If we take a short walk to the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, we find the tomb of Galileo. He looks upward toward his expanded heavens and holds a
telescope in his right hand. His left hand envelops the small and insignificant sphere of the earth. In two centuries (Galileo died in 1642), the earth had been displaced from a large and ruling centrality in a limited and subservient universe to peripheral status as a little hunk of stone suspended in the midst of inconceivable vastness.
In a famous statement, Sigmund Freud argued that scientific
revolutions reach completion not when people accept the physical reconstruction of reality thus implied, but when they also own the consequences of this radically revised universe for a demoted view of human status. Freud claimed that all important scientific revolutions share the ironic property of deposing humans from one pedestal after another of previous self-assurance about our exalted
cosmic status. Therefore, all great revolutions smash pedestals—and inspire resistance for the obvious reason that we accept such demotions only begrudgingly. Freud identified two revolutions as paramount—Copernicus and Galileo on the nature of the heavens, and Darwin on the status of life. Unfortunately, Darwin’s revolution remains incomplete to this day because we spin-doctor the results of evolution
to preserve our pedestal of arrogance by misreading the process as a predictable accumulation of improvements, leading sensibly to the late appearance of human intelligence as a culmination.
Although we have yet to make our peace with Darwin, the first revolution of cosmic realignment passed quickly into public acceptance. In 1633, Galileo appeared before the Inquisition in Rome, where, under
threat of torture and death, he officially abjured his belief in the sun-centered Copernican system. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest on his estate at Arcetri, near Florence, where he died in 1642. In the same year, Robert Boyle, then a wealthy teenager on his grand tour of Europe, but soon to become a great physicist and chemist in his own right, visited Florence and read Galileo’s
Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems
—just as the master lay dying nearby in Arcetri.
In 1688, as an elderly man himself, Robert Boyle wrote a famous treatise on science and religion titled
A disquisition about the final causes of natural things: wherein it is inquir’d, whether, and (if at all) with what cautions, a naturalist should admit them?
In this work, just two generations after Galileo’s
death, Boyle demonstrates that the pedestal-smashing implications of Copernican cosmology had already been articulated and accepted, thus completing the first revolution in Freud’s crucial sense. (I regard this timing as important because one might claim that Galileo triumphed, while Darwin remains in limbo, simply because pedestal-smashing takes centuries and Galileo had a two-hundred-year
head start. But if the pedestal crumbled during Galileo’s own century, then we have had more than enough time for Darwin—and our failure to smash this second pedestal must record its greater durability in our unwilling psyches.)
Boyle asks whether the existence and regular motion of the sun and moon provide evidence of God’s creative power and benevolent action. He begins by ridiculing those
who would argue for the old geocentric system because God made everything for human benefit:
I dare not imitate their boldness, that affirm, that the sun and moon, and all the stars, and other celestial bodies, were made solely for the use of man; . . . as when they argue, that the sun and other vast globes of light, ought to be in perpetual motion to shine upon the earth; because, they fancy,
’tis more convenient for man, that those distant bodies, than that the earth, which is his habitation, should be kept in motion.
Boyle then invokes the smashed pedestal more directly to claim that God would not create something so huge as the sun only to illuminate such a tiny and inconsequential body as the earth:
But, considering things as mere naturalists, it seems not very likely, that
a most Wise Agent should have made such vast bodies, as the sun and the fixed stars, especially if we suppose them to move with that inconceivable rapidity that vulgar astronomers do and must assign them; only or chiefly to illuminate a little globe that without hyperbole is but a physical point in comparison of the immense spaces comprised under the name of heaven.
We would not expect Boyle,
who (after all) wrote 150 years before Darwin, to assault the second pedestal or even to question the creationist view of life at all. Rather, I dedicate this essay to demonstrating that Boyle’s particular view of natural religion provides a distinctively English insight into the historical traditions that make the Darwinian pedestal so impervious to demolition. I then show that Darwin’s philosophical
radicalism lies best exposed when we view the theory of natural selection as a direct and purposeful assault upon Boyle’s natural theology.
Robert Boyle (1627-1691), son of the first Earl of Cork, belonged to a noble and wealthy Anglo-Irish family. After studying at Eton and living abroad for several years, Boyle spent his most scientifically productive decade in Oxford (1656–1668), where he
constructed an air pump and performed his major experiments on the properties of gases. (His most famous result, Boyle’s Law, states that, at a constant temperature, the pressure of a given quantity of gas varies inversely to its volume.) In his major work, the
Sceptical Chemist
(1661), Boyle attacked the Aristotelian theory of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), and developed an important
corpuscular theory of matter. (He did not postulate different kinds of basic elements, as later validated and established in the periodic table, but rather argued that properties of different substances arose from variation in the motion and organization of primary particles.)
Boyle moved permanently to London in 1668, where he continued his organizational work as a founder of the Royal Society
(still Britain’s leading scientific establishment), and labored for many other causes close to his heart. (He was, for example, the governor of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England.)
In science, Boyle’s main reputation rested upon his stern defense of mechanism and his abjuration of Aristotelian forms and essences. The
Dictionary of Scientific Biography
describes his fundamental
philosophy in these terms:
[Boyle was] a profound believer in the need to establish an empirically based, mechanistic theory of matter and in the possibility of establishing a scientific, rational, theoretical chemistry . . . Boyle was long remembered as “the restorer of the mechanical philosophy” in England . . . What mattered most to him was destroying all Aristotelian forms of qualities .
. . and substituting for them rational, mechanical explanation in terms of what he called “those two grand and most catholic principles, matter and motion.”
But Boyle matched his devotion to science with another controlling and passionate interest—his orthodox Protestant beliefs and his unflagging commitment to the cause of religion. Of all the scientists in Newton’s orbit, Boyle was the most
conventionally and sincerely devout. Moreover, Boyle did not consider religion as a merely private matter. He wrote as much about theology as about science, and he composed several treatises on the potentially harmonious relationship between these two disciplines, including the work analyzed in this essay.
Such a statement may seem contradictory if we accept the false, but commonly held, view
that all religion must be inherently mystical, while the mechanistic components of science must be antithetical to such a notion of higher reality. But Boyle’s view of God, widely shared by Newton and most of his scientific contemporaries, neatly married mechanism and religion into a coherent system that granted higher status to both sides. Boyle’s God is a masterful mechanical clock-winder who created
the universe with all natural laws so perfectly tuned and contrived at the outset that the entire course of future history could unfold without further miraculous intervention (though neither Boyle nor Newton wanted to constrain God to His initial decisions, and certainly granted Him the right to interpose a miracle or two now and then, whenever His ineffable wisdom so decreed). Boyle wrote:
The most wise and powerful Author of Nature, whose piercing sight is able to penetrate the whole universe, and survey all the parts of it at once, did at the beginning of things, frame things corporeal into such a system, and settled among them such laws of motion, as he judged suitable to the ends he proposed to himself in making the world. And by virtue of his vast and boundless intellect that
he at first employed, he was able not only to see the present state of things he had made, but to foresee all the effects . . . Nor is this doctrine inconsistent with the belief of any true miracle; for, it supposes the ordinary and settled course of nature to be maintained, without at all denying, that the most free and powerful Author of Nature is able, whenever he thinks fit, to suspend, alter,
or contradict those laws of motion, which he alone at first established.
Since God’s invariant laws can be discovered and studied by science, and since divine omnipotence lies best exposed in these regularities of nature, God’s glory can be apprehended empirically, thus making science a handmaid to religion, and not an adversary at all.
Boyle’s 1688
Disquisition About the Final Causes of Natural
Things
, though rarely consulted today (and undoubtedly unknown to nearly all practicing scientists), stands as the classic statement of this English approach to natural theology. Boyle’s book began a tradition that culminated in one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century, William Paley’s
Natural Theology
of 1802, and collapsed with Darwin’s
Origin of Species
in 1859. As the centerpiece
of this tradition, Boyle and his colleagues proposed and developed the so-called argument from design—the attempt to identify final causes in nature as proofs both for God’s existence and for His attributes of ultimate power and unceasing benevolence. (Paley subtitled his work
Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature
.)
To appreciate the
power (and ultimate fallacy) of this argument, we must recover some forgotten terminology to explicate the notion of “final cause” in the light of Aristotle’s celebrated analysis. (Boyle cared little for Aristotle’s physics, but he followed the master’s traditional explication of the categories of causality.) Aristotle proposed that causality included four separate components, as illustrated in the
classic “parable of the house.” The stuff of construction counts as a “material cause,” for the house will be different (as the three little pigs discovered) if the building be made of straw, wood, or stone. The mason who actually puts the pieces together works as an “efficient cause.” The blueprint only represents a plan on paper and does nothing to build the house directly. But without a plan,
you never get beyond a pile of stones, so the blueprint counts as a “formal cause.” Lastly, without an intended purpose, no one would bother to build at all, so the owner’s desire to live in the house counts as a “final cause” (not “final” in the temporal sense of coming last, but in the literal Latin meaning of an end, or a purpose).
In one of the most striking changes in the definition of science
between Boyle’s day and our own, our concept of the meaning of causality has shifted in a fundamental way. One change is only terminological and therefore less important. We would still acknowledge the vital character of material and formal factors, but we no longer choose to label them as “causes.” As the fundamental change, the mechanical revolution unleashed by Boyle and his generation succeeded
so thoroughly that the actual building and manipulation of things, called “efficient” causes by Aristotle, became enshrined as the only acceptable definition of causality. Meanwhile, and in consequence, the notion of purpose, or final cause, was banished from science. We no longer believe that inorganic objects have intended purposes, defined either in human or in any other terms. As for
organisms, we surely allow a notion of purpose in the vernacular sense that good designs have functions (yes, eyes evolved for seeing)—but we now view such functions as products of the efficient cause of natural selection, and not as conscious intentions either of organisms themselves or of a creating deity.
But final causes remained orthodox (in science as well as religion) during Boyle’s time,
and he wrote his 1688 treatise to define the appropriate domain of final causes and to assess the evidence for their action. Interestingly, Boyle sets up the issue as a “Goldilocks” problem by identifying one class of objects as too little, another as too big, and a third as just right. In defining the good design of organisms as “just right,” Boyle firmly linked the venerable notion of final
causes to biology, and therefore rooted his natural defense of religion in the phenomena that Darwin’s revolution would later identify as a product of ordinary efficient causality. Boyle’s argument—that good organic design implies benevolent purpose in the cosmos—provides a comfort and appeal that we have not been able to relinquish. So we shore up the pedestal that Darwin should have smashed, and
we spin-doctor our interpretation of evolution to view organic change as predictably purposeful (rather than fortuitously contingent), thereby converting Darwin’s mechanism into a false argument for the same comfort that Boyle’s God once provided.
Boyle begins his argument by stating that two schools of philosophical thought deny the existence of ascertainable final causes for opposite reasons—the
Epicureans, who view material objects as constructed by chance, and the Cartesians, who regard God’s wisdom as so inscrutable that mere earthly mortals could never discern his true purposes:
Epicurus and most of his followers banish the consideration of the ends of things [final causes] because the world being, according to them, made by chance, no ends of anything can be supposed to have been
intended. And on the contrary, Monsieur Des Cartes, and most of his followers, suppose all the ends of God in things corporeal to be so sublime, that ‘twere presumption in man to think his reason can extend to discover them. So that, according to these opposite sects, ’tis either impertinent for us to seek after final causes, or presumptuous to think we may find them.