The Watch on the Heath: Science and Religion before Darwin

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 knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever; nor would it perhaps be very easy to shew the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be enquired how the watch happened to be in that place … why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone? … For this reason, and 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, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the several parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order … none which would have answered the use, that is now served by it … This mechanism being observed, (it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it) … 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 or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purposes, which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.

In this analogy the watch stands for all living organisms; the ‘who’, of course, is God. A modern wristwatch is a dull, efficient affair. Paley’s watch would have been a large hunter or repeater enclosed within a silver or gold case. The back would hinge open to reveal a world in miniature of revolving gears in shining brass, tiny oscillating devices, and a great central spring, perhaps even (if a repeater) tiny bells to signal the quarter hours. The mechanics alone would qualify as a work of art as well as artifice. Paley’s conclusion leaps from the page: the springs, gear wheels and all the other bits and pieces of the watch represent the heart, the muscles, nerves, joints and all the thousands of tissues that constitute a living creature. If the watch and all its precisely interacting parts are made for a purpose, we are forced to conclude that we humans and all of living nature are also made to accord with a particular vision.

On the face of it, Paley’s premise is incontrovertible. A watch could not have appeared out of thin air. It did not chip off something else, as the stone might have done. It did not grow out of the ground like the grass on the heathland. Any machine must be made; in the case of something so intricate as a watch, it requires a detailed plan and a craftsman of great skill. And, given that it has been made so carefully, even someone who had never seen a watch before would conclude that it must have some purpose, a function. Every machine of human invention, all its parts neatly functioning, precisely adapted to each other and to the whole, must exist for a purpose. (If you set out to make a machine that had no purpose, then that would then constitute its purpose.) From this it follows that the more we study natural organisms – the elegant ‘machines’ of nature – the more we will learn about and confirm the power, purpose and goodness of the Creator. Construed thus, science is an exercise in piety and the sciences dealing with life on earth provide an unending catalogue of arguments about the existence and benevolence of the Creator.

The concept of the body as a machine would have been as familiar to Paley’s readers as the clockwork universe. A machine analogy for natural phenomena had long been a consistent element in Enlightenment philosophy. Leonardo da Vinci and the anatomists of the sixteenth century had seen the mechanical elements of a machine in the levers and pulleys of the skeleton and William Harvey, with the discovery of the circulation of the blood, made the body a dynamic mechanism. When Robert Boyle asked him what had inspired his discovery,

[Harvey] answer’d me, that when he took notice that the Valves in the Veins of so many sevral parts of the Body, were so plac’d that they gave free passage to the Blood towards the heart but oppos’d the passage of Veinal Blood to the Contrary: He was invited to imagine, that so Provident a Cause as nature had not so Plac’d so many valves without Design: and no Design seem’d more possible than that … it should be Sent through the Arteries, and Return through the Veins10.

Having given the outline of his case, on the very second page of his book Paley moved summarily to dispose of some easily anticipated criticisms.

Nor would it, I apprehend, weaken the conclusion, that we had never seen a watch made … Neither, secondly, would it invalidate our conclusions, that the watch sometimes went wrong, or that it seldom went exactly right … It is not necessary that a machine be made perfect, in order to shew with what design it was made … Nor, thirdly, would it bring any uncertainty into the argument, if there were a few parts of the watch, concerning which we could not discover, or had not yet discovered, whether they conduced to the general effect.

These are the sorts of objections that any reader might raise, especially as, in 1802, the mysteries of reproduction were still just that, everyone fell ill at times (Paley was seriously ill as he wrote the book), scholars had long wondered about the uses of the apparently functionless appendix, and so on.

Paley was concerned with far deeper issues than this, however. He launched into a debate with all the leading ‘atheistic’ positions of the day. In Paley’s typically eighteenth-century prose and sharp argumentation, the reader discovers a set of special issues and opponents. He fires off shots at a whole range of philosophers and philosophies, from Descartes to Locke, from Buffon to Erasmus Darwin. Their challenges to the foundations of Christian belief are both the immediate and eternal reason for his book. His special preoccupation is with what he considered the ultimate heresies – evolutionary theories. If Paley’s arguments were framed in terms unfamiliar to modern readers it is because we have variously absorbed and discarded Locke on understanding and Cartesian/Epicurean atomism, and Buffon’s and Erasmus Darwin’s ideas about evolution were long ago rendered extinct by those of Charles Darwin.

William Paley devoted his life, and particularly his great skills as a thinker and writer, to God and will long be remembered as the man who set out nothing less than a proof of the ‘existence and attributes of the Deity’. Natural Theology was Paley’s last book, written in his old age. While even the most assertive or arrogant of intellectuals might have hesitated at attempting to produce a definitive proof of the existence of God – and Paley’s book certainly shows itself as the work of someone who is very confident – in life he was modest and quiet, a somewhat shy, shambling figure, built short and square, and by 1800 suffering terrible pain from what was probably abdominal cancer. The only known portrait shows a man with a smile to light up even the most dreary northern winter day. His deep, quiet voice – always too soft for a properly dramatic manner at the pulpit – was the voice of calm and reason. As a student, he had never dreamt of adopting the citified modes of speech of Cambridge and London. His rough-hewn manner allowed him to speak directly to his flock and no one criticised or mocked his outmoded coat, his old-fashioned hat or his wrinkled stockings. At his prime, his sermons persuaded, cajoled and inspired rather than insisted or threatened. Those sermons, like his life, were full of wit and wisdom and coloured with just enough liberal thinking to make his superiors uneasy. As for inspiration, he never hesitated to build upon the works of others, indeed he mischievously advised young clerics: ‘if your situation requires a sermon every Sunday, make one and steal five’. Towards the end of his life he walked with a broken, rolling, seaman’s gait and would stop occasionally to recite aloud snatches of poetry or to sing.

He was born in 1743, the first child and only son of William and Elizabeth Clapham Paley. His father was headmaster of Giggleswick School and his mother a fine, intelligent woman, noted for her thrift. From them he inherited a flair for mathematics and a love of argument. Fifty-five years before Charles Darwin, he too entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated first of his class (‘Senior Wrangler’) in 1763 and then stayed on as Fellow of the college, teaching philosophy and the Greek Testament. From the very first a brilliant and much-loved, if unconventional, teacher, he was ordained in 1767. But the celibate life of the university don was not for him and in 1776 he married Jane Hewitt of Carlisle and became a clergyman and writer. His teaching at Cambridge had been so successful that his friends pushed him to publish his lectures, some of which had formed the basis of his first book, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1768).11 This book alone would have earned him a place in history, enjoying some twenty editions in his own lifetime. Morals was followed by an influential study of St Paul and then, in 1794, Paley wrote a third book, arguably greater still. A View of the Evidences of Christianity12 set out to show, conclusively and incontrovertibly, proofs of the historical truth of Jesus and the truth of his revelations. In this book, Paley put aside the exhortations of the pulpit in favour of the forensic techniques of the courtroom lawyer – a style that came very naturally to him. After graduating from Cambridge, he had for a while taught at a school in London. There he spent his spare time equally at the theatre and the law courts. Both seem to have polished his rhetorical skills. He may even have been seriously tempted by the field of law and become a leading barrister at the Inns of Court; for his was a mind drawn naturally to logic, and to proofs and precision; instead he became a barrister for Christ.

In Evidences, he took the role of counsel for the prosecution, basing his case on evidence from four witnesses, the authors of the gospels. The lives, and not least the terrible deaths, of the Apostles and the other early martyred saints of the Church provided reason enough to believe, resoundingly answering the atheists’ jibe: ‘Either the Apostles could not write more intelligibly of the reputed Mysteries or they would not’.13 Paley also insisted upon the authenticity of miracles as the vehicle for God’s revelation of himself to man. They were an integral part of God’s design and the essential mode by which God could communicate with the works of his Creation. ‘Now in what way can revelation be made but by miracles? Consequently, in whatever degree it is probable or not very improbable that a revelation should be communicated to mankind at all, in the same degree it is probable or not very improbable that miracles should be wrought.’

Morals and Evidences brought Paley fame and a certain fortune and both became set books for examination of Cambridge students. (Remarkably enough, the last Cambridge students to be held responsible for the contents of Evidences sat warily down to their desks in 1920.)14 But he never attained the bishopric that would have seemed the natural preferment for so revered a teacher and preacher. His highest appointment was Archdeacon of Carlisle. While his parishioners loved him, his peers may have found him just a shade too brilliant and too free with his ‘almost too unlimited indulgence of wit and drollery’ – for example in that advice to young clerics over sermons.15 In Morals he had sided with Locke, whose work he had taught at Cambridge, over the right of people to revolt when their government failed in its responsibilities, a position he later abandoned in Natural Theology. And in one respect he was his own worst enemy – he refused to engage in ‘rooting’, his term for cosying up to people for influence. Nonetheless, the father of his great college friend John Law was Dr Edmund Law who, as Bishop of Carlisle, put a series of comfortable absentee livings his way, making sure that he had the security and contentment to write. The awkward man with his unfashionable accent and deep country manners was free to pour forth his brilliantly crafted texts, creating an intellectual achievement that has survived more than 200 years.

Evidences, with its insistence on the power of divine revelation, is obviously a mainstream Christian book, its goal to provide an independent line of support for the revelations that form the mainstay of Christian belief. It is often said of such books that their principal role is to comfort and confirm the believer rather than to persuade the atheist or sceptic, but in Paley’s case this would be a cheap sneer. His technique was not to appeal to faith but to reason. All Paley’s books are part of the maelstrom of ideas and movements that framed the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. His 1802 masterpiece on God, through the strict logic of its author with all its strengths and flaws, visits the science of the age and the countervailing resistance of the natural world to simple arguments and neat solutions. Its full title is Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature. When, with the customary deference of the day, he dedicated his book to his bishop, Paley was at pains to point out that the work was intended to form a whole with his others, ‘a system … the evidences of natural religion, the evidences of revealed religion, and an account of the duties that result from both’. In fact, in Natural Theology a different, more liberal, Paley emerges, carefully writing to persuade the deist or Christian alike. For an analytical reader like Darwin, the differences between Evidences and Natural Theology were striking.

The logical basis of Paley’s argument would have been familiar to Darwin. The watch analogy was a syllogism, depending on the first two ‘Rules of Reasoning’ that Newton had laid down in his Principia Mathematica of 1687, the foundation stone of modern science: ‘We are to admit of no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances [and] … Like effects proceed from like causes.’ Whether Paley can be thought truly to have abided by the first principle is debatable. What is true and sufficient is something to be determined, not taken for granted, in this debate. Newton’s second rule gives greater support to the argument: ‘Like effects [complexity] proceed from like causes [a maker].’ However, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, among others, had already given the case against this kind of thinking:

When we infer any particular cause from an effect, we must proportion the one to the other, and can never be allowed to ascribe to the cause any qualities, but what are exactly sufficient to cause the effect. And if we ascribe to it farther qualities, or affirm it capable of producing any other effect, we only indulge the licence of conjecture without reason or authority.16

Elsewhere he wrote: ‘There can be no demonstrative arguments to prove that those instances of which we have no experience, resemble those, of which we have had experience.’17 In other words, one cannot be confident in explaining what we do not know from what we do know, because we don’t know what it is we don’t know. Time and again we find the sciences, like other disciplines, exhibiting just this weakness, with false conclusions being drawn because of an incomplete vision of possible causes that in turn limits the imagination. It took Einstein, for example, to break the belief that light invariably travels in straight lines; he could conceive of something others could not (before it could be shown empirically).

The odd thing is that William Paley was not really a ‘scientist’ (a natural philosopher). He was not known as a naturalist, he did not collect insects or fossils as did so many of his colleagues, although he very much enjoyed angling. Although he had no training or experience in medicine, astronomy, chemistry or geology, the task he set himself was to turn the ploughshares of science into swords of religion. His dilemma, brilliantly resolved, was to find a way to use the contemporary fashion for rationality and science to make a case for God, when many scholars thought that philosophy and discovery were pointing in the opposite direction. He had not just to reconcile science and religion, but to use science to support, indeed to confirm, a belief in God; and not in some rearguard action, but a major offensive. For Paley, there was no luxury of time, however. Instead, there was a terrible urgency; he had to turn the scientists and philosophers against themselves before they could overwhelm his world. He had to affirm the existence of the Creator without getting caught up in contemporary arguments about biblical authority and the literal truth of every word of the book of Genesis. And he had to take on some of the greatest philosophers of the age.

Although they ended up on opposite sides of the issues of God, creation and life, Paley (in 1802) and Charles Darwin (starting around 1838) had to confront very similar problems. Both suffered the disadvantage of trying to make an incontrovertible case without the kind of irrefutable empirical evidence we usually describe as a ‘smoking gun’. They had to convince by argument because they could not ‘prove’, and therein lies a restatement of Paley’s dilemma: were his arguments founded on scientific fact or pious belief? Were they the long-sought-after proofs or only the familiar old assertions and appeals to faith? Darwin, in turn, could describe natural selection but no one had seen the origin of a new species actually happen. And for both men, the growth of scientific explanations of material phenomena conflicted directly with established beliefs and the teaching of the Church. For Darwin, having at least started to train for the Church, the burden of his discoveries was so great that it made him a physical invalid. He knew the consequences of his theory and the effect it would have on religion and thus the very fabric of society. It would set people against each other; it would set him against his own wife. If his theory proved too revolutionary, it would be rejected out of hand. He would become an outcast and all his efforts would be for nought. He delayed publication for more than twenty years until he thought the ground had been sufficiently prepared for his radical theory of an evolutionary mechanism that would cut the intellectual ground from under the feet of all the natural theologians.

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.