Science and Religion

I

Galileo taught us the physical nature of the universe. Others before him, most notably Copernicus, had suggested that the earth was one among a number of planets orbiting the sun. But Galileo made the telescope observations which established the solar system as near certainty; and his application of mathematics to the basic concepts of physics laid the foundation for the more comprehensive explanations of Newton. Nevertheless his Dialogue, in which he presented the arguments for and against the heliocentric solar system, was placed on the Catholic index of banned books, where it remained for two hundred years. By this action and other similar actions, the Catholic Church condemned itself to intellectual sterility. Italy (where the Church was all-powerful) ceased to be the intellectual centre of Europe.

In northern Europe and particularly in England, the Catholic Church lost its power but a new and less dogmatic version of Christianity took its place. This version accepted the new scientific perception of space as part of a divine plan - a divine plan that was believed to include also the perfect design of living creatures. It was believed that God had created (once and for all and not very long ago) a complete universe, following scientific laws, filled with animals and plants wonderfully designed to live the lives for which they were intended. God had designed the solar system, the wider universe, and the tiny microcosms of life with equal skill and equal finality. It was all believed to be a perfectly functioning machine of very great complexity but complete predictability once science had discovered its laws. There was no place is this scheme of things for growth and organic development over time.

In Britain it seemed that science and established religion were again in harmony. In the case of biology, the relationship between the two was particularly close. Rev. John Ray was one of the founders of the modern biology. Ray was among the first to define the concept of a biological species and among the first to insist that fossils were the remains of creatures which had formally lived. He produced a large number of detailed descriptions of the natural world, particularly of plants. His book The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of his Creation, first published in 1691, was still being reprinted and read in the first half of the nineteenth century. Giving innumerable very specific examples from life, Ray taught that the best possible proof of the existence, wisdom and goodness of God is to be found in the structures and functions of living things. Nothing in animals and plants, he showed us, appears to be useless: everything has been arranged for a good reason. If in a few cases we ourselves cannot see the purpose of some detail, there is likely still to be a purpose known to God, and useful to the creature concerned.

In an age and a country which was fascinated by intricate machinery, and was soon to produce the Industrial Revolution, Ray showed that animals and plants are living mechanisms whose many parts are designed with a far greater subtlety and complexity than could conceivably be achieved by man. Only a supremely wise and omnipotent craftsman - God himself - could have done it. And thus we should deduce that God exists, and is infinitely wise.

Ray's book was one of the earliest of a series of works on the same theme. Rev. William Paley's Natural Theology (1802) which Darwin studied at Cambridge, is a classic statement of the theory. If (he writes) one finds a complex mechanism like a watch, one knows someone must have contrived it. The same is not true of a stone. But a living creature is not like a stone - it is complex, and like a watch (only more so) shows evidence of design:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone , and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that for any thing I know to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone? why is it not as admissable in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz ., that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose . . . This mechanism being observed . . . the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place of other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use...

Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of Nature; with the difference, on the side of Nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.

By Paley's time, Protestant Christianity (and especially British Protestant Christianity) had argued itself into a position where religious belief depended heavily upon this interpretation of biology for intellectual support. Ray and Paley and others wrote books which were read and valued by both biologists and theologians; indeed the distinction between the two was not absolute. Many of the churchmen who later joined in the controversy aroused by The Origin of Species had a good knowledge of biology.

Paley himself had added another dimension to Ray's "Natural Religion." The weakness of Natural Religion was that it did little but establish in the mind of the believer the omnipotence and wisdom of God. It added no new moral force of its own, and relied on the Bible and the established traditions of the Church and of society to fill out the details of doctrine and morality. There was (it seemed) nothing in biology to controvert the religion of the Bible, but equally there was nothing to support it. There was a danger that belief in natural religion might become separated from Christian doctrine and Christian morality and become no more than an unprincipled and irresponsible deism - a belief in God, but in nothing else.

This danger started to appear much greater at the end of the century under the moral stress of the French Revolution, and particularly when Thomas Paine caused a sensation, in 1794, with his brilliantly written and very widely circulated Age of Reason. Paine was a revolutionary: he had played an important propaganda role in the establishment of American independence and he welcomed the French Revolution. He accepted natural religion but did not accept Christianity: in the name of deism, Paine ridiculed the Church, reviled the Old Testament, and reduced Jesus to the status of a minor teacher. He regarded the Church as a system of organized self-serving hypocrisy:

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive any thing more destructive to morality than this?

The Church was in urgent need of moral support. Paley responded later in 1794 with his Evidences of Christianity. His book was intended to forge an unbreakable bond between natural religion and explicit New Testament Christianity. It had an immediate impact - the first edition was sold out in a day. Darwin studied it at Cambridge and was completely convinced. The comments in his Autobiography are significant:

I am convinced I could have written out the whole of the Evidences, with perfect correctness, though not of course in the clear language of Paley. The logic of the book, and I may add of his Natural Theology, gave as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works was the only part of the academical course which, as I then felt, as I still believe was of the least use to me in the education of my mind.

He continues:

I did not at this time trouble myself about Paley's premises; and taking these on trust, I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation.

Paley's argument needs to be read (see link, first section, Preparatory Considerations) to appreciate its force and conviction. It irresistibly demonstrates (to the reader willing to be carried along) the logical link which Paley believed existed between natural religion and the doctrines of the Church. Having established (he believes) the omnipotence and goodness of God by examples from nature (his "premises"), Paley teaches that because God is good, he will not allow evil to triumph on earth, as it so often does, without a compensating afterlife for humanity. Mankind has to be adequately informed of this arrangement, and of the incentives for correct behaviour on earth: how could this have been achieved, but by the Christian revelation and the Christian miracles?

The whole Christian edifice is now to be based on the concept of God as the divine Engineer of the Universe. Throughout, everything depends on the 'first premise', about which Darwin ‘did not at first trouble himself' - the premise of God, derived from the perfect design of living things. Without that premise - if the perfect design of living things could be otherwise explained - the whole structure of Paley's Christian belief must now fall to the ground. If there was no longer any proof in nature of the omnipotence and goodness of God, there could no longer be any basis for faith. Natural religion had been made to support the whole Church, and everything depended upon it. Because of this terrible dependence, the 19th century Christian, confronted with the plausibility of natural selection, found the whole foundation of his faith cut from beneath him.

Darwin presented Natural Selection as a hypothesis, which could provide a possible but not certain explanation for the evolutionary process of life revealed by the fossil record. But the new hypothesis was convincing enough to introduce an intolerable sense of doubt into mind of the believer in natural religion; and little has been heard of natural religion since. Thus for a second time, a conflict seemed to have arisen between science and established religion.

Yet in a sense there was a continuity between the new theory and the old. Both 18th and 19th century Natural Religion and 19th and 20th century atheism are based on the premise that life is a purely mechanical process. Ray and his contemporaries and successors had believed that animals were intricate mechanisms - machines designed by the Great Engineer of the universe. Eighteenth and early nineteenth century philosophers and theologians were able to believe that animals were no more than machines because Christianity made an explicit distinction between mankind and the other animals. Men and women were not (it was thought) machines, or rather they were more than machines, because the human machine, base as it was, had been specially created by God as a vehicle for consciousness, for the human soul.

The theory of Natural Selection made it possible to believe that animals not only functioned and reproduced but had actually come into existence as new species as a result of automatic self-perpetuating processes. Animals were still perceived essentially as machines. But whereas previously it was only the functioning and reproduction of the animal which was thought of as automatic, now the actual design of the "living machine" was believed to be an automatic process. The process by which (it seemed) ape had evolved into man was now believed to be equally automatic.

The intellectual leap from Natural Christianity to the atheism professed by so many scientists in the twentieth century was actually not such a difficult one to make. Having in the 18th century dismissed all other animals as no more than machines, it was not particularly difficult in the later 19th and 20th centuries to put human beings into the same mechanical category and to see a mechanical principle behind the whole developing process of evolution.

But is life a mechanical process? Is there not an important distinction between a machine and a living creature? Earlier centuries tended to believe that animals were no more than machines, and their mechanical nature seemed to be confirmed when such discoveries as the circulation of the blood revealed the mechanical principles by which life often functions. Earlier centuries also believed that the animal world had been designed and intended by God specifically for the use of mankind. These beliefs should be seen against the background of economic systems and human daily lives in which domesticated animals - notably horses - were exploited as living mechanisms for the benefit of their owners. In the modern world, domesticated animals are no longer a mechanical necessity to us. Unless we are livestock farmers, we no longer use animals for our own ends. As pets, we lavish affection on them. In the wild, we endeavour to protect them. In both cases, we are increasingly sympathetic to animals, and aware in a positive way of how much we have in common with them. So we no longer find it so easy to dismiss them as mere machines.

II

Professor Thomas Alerstam ends his wonderful book Bird Migration as follows:

We are compelled to resign ourselves to continuing uncertainty and confusion over how birds find the right migration route...

So, this book ends with an unsolved mystery. Actually I do not think that this is any major shortcoming. It might be hoped that we humans would gain a greater degree of inspiration from unsolved mysteries than from what we believe we know - in great things as in small. May the birds continue to fly over the earth, and may mankind wonder and investigate.

Perhaps there will always be "unsolved mysteries" and the true scientist recognises them and does not pretend to an understanding which he does not have. But scientists are human; and human beings feel the need for irrational dogmas and often feel more certain about them than they do about rational conclusions. The dogmatic mind abhors a vacuum and in the twentieth century, many scientists found themselves replacing the old Christian dogmas with new dogmas of their own. Faced with the ultimate mystery of the origin of life, the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution tells us that

Life began about 3000 million years ago, probably just once. The earliest organisms were short stretches of nucleic acid floating in a chemical sea..

( Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution , p. 9)

It is a curious fact that this is one of the most positive and categorical statements in the Encyclopedia. On more recent issues such as the origin of bipedalism, where we can judge on the basis of far more evidence and where common sense also might be consulted, the authors hesitate and are reluctant to commit themselves. Yet on the origin of life itself, earliest, most fundamental and most unknowable biological issue, they appear surprisingly confident that they know (more or less) what happened.

There is an excellent summary of current theories of the origin of life from inanimate matter in Wikipedia (see link). The article demonstrates better than I can that there are many such theories and they remain simply theories. It is interesting to note the assumption behind the theories (assumed perhaps also by the authors of the Wikipedia article) that there was an origin and that science may soon find it.

The theories of the origin of life can do no harm if they are seen just as theories; but asserted as serious conclusions with the authority and prestige of science, they are essentially irrational dogmas. Dogmas often have a purpose: the purpose of these is reassure us that there is no absolute distinction between life and inanimate matter. This is not an easy thing to believe - all human experience and all of biology suggests that there is an absolute distinction. But the materialistic worldview makes this kind of possibly irrational belief emotionally necessary.

There are many things which we shall never know. Perhaps the origin of life (if indeed life had an origin) is one of the things we shall never know. Just because we accept that reptiles probably evolved from amphibians, mammals from reptiles and man from the mammals, we are in no way obliged to accept that life evolved from inanimate matter. There are no fossils to prove that and certainly no experimental evidence. All our experience (and all science since Pasteur) suggests that life - no matter how relatively simple, though all known life is highly complex - has a special quality that inanimate matter does not have. We see living creatures die and become inanimate, but none of us has ever seen the process happening in the reverse direction. Every chicken has hatched from an egg, every egg has been laid by a chicken. Evolution tells us how it appears that life developed. How life began is a more difficult question: perhaps one to which we shall never know the answer. Life is a mystery. However much it makes use of mechanical principles in the way it operates, life has a unique nature which no machine has.

Science only conflicts with religion when it becomes dogmatic; and science should never be dogmatic. The true scientist always knows the limits of his own knowledge. True religion is in harmony with true science, because both recognise the limits of human understanding. Beyond that, religion recognises the common human experience that we do not and cannot fully control our lives, yet that somehow things hang together; events are (as we often say) meant to be.

Religion also teaches us to avoid arrogance - including intellectual arrogance. To an astonishing degree, we now understand the universe in which we live. But there is also still a great deal which we do not understand. And often new research and new thought shows that our previous understanding was incorrect or incomplete.

I have suggested that there is a qualitative difference between humanity and all earlier bipedal primates. Since we are talking about our own species, it is a qualitative difference which matters a great deal to us; one which we would probably be very much aware of, should we ever encounter a Neanderthal. But presumably every other species is also qualitatively different from its nearest relatives.

I have tried to explain current thought on speciation. But it remains true that no one has ever seen a new species come into existence. It is easy to say that given a long enough geographical separation, one species can become two qualitatively different species. But we cannot be sure that this is what happens, because no one has actually seen it happen.

Even evolution should not be regarded as unchallengeable dogma. This site takes the basic principle of evolution for granted. But who knows what the future will have to say about that? Even now, there are genetic puzzles which are hard to resolve. Perhaps we embrace evolution with so much enthusiasm partly because it is intellectually attractive to us. Perhaps we find it satisfying to feel - as the Christian centuries did not feel - that life is one, and we are part of it.

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