverse would apply, and the sun and stars would not be big enough to generate those prodigious amounts of heat and energy. The sky would be empty at night, and once again we humans would never have been around to appreciate it. It is, of course, very difficult to convey just how precise those forces necessary for the creation of the universe (and the subsequent emergence of life on planet earth) had to be, but physicist John Polkinghorne estimates their fine tuning had to be accurate to within one part in a trillion trillion (and several trillion more), a figure greater by far than all the particles in the universe – a degree of accuracy, it is estimated, equivalent to hitting a target an inch wide on the other side of the universe.
Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity is the most elegant idea in the history of science. Nothing touches its combination of pure simplicity, readily understandable by a class of ten-year-olds, and all-encompassing explanatory power. His contemporaries were dazzled that so elementary a mathematical formula could account for so much – prompting the poet Alexander Pope to propose as his epitaph in Westminster Abbey:
Nature and nature’s laws lay hidden in night
God said Let Newton be! And all was light.
Still, Newton’s gravitational force, imposing ‘order’ on the physical universe, clearly fails the test of scientific ‘knowability’, for while we can fully comprehend all its consequences we are ‘left with that absurdity that no thinking man can ever fall into’ of having to suppose that a non-material force can ‘act at a distance’ across millions of miles of empty space without the mediation of anything by which that action and force may be conveyed. Thus, ironically, this most scientific of theories, grounded in the observation of the movements of the planets expressed in mathematical form, subverts the scientific or materialist view which holds that everything must ultimately be explicable in terms of its material properties alone.
We turn now to the living world of plants, insects, fishes, birds and ourselves, which is billions upon billions upon billions of times more complex than Newton’s non-living, physical universe. Hence, the two forces that impose order on that world, the Double Helix imposing the order of form on living things, and the human brain and its mind imposing the order of understanding, will be profounder than the glue of gravity by similar orders of magnitude. We might anticipate that these two further forces of order will, like Newton’s theory of gravity, similarly prove to be non-material, and therefore fail the test of scientific knowability. But to ‘get there’ we must first come to grips with how we have come to suppose otherwise, and specifically how in the mid-nineteenth century Darwin’s grand evolutionary theory, as set out in the twin texts of On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, offered an apparently all-encompassing and exclusively materialist explanation for the phenomena of life.
4 The (Evolutionary) ‘Reason forEverything’: Certainty
‘There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one … from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved.’
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)
Charles Darwin, while a theology student at Cambridge University, developed a passion for beetles. ‘Nothing gave me so much pleasure,’ he would write in his autobiography, recalling how, ‘as proof of my zeal’:
One day, on tearing off some old bark I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I put the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. But alas! It ejected some intensely acrid fluid that burnt my tongue so I was forced to spit it out and so it was lost.
Darwin’s zeal for beetles was quite unexceptional, for he was born into the Golden Age of Natural History, when the wonders of nature as revealed by science gripped the public imagination with an extraordinary intensity, while being also the most tangible evidence of a divinely ordained world. ‘The naturalist … sees the beautiful connection that subsists throughout the whole scheme of animated nature,’ observed the editor of the Zoological Journal of London. ‘He traces … the mutual depending that convinces him nothing is made in vain.’
There seemed no limit to the new forms of ‘animated nature’ just waiting to be discovered. In 1771 the famed maritime explorer James Cook had returned from his epic three-year circumnavigation of the world ‘laden with the greatest treasure of natural history that ever was brought into any country at one time’: no fewer than 1,400 new plant species, more than a thousand new species of animals, two hundred fish and assorted molluscs, insects and marine creatures. For his friend the anatomist John Hunter, waiting for him as his ship anchored off Deal harbour, Cook had several unusual specimens to add to his famous collection: a striped polecat from the Cape of Good Hope, part of a giant squid, and a peculiar animal ‘as large as a greyhound, of mouse colour and very swift’, known in the Aboriginal dialect as a ‘kangooroo’.
The discovery of this exhilarating diversity of life extended beyond the living to the long-since extinct. For this, too, was the great period of geological discovery of the antiquity of the earth, the strata of whose rocks revealed fossilised bones and teeth so much larger than any previously encountered as to suggest that vast, fantastical creatures had roamed the surface of the earth millions of years before man.
The immediate fascination of natural history lay in the accurate description of that teeming variety of life, but beyond that there was every reason to suppose that comparing the anatomical structure and the behaviour of living organisms such as the polecat, squid and kangaroo would reveal the long-suspected hidden laws that link all ‘animated nature’ together. The search for those laws