For Further Reading

Chapter 2

Getting Started: Some Historical Landmarks

Many people are attracted to study the relation of science and religion because it engages many of today's ‘big questions’ – such as how to live a good life, and how we can inhabit this puzzling universe in a meaningful way. Part of the sheer excitement of this field is the fact that it engages live debates, issues that are of immediate relevance. Yet many who are exploring the field of science and religion for the first time find themselves puzzled by the emphasis that many works in this field place on past discussions and debates.

Why study past debates, when these seem irrelevant to contemporary concerns? Why look at the past, when there are so many important discussions taking place in the present? Many natural scientists point out that their disciplines are developing so rapidly that older ideas become outdated with alarming speed, with research articles becoming outdated within two decades. To study history seems to be about disengaging from the real world and entering a very different world that bears little relation to ours. ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ (L. P. Hartley).

Nevertheless, anyone wishing to understand the interaction of science and religion needs to become familiar with at least four major historical landmarks – the astronomical debates of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the rise of the Newtonian worldview in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century; the Darwinian controversy of the nineteenth century; and the cosmological developments of the twentieth century relating to the origins of the universe. The issues raised by these developments are found again and again in contemporary debates. They loom over contemporary discussions of the relation of science and faith in general, while raising specific questions that continue to be debated today, often relating to biblical interpretation. Memories of past debates constantly hover around today's discussions.

This chapter aims to introduce these historical landmarks, indicating the major points they raise for discussion and their significance for our time. As these four discussions are constantly referred to in the literature concerning the theme of ‘science and religion’ – as they are also in the present text – readers need to be familiar with the basic ideas and developments. They are therefore discussed in this early section, along with the emergence of the ‘medieval synthesis’, which many scholars now consider to have provided the essential intellectual context for the emergence of the natural sciences.

Yet many readers of this work, while recognizing the practical force of this point, will still want to ask why they should bother studying history at all. Before looking at these four specific debates, we shall pause and give some thought to the place of history in the interaction between science and religion.

Why Study History?

What is the point of looking back to the past when we are meant to be talking about themes concerning science and religion in the twenty‐first century? Why study debates from centuries ago, when there is so much that is intellectually important and interesting in the present? These are fair questions, which deserve careful answers.

Any discussion of the relationship between science and religion today has been made problematic by the lingering influence of past controversies, often in the form of popular misreadings or misrepresentations of multifaceted historical episodes. For example, the tensions between Galileo and the church were complicated by institutional apologetics and the political power of Aristotelian approaches to science, especially at the University of Padua. Modern scholarship has successfully deconstructed popular historical accounts of many of these controversies, exposing the power dynamics and cultural agendas of many of those who seek to portray science and Christianity as locked in mortal combat.

In a series of important and influential historical studies of science and religion, published in the 1990s and beyond and focusing especially on the nineteenth century, the Oxford scholar John Hedley Brooke has argued that serious scholarship in the history of science has revealed ‘so extraordinarily rich and complex a relationship between science and religion in the past that general theses are difficult to sustain. The real lesson turns out to be the complexity.’ Brooke's analysis has found widespread support within the scholarly community, even if it has been slow to filter down to popular discussions. Peter Harrison has more recently pointed out that ‘study of the historical relations between science and religion does not reveal any simple pattern at all’, such as the monomyth of the ‘conflict’ narrative, which we shall consider below. It does, however, disclose a general trend – that for most of the time, according to Harrison, religion has facilitated scientific inquiry.

Historical research over the last three decades has made it clear that there is no ‘right’ or privileged way of understanding the relationship of science and religion. Instead, we find a rich range of possibilities, some of which are declared to be normative by those with special interests in the matter. The tendency to essentialize both ‘science’ and ‘religion’ has led many to neglect the importance of historical and cultural context in shaping perceptions about how Christianity and the natural sciences should – or might – relate to each other.

In what follows, we shall look at how studying the past history of the interaction of science and religion helps us understand their present relationship. To explore the importance of this point, we shall begin by considering the origins of the widespread popular belief that science and religion are permanently at loggerheads – the so‐called ‘warfare’ model of the interaction of science and religion. This is still deeply embedded in popular thinking.

Inventing the ‘Warfare’ of Science and Religion

The relationship between science and religion has always been complex. There is no ‘master narrative’ which describes their relationship – such as the notoriously inaccurate ‘warfare’ narrative, noted above, which posits that science and religion have always been engaged in a fight to the death. It is well known that the scientific revolution witnessed both tension and collaboration between traditional religious viewpoints and innovative scientific theories.

To illustrate this complex picture, let us consider the Christian doctrine of creation, which shaped the intellectual world of early modern Europe, and encouraged people to think of a regular, ordered universe that reflected the wisdom of its creator. Intense study of the created order was seen by many as a means of gaining an increased appreciation of the ‘mind of God’. There was thus a positive religious motivation for undertaking scientific research. Yet this same traditional doctrine of creation generated tensions, especially as Charles Darwin's narrative of human origins began to gain the ascendency in the late nineteenth century. Darwin's theory seemed to call into question the validity of a literal reading of the opening chapters of the book of Genesis. Tensions emerged, which remain to this day.

It is also important to appreciate that science is, almost by definition, a subversive activity, challenging all kinds of vested interests and power groups. The physicist Freeman Dyson penned an important essay entitled ‘The Scientist as Rebel’, in which he pointed out that many scientists have found themselves engaged in a ‘rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the local prevailing culture’.

This can easily be illustrated from the history of the interaction of science and culture. For the Arab mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam (1048–1122), science was a rebellion against the intellectual constraints of Islam; for nineteenth‐century Japanese scientists, science was a rebellion against the lingering feudalism of their culture; for the great Indian physicists of the twentieth century, their discipline was a powerful intellectual force directed against the fatalistic ethic of Hinduism (not to mention British imperialism, which was then dominant in the region). In western Europe, scientific advance inevitably involved confrontation with the culture of the day – including its political, social, and religious elements. In that the West has been dominated by Christianity, it is thus unsurprising that the tension between science and Western culture has often been viewed as a confrontation between science and Christianity. In fact, the real tension is between scientific innovation and cultural traditionalism.

Yet despite this clear absence of any normative metanarrative of the relation of religion and science, one ‘story’ has gained the ascendancy and, despite its obvious evidential underdetermination, it continues to shape media narratives and cultural attitudes – I refer to the ‘warfare’ model. According to the historian of science Thomas Dixon, the myth of the ‘warfare’ of science and religion was a self‐serving myth that was invented by Enlightenment rationalists in the late 1700s, propagated by Victorian free‐thinkers in the late 1800s, and is defended today by ‘scientific’ atheists and many influential voices competing for authority within Western popular culture. The idea that the history of the relationship between science and religion is, in the first place, simple and, in the second, marked by a perpetual and necessary conflict of ideas and methods has been comprehensively refuted by historians of science, such as Colin Russell:

The common belief that … the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility … is not only historically inaccurate, but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability.

Historical research has shown up both the factual unreliability of this myth, as well as the social factors that caused it to emerge and gain cultural traction. In the eighteenth century, a remarkable synergy developed between religion and the sciences in England. Newton's ‘celestial mechanics’ was widely regarded as consistent with, if not a confirmation of, the Christian view of God as the creator of a harmonious universe. Many members of the Royal Society of London – founded to advance scientific understanding and research – were strongly religious in their outlooks and saw their religious commitments as enhancing their commitment to scientific advancement. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, was similarly positive in its attitudes towards religion, although it was convinced of the importance of freedom of scientific investigation and expression. During the period 1831–1865, no fewer than 41 clergy of the Church of England had presided over the various sections of the British Association. (Note, however, that between 1866 and 1900 this number fell to three as a new professionalism emerged within the scientific community.)

Yet all this changed in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The general tone of the later nineteenth‐century encounter between religion (especially Christianity) and the natural sciences was set by two American works – John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). These two works played an important role in generating the ‘culture wars’ over science and religion which have become such a distinct feature of American culture. It is important to note that both these works appeared after the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. The ‘warfare’ myth originated some time after the publication of Darwin's work, and was not – as is sometimes suggested – a direct response to it.

As a generation of historians has now pointed out, the notion of an endemic conflict between science and religion, so aggressively advocated by White and Draper, is itself socially determined, created in the lengthening shadows of hostility towards individual clergy and church institutions. The interaction of science and religion has been influenced more by their social circumstances than by their specific ideas. The late Victorian period itself gave rise to the social pressures and tensions which engendered the myth of permanent warfare between science and religion.

A significant social shift can be discerned behind the emergence of this ‘conflict’ model. From a sociological perspective, scientific knowledge was advocated by particular social groups to advance their own specific goals and interests. There was growing competition between two specific groups within English society in the nineteenth century: the clergy and the scientific professionals. The clergy were widely regarded as an elite at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the ‘scientific parson’ a well‐established social stereotype. With the appearance of the professional scientist, however, a struggle for supremacy began, to determine who would gain the cultural ascendancy within British culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. The ‘conflict’ model has its origins in the specific conditions of the Victorian era, in which an emerging professional intellectual group sought to displace a group which had hitherto occupied the place of honour.

The ‘conflict’ model of science and religion thus came to prominence at a time when professional scientists wished to distance themselves from their amateur colleagues, and when changing patterns in academic culture necessitated demonstrating its independence from the church and other bastions of the establishment. Academic freedom demanded a break with the church; it was a small step towards depicting the church as the opponent of learning and scientific advance in the late nineteenth century, and the natural sciences as its strongest advocates. This naturally led to earlier incidents – such as the Galileo debate – being read and interpreted in the light of this controlling paradigm of the warfare of science and religion.

The idea that science and religion are in permanent conflict thus clearly reflects the agendas and concerns of a specific period. Yet that moment is now past, and its agendas can be set to one side, allowing a more informed and dispassionate assessment of things. The study of history allows us both to account for the origins of this deeply problematic understanding of the relation of science and religion, and to assess its reliability. Above all, it allows us to move beyond it, and construct more informed and positive approaches to the interaction of these two distinct domains of thought.

The ‘Essentialist Fallacy’ about Science and Religion

Some writers take the view that the relation between science and Christianity – or any other religion – is permanently defined, at least in its fundamental respects, by the essential nature of the two disciplines. To put this another way, science and religion are each ‘reified’ – that is to say, affirmed to have some essential identity, rather than being shaped by practices. It is argued that, once the essential nature of the two disciplines is grasped, their mutual relationship can be inferred as a matter of course. Yet this overlooks the obvious fact that both of the terms ‘science’ and ‘religion’ have a changing history of use. Both terms possess a conceptual fluidity that makes it improper to try and pin them down. Peter Harrison has persuasively argued that this reification of both science and religion is a relatively recent development, and he argued for its deconstruction. For Harrison, a more nuanced reading of history holds the key to helping us to ‘reconfigure the relationship between the entities that we now call “science” and “religion” ’, recognizing that linguistic analysis helps us to realize that their problematic nature arises out of the language in which they are framed.

Essentialist or reified views of both science and religion are found particularly in writers who are hostile to religion, such as the outspoken Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne.

Religion and science are engaged in a kind of war, a war for understanding, a war about whether we should have good reasons for what we accept as true.… I see this as only one battle in a wider war—a war between rationality and superstition. Religion is but a single brand of superstition (others include beliefs in astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing), but it is the most widespread and harmful form of superstition.

However, the essentialist fallacy is not limited to those who advocate the ‘warfare’ model, being also encountered in the writings of those who argue that science and religion are essentially collaborative.

Underlying these ‘essentialist’ accounts of the interaction of science and religion is the assumption that each of these terms designates something fixed, permanent, and essential. This means that their mutual relationship is determined by something essential to each of the disciplines, which is not affected by the contingencies of history of culture. Yet this tendency to attribute fixed and unchanging defining qualities to both science and religion has been successfully challenged by a series of rigorous historical studies. These have demonstrated the diversity, occasional inconsistency, and sheer complexity of understandings of the mutual relationship of science and religion since about the year 1500. No single account or ‘metanarrative’ may be offered of this relationship, precisely because the variety of relationships that have existed reflect prevailing social, political, economic, and cultural factors.

There are three main difficulties with this ‘essentialist’ approach, all of which are shown up by historical scholarship.

Dispelling Myths about Science and Religion

Certain stereotypes about science and religion remain prevalent in Western culture. These often rest on misunderstandings or misreading of history. The study of history helps clear the air for the dialogue between science and religion by neutralizing the purely negative perceptions of this relationship which are often perpetuated in the media. An obvious example is the controversy surrounding Galileo Galilei's views on the solar system. The Galileo affair is often portrayed as yet another illustration of the perennial war between science and religion. Yet things were much more complicated.

Galileo and his heliocentric theories were initially well received within papal circles. It is generally agreed that Galileo's positive reputation in ecclesiastical circles until a surprisingly late date was linked to his close relationship with the papal favourite, Giovanni Ciampoli. When Ciampoli fell from grace in the spring of 1632, Galileo found his position seriously weakened, perhaps to the point of being fatally compromised. Without the protection of Ciampoli, Galileo became vulnerable to those who wished to discredit him. Sadly, Galileo and his theories became interlocked with papal politics and the wider ecclesiastical conflicts of his age.

A second example of a stereotypical account of the relation of science and religion which can be defused by serious historical scholarship concerns the famous meeting of the British Association at Oxford on 30 June 1860. The myth that science and religion are permanently at war with each other is often justified through an appeal to this meeting of the British Association, which set Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, against Thomas H. Huxley on the topic of Darwin's theory of evolution. A generation later, this debate was propelled to iconic status as a classic example of the ‘warfare of science and religion’. However, in the last generation, historians have offered a much more informed and balanced account of the meeting, which is now seen in a very different light.

The popular image of Huxley's triumphant defeat of a reactionary religious opponent of evolution is now generally seen as a myth created by the opponents of organized religion in the 1890s. Recent revisionist accounts of the meeting call into question overblown and inaccurate accounts of its significance and offers an informed reconstruction of the debate which accounts better for the historical evidence at our disposal.

The British Association for the Advancement of Science was scheduled to meet in Oxford in 1860. As Charles Darwin's Origin of Species had been published the previous year, it was natural that it should be a subject of discussion at the 1860 meeting. Darwin himself was unwell and was unable to attend the meeting in person. Huxley – then a young man – was invited in his place. Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, was also invited to speak. He had been Vice‐President of the British Association in the past and was known to be familiar with Darwin's ideas and writings. Although he was Bishop of Oxford at the time, he was not present as a representative of the Church of England at this meeting.

In his address, Wilberforce set out the main themes of Darwin's work, emphasizing that the British Association discussion was about science, not religion. In his extended review of Darwin's Origin of Species, published in The Quarterly Review in the same month as the British Association meeting, Wilberforce made it clear that he had ‘no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them is taught by Revelation.’

According to a popular legend that is regularly and uncritically reproduced in many older biographies of Darwin, Wilberforce attempted to pour scorn on the theory of evolution by suggesting that it implied that humans were recently descended from monkeys. Would Huxley, he asked, prefer to think of himself being descended from an ape on his grandfather's or grandmother's side? He was then duly rebuked by Huxley, who turned the tables on him, showing him up to be an ignorant and arrogant cleric. Even the British Broadcasting Corporation perpetuated this myth in the 1970s, representing a ‘young, handsome, heroic Huxley’ triumphing over a sulky and villainous Wilberforce.

This demonization of Wilberforce rests largely on an autobiographical memory from Mrs Isabella Sidgewick, published in Macmillan's Magazine in 1898. This idiosyncratic account is inconsistent with most accounts published or in circulation closer to the time of the meeting itself, nearly forty years earlier, raising some awkward questions about the reliability of Mrs Sidgewick's memory. A review, published shortly after the event in the Athenaeum, expressed the consensus of 1860. Wilberforce and Huxley, it declared, ‘have each found foemen worthy of their steel, and made their charges and countercharges very much to their own satisfaction and the delight of their respective friends.’

The fact that Wilberforce was Bishop of Oxford has clearly led many to conclude that religion was at the forefront of the debate, and that Wilberforce opposed Darwin on religious grounds. The evidence does not support this interpretation of events. The debate was primarily about the scientific merits of Darwin's theory, and Wilberforce – who, it must be emphasized, was present in his capacity as a former Vice‐President of the British Association, not as a bishop of the Church of England – was clearly well informed about the matter. Darwin himself remarked, after reading Wilberforce's review of his work, that the review was ‘uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts and brings forward well all the difficulties. It quizzes me quite splendidly.’

In fact, Wilberforce raised several reasonable scientific concerns about Darwin's theory of natural selection in his review. To begin with, Wilberforce noted, the fossil record did not appear to bear witness to the past existence of transitional forms. Another more significant concern related to Darwin's analogy between the selective breeding of domesticated species and the hypothetical process of ‘natural selection’. It was certainly true, Wilberforce noted, that domestic breeders could control the breeding process to produce pigeons with new characteristics. Yet the evidence suggested that if such pigeons were released into the wild, their progeny would soon return to the original type. Their new characteristics were not stable or sustainable over time. (A similar concern, it should be noted, was raised by the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell in assessing the earlier evolutionary theory of Jean‐Baptiste Lamarck.)

It is quite clear from Wilberforce's careful and insightful published review of Darwin's Origin of Species that religious issues did not feature prominently in his mind; the issue was the scientific case for evolution, not its religious implications or complications. Yet this is not to say that he had no religious concerns about Darwin's ideas. Many people had difficulties with the notion of the continuity that Darwin's theory seemed to imply between humans and their animal ancestors – something that was hinted at in Origin of Species but that was not stated more explicitly until The Descent of Man (1871). Yet such concerns do not amount to an uncritical rejection of the theory. Rather, they represent a recognition that there were further questions that needed to be explored in relation to Darwin's new theory – some scientific, some religious, and some ethical.

The Yale historian Frank Turner made the important observation that the Victorian ‘conflict’ between science and religion is best seen as an epiphenomenon, rather than a phenomenon in itself. It arose from a significant social transformation in the status, organization, and practice of the natural sciences. In the early nineteenth century, English clergy were at the forefront in studying natural history and the life sciences. Yet their essentially amateur approach was being overtaken by new standards of professionalism. In the eyes of this rising generation of professional scientists, Oxbridge clerical scientists represented the past. The debate between Wilberforce and Huxley was thus not, as is often suggested in popular accounts, a debate between atheism and religion. It was really a debate between two individuals who represented quite different visions of the place of science – an old amateurism on the part of interested clergy and a new professionalism located outside the Church of England.

The Importance of Biblical Interpretation

Finally, we may note one issue that recurs throughout the history of the interaction of science and religion – the importance of biblical interpretation. Peter Harrison has recently highlighted the importance of the Bible as a catalyst for the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century within Protestantism, noting how the new readings of the Bible that arose from the Protestant Reformation played a key role in fostering the emergence of the natural sciences.

The Bible – its contents, the controversies it generated, its varying fortunes as an authority, and most importantly the new way in which it was read by Protestants – played a central role in the emergence of natural science in the seventeenth century.

Harrison notes how certain passages of the Bible (such as the Genesis creation narratives) now came to be read in a way that both sanctioned and motivated scientific enquiry.

The study of how Christians have interpreted the Bible over the last 2000 years shows that a variety of interpretative frameworks and conventions were used, which shifted over time. The perception of a conflict between science and religion often arose when scientific advances were seen to conflict with the prevailing modes of biblical interpretation – which often needed challenging or correcting. Two examples will help to bring out the importance of this point.

The Copernican debate centred on the question of whether the earth rotated around the sun (the ‘heliocentric’ model) or the sun around the earth (the ‘geocentric’ model). One or two passages in the Christian Bible seemed to point to the earth being stationary and the sun rotating – for example, references to the sun standing still (Joshua 10.12) or to the foundations of the earth being ‘immovable’ (Psalm 93.10). A ‘common sense’ or ‘literal’ reading of these texts pointed to a geocentric view of the solar system. But was this what was actually intended? Was this simply a conventional way of speaking, which was not intended to have metaphysical implications?

Similarly, the Darwinian controversy raised some important questions about how the Genesis creation accounts were to be understood. Were they literal accounts of the origins of the universe and humanity, which taught that the universe originated about 6000 years ago? Or were they to be interpreted in terms of a more extended vision of creation? In this case, Darwinism found itself pitted against very literal approaches to the interpretation of the Genesis creation narratives. These had developed within English‐speaking Protestantism since the early eighteenth century and had been assumed to be normative or natural ways of reading these texts. Darwinism called this into question.

Yet it must not be supposed that the advance of science has constantly challenged traditional biblical interpretation, as is sometimes suggested. Traditional Christian views of creation, for example, speak of the cosmos coming into being from nothing. Yet the Western scientific tradition, from Aristotle until the 1940s, tended to treat the universe as something that was permanent or eternal. The idea that it had a chronological beginning was seen as absurd. The rise of what is now known as the ‘standard cosmological model’ in the last 50 years is based on the notion that the universe is not eternal, but that it came into being at a definite point. Here we have a situation in which a traditional Christian interpretation of the Bible resonates with modern cosmology.

We now turn to consider four historical landmarks in the complex relationship of science and religion. After a brief consideration of the emergence of an intellectual context favourable to the natural sciences in western Europe during the Middle Ages, we shall examine in some detail the astronomical developments of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, associated with Copernicus and Galileo; the rise of the Newtonian worldview during the eighteenth century; and Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection during the nineteenth century. Each of these landmarks is regularly referenced in discussions of science and religion.

The Emergence of the Medieval Synthesis

It is often suggested that the scientific revolution which emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth century owed little, if anything, positive to the Middle Ages. This view, which is widely encountered in older studies of the history of science, has recently come under criticism from specialists in medieval intellectual history, such as the American historian of medieval science Edward Grant. They have pointed out that the origins of the scientific revolution can indeed be traced back to the Middle Ages. For Grant, the medieval period created an intellectual context within which the natural sciences could develop as serious intellectual disciplines, and also furnished ideas and methods which would prove of major importance to that development.

Three main developments which may be regarded as establishing a context within which the natural sciences could emerge during the Middle Ages should be noted. First, the Middle Ages saw the translation into Latin – the common language of the western European scholarly community – of a series of scientific texts which had their origins in the Greco‐Arabian tradition. Arabian commentators on the text of Aristotle, as well as the original Aristotelian texts themselves, became available to Western thinkers. The rediscovery of Aristotle had a major impact on medieval theology and philosophy, with writers such as Thomas Aquinas finding him a major stimulus to philosophical and theological reflection. These texts – by no means limited to the writings of Aristotle – also proved to be a major stimulus to wrestling with the questions of the natural sciences. While it is possible to argue that the natural sciences could have developed without these texts, that development would unquestionably have taken place later than it did.

Aristotle, however, was not always a positive influence on the development of the natural sciences. According to Aristotle, the universe had always existed, so that it was not meaningful to use religious language about creation. Galileo found himself having to refute some Aristotelian ideas, which were particularly influential at the University of Padua. For example, Aristotle held that that the moon, as a heavenly body, was perfectly smooth and spherical, whereas Galileo's telescopic observations suggested that the moon possessed a rough surface covered with mountains and craters. Aristotle's scientific dogmas had already been called into question through the appearance of a ‘new star’ – now known to have been a supernova – in the constellation of Cassiopeia in 1572. This event – often referred to as ‘Tycho's Supernova’, on account of Tycho Brahe's detailed observations of its position and varying magnitude – was recognized to be inconsistent with Aristotle's dogma of the unchangeability of the heavens.

Second, the Middle Ages saw the foundation of the great universities of western Europe. These would prove to be of central importance in the development of the natural sciences. Courses in logic, natural philosophy, geometry, music, arithmetic, and astronomy were prescribed for all those wishing to gain any qualification from a typical medieval university. The introduction of natural philosophy into the medieval university curriculum ensured that a significant number of scientific issues were addressed as a routine part of higher education. A typical medieval university would have four faculties: the faculty of arts, and the three ‘higher faculties’ of medicine, law, and theology. The faculty of arts was seen as laying the foundation for more advanced study, and it is important to note how much ‘natural philosophy’ was included in that foundational course.

Third, a class of ‘theologians/natural philosophers’ emerged, often within a university context, who were convinced that the study of natural world was theologically legitimate. Although Aristotle was widely regarded as a pagan philosopher (and hence of limited value to Christians), he was nevertheless seen as a resource to allow a greater understanding of the natural world, and hence to learn more of the God who had created that world. Many of the greatest names in the world of medieval natural science – such as Robert Grosseteste, Nicolas Oresme, and Henry of Langenstein – were all active theologians who did not see a contradiction between their faith and the investigation of the natural order. This growing emphasis on ‘natural philosophy’ proved to be of major importance to the emergence of the natural sciences in western Europe.

We now turn to consider four significant and defining historical episodes that are widely referenced in discussions of science and religion, and often shape the context within which that relationship is discussed. We begin with the astronomical discussions of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which centred on Copernicus and Galileo.

Copernicus, Galileo, and the Solar System

The great Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud once suggested that humanity had been the subject of three ‘narcissistic wounds’ in the modern age, each of which damaged any human sense of self‐importance. The first wound, Freud argued, was inflicted by the Copernican revolution, which showed that human beings were not located at the centre of the universe. The second was the Darwinian demonstration that humanity did not even have a unique place on the planet earth. The third, Freud somewhat immodestly suggested, was his own demonstration that humanity was not even the master of its own limited realm, being the prisoner of the hidden forces of the human unconsciousness. According to Freud, each of these revolutions added to the pain and wounds inflicted by its predecessor, forcing a radical re‐evaluation of the place and significance of humanity. We shall consider the religious importance of Freud's views later in this work. Yet it is highly appropriate to open this account by looking at the first of these ‘wounds’ – the Copernican revolution.

Every age is characterized by a group of settled beliefs which undergird its worldview. The Middle Ages is no exception. One of the more important elements in the medieval worldview was the belief that the sun and other celestial bodies – such as the moon and the planets – rotated around the earth. This ‘geocentric’ view of the universe was treated as self‐evidently true. The Bible was interpreted in the light of this belief, with geocentric assumptions being brought to – and at times even imposed upon – the interpretation of a number of passages. Most living languages still bear witness to this geocentric worldview. For example, even in modern English, it is perfectly acceptable to state that ‘the sun rose at 7.33 a.m.’ – despite the fact that this reflects the discarded scientific belief that the sun rotates around the earth. As the truth or falsity of the geocentric model of the solar system made little difference to everyday life anyway, there was little popular interest in challenging it.

The model of the universe which was most widely accepted during the early Middle Ages was devised by Claudius Ptolemy, an astronomer who worked in the Egyptian city of Alexandria during the first half of the second century CE. In his Amalgest, Ptolemy brought together existing ideas concerning the motions of the moon and planets, and argued that these could be understood on the basis of the following assumptions:

Increasingly detailed and precise observation of the movement of the planets and stars caused some to have doubts about the reliability of this theory. Initially, the discrepancies could be accommodated by adding additional epicycles. By the end of the fifteenth century, the model was so complex and unwieldy that it was close to collapse. But what could replace it?

During the sixteenth century, the geocentric model of the solar system was abandoned in favour of a heliocentric model, which depicted the sun as lying at its centre, with the earth as one of a number of planets orbiting around it. Although this shift in thinking is usually described as ‘the Copernican revolution’, it is generally agreed that three individuals were of major importance in bringing about the acceptance of this change in Protestant northern Europe: Nicholas Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Johann Kepler.

The publication of Nicolas Copernicus’ treatise On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies in May 1543 caused a mild sensation, although the final acceptance of the model would have to wait for the detailed work by Kepler in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Copernicus argued that the planets moved in concentric circles at uniform speeds around the sun. The earth, in addition to rotating about the sun, also rotated on its own axis. The apparent motion of the stars and planets was thus due to a combination of the rotation of the earth on its own axis and its rotation around the sun. The model possessed a simplicity and elegance which compared favourably with the increasingly cumbersome Ptolemaic model. Nevertheless, it did not fit the known observational data. Something was wrong with the theory. In the end, it was found that the problem did not lie with Copernicus’ idea that the planets rotated around the sun. His mistake was to assume that they rotated around the sun in circular orbits at constant velocity.

The Danish researcher Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), based at an observatory on an island near Copenhagen, carried out a series of precise observations on planetary motion over the period 1576–1592. These observations would form the basis for Johann Kepler's modified model of the solar system (see below). Kepler acted as assistant to Tycho when Tycho was forced to relocate to Bohemia following the death of Frederick II of Denmark.

The German astronomer Johann Kepler (1571–1630) focused his attention on the observation of the motion of the planet Mars. The Copernican model, which assumed that planets orbit in circles around the sun, was unable to account for the observed motion of this planet. In 1609, Kepler was able to announce that he had uncovered two general laws governing the motion of Mars. First, Mars rotated in an elliptical orbit, with the sun at one of its two foci. Second, the line joining Mars to the sun covers equal areas in equal periods of time. By 1619, he had extended these two laws to the remaining planets and uncovered a third law: the square of the periodic time of a planet (that is, the time taken by the planet to complete one orbit around the sun) is directly proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the sun.

Kepler's model represented a significant modification of Copernicus’ ideas. Copernicus’ radical new model was unable to explain the observational data satisfactorily, despite its conceptual elegance and simplicity, on account of his flawed assumption that orbits were necessarily circular and that the planets moved at constant speed. This assumption, interestingly, seems to have derived from classical Euclidian geometry; Copernicus never really freed himself completely from classical Greek ways of thinking. Circles were perfect geometrical figures, whereas ellipses were distorted. Why should nature make use of deformed geometry?

As we noted, the older model (often referred to as a ‘geocentric’ theory) was widely accepted by theologians of the Middle Ages, who had become so familiar with reading the text of the Bible through geocentric spectacles that they had some difficulty coping with the new approach. Early published defences of the Copernican theory (such as G. J. Rheticus's Treatise on Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth, which is widely regarded as the earliest known work to deal explicitly with the relation of the Bible and the Copernican theory) thus had to deal with two issues.

First, they had to set out the observational evidence which led to the conclusion that the earth and other planets rotated around the sun. Second, they had to demonstrate that this viewpoint was consistent with the Bible, which had long been read as endorsing a geocentric view of the earth. As we noted above, the observational evidence was only finally accounted for in the light of Kepler's modification of Copernicus's model. But what of the theological aspects of that model? What of the radical shift which it proposed from an earth‐centred universe?

There is no doubt that the rise of the heliocentric theory of the solar system caused theologians to re‐examine the manner in which certain biblical passages were interpreted. However, at this stage, we may distinguish three broad approaches within the Christian tradition of biblical interpretation. In what follows, we shall note these, and consider their importance to the science and religion dialogue.

The third approach proved to be of especial importance during the debates over the relation between theology and astronomy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The noted Protestant theologian John Calvin (1509–1564) made two major and positive contributions to the appreciation and development of the natural sciences. First, he positively encouraged the scientific study of nature as a way of deepening an appreciation of God's wisdom; second, he argued that sections of the Bible were be interpreted in terms of divine ‘accommodation’ (as explained above). His first contribution is specifically linked with his stress upon the orderliness of creation; both the physical world and the human body testify to the wisdom and character of God. Calvin thus commends the study of both astronomy and medicine. They are able to probe more deeply than theology into the natural world, and thus uncover further evidence of the orderliness of the creation and the wisdom of its creator. It may thus be argued that Calvin gave a new religious motivation to the scientific investigation of nature.

Calvin's second major contribution was to eliminate a significant obstacle to the development of the natural sciences – biblical literalism. Calvin points out that the Bible is primarily concerned with the knowledge of Jesus Christ. It is not an astronomical, geographical, or biological textbook. And when the Bible is interpreted, it must be borne in mind that God ‘adjusts’ to the capacities of the human mind and heart. God has to come down to our level if revelation is to take place. Revelation thus presents a scaled‐down or ‘accommodated’ version of God to us, in order to meet our limited abilities. Just as a human mother stoops down to reach her child, so God stoops down to come to our level. Revelation is an act of divine condescension.

The impact of both these ideas upon scientific theorizing, especially during the seventeenth century, was considerable. For example, the English writer Edward Wright defended Copernicus’ heliocentric theory of the solar system against biblical literalists by arguing, in the first place, that Scripture was not concerned with physics and, in the second, that its manner of speaking was ‘accommodated to the understanding and way of speech of the common people, like nurses to little children’. Both these arguments derive directly from Calvin, who may be argued to have made a fundamental contribution to the emergence of the natural sciences in this respect.

Fresh controversy broke out over the heliocentric model of the solar system in Catholic Italy during the early decades of the seventeenth century. In this case, the debate centred on the views of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). This eventually led to the Catholic church condemning Galileo Galilei, in what is now widely regarded as a clear error of judgement on the part of some ecclesiastical bureaucrats. Galileo mounted a major defence of the Copernican theory of the solar system. Galileo's views were initially received sympathetically within senior church circles, partly on account of the fact that he was held in high regard by a papal favourite, Giovanni Ciampoli. Ciampoli's fall from power led to Galileo losing support within papal circles, and this is widely regarded as opening the way to Galileo's condemnation by his enemies.

Although the controversy centring on Galileo is often portrayed as science versus religion, or libertarianism versus authoritarianism, the real issue concerned the correct interpretation of the Bible. Appreciation of this point is thought to have been hindered in the past on account of the failure of historians to engage with the theological (and, more precisely, the hermeneutical) issues associated with the debate. In part, this can be seen as reflecting the fact that many of the scholars interested in this particular controversy were scientists or historians of science, who were not familiar with the intricacies of the debates on biblical interpretation of this remarkably complex period. Nevertheless, it is clear that the issue which dominated the discussion between Galileo and his critics was that of how to interpret certain biblical passages. The issue of accommodation was of major important to that debate, as we shall see.

To explore this point, we may turn to a significant work published in January 1615. In his Letter on the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus, the Carmelite friar Paolo Antonio Foscarini argued that the heliocentric model of the solar system was not incompatible with the Bible. Foscarini did not introduce any new principles of biblical interpretation in his analysis; rather, he sets out and applies traditional rules of interpretation:

When Holy Scripture attributes something to God or to any other creature which would otherwise be improper and incommensurate, then it should be interpreted and explained in one or more of the following ways. First, it is said to pertain metaphorically and proportionally, or by similitude. Second, it is said … according to our mode of consideration, apprehension, understanding, knowing, etc. Thirdly, it is said according to vulgar opinion and the common way of speaking.

The second and third ways which Foscarini identifies are generally regarded as types of ‘accommodation’, the third model of biblical interpretation we noted earlier. As we have seen, this approach to biblical interpretation can be traced back to the first Christian centuries, and was not regarded as controversial.

Foscarini's innovation did not lie in the interpretative method he adopted, but in the biblical passages to which he applied it. In other words, Foscarini suggested that certain passages, which many had interpreted literally up to this point, were to be interpreted in an accommodated manner. The passages to which he applied this approach were those which seemed to suggest that the earth remained stationary, and the sun moved. Foscarini argued as follows:

Scripture speaks according to our mode of understanding, and according to appearances, and in respect to us. For thus it is that these bodies appear to be related to us and are described by the common and vulgar mode of human thinking, namely, the earth seems to stand still and to be immobile, and the sun seems to rotate around it. And hence Scripture serves us by speaking in the vulgar and common manner; for from our point of view it does seem that the earth stands firmly in the center and that the sun revolves around it, rather than the contrary.

Galileo's growing commitment to the Copernican position led him to adopt an approach to biblical interpretation similar to Foscarini's.

Galileo's critics argued that some biblical passages contradicted him. For example, they argued that Joshua 10.12 spoke of the sun standing still at Joshua's command. Did not that prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was the sun which moved around the earth? In his Letter to the Grand Countess Christina, Galileo countered with an argument that this was simply a common way of speaking. Joshua could not be expected to know the intricacies of celestial mechanics, and therefore used an ‘accommodated’ way of speaking.

It must be emphasized that the issue of how to interpret the Bible was not merely important for Galileo and his critics; it had also become controversial as a result of the great theological controversies of the late sixteenth century resulting from the Protestant Reformation. The official condemnation of Galileo's biblical interpretation reflected this tension, and was based on two considerations. In the first place, Scripture is to be interpreted according ‘to the proper meaning of the words’. The accommodated approach adopted by Foscarini is thus rejected in favour of a more literal approach. As we have stressed, both methods of interpretation were accepted as legitimate, and had a long history of use within Christian theology. The debate centred on the question of which was appropriate to the passages in question.

Second, the Bible is to be interpreted ‘according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and of learned theologians’. In other words, it was being argued that nobody of any significance had adopted Foscarini's interpretation in the past; it was therefore to be dismissed as an innovation. It therefore followed that the views of both Foscarini and Galileo were to be rejected as innovations, without any precedent in Christian thought.

This second point is of major importance and needs to be examined more carefully, in that it is to be set against the long‐standing and bitter debate, fuelled during the seventeenth century by the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), between Protestantism and Catholicism over whether the former was an innovation or a recovery of authentic Christianity. The idea of the unchangeability of the catholic tradition became an integral element of Catholic polemic against Protestantism. As Jacques‐Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), one of the most formidable apologists for Catholicism, put this point in 1688:

The teaching of the church is always the same …. The gospel is never different from what it was before. Hence, if at any time someone says that the faith includes something which yesterday was not said to be of the faith, it is always heterodoxy, which is any doctrine different from orthodoxy. There is no difficulty about recognizing false doctrine; there is no argument about it. It is recognized at once, whenever it appears, simply because it is new.

These same arguments were widely used at the opening of the seventeenth century, and are clearly reflected and embodied in the official critique of Foscarini. The interpretation which he offered had never been offered before – and it was, for that reason alone, wrong.

It will therefore be clear that this critical debate over the interpretation of the Bible must be set against a complex background. The highly charged and politicized atmosphere at the time seriously prejudiced theological debate, for fear that the concession of any new approach might be seen as an indirect concession of the Protestant claim to legitimacy. To allow that Catholic teaching on any matter of significance had ‘changed’ was potentially to open the floodgates which would inevitably lead to demands for recognition of the orthodoxy of central Protestant teachings – teachings that the Catholic church had been able to reject as ‘innovations’ up to this point.

It was thus inevitable that Galileo's views would meet with resistance. They key factor was that he seemed to have introduced theological innovations. For the Catholic church to concede the validity of Galileo's interpretation of certain biblical passages would seriously undermine a core Catholic criticism of Protestantism – namely, that Protestantism had introduced new (and therefore erroneous) interpretations of certain biblical passages. Sadly, it was only a matter of time before his views would be rejected. From this brief analysis, it will be clear that the Galileo controversy was set against a complex polemical background, involving tensions between Protestants and Catholics over the interpretation of Scripture and doctrinal heritage. Galileo had the misfortune to get caught up in the crossfire and undercurrents of this debate.

In this section, we have considered the importance of the growing realization that the earth did not stand at the centre of the universe for scientific and religious thought. In the following section, we shall consider the scientific and religious aspects of the growing realization that the known universe could be regarded as a vast, complex, and regular piece of machinery. We therefore turn to consider the achievements of Isaac Newton and the emergence of the mechanical worldview.

Newton, the Mechanical Universe, and Deism

Scholars routinely speak of the ‘scientific revolution’ which swept through western Europe during the seventeenth century. It is difficult to say precisely when this revolution began. Some would argue that its origins lie in the work of Copernicus and Galileo, which we looked at in the previous section. Others would argue that it began much earlier, having its roots in trends in late medieval universities, or the new attitudes of the Renaissance.

Others suggest that a fundamental philosophical change lay behind the scientific revolution. The work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) argued that knowledge began with experience of the world. The proper starting point of scientific knowledge is the observation of phenomena, which is followed by the attempt to derive some general underlying principles which might explain those observations. Aristotle's demand that theories should ‘preserve the phenomena’ became embedded within the emerging natural philosophy of the day. Despite some difficulties of definition, there is virtually universal agreement that Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) played a pivotal role in the consolidation of the scientific revolution. In this section, we shall consider some of his achievements and their religious implications.

As we saw in the previous section, the emergence of the heliocentric model of the solar system had clarified some issues of celestial geometry; issues of celestial mechanics, however, remained unresolved. Kepler had established that the square of the periodic time of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the sun. But what was the basis of this law? What deeper significance did it possess? Could the motion of the earth, moon, and planets all be accounted for on the basis of some more fundamental principles? Part of the genius of Isaac Newton lay in his demonstration that Kepler's laws of planetary motion could be explained on the basis of the principles that governed the motion of bodies on earth. Newton's exploration of the mechanics of the solar system was so impressive that the leading English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) wrote the following lines in Newton's memory:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:

God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.

Newton is often presented as someone who affirmed rationality and cosmic order in the face of religious belief, a beacon of scientific orthodoxy in the midst of a still superstitious society. In fact, the reality is somewhat more complicated. Papers which remained undiscovered until the twentieth century offer a more complex picture of Newton as someone of almost pathological loneliness, who came close to madness, was obsessed with alchemy, and was fascinated by theological heresies. Newton may well have ushered in the modern world through his discoveries, but he belonged to the world that has now been left behind. Yet despite these many foibles, Newton remains one of the most significant figures in the history of science in general, and its relation to religion in particular.

The most helpful way to understand Newton's demonstration of the laws of planetary motion is to think of Newton establishing the basic principles which govern the behaviour of objects on earth, and subsequently extrapolating these same principles to the motion of the planets. For example, consider the famous story of Newton noticing an apple falling to the earth. The same force which attracted the apple to the earth could, in Newton's view, operate between the sun and the planets. The gravitational attraction between the earth and an apple is precisely the same force which operates between the sun and a planet, or the earth and the moon.

Newton initially concentrated his attention on uncovering the laws which governed motion of bodies on earth, leading to his formulation of his three laws of motion.

These three laws of motion established the general principles relating to terrestrial motion. Newton's breakthrough lay in realizing that these same laws could be applied to celestial as much as to terrestrial mechanics. Newton began work on his planetary theory as early as 1666. Taking his laws of motion as his starting point, he addressed Kepler's three laws of planetary motion. It was a relatively simple matter to demonstrate that Kepler's second law could be understood if there exists a force between the planet and the sun, directed towards the sun. The first law could be explained if it was assumed that the force between the planet and sun was inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This force could be determined mathematically, on the basis of what would later be termed ‘the Law of Universal Gravitation’:

any two material bodies, P and P', with masses m and m', attract each other with a force F, given by the formula

where d is their distance apart and G is the gravitational constant.

(Newton did not need to determine the precise value of G to explain Kepler's laws.)

Newton applied the laws of motion to the orbit of the moon around the earth. On the basis of the assumption that the force which attracted an apple to fall to the earth also held the moon in its orbit around the earth, and that this force was inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the moon and the earth, Newton was able to calculate the period of the moon's orbit. It proved to be incorrect by a factor of roughly 10%. This error arose only through an inaccurate estimate of the distance between the earth and the moon. Newton had simply used the prevailing estimate of this distance; on using a value which was more accurate, determined by the French astronomer Jean Picard in 1672, theory and observation proved to be in agreement.

Newton's theories were grounded on the basic concepts of mass, space, and time. Each of these concepts can be measured, analysed, and represented mathematically. Although Newton's emphasis on mass has now been replaced by an interest in momentum (the product of mass and velocity), these basic themes continue to be of major significance in classical physics. On the basis of his three fundamental concepts, he was able to develop precise ideas of acceleration, force, momentum, and velocity.

There is not enough space to provide a full historical analysis of precisely how and when Newton arrived at his conclusions, nor to set them out in detail. The important point to appreciate is that Newton was able to demonstrate that a vast range of observational data could be explained on the basis of a set of universal principles. Newton's successes in explaining terrestrial and celestial mechanics led to the rapid development of the idea that the universe could be thought of as a great machine, acting according to fixed laws. This is often referred to as a ‘mechanistic worldview’, in that the operation of nature is explained on the assumption that it is a machine operating according to fixed rules.

The religious implications of this will be clear. The idea of the world as a machine immediately suggested the idea of design. Newton himself was supportive of this interpretation. Although later writers tended to suggest that the mechanism in question was totally self‐contained and self‐sustaining – and therefore did not require the existence of a God – this view was not widely held in the 1690s. Perhaps the most famous application of Newton's approach is found in the writings of William Paley (1743–1805), who compared the complexity of the natural world with the design of a watch. Both implied design and purpose, and thus pointed to a creator. Newton's work was thus initially seen as a splendid confirmation of the existence of God.

Newton's emphasis upon the regularity of the world was one of the reasons behind a significant development in the ways in which God was pictured and understood. Traditionally, Christian theology and iconography drew on biblical images of God, such as a king or shepherd. The scientific revolution led to a new image of God capturing the imagination of many during the seventeenth century – namely, God as a clockmaker. One clock in particular was singled out as a worthy analogue of the celestial machine – the great cathedral clock of Strasbourg. This clock, rebuilt in 1574, displayed information about the time, the location of the planets, the phases of the moon, and other astronomical information. These were displayed using a series of dials and other visual effects.

Yet it was not long before the estrangement of celestial mechanics and religion began to set in. Celestial mechanics seemed to suggest that the world was a self‐sustaining mechanism which had no need for divine governance or support for its day‐to‐day operation. The image of God as a ‘clockmaker’ came to be seen as leading to a purely naturalist understanding of the universe, in which God had no continuing role to play. The scene was set for the rise of the important religious movement generally known as ‘deism’.

Newton's emphasis on the regularity of nature is seen by most scholars as one of the factors which encouraged the rise of deism. The term ‘deism’ (from the Latin deus, ‘god’) refers to a view of God which maintains God's creatorship, but denies a continuing divine involvement with, or special presence within, that creation. It is thus often contrasted with ‘theism’ (from the Greek theos, ‘god’), which allows for continuing divine involvement within the world. The term ‘deism’ is generally used to refer to the views of a group of English thinkers during the ‘Age of Reason’, in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth centuries. In his influential study The Principal Deistic Writers (1757), John Leland grouped together a number of writers – including Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume – under the broad and newly coined term ‘deist’. Whether these writers would have approved of this designation is questionable. Close examination of their religious views shows that they have relatively little in common, apart from a general skepticism about several traditional Christian ideas, such as the necessity of divine revelation. The Newtonian worldview offered deism a highly sophisticated way of defending and developing their views, by allowing them to focus on the wisdom of God in creating an elegant and ordered world, governed by the laws of nature.

Although modern scholarship has raised significant questions about whether deism can be regarded as a coherent intellectual movement, it can certainly be presented as a generic and diluted form of Christianity which focused solely on God as creator of the world, and hence highlighted the regularity of the natural order. John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) developed an idea of God which became characteristic of much later deism. Locke argued that ‘reason leads us to the knowledge of this certain and evident truth, that there is an eternal, most powerful and most knowing Being.’ The attributes of this being are those which human reason recognizes as appropriate for God. Having considered which moral and rational qualities are suited to the deity, Locke argues that ‘we enlarge every one of these with our idea of infinity, and so, putting them together, make our complex idea of God.’ In other words, the idea of God is made up of human rational and moral qualities, projected to infinity. Its critics, however, saw deism as having reduced God to a mere clockmaker. God wound the world up, like a clock, and then left it to run, unattended. Once God had established a regular universe, governed by fixed laws, there was no need for special divine action to keep it going.

We see here how the rise of the mechanical worldview is to be seen as scientific with religious implications. The Newtonian mechanical model of the universe seemed to resonate with a particular way of thinking about God. More importantly, it suggested that this god could be known and studied without the need for any specifically religious beliefs, or the study of religious texts, such as the Bible. A religion of nature could be developed, appealing from the regularity of the mechanism of the universe to the wisdom of its constructor.

This line of argument can be found in Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), which argued that Christianity was nothing other than the ‘republication of the religion of nature’. God is understood as the extension of accepted human ideas of justice, rationality, and wisdom. This universal religion is available at all times and in every place, whereas traditional Christianity rested upon the idea of a divine revelation which was not accessible to those who lived before Christ.

The ideas of English Deism percolated through to the continent of Europe through translations (especially in Germany), and through the writings of individuals familiar with and sympathetic to them, such as Voltaire's Philosophical Letters. Enlightenment rationalism is often considered to be the final flowering of the bud of English Deism. For our purposes, however, it is especially important to note the obvious consonance between deism and the Newtonian worldview. As we noted earlier, deism owed its growing intellectual acceptance in part to the successes of the Newtonian mechanical view of the world.

If God was being excluded from the mechanics of the world, there were many who suggested that divine design and activity was still to be found in the biological realm. Did not this show evidence of design? One of the most influential writers to suggest that this was the case was John Ray (1627–1705). In his Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), Ray argued that the beauty and regularity of the created order, including plants and animals, pointed to the wisdom of their creator. Ray, it must be emphasized, worked with a static view of creation. He understood the phrase ‘Works of Creation’ to mean ‘the Works created by God at first, and by Him conserv’d to this Day in the same State and Condition in which they were at first made.’

The most famous appeal to God as the designer and maker of the natural world, especially its biological aspects, was due to William Paley, archdeacon of Carlisle, who compared God to one of the mechanical inventors of the Industrial Revolution. God had directly created the world in all its intricacy. Paley accepted the viewpoint of his age – namely, that God had constructed (Paley prefers the word ‘contrived’) the world in its finished form, as we now know it. No watchmaker would leave something unfinished, and not fit for its purpose.

Paley argued that the present organization of the world, both physical and biological, could be seen as a compelling witness to the wisdom of a creator god. Paley's Natural Theology; or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802) had a profound influence on popular English religious thought in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is known to have been read by Darwin. Paley was deeply impressed by Newton's discovery of the regularity of nature, which allowed the universe to be thought of as a complex mechanism, operating according to regular and understandable principles. Nature consists of a series of biological structures which are to be thought of as being ‘contrived’ – that is, constructed with a clear purpose in mind.

Paley used his famous analogy of the watch on a heath to emphasize that contrivance necessarily presupposed a designer and constructor. ‘Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature.’ Indeed, Paley argues, the difference is that nature shows an even greater degree of contrivance than the watch. (We shall consider Paley's approach in more detail later: 00‐00). Paley is at his best when he deals with the description of mechanical systems within nature, such as the immensely complex structure of the human eye and heart. Yet Paley's argument (like John Ray's before him) depended on a static worldview, and simply could not cope with the dynamic worldview which lay at the heart of Darwinism.

It is at this point that we need to turn to consider the nineteenth‐century Darwinian controversy, which opened up a new area of scientific debate with important implications for some traditional religious beliefs.

Darwin and the Biological Origins of Humanity

The publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) is rightly regarded as a landmark in nineteenth‐century science. On December 27 1831, HMS Beagle set out from the southern English port of Plymouth on a voyage that lasted almost five years. Its mission was to complete a survey of the southern coasts of South America, and afterwards to circumnavigate the globe. The small ship's naturalist was Charles Darwin (1809–1882). During the long voyage, Darwin noted some aspects of the plant and animal life of South America, particularly the Galapagos Islands and Tierra del Fuego, which seemed to him to require explanation, yet which were not satisfactorily accounted for by existing theories. The opening words of Origin of Species set out the riddle that he was determined to solve:

When on board HMS Beagle as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the latter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.

One popular account of the origin of species, widely supported by the religious and academic establishment of the early nineteenth century, held that God had somehow created everything more or less as we now see it. The success of the view owed much to the influence of William Paley, whose approach we considered in the previous section. God was the divine watchmaker, responsible for the design and construction of such fabulously complex structures as the human eye.

Darwin knew of Paley's views, and initially found them persuasive. However, his observations on the Beagle raised some questions. On his return, Darwin set out to develop a more satisfying explanation of his own observations and those of others. Although Darwin appears to have hit on the basic idea of evolution through natural selection by 1842, he was not ready to publish. Such a radical theory would require massive observational evidence to be marshalled in its support.

Four features of the natural world seemed to Darwin to require particularly close attention, in the light of problems and shortcomings with existing explanations.

These aspects of the natural order could all be explained on the basis of Paley's theory. Yet the explanations offered seemed cumbersome and strained. What was originally a relatively neat and elegant theory began to crumble under the weight of accumulated difficulties and tensions. There had to be a better explanation. Darwin offered a wealth of evidence in support of the idea of biological evolution, and proposed a mechanism by which it might work – natural selection.

Darwin's radical theory of natural selection can be seen as the culmination of a long process of reflection on the origins of species. Among the studies which prepared the way for Darwin's theory, particular attention should be paid to Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830). The prevailing popular understanding of the history of the earth from its creation took the form of a series of catastrophic changes. Lyell argued for ‘uniformitarianism’ (a term coined by James Hutton in 1795), in which the same forces which are now at work within the natural world are assumed also to have been active over huge expanses of time in the past. Darwin's theory of evolution works on a related assumption: that forces which lead to the development of new breeds of plants or animals in the present operated over very long periods of time in the past.

The major rival to Darwin's theory was due to the eighteenth‐century Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (1707–1778), more generally known by the Latinized form of his name ‘Linnaeus’. Linnaeus argued for the ‘fixity of species’. In other words, the present range of species which can be observed in the natural world represents the way things have been in the past, and is the way they will remain. Linnaeus’ detailed classification of species conveyed the impression to many of his readers that nature was fixed from the moment of its origination. This seemed to fit in rather well with a traditional and popular reading of the Genesis creation accounts, and suggested that the botanical world of today more or less corresponded to that established in creation. Each species could be regarded as having been created separately and distinctly by God, and endowed with its fixed characteristics.

The main difficulty here, pointed out by Georges Buffon and others, was that the fossil evidence suggested that certain species had become extinct. In other words, fossils were found which contained the preserved remains of plants (and animals) which now had no known counterpart on the earth. Did not this seem to contradict the assumption of the fixity of species? And if old species died out, might not new ones arise to replace them? Other issues seemed to cause some difficulty for the theory of special creation – for example, the irregular geographical distribution of species.

In his Origin of Species, Darwin set out with great care why the idea of ‘natural selection’ should be considered the best mechanism to explain how the evolution of species took place and how it is to be understood. Darwin argues that a process can be discerned within nature – ‘natural selection’ – which is analogous to the process of ‘artificial selection’ used by stockbreeders. The first chapter of Origin of Species therefore considers ‘variation under domestication’ – that is, the way in which domestic plants and animals are bred by agriculturists. Darwin notes how selective breeding allows farmers to create animals or plants with particularly desirable traits. Variations develop in successive generations through this process of breeding, and these can be exploited to bring about inherited characteristics which are regarded as being of particular value by the breeder. This familiar process of ‘domestic selection’ or ‘artificial selection’ suggests that a similar mechanism appears to operate in nature itself. ‘Variation under domestication’ is presented as an analogue of ‘variation under nature’.

Darwin's theory of natural selection suggested that one could speak of directionality within nature, without implying that there was either progression or purpose. The choice of the phrase ‘natural selection’ proved controversial, as it seemed to some of Darwin's critics that it implied that nature somehow actively or intentionally chose which evolutionary outcomes were to be preferred. This is not what Darwin intended. He was simply making the point that some process similar to ‘artificial selection’ seemed to operate within nature itself. Darwin offered a completely naturalistic mechanism for evolution, which did not depend upon nature actively choosing its own outcomes. Indeed, one of the most significant implications of Darwin's theory is that any notion of teleology or purpose within nature becomes very difficult to sustain – a point emphasized by Thomas H. Huxley, who suggested that Darwin's account of natural selection had called into question traditional notions of teleology (though not the notion of teleology itself).

In the end, Darwin's theory had many weaknesses and loose ends. For example, it required that speciation should take place; yet the evidence for this was conspicuously absent at that time. Darwin himself devoted a large section of Origin of Species to listing such difficulties with his theory, noting in particular the ‘imperfection of the geological record’, which gave little indication of the existence of intermediate species, and the ‘extreme perfection and complication’ of certain individual organs, such as the eye. Nevertheless, he was convinced that these were difficulties which could be tolerated on account of the clear explanatory superiority of his approach. Yet even though Darwin did not believe that he had adequately dealt with all the problems which required resolution, he was confident that his explanation was the best available:

A crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered; but, to the best of my judgement, the greater number are only apparent, and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to my theory.

Darwin's theories, as set out in Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), hold that all species – including humanity – are the outcome of a long and complex process of biological evolution. The religious implications of this will be clear. Traditional Christian thought regarded humanity as being set apart from the rest of nature, created as the height of God's creation, and alone endowed with the ‘image of God’. Darwin's theory suggested that human nature emerged gradually, over a long period of time, and that no fundamental biological distinction could be drawn between human beings and animals in terms of their origins and development.

So what religious issues were raised by Darwin's theory? It will be evident from the historical account just presented that Darwin's account of the origin of species raises serious problems for a static understanding of the biological order. As we noted in the previous section, this underlies William Paley's arguments for the existence of God, based on an appeal to the intricacies of the biological realm. Paley's most noted critic in recent years is the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, who argues that Darwin's approach eliminates any notion of God creating or designing the world. Everything can be accounted for, he argues, by the blind forces of natural selection. In his Blind Watchmaker (1987), Dawkins relentlessly points out the failings of Paley's viewpoint and the explanatory superiority of Darwin's approach, especially as it has been modified through the neo‐Darwinian synthesis. Dawkins argues that Paley's approach is based on a static view of the world, rendered obsolete by Darwin's theory.

Dawkins himself is eloquent and generous in his account of Paley's achievement, noting with appreciation his ‘beautiful and reverent descriptions of the dissected machinery of life’. Without in any way belittling the wonder of the biological ‘watches’ that so fascinated and impressed Paley, Dawkins argued that Paley's case for God – though made with ‘passionate sincerity’ and ‘informed by the best biological scholarship of his day’ – is ‘gloriously and utterly wrong’. The ‘only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics.’ For Dawkins, Paley is typical of his age; his ideas are entirely understandable, given his historical location prior to Darwin. But nobody, Dawkins argues, could share these ideas now. Paley is obsolete.

This, then, is perhaps one of the most obvious religious issues raised by the rise of Darwinism – the undermining of an argument for the existence of God which had played a major role in British religious thought, both popular and academic, for more than a century. Of course, the argument could easily be restated in more appropriate forms – a development which took place during the second half of the nineteenth century, when many Christian writers stressed that evolution could be seen as the means by which God providentially directed what was now understood as an extended process, rather than a single event.

A further religious issue concerned the interpretation of the Bible. Many of the controversies concerning science and religion have focused on the issue of biblical interpretation. The Copernican controversy, for example, raised the question of whether the Bible actively promoted a geocentric view of the universe, or whether it had simply been interpreted in this way for sufficiently long for this impression to have become widespread. A similar issue emerged with the debate concerning Darwinism.

It is of importance to note that Darwinism became of particular concern to Christians influenced by literal readings of the book of Genesis. Such readings are known to have been widespread within popular Protestantism in Britain and the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, even though more nuanced interpretative schemes had been proposed by Protestant academics in both countries. Despite these more sophisticated interpretations of the Genesis creation accounts, at the popular level it was widely assumed that the ‘common sense’ reading of the Bible led to a six‐day understanding of the creation of the world and humanity. Darwinism posed a significant challenge both to this specific reading of the book of Genesis as well as to existing models of biblical interpretation in general. Were the six days of the Genesis creation account to be taken literally, as periods of 24 hours? Or as indefinite periods of time? And was it legitimate to suggest that vast periods of time might separate the events of that narrative? Or was the Genesis creation account to be interpreted as a historically and culturally conditioned narrative, reflecting ancient Babylonian myths, which could not be taken as a scientific account of the origins of life in general, and humanity in particular? The debates are many, and continue to this day.

A third point at which Darwin's theories raises difficulties for traditional Christian theology concerned the status of humanity. For most Christians, humanity was the height of God's creation, distinguished from the remainder of the created order by being created in the image of God. On this traditional reading of things, humanity was located within the created order as a whole yet standing above it on account of its unique relationship to God. Yet Darwin's Origin of Species posed an implicit challenge to this view, and The Descent of Man made the challenge explicit. Humanity had emerged, over a vast period of time, from within the natural order.

If there was one aspect of his own theory of evolution which left Charles Darwin feeling unsettled, it was its implications for the status and identity of the human race. In every edition of Origin of Species, Darwin consistently stated that his proposed mechanism of natural selection did not entail any fixed or universal law of progressive development. Furthermore, he explicitly rejected Lamarck's theory that evolution demonstrated an ‘innate and inevitable tendency towards perfection’. The inevitable conclusion must therefore be that human beings (now understood to be participants within, rather than merely observers of, the evolutionary process) cannot in any sense be said to be either the ‘goal’ or the ‘apex’ of evolution.

This was not an easy idea for Darwin, or for his age, to accept. The conclusion to The Descent of Man speaks of humanity in exalted terms, while nevertheless insisting upon its ‘lowly’ biological origins: ‘Man with all his noble qualities … still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’

Most Darwinists would insist that it is a corollary of an evolutionary worldview that we must recognize that we are animals, part of the evolutionary process. Darwinism thus critiques the absolutist assumptions concerning the place of humanity within nature that lies behind ‘speciesism’ – a somewhat cumbersome term introduced by Richard Ryder, and given wider currency by the Australian ethicist Peter Singer (born 1946), currently Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. This has raised considerable difficulties beyond the realm of traditional religion, in that many political and ethical theories are predicated on the assumption of the privileged status of humanity within nature, whether this is justified on religious or secular grounds.

So how have Christians responded to the challenges of Darwin's theory of natural selection? During the century and a half since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, at least four general responses have emerged.

These terms are, of course, open to criticism. Writers such as the philosopher of biology Francisco Ayala (born 1934), for example, has pointed out that ‘creationism’ and ‘intelligent design’ can be interpreted in thoroughly mainline ways, open to biological evolution. Others have pointed out that the term ‘evolutionary theism’ might be taken to suggest that its adherents do not believe in the divine creation of all things. In fact, evolutionary theism holds that creation is to be understood both as event and process, rather than as a simple event in the past.

The ‘Big Bang’: New Insights into the Origins of the Universe

The question of the origin of the universe is without doubt one of the most fascinating areas of modern scientific analysis and debate. That there are religious dimensions to this debate will be clear. Sir Bernard Lovell (1913–2012), the distinguished British pioneer of radio astronomy, is one of many to note that discussion of the origins of the universe inevitably raises fundamentally religious questions. More recently, the physicist Paul Davies has drawn attention to the implications of the ‘new physics’ for thinking about God, especially in his widely read book God and the New Physics.

It is important to appreciate that the scientific consensus before the First World War was that the universe was eternal. This was the view of the great classical Greek philosopher Aristotle, who exercised considerable influence over the development of the natural sciences in medieval Europe. Aristotle's emphasis on certain aspects of empirical method – such as the need to ‘preserve the phenomena’ – were unquestionably helpful to the emergence of the natural sciences. Yet it is often overlooked that Aristotle was committed to a number of decided non‐empirical views, which arguably hindered scientific development. An example is his view on the perfect nature of heavenly bodies – such as the sun and moon – which were called into question by the discovery of sunspots and lunar craters in the early seventeenth century, particularly as a result of the telescopic observations of Galileo.

Aristotle's views of the eternity of the universe dominated the thought‐worlds of late classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Early Christian writers challenged Aristotle on this point. Augustine of Hippo, for example, argued in the early fifth century that God brought everything into existence in a single moment of creation. Yet this created order was not static, but was endowed with the capacity to develop. The universe thus changed over time, becoming what God intended it to be, rather than have being created in its final definitive form. Thomas Aquinas took a similar position, making clear his disagreement with Aristotle on this point. Aquinas appropriated Aristotle's methods appreciatively at many points – but not on this question.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the scientific consensus continued to be a recognizable version of Aristotle's notion of the permanence of the universe. In his bestselling work Worlds in the Making (1908), the Swedish physicist and Nobel Laureate Svante August Arrhenius declared that modern science disclosed an infinite, self‐perpetuating universe, without beginning or end. ‘The Universe in its essence has always been what it is now. Matter, energy, and life have only varied as to shape and position in space.’ While matter and energy might be subject to relocation within the universe, the system as a whole remained unchanged.

This view remained influential, especially in wider intellectual circles, into the 1950s. In 1948, for example, the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that the universe did not require explanation – for example, by an appeal to God. Since the universe has always existed, the brute fact of its existence does not need to be explained. This, of course, was dramatically called into question by the growing realization that the universe appeared to have a beginning – the idea that we now know as the ‘big bang’.

The origins of the ‘big bang’ theory may be argued to lie in the general theory of relativity proposed by Albert Einstein (1879–1955). Einstein's theory was proposed at a time when the scientific consensus favoured the notion of a static universe. The equations which Einstein derived to describe the effects of relativity were interpreted by him in terms of a gravitational and levitational equilibrium. However, the Russian meteorologist Alexander Friedman (1888–1925) noticed that the solutions to the equations which he himself derived pointed to a rather different model. If the universe was perfectly homogenous and expanding, then the universe must have expanded from a singular initial state at some point in the past characterized by zero radius and infinite density, temperature, and curvature. Other solutions to the equations suggested a cycle of expansion and contraction. The analysis was disregarded, probably because it did not conform to the consensus viewpoint within the scientific community.

During the period between 1900 and 1931 astronomers witnessed three dramatic alterations in their view of the universe. First, the accepted value of the size of the star system increased by a factor of ten; secondly, the work of Edwin Hubble (1883–1953) led to the realization that there are other star systems beyond our own galaxy; and thirdly, the behaviour of these galaxies beyond our own indicated that the universe was expanding. The expansion of the universe was a difficult idea to accept at the time, as it clearly implied that the universe had evolved from a very dense initial state – in other words, that the universe had a beginning.

Some astronomers resisted any such suggestion, sometimes fearing the potential religious implications of the idea of the origins of the universe. In 1948, Fred Hoyle and others developed a ‘steady state’ theory of the universe, which held that the universe, although expanding, could not be said to have had a beginning. Matter was continuously created in order to fill in the voids arising from cosmic expansion. There was no need to propose a ‘big bang’ – a pejorative term invented by Hoyle with the intention of discrediting the notion of the origins of the universe.

Opinion began to shift decisively in the 1960s, chiefly on account of the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were working on an experimental microwave antenna at the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. They were experiencing some difficulties. No matter which direction in which they pointed their radio antenna, they picked up an unwanted and obtrusive background hissing noise which they simply could not eliminate. Their initial explanation of this phenomenon was that the pigeons roosting on the antenna were interfering with it. Yet, even after the enforced departure of these offending birds, the hiss remained.

It was only a matter of time before the full significance of this irritating background hiss was grasped. It could be understood as the ‘afterglow’ of a ‘big bang’ – a primal cosmic explosion, the existence of which had been proposed in 1948 by Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman. When seen alongside other pieces of evidence, this background radiation provided significant support for the idea that the universe had a beginning, and caused significant difficulties for Hoyle's rival ‘steady state’ theory.

Since then, the basic elements of the standard cosmological model have become clarified, and have secured widespread support within the scientific community. Although there remain significant areas of debate, this model – further developed during the 1990s and beyond to yield the ‘Lambda‐CDM’ or ‘standard cosmological model’ – is widely agreed to offer the best resonance with observational evidence, despite concerns that some of its assumptions lie beyond empirical verification.

This ‘standard model’ suggests that the universe originated some 13.8 billion years ago, and that it has been expanding and cooling ever since. (However, this figure is subject to change in the light of continuing refinement of the ‘Lambda‐CDM’ model.) The two most significant pieces of evidence in support of this theory are the cosmic microwave background radiation and the relative abundance of light nuclei (such as hydrogen, deuterium, and helium) synthesized in the immediate aftermath of the ‘big bang’. This entails the recognition that the origin of the universe must be recognized to be a singularity – a unique event, something which can never be repeated, and hence never subjected to the precise experimental analysis that some hold to be characteristic of the scientific method.

It was a dramatic development, which caused a sea change in thinking about religious language about ‘creation’. It is often said by atheist apologists that science has eroded the plausibility of faith over the last century. And perhaps that may be true in some respects. Yet in others, it is demonstrably false. The ‘standard cosmological model’ resonates strongly with a Christian narrative of creation.

Hoyle's ‘steady state’ model of the universe was the preferred cosmology of atheists during the early 1960s, as it seemed to eliminate any possibility of a ‘creation’. Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967, Steven Weinberg remarked that ‘the steady state theory is philosophically the most attractive theory because it least resembles the account given in Genesis.’ Unfortunately, he conceded, Hoyle's theory now seemed to be wrong. ‘It is a pity that the steady state theory is contradicted by experiment.’

As we shall see later in this work, the recognition that the universe had an origin has rekindled interest in the Christian narrative of the creation of the world, and how this correlates with a scientific narrative of origination. The idea that scientific advance constantly demands theological retreat is clearly a gross oversimplification! This potentially productive and constructive conversation would have been inconceivable before the First World War. However, the conversation is richer and more nuanced than this, due to the recognition of the ‘fine tuning’ of the fundamental constants of nature for the emergence of life. As we shall see later in this work, the argument about ‘anthropic’ phenomena is both fascinating and potentially unresolvable. The debate continues.

This chapter has provided some important historical context for discussion of the relation of science and religion, focusing on four debates and discussions of the sixteenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries which continue to inform and stimulate more recent discussions of the relation of science and faith in general, as well as certain specific aspects of that relationship. There are, of course, many other discussions which merit attention – some of which will be considered further in . Our attention now, however, now moves on to some of the grand debates within the philosophy of science which clearly have theological significance, which will be considered in the next chapter.

For Further Reading

General Themes

The Emergence of the Medieval Synthesis

Copernicus, Galileo, and the Solar System

Newton, the Mechanical Universe, and Deism

Darwin and the Biological Origins of Humanity

The ‘Big Bang’: New Insights into the Origins of the Universe

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