The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  Is this not what we feel when we look at nature, and see wondrous and inexplicable events, such as new species arising as others die off? Babbage inquired. Is this not typically explained by supposing that God, our creator, our inventor if you will, has intervened in the world causing this event, outside of the natural order of things? Is this not exactly what we call a “miracle”?17

  The crowd paid rapt attention to their host. They were not expecting a sermon; some tried to get into the properly sober frame of mind for one. Others looked nervously around, wondering if they would be very visible trying to leave the room. But Babbage shocked everyone with what he said next.

  As you saw, I, the inventor of the machine, did not have to intervene in its workings to bring about this change in the calculating function. Rather, with my foresight, I impressed upon the machine a rule that caused it, when the results reached 100, to change the law upon which it calculated. In like manner does God impress His creation with laws, laws that have built into them future alterations in their patterns. God’s omnipotence entails that He can foretell what causes will be needed to bring about the effects He desires; God does not need to intervene each and every time some new cause is required. To think this is to burden God with our own infirmities, the limitations of our own nature. Miracles are not cases of intercession of God outside the normal laws governing the physical world. God, the creator of these laws, has built into them the changes necessary to bring about his purposes. God, then, is like the inventor of a complex, powerful calculating engine. (And—though Babbage may have restrained himself from pointing this out—as the inventor of the calculating machine before them, he was a bit godlike himself!) The crowd, delighted, burst into applause, and then dispersed for refreshments and more dancing.

  As his audiences realized, Babbage was portraying God in a most unconventional manner. On this view God was not a mechanic, constantly tinkering with his invention, but a divine programmer, who had preset his Creation to run according to natural law, requiring no further intervention. By explicitly linking this image of God with the origin of new species, Babbage was characteristically jumping headfirst into controversy. In the preceding decades geologists and amateur fossil hunters had been digging up clear evidence that new species had emerged at various times in the history of the earth. Were these new species created by an act of God, intervening outside of natural law—by a new “miracle” each and every time? Or—and few people would seriously consider this—could they have emerged through some sort of purely natural process, perhaps even by a kind of “transmutation” from the older species?

  Babbage was provocatively coming down on the side of a purely natural process, even if it was one started off by a divine programmer. With this original—and, in most circles, heretical—view of God, Babbage would lead the way in pointing toward a new view of the relation between science and religion, one in which religion and science could coexist without religion being given the upper hand. This view would soon come to dominate the scientific world. And he very likely planted a seed in the mind of one of his audience members, Charles Darwin, who at that moment was trying to reconcile his belief in God with his growing suspicion that species were not “fixed,” that they in fact changed over time into new species. Darwin, too, would soon come to see God as a kind of divine programmer, setting his creation in advance with the conditions for the origin of new species.

  Babbage’s public demonstrations of his view of God’s “miracles” had been sparked by an argument he was having with Whewell about God’s role in the natural world, a dispute from which their friendship—and, indeed, the unity of the Philosophical Breakfast Club—would never entirely recover.

  IN 1834 Whewell sat for a portrait by William Drummond, a painting commissioned and paid for by Jones. The portrait shows Whewell with piercing dark eyes, movie-star good looks, and slightly disheveled hair, in contrast to the very formal attire that he wears. The occasion Jones wished to commemorate was the success of Whewell’s “breakthrough” book, published the year before: a work on the relation between science and religion that gained Whewell a large popular audience for the first time. In this book, his contribution to the “Bridgewater Treatises,” Whewell had argued for a view of God’s role in the natural world that was more typical of the age, and vastly different from Babbage’s conception.

  That Babbage and Whewell were thinking about God and His relation to science was not unusual. At that time, especially in Britain, science and religion were not considered enemies; on the contrary, they were seen as compatriots, both devoted to an appreciation of the Creator of the universe. As Bacon had put it in his Advancement of Learning, “Let no man … think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavor an endless progression or proficience in both.” The idea that nature was one of God’s two books—the other, of course, being the Bible—was the foundation of “natural theology,” which held that the study of the natural world brought men closer to God, because the world itself contained evidence of God’s existence and goodness. The most renowned proponent of this viewpoint in the nineteenth century was William Paley (1743–1805), an Anglican priest, former senior wrangler and fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge.

  Paley’s books influenced generations of Cambridge students. His Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy was required for the Tripos exams into the nineteenth century, until Whewell dislodged it, replacing it with his own textbooks on moral philosophy—even after it was no longer required reading, the book remained on the syllabus at Cambridge until 1920. Another Paley work, A View of the Evidences of Christianity, was required reading at Cambridge University until the twentieth century. This book attempted to prove that the New Testament was a historical record of revelation; Paley argued, against David Hume’s famous rejection of miracles, that the testimony of the apostles regarding Christ’s resurrection was reliable. Most Cambridge students also read another of his books, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, first published in 1802.18

  In Natural Theology, Paley elaborated the now-famous metaphor of the world as a watch designed and constructed by a divine watchmaker. Paley claimed that if he happened to stumble upon a stone while walking along a heath, it would not be surprising, nor would it require any special kind of explanation to account for the stone’s being there. It could just be a matter of chance. But if he found a watch lying on the heath, that would lead to an entirely different conclusion. “When we come to inspect the watch,” Paley explained, “we perceive … that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day.… The inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker.”19

  In Paley’s view, the existence of a watch requires the existence of a watchmaker, someone who made it such that all of its parts work together for the purpose of keeping time. Mere chance could not account for this: the separate parts of the watch could not just randomly come together to create a working watch. Organisms are even more complicated than watches, Paley continued. How could such an exquisite organ as the human eye have come into being, if not through the agency of an intelligent designer? There must be some creator who brought together all the parts to function “just so,” for the specific purpose of sight. Moreover, how did the polar bear end up with white fur, so well suited for evading predators in the snowy climes in which it lives? The fitness of organisms for surviving in their environments could not arise by mere chance or random accident.

  Chance was not an option for the scientifically minded in those days. Today, our awareness of quantum mechanics, which seems to hold that there is an irreducibly random component to nature, has made us more comfortable with the notion of chance playing a role in the universe.
But in the nineteenth century, randomness was seen as unscientific. When an event seemed random, it was because we did not yet understand the cause; as Hume had put it, “ ’Tis commonly allow’d by philosophers that what the vulgar call chance is nothing but a secret and conceal’d cause.”20 It seemed obvious to most people that if chance—a mere cosmic roll of the dice—was not a scientifically viable explanation for the fitness of organisms to their environments, or the complexity of organs, then the only other feasible explanation was God’s Design. If Paley’s view sounds familiar, that is because his position—and even his favorite example of the human eye—has been taken up by modern proponents of “intelligent design,” who argue that natural causes (such as those described by evolutionary theory) are not sufficient to account for the emergence of complex organs or new species, and that God must have intervened to bring them about.

  Whewell shared Paley’s natural-theology outlook, with one important difference. Like Paley and Bacon, Whewell believed that, as he put it in a diary entry from 1825, knowing the laws of nature is like knowing “the language in which the book of nature is written.” It is God who puts these laws into the world; as Whewell waxes lyrical, it is God who “paints the western sky, and streaks the tulip, and scents the rose, and gives its flavor to the ananas [pineapple].” Studying nature and its laws is a way to learn about the workings of the mind that created those laws, the Divine Mind, and thus brings us closer to God.21

  Whewell had no doubt that the study of nature was consistent with religion; indeed, he believed that “truth cannot conflict with truth.” In later years—signaling his departure from the view of Paley and modern-day intelligent-design proponents—he would go so far as to contend that if a law of nature discovered by proper scientific method seems to conflict with theology, there must be a problem with our interpretation of the Bible. But in the late 1820s and 1830s, Whewell was content to argue for the consistency of science and religion, and he did so with his friend Hugh James Rose, who felt that studying science took men away from religious pursuits, and closer to an atheistic outlook. Rose rejected natural theology, not because it was unscientific, but because it was, he thought, irreligious. On the contrary, Whewell chided, it seemed obvious to him that there was nothing in the pursuit of scientific knowledge that could be considered damaging to a religious outlook. “If I were not so persuaded,” he admitted, “I should be much puzzled to account for our being invested, as we so amply are, with the faculties that lead us to the discovery of scientific truth. It would be strange if our Creator should be found urging us on in a career which tended to a forgetfulness of him.”22 When Rose protested that the indulgence in scientific study was just like the indulgence in other physical pleasures, Whewell sharply corrected him. “It appears to me,” he instructed his friend, “that our faculties for discovering and enjoying truth, and our faculties for making champagne and catching turtle and then making beasts of ourselves by too intense perception of their beauties, are altogether different things.”23

  It is not surprising that Whewell was thinking about how to reconcile science and religion at that time. As required for all fellows of Trinity after an initial seven-year period, Whewell was then in the process of being ordained a priest in the Anglican Church. This requirement was a reflection of the university’s status as an institution still conceived mainly as the training ground for the Church of England’s clergy. Fellows who were not inclined to ordination would stay for the initial seven years and then leave to find another profession. Others would seek ordination sooner than the deadline. Although Whewell had been ordained a deacon by 1823, he had waited until the very deadline to submit himself to the required admission to priest’s orders.24

  As an ordained priest already known for his expertise in science, Whewell was an obvious choice for being tapped to write one of the Bridgewater Treatises in the early 1830s. The Earl of Bridgewater (a relative of the canal-building duke) had died in 1829, leaving the considerable sum of £8,000 for the writing and publishing of a book, or a series of books, intended to show how the study of science could serve religion by increasing our belief in God. As the will stated, the works should illustrate “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.” The books were intended to update Paley’s view, mustering the forces of the most cutting-edge science to strengthen natural theology.

  The president of the Royal Society, Davies Gilbert, was charged with selecting the writer or writers of these works, in consultation with the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Gilbert quickly decided that the money would be best divided into eight parts, so that eight men of science could benefit from the largesse, and also so that the books could be written on eight different topics. One of the most important of these would be the Bridgewater Treatise on astronomy, showing how God’s glory was visible in the very heavens. (Other treatises would include one by Peter Mark Roget—later of thesaurus fame—on animal and vegetable physiology, and William Buckland’s on geology.)

  Whewell was not Gilbert’s first choice for the treatise on astronomy. Gilbert initially asked Herschel, who was not only the most eminent astronomer of the day, but also, as one of the leaders of the reform movement in the Royal Society, the most politic of the possibilities (this was soon after Babbage published his Decline of Science, but three months before Gilbert announced his resignation as president of the Royal Society). Herschel, however, declined the commission, giving two reasons. First, he raised his general reluctance to write for money, telling Gilbert he felt “repugnance” at the thought of promoting religious belief or scientific views “under the direct and avowed influence of pecuniary reward.” At around the same time he returned to the editor of the Quarterly Review his fee for writing a review of Mary Somerville’s Mechanism of the Heavens, noting that he did not expect payment for his work.25 But Herschel more urgently pressed his second point, which was that the beneficiary of such a generous windfall should be one of the men “who live, or rather starve on their science, but who prefer hunger in that good cause to competency in a less dignified calling.”26

  Learning of Herschel’s refusal, and the reasons for it, the Bishop of London suggested Whewell to Gilbert. As a fellow of one of the richest colleges at Cambridge, Whewell was not starving for science, but he was certainly not independently a man of means like Herschel or Babbage. The £1,000 he received for his Bridgewater Treatise made Whewell a wealthy man for the first time in his life. One of his first steps was to give up the job of handling the bills and accounts of his pupils, keeping only the tutoring part of his responsibilities to them; as a consequence he earned less money from the pupils, but he gained more time.27 He also moved into nicer rooms in Trinity, those vacated by Julius Hare when he left Cambridge to take up the parish of Herstmonceux. These spacious and sunny rooms were in the gateway tower of New Court, to the left of Neville’s Court, overlooking the “fine walk of limes” that led to the Cam, “with the nearest pair of trees almost waving against the window.”28 Hare would later reminisce that his old rooms (now the undergraduate admission office of Trinity) were “the admiration of everybody who entered them.”29 With the proceeds of his book, Whewell could even afford to renovate before moving in, with new paint and wallpaper and furniture. He commissioned two paintings of Lancaster, so he could look upon his home town from his new aerie in Trinity.30

  At the same time, earning so much money made Whewell more apprehensive than usual about the quality of his work. Generally, as he had explained to Jones during Jones’s struggle to complete the book on political economy, “while you work for years in the elaboration of slowly developing ideas, I take the first buds of thought and make a nosegay out of them.”31 This time, however, he fretted, “In this matter, where I am to receive a thousand pounds, it is by no means enough that I should know that I am right.”32 He sent his manuscript to Jones for comments and suggestions. Jones procrastinated in his reply—so much so that Whewell grew exasperated with him, reminding hi
s friend sharply that “it much concerns me what you think!”33 Whewell spent more time on this work than on his other books, taking over one and a half years to complete it.

  The hard work paid off. Whewell’s book, Astronomy and General Physics, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, became the most popular of the Bridgewater Treatises, going through nine editions in Whewell’s lifetime.

  His goal in the book was, as he wrote, to show how “every advance in our knowledge of the universe harmonizes with the belief of a most wise and good God.”34 He started off right on the frontispiece with a quote from Isaac Newton, showing that even the most famous scientist of all time had agreed with the natural-theology position. In his Principia Mathematica, the book in which he proved the law of universal gravitation, Newton had explained, “This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.” Two years earlier, Brewster’s Life of Newton had introduced the British reading public to the religious side of Newton, which had been downplayed by French writers on Newton (who tended to be atheists themselves) such as the physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot.

  Whewell used examples originally employed by Newton to show how the structure of the universe indicates the handiwork of its Creator. All the planets circle the sun in their nearly circular orbits, all in nearly the same plane.35 The sun is in the center of the solar system, an arrangement necessary for us to receive the amount of light and heat needed for life on our planet; this could not have been by chance.36 Whewell quoted from a letter of Newton to Richard Bentley (reproduced in Brewster’s book from the originals held at Trinity College), in which Newton admitted that he could accept the possibility that matter may have formed into separate bodies merely by the force of gravitation; but he still could not see how the “luminous” matter of stars and sun could have separated, by itself, from the darker matter forming planets and their satellites. This, Newton noted, “I am forced to ascribe to the counsel and contrivance of a voluntary agent.”37