Paul Broman: When Science Outgrew Religion--The Decline of Natural Theology--Part 3
Guest essay on Wednesday, 3 July 2024
We heard Paul Broman give a wonderful lecture at the Atlanta Freethought Society a few weeks back and I was so impressed that I asked him to allow me to use it as a guest essay—in fact three of them (today’s is the third and last). He graciously agreed. I learned some new things—and you may, too. And I was delighted with the review of some things I already knew, too—I hope the same happens to you. Thanks, Paul!
When Science Outgrew Religion
by Paul Broman
Academic disclaimer
The author of these essays (Parts 1-2-3), Atlanta Freethought Society member Paul Broman, is not a credentialed historian. He does have a college degree, but not in the Humanities. Paul is, however, an avid history buff who is well read in non-fiction titles, especially science histories. Paul has made every effort to ensure that all the information contained in this essay is historically accurate but has not read every book mentioned in this essay, and has relied on academic summaries of those works.
Part 3: An Anonymous Book Begins a Paradigm Shift
In 1844 an anonymous book was published that would force the entire establishment of science to do battle with all of these controversial ideas at once. This book, titled Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, weaved together the sumtotal of what was known (or speculated) at cutting edge science at the time, and unlike some earlier controversial works of science, was published in an accessible style for a layman reader to understand.
Topics covered in Vestiges of Creation included:
The nebular hypothesis of star and planet formation, including speculations on life on other planets.
The geologic ages identified up to that time and the vast spans of time they occupy.
The various kinds of fossil organisms that had been found in each age, and how the fossil record shows simpler and simpler forms as you go further into the past.
Speculations on evolution of fossil creatures, including morphological arguments made by Saint-Hilaire.
Speculations on the origin of life (with a nod to spontaneous generation).
Speculations on how the human brain and consciousness may not be fundamentally different from the animal brain and consciousness, contrary to ideas first established by René Descartes.
Speculations on the origin of human language and civilization, espousing the Indo-European language theory that suggests most of the languages of Europe, Caucasia, Persia, and India had a common origin.
The book became a bestseller, which was widely read and published in 12 editions between 1844 and 1884. It became the best selling popular science book of the 19th century, and in a sense was akin to the Carl Sagan’s Cosmos of its day, in that it tried to distill all that was known about natural history into an entertaining and fascinating account that could be understood by laypeople.
Queen Victoria and her Prince Consort Albert were said to have read Vestiges together shortly after it was published. British Prime minister Benjamin Disraeli wrote that controversy over Vestiges was “convulsing the world”. Writer Alfred, Lord Tennyson said Vestiges contained “many speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one poem”. According to his law partner and biographer, future American President Abraham Lincoln read Vestiges voraciously upon acquiring his copy, and was deeply impressed with its notion of a “law of evolution”.
Vestiges was published anonymously because the author knew that many of the ideas in the book were controversial. The book itself is not atheistic; it credits god with creating the universe and its natural laws, but the book strongly rejected the literal Biblical creation, which Natural Theology was trying to accommodate. It stressed that god did not specially create individual forms of life, and in fact does not directly intervene with creation in any sense. It suggests life may exist on other planets, and it also puts humans and lower animals on a continuum of life, rather than asserting humans are a separate higher form of life specially created by god.
“The ignorant believe the very hand of Deity to be at work [creating new fossil forms]. Amongst the learned, we hear of ‘creative fiats’ . . . a new fiat for fishes, another for reptiles, a third for birds . . . The whole aim of science from the beginning has been to ascertain [physical] law . . . It seems strange [divine intervention] should appear necessary at this particular point in the march of science.” —Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 12th edition, pp. 149-151
The author’s identity would not be revealed until 1884 when the final edition was printed on the 40th anniversary of the first edition (and 13 years after his death). The author had been Robert Chambers, the publisher of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, dedicated to science, literature, history, and the arts. He gained a special interest in the new science of geology due to Scotland’s rise as an epicenter of geologic exploration with many important early geologists living in Scotland (including Jameson, Murchison, and Lyell). Chambers was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1840, which provided him access to these scientists.
Vestiges was popular, but more than a few people were troubled by the implications of what they were reading:
"In spite of the allusions to the creative will of God the cosmogony is atheistic ... at least the introduction of an author of all things seems very like a formality for the sake of saving appearances ... it is not a necessary part of the scheme ... the attempt to reconcile moral & physical evil with ye benevolence & omnipotence of the deity is pretty much an expansion in prose of a few lines of the Essay on Man ... [Vestiges] does not meddle with revealed religion ... but unless I am mistaken the leaders of revealed religion will meddle with it.” —John Hobhouse, British Whig politician, private diary
The first of those “leaders of revealed religion” who appears to have been deeply troubled by Vestiges was Abraham Hume, an Anglican minister, who issued his own scathing attack on the implications of Vestiges the year after its first publication and then sought the help of scientists to refute the book.
The eminent scientist John Herschel, son of famed astronomer William Herschel, and famous in his own right for his studies of photosensitive chemicals that led to his invention of blueprints and Daguerre's invention of photography, gave the keynote address at the 1845 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the year after Vestiges was published. Without explicitly mentioning Vestiges, he attacked the notion that scientific laws could be applied to evolution, which was a major argument put forward by Vestiges, and was clearly on the minds of many scientists a year later.
“A law may be a rule of action, but it is not action. The Great First Agent may lay down a rule of action for himself, and that rule may become known to man by observation of its uniformity, but ... we can never substitute the Rule for the Act. … So long as no such process can be traced and analyzed out in this manner ... the transition from inanimate crystal to ... endless organic and intellectual development, is ... in any human sense of the word, as miraculous as the immediate Creation ... of every species and every individual would be.”—John Hershel, 1845.
Another important scientist of the time to publicly object to Vestiges was the polymath William Whewell, who studied the global effects of tides and also made contributions to mineralogy and mathematics. among other branches of science. Whewell also studied the history of the scientific method and coined the word “scientist” (replacing the term “natural philosopher”, which had been used throughout the 17th and 18th centuries), as well as other still-common science-related terms like “physicist,”“astigmatism,” “ion,” “cathode,” and “electrode.”
Whewell had been author of one Bridgewater Treatise, titled Astronomy and General Physics Considered With Reference to Natural Theology (1833). He called Vestiges “false” and “a broken … view of nature”. He condensed his own scientific works down to the parts where he argued most strongly for Natural Theology and republished them as Indications of a Creator in 1845, the year after Vestiges was first published. Later, he would publish On The Plurality of Worlds (1853) in which he argued that there could not be life on other planets without contradicting Christian scripture.
In 1846, David Brewster, a pioneer of the science of optics, and also a deeply religious man who wrote that “truths physical have an origin as divine as truths religious,” penned his own scathing review:
“Prophetic of infidel times, and indicating the unsoundness of our general education, 'The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation', has started into public favour with a fair chance of poisoning the fountains of science, and sapping the foundations of religion. —David Brewser, 1846.
Adam Sedgwick, a pioneering geologist and also a former Catastrophist, who once taught a young Charles Darwin as one of his students, was shocked by the “rank materialism” of Vestiges. In a letter to Charles Lyell, he wrote:
“If the book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine ... and man and woman are only better beasts!”
Sedgwick published a point-by-point refutation in a review submitted to the Edinburgh Review in 1845:
“[Woe to those] listening to the seductions of this author ... who tells them that their Bible is a fable when it teaches them that they were made in the image of God — that they are the children of apes and breeders of monsters—that he has annulled all distinction between physical and moral.”—Adam Sedgwick, 1845.
Despite the vigorous objection of some in the scientific community, Vestiges did much to change minds and influence opinion. As new attacks against the ideas in Vestiges were conceived by their critics, Chambers would counter the criticisms in new revised editions of Vestiges and also in a “sequel” of the book titled Explanations. He continually revised his books until his death in 1871.
Charles Darwin had already conceived the general outline of his idea of evolution by natural selection by the time Vestiges was published in 1844 (although he would not publish his ideas until 1859). Private correspondence shows that Darwin was interested in the controversy that Vestiges was creating, and in particular he was "well pleased to find" that he "had not overlooked any of the arguments" made by Sedgwick in his attacks on the idea of evolution. In 1861, two years after Darwin published his evolution theory, he wrote:
"[Vestiges] has done excellent service in this country in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views."
—Charles Darwin, 1861.
Alfred Russel Wallace, who would later go on to be one of the leading evolutionary scientists of the later part of the 19th century, said that Vestiges had convinced him in the reality of species evolution and set his mind to trying to find evidence evolution was true. In 1845, he wrote the following to fellow naturalist Henry Bates:
"I do not consider [Vestiges] a hasty generalization, but rather as an ingenious hypothesis strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies, but which remains to be proved by more facts and the additional light which more research may throw upon the problem."—Alfred Russel Wallace, 1845.
Herschel would live to see Darwin publish Origin of Species in 1859, and he would ridicule Darwin’s theory as “the law of higgledy-piggledy,” just as he had dismissed Vestiges, but the efforts of Darwin, Wallace and others would make evolution by natural selection the scientific consensus in just a few decades. By then, even some theologians began reinterpreting divine creation on its terms.
"Mr Darwin's theory need not then to be atheistical ... it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of Divine Prescience and Skill … and I do not [see] that 'the accidental evolution of organic beings' is inconsistent with divine design — It is accidental to us, not to God."—Cardinal John Henry Newman, 1868.
However, almost none of the scientists mentioned previously who publicly objected to Vestiges when it was first published would ever accept evolution. All of them lived to see Origin of Species, but that didn’t convince them either. Charles Lyell, who never publicly commented on Vestiges but privately agreed with Sedgwick in their correspondence, continued to deny evolution in new editions of Principles of Geology even in the first few years after Origin. However, he reversed himself when he wrote his final book, Geologic Evidence for the Antiquity of Man (1863), in which he revealed evidence he had collected showing that humans lived through a long pre-civilized period and acknowledged that humans probably evolved by natural selection. This book also firmly established that a recent “ice age” had occurred, and left evidence of itself in terms of glacial till debris, which some Christian geologists had mis-identified as debris remaining from the Biblical Flood.
Among the next generation of scientists, a young Thomas Henry Huxley originally wrote a negative review of Vestiges in 1854 in which he attacked Vestiges as a “notorious work … of fiction,” largely for being a collection of speculations rather than being a scholarly work of science. However, Huxley would be convinced that the speculations in Vestiges were more or less correct after Origin of Species and would later become one of the most vigorous supporters of natural selection, so much so he became known by some as “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Huxley was quoted in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1881) as regretting his earlier comments about Vestiges. Most other up-and-coming scientists of the mid 19th century accepted evolution and other controversial ideas from Vestiges from the beginning, although it wasn’t until around 1875 that most agreed natural selection had to be the mechanism of evolution, rather than any possible influence, rational or divine.
In 1876, botanist Asa Gray would write Darwiniana, a book trying to reconcile Darwinian evolution with Natural Theology. It advocated a concept of “theistic evolution,” or evolution set in motion by god. In order to be consistent with principles of natural selection, Gray’s theistic evolution does not claim that god actively guides evolution’s ends, only that god set the process in motion using natural laws. Ironically, this is the exact same position on evolution that Chambers took in Vestiges, which had been attacked at the time as being a materialist (atheistic) position.
Natural Theology gradually faded for the rest of the 19th century, losing favor among mainstream scientists after Vestiges and Darwin’s Origin of Species that it would never regain. Never again would religious belief shape mainstream scientific ideas. Never again would mainstream scientists promote a particular theory (like Catastrophism) because it was perceived a “better fit” than competing theories with the sacred texts or beliefs of Christianity or any other religion.
Before 1775, Enlightenment science proudly upheld all Christian scripture as inerrant truth that could be woven into scientific theory. But just a century later, it became untenable to be both a Biblical literalist and an unbiased scientist.
Science did not unfold in a way that met Natural Theology’s goal of asserting the validity of god’s divine plan of creation as outlined in Christian scripture; in fact, it largely did the opposite. One result was that scientists tended to become less religious. According to the science journal Nature, since 1914 the majority of scientists have been non-religious.
Approximately fifty years after the scientific community reached a consensus that Natural Theology should yield to natural selection, Albert Einstein objected to the inherent randomness of the new Quantum Theory of the motion of tiny subatomic particles. Einstein wrote a letter to fellow scientist Max Born which contained a quote that has been famously paraphrased, but here is the original:
“[Quantum theory] produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am … convinced that He does not play dice.” —Albert Einstein, 1926.
Einstein's opinion that quantum theory should be discarded because it was too random to allow room for god was a minority opinion among scientists when he expressed it, and despite his personal stature as possibly the greatest scientist since Newton due to his paradigm-breaking Theory of Relativity, he was unable to affect the path of mainstream science, which was perfectly willing by the early 20th century to accept a completely random, materialist universe, where physical laws arise because of mathematical probabilities over huge numbers of events rather than because of concrete absolute rules, such as those that might have been designed by an architect of nature.
In the 20th century, two similar ideas emerged that would eclipse the old ideas of Natural Theology. The first idea was Theological Critical Realism, espoused by theologian Ian Barbour in Issues in Science and Religion (1966). It argued that both science and religion had similarities, including analogous if different ways of “knowing” and “falsifying.” It suggested that these differing methods can both be applied simultaneously and both be true even if they seem to be in conflict. The kernel of this same idea also forms the basis of the concept of the “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” popularized by American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in his book Rocks of Ages (1999).
These ideas both suggest that what your religion informs you doesn’t actually have to match what reality demonstrates, yet can somehow still be true. I suspect neither of these 20th century ideas would have seemed reasonable to the 19th century religious scientists who genuinely wanted to unlock the secrets of nature and reality but could not accept scientific findings that conflicted with their religious beliefs. It would have seemed to them like an admission that religious teachings and holy scriptures are incorrect about the true nature of reality and history in ways that cannot possibly be reconciled – in other words, a great surrender – which of course it is.
Some mysteries discussed in Vestiges are still unsolved today. We still don’t have a clear understanding of how life began. We also don’t have a full understanding of how the universe began. We have evidence of a “Big Bang”, but we don’t understand why it happened. We still don’t have evidence of life beyond the earth, the discovery of which would have profound implications for both biology and theology. We also still don’t fully understand the biological processes that lead to what we experience as consciousness, and whether or not such processes leave any possible room for an immaterial soul that can survive the death of the physical body, the reality of which still forms a central part of belief for a majority of religious believers worldwide.
Eventually, the above mysteries will fall under scientific inquiry. When those mysteries are unsealed, the findings seem likely to once again conflict with religious ideas. When that happens, the current paradigm that religion and science can say different things but both still be true may not be able to hold, and there may well be another revolution in the interaction between religion and science.
Sources and References
The primary source is my own personal copy of the 12th edition of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Robert Chambers, 1884. I used information derived from many Wikipedia articles, including articles on all persons and books specifically discussed in this presentation, as well as these general articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_creation%E2%80%93evolution_controversy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_thought
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_of_evolution_by_religious_groups
I also used material from the various essays by Stephen Foster that can be found on The Victorian Web related to the Vestiges controversy, at https://victorianweb.org/science/geology/chambers8.html.
Other sources include:
Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, James A. Secord, 2001.
Vestiges and the Debate Before Darwin. John M. Lynch, Arizona State Univeristy, 2000. (https://books.google.com/books?id=Gr6ZiGHAqHcC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Including other material from the same author on the Arizona State University website: https://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/darwin/RobertChambers.htmhttps://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/darwin/Vestiges.htm
“Systèmes de la Nature and Theories of Life: Bridging the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Pietro Corsi, 2018.(https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/syst%C3%A8mes-de-la-nature-and-theories-life-bridging-eighteenth-and-nineteenth-centuries)
“A God Beyond Logic,” Adam R. Shapiro, 2022. (https://aeon.co/essays/for-natural-theologians-proving-god-was-beside-the-point)
“Scriptural Geology, Then and Now,” William H. Johns, 2016. (https://answersresearchjournal.org/scriptural-geology-then-and-now/)
“Ancient Fossil Discoveries and Interpretations,” Adrienne Mayor, 2014.(https://chilonas.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/ancient_fossil_discoveries_and_interpret.pdf)
“Leading Scientists Still Reject God,” Edward J Larson & Larry Witham, 1998.(https://www.nature.com/articles/28478)
“Debate over Natural Theology” (https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/Evolution/Unit11NatTheo/NatTheo.html)
“Ancient Fossil Discoveries and Interpretations,” Adrienne Mayor, 2014.(https://chilonas.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/ancient_fossil_discoveries_and_interpret.pdf)
“Roman Emperors, Monster Bones, and the Early History of Fossil Hunting,” Sarah Bond, 2016. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2016/06/29/roman-emperors-monster-bones-and-the-early-history-of-fossil-hunting/?sh=619f203d7f05)
Leonardo Da Vinci and his contribution to Zoology,” Manuel Ruiz Rejon, 2019.(https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/bioscience/leonardo-da-vinci-and-his-contribution-to-zoology/ )
“William Buckland in Retrospect,” John R. Armstrong, 1990.(https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1990/PSCF3-90Armstrong.html)
Essay on John Ray from the University of California Museum of Paleontology(https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/ray.html)
“Romantic Natural History” essay on Erienne Geoffrey St. Hilaire, 2011.(https://blogs.dickinson.edu/romnat/2011/06/07/geoffray-st-hilaire/)
Transcript of John Hershel’s address to the 1845 BAAS meeting, pp xxlii-xxliii (https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/46638#page/47/mode/1up)
“An experimental "Life" for an experimental life - Richard Waller's biography of Robert Hooke,” 2020(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26877147/)
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Paul, I was out of town and without internet access when you spoke on this topic at AFS. Thanks to Ed providing you this opportunity, I'm now catching up on what I missed—I see it was a lot!
Natural theology has always been of special interest to me. In the mid-1970's, shortly after becoming an atheist, I read Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and found it fascinating.
On the other hand, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is a book I had not heard of until learning about your AFS talk. In terms of intellectual history (the great conversation humans continue to have about the nature of life) it seems Vestiges is both an important intellectual milestone and significantly influential—pretty impressive for a work most of us have never heard of.
I hope you continue your research and continue to write about this. In fact, I foresee a book in your future. You write well—and the topic is inadequately explored.
Hey Ed! Thanks very much for posting all 3 parts of my AFS presentation! It was all inspired by my learning about the Vestiges book last year, and all of the controversy surrounding it. There was no other time in history when so many leading scientists tried to fight against a spectrum of scientific findings that conflicted with religious ideas. I've been a freethinker for 30 years and had never heard of Vestiges or its controversy until last year, despite having read science histories for decades from authors like Carl Sagan, Timothy Ferris, James Burke, and Bill Bryson. I found it to be the most interesting piece of history I had read in years, and want to share it with as many freethinkers as possible, so thanks again Ed for spreading this interesting knowledge!