Science and Religion by John Hedley Brooke

Author:John Hedley Brooke [Brooke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

In acknowledging that displacement, Owen was admitting that if natural theology were to survive, it would have to change its format. He masterminded the change by locating the evidence for design in the modification of a structural archetype in special ways for special purposes. But Owen’s move, even though it won the support of Whewell, signified a weakening of the conventional argument. Whewell admitted as much, even before the impact of Darwin was felt. With regard to the design that was seen in the organs of living things, Whewell observed that “though we can confidently say we see it, how obscurely is it shown, and how much is our view of it disturbed by other laws and analogies.”

One last axis along which natural theology diversified can be illustrated by those scientists who simply reduced the design to the wisdom enshrined within scientific laws. This was something of a fall-back position. It appealed to the Oxford mathematician and philosopher Baden Powell (1796–1860) because it preempted objections arising from the further expansion of scientific territory. It did not matter to Powell if the development of the solar system, or even of organic systems, could be explained by natural laws. The fact that those laws had conspired to produce such a world as this was sufficient testimony to divine wisdom and foresight. Powell’s position was ultraliberal among the clergy. It reflected years of frustration and disillusionment as he sought to advance the cause of science at Oxford during the 1830s and 1840s. It also had an embarrassing consequence. It gave tacit support to the materialist thesis of a book that appeared anonymously in Britain in 1844.

The work of a Scottish publisher, Robert Chambers (1802–71), the book had as its title Vestiges of the natural history of creation. Its message was that the transformation of species was not merely a fact but a law. Chambers drew on developments in astronomy, evidence from fossils and comparative embryology, the popular science of phrenology (which promised character determination from the topography of bumps on the head), even experiments purporting to show the in vitro production of microorganisms – all to make the point that the scientific elite who were denying organic evolution were missing the wood for the trees. All that was required for the emergence of new species was an abnormally long period of gestation in the development of an embryo. Widely considered a recipe for disaster, his book sold like hotcakes. Yet, for all its subversive implications (a “foul book” Sedgwick called it), Chambers presented it as a treatise on natural theology. If Newton’s law of gravitation could be a reflection of divine activity in the physical domain, why could not the same be said of a law of organic development? If a law of development were denied, one would be left, according to Chambers, with the degrading image of a deity who had separately produced every new species throughout the universe, like so many conjuring tricks.

The fact that a theory of organic transformation could

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