by Susan Jacoby
As Boyle himself described his conversion, he woke up in a storm with claps of thunder and flashes of lightning so numerous and dazzling that he feared the imminence (and probably the immanence) of Judgment Day. The frightened boy vowed then and there that “all further additions to his life should be more Religiously & carefully employ’d.” Feeling guilty about having found faith only because of fear, he repeated his pledge in tranquil weather “so solemnly that from that Day he dated his Conversion; renewing now he was past Danger, the vow he had made whilst he fancy’d himselfe to be in it…yet at least he might now owe his more deliberate consecration…of himselfe to Piety, to any less noble Motive than that of it’s owne Excellence.”3
Boyle’s overnight adolescent conversion differs markedly from the long, thoroughly considered movement toward Christianity by the young Augustine, but it cannot be dismissed as the overwrought self-dramatization of an impressionable teenager; the scientist’s intense devotion to religion and theological writing throughout his life rules out such an interpretation. If his had been a spur-of-the-moment teenage conversion, he probably would have gone through numerous subsequent conversions—as so many of his contemporaries did. Precisely because Boyle was a scientist, his awakening to a more orthodox form of faith remains important to educated evangelical Christians today. An entry in the archives of Christianity Today, the evangelical magazine founded by the Reverend Billy Graham, misleadingly asserts that Boyle’s scientific inquiries can be dated from the time of his conversion. “The ‘science’ of the day disagreed with the Bible,” the article states. “Was the Bible true, or the science? Robert would have committed suicide over this troubling issue if he had not believed that God forbade it. Instead, he determined to press hard after truth. He had become one of the Protestant thinkers who exposed the nonsensical and inaccurate ideas of the time and replaced them with ideas based on experiments.”4 The quotation marks around the word “science” in this passage imply that Boyle’s religious conversion was somehow intended to help him distinguish between so-called false science, which disagreed with the Bible, and true science, which could be reconciled with biblical supernaturalism. However, nearly all of the insights of the dawning age of science—whether they turned out to be scientifically true or false in light of later knowledge and discoveries—contradicted the Bible. This was as true of Leonardo da Vinci’s fifteenth-century observations of marine fossils, which could not be reconciled with the biblical story of Noah’s flood because the fossils had been deposited in different strata of rock at different periods of time, as it was of the many anatomical and astronomical insights of Boyle’s century.*4 The out-of-season thunderstorm that triggered Boyle’s religious awakening would have been seen as a purely natural phenomenon by a great many contemporary scientists and philosophers. We can be as certain as it is possible to be of anything that Spinoza, Leibniz, Galileo, William Harvey, or, for that matter, seventeenth-century popes were no more disposed to believe that thunderstorms predicted Armageddon than that lightning was instigated by Thor’s hammer.
What seems more likely than Christianity Today’s tortuous attempt to attribute Boyle’s conversion to his worries about false “science” is that the young Robert, educated at Eton and traveling through Europe in order to broaden his cultural and linguistic background, was already quite aware that it would take stronger religious convictions than those inspired by a reflexive adherence to an established church to deal with the philosophical implications of science without quotation marks. Throughout his life, Boyle would be subject to doubts about his faith—some evoked by ancient philosophers, and some by contemporaries, who included Spinoza. Boyle viewed these doubts as bearing the same relation to the spirit as a toothache to the body—“for tho it be not mortal, ’tis very troublesome.”5 He even acknowledged that “the greatest number of those that pass for Christians, profess themselves such only because Christianity is the religion of their Parents, or their Country, or their Prince, or those that have been, or may be, their Benefactors; which is in effect to say, that they are Christians, but upon the same grounds that would have made them Mahometans, if they had been born and bred in Turkey.”6 Even today, this insight remains uncommon among people convinced (as Boyle was) that their own religion embodies absolute truth. Boyle’s disdain for reflexive, unexamined, “inherited” faith was responsible for his determination to contribute as much as possible toward the conversion of “heathen” peoples under the control of the expanding British Empire. Born to wealth and privilege, Boyle became even richer as a director of the East India Company and personally financed translations of the (Protestant) Bible into Malay, Turkish, Lithuanian, and Gaelic. The Catholic Irish did not appreciate having greater access to the King James Bible, which was used by the hated English Protestants. Turks of Muslim persuasion may not have been excited, either. But no matter: attracting potential converts was the whole point of Boyle’s underwriting of foreign-language translations of his Bible. He believed not in conversion by the sword but only in conversion by proselytizing. In his will, Boyle set up a fund for lectures on the relationship between religion and new discoveries in science, but these lectures were aimed at atheists, Muslims, Jews, and other non-Christian “infidels.” They were not supposed to deal with differences among Christian sects (which Boyle considered deeply regrettable), although many of the early lectures did take up the issues raised by Christian deism.
Boyle became one of the chief authors of what is today called the intelligent design argument for the existence of a divine creator—a being who set the universe in motion and allows most corporal affairs to be governed by mechanistic natural laws but is also capable, for reasons beyond human understanding, of suspending those laws to perform miracles. The inadequacy of human understanding in the face of mystery and miracle is the a priori assumption underlying the impossible attempt to truly reconcile empirical science with the miraculous. In his 1675 essay Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection, Boyle clearly sets forth the crucial, not-to-be-questioned assumptions supporting the existence of miracles. “For supposing the truth of the history of the scriptures,” he writes, “we may observe that the power of God has already extended itself to the performance of such things as import as much as we need infer, sometimes by suspending the natural actings of bodies upon one another, and sometimes by endowing human and other bodies with preternatural qualities.”7 More than three centuries later, the current director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, would say essentially the same thing in an interview about his conversion, at age twenty-seven, from atheism to evangelical Protestantism. “If God is who God claims to be, and who I believe he is, then he is not explainable in natural terms,” Collins told the Public Broadcasting Service. “He is outside the natural world; outside of space and time. So if God chose to intervene from time to time in the natural world by allowing the occurrence of miraculous events, I don’t see why that is an illogical possibility. Once one accepts that idea that there could be something outside the natural, then miracles become possible.”8 The seventeenth-century chemist and the twenty-first-century head of all federally financed American scientific research say essentially the same thing: it’s a mystery. (Unlike Boyle, Collins was not converted suddenly in a thunderstorm, but struggled with doubts for many years. His decision to embrace religion was made, however, at a particular time during a hike in the mountains, when he felt, “I cannot resist this another moment.”)
For Spinoza, the reconciliation of science with belief in miracles was impossible. To him, what people called a miracle was simply a phenomenon insufficiently exposed to the light of reason and insufficiently examined (and examinable) by contemporary science. The absence of a reasonable and natural explanation for what is generally considered a miracle in no way precluded the discovery of such an explanation in the future. Eclipses of the sun, violent earthquakes, great floods, Boyle’s conversion-inducing thunderstorms, long considered su
pernatural manifestations of the Creator’s power (or the power of the Creator’s nemesis), were already known to have natural causes, and there was no reason why the natural causes of other mysterious (to the contemporary mind) phenomena should not be unraveled in the future. Spinoza’s scathing assessment of miracles was one element of the Tractatus that would eventually place him beyond the pale for Boyle, Oldenburg, and any number of liberal religious believers. (I found it easy, while reading the famous opening paragraphs of Spinoza’s chapter “Of Miracles,” to understand why a devout student at a religious college once told me that he was “shocked” and unable to sleep for several nights after reading the passages. If it is strong stuff for a believer today, one can only imagine how Spinoza’s rejection of miracles must have affected religious thinkers 350 years ago.)
As men are accustomed to call Divine the knowledge which transcends human understanding, so also do they stile Divine, or the work of God, anything of which the cause is not generally known: for the masses think that the power and providence of God are most clearly displayed by events that are extraordinary and contrary to the conception they have formed of nature, especially if such events bring them any profit or convenience: they think that the clearest possible proof of God’s existence is afforded when nature, as they suppose, breaks her accustomed order, and consequently they believe that those who explain or endeavour to understand phenomena or miracles through their natural causes are doing away with God and his providence….
The masses then style unusual phenomena “miracles,” and partly from piety, partly for the sake of opposing the students of science, prefer to remain in ignorance of natural causes, and only to hear of those things in which they know least, and consequently admire most. In fact, the common people can only adore God, and refer all things to His power by removing natural causes, and conceiving things happening out of their due course, and only admire the power of God when the power of nature is conceled as in subjection to it.9
As Boyle made clear in his rationalization for that most miraculous of all miracles, the resurrection of the dead, his views on the subject could not have been more alien to Spinoza’s philosophy. Boyle also objected strongly to the use of the term “nature” as identical to, or even as a substitute for, God. In his 1686 essay, “A Free Enquiry Into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature,” Boyle argued that the word “nature” should never be used when what is really meant is the Divinity and Creator. To write of nature instead of God “seems not to me very suitable to the profound reverence we owe the divine majesty, since it seems to make the creator differ too little by far from a created (not to say imaginary) being….”10 The use of nature was “harsh and needless” and “in use only among the schoolmen.”*5
Boyle also objected—and here is the heart of his disagreement with Spinoza and with the later philosophers of the High Enlightenment—to references to the “laws of nature” (while admitting that even he was wont to lapse and use the vulgar phrase when referring to well-established facts such as the movements of heavenly bodies). But Boyle emphasized that philosophers should never use language so loosely on matters of ultimate importance—such as nature itself. It is impossible to overstate the degree of danger, from the perspective of orthodox religious thinkers, inherent in the Spinozan idea that God and nature were one and indistinguishable. The 1697 indictment of Thomas Aikenhead, which served as the rationale for his execution for blasphemy, excoriated the young student for claiming “that God, the world, and nature, are but one thing, and that the world was from eternity.”11 Boyle also considered such views blasphemous. A law, according to Boyle, could only be “a notional role of acting according to the declared will of a superior.” He further argued that “nothing but an intellectual being can be properly capable of receiving and acting by a law. For if it does not understand, it cannot know what the will of the legislator is; nor can it have any intention to accomplish it, nor can it act with regard to it, or know what it does, in acting, either conform to it or deviate from it. And it is intelligible to me that God should at the beginning impress determinate notions upon the parts of matter, and guide them as he thought requisite for the primordial constitution of things, and that, ever since, he should by his ordinary and general concourse maintain those powers which he gave the parts of matter to transmit their motion thus and thus to one another.”12
The intelligent designer, then, accounts for miracles and the ordinary workings of nature, for the demonstrable and the undemonstrable. Boyle’s work laid the foundation for the most famous argument for intelligent design, articulated in the late eighteenth century by the English philosopher William Paley, whose “watchmaker God” served as the foundation for Christian deism during the High Enlightenment and frequently appears on anti-evolution Web sites today.*6 Boyle, too, had used images of clocks in his seventeenth-century arguments for intelligent design. Neither Boyle nor Paley came to grips with the fact that all of the marvelous inner workings of a clock or watch are useless if they lack an outside source of energy—in their day provided by human hands winding a mechanism, in ours mainly by batteries or digital chips. This does not pose a logical (or theological) difficulty if man himself is the product of intelligent design (apart from the question of why an intelligent designer would not make a man who could invent an everlasting battery).
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It is difficult to evaluate the influence of seventeenth-century science on the prevalence of religious conversion in an era characterized by large new religious movements, notable individual conversions, and religious violence connected with widespread political instability. Knowledge of science, like philosophy, was available primarily to a literate elite. And yet, as was already evident from the early decades of the Reformation, the printing press fostered more general discussion of all ideas that would once have been solely the province of a literate few. If one literate man in a seventeenth-century household read a pamphlet about contemporary science’s conclusions concerning the solar system, it is unlikely that he would fail to share the information that the earth moved around the sun with other members of his family.
Certainly, many conversions—Margaret Fell’s, for example—would seem, on the surface, to have little or nothing to do with the new science. Yet the Quaker ideal of the primacy of individual conscience over hierarchical thinking and authority fitted well with the hierarchy-shattering implications of experimental research that was overturning mistaken concepts, held since antiquity, about everything from the motion of planets to the circulation of blood. As Boyle’s case demonstrates—and he was far from alone—even leading figures in the new science might convert to a more personally demanding form of faith and insist that there was no conflict between their religion and their experimental work as researchers. There is not the slightest indication that medical luminaries such as William Harvey (1578–1657) were even slightly worried about the implications of new medical discoveries for religion. Yet the new science and its inventions did frighten many dissident Protestants. The large Anabaptist movements, whose traces remain today in relatively small Amish, Mennonite, and Hutterite communities in North America, turned into faiths noted for their rejection of changing science and technology.
The inarguable and most important impact of early Enlightenment science on religion was its inevitable challenge to the notion of unchanging, accepted truth. The most earnest, if literally fantastic, attempts by religious scientists like Boyle and Newton to reconcile the validity of experimental science with belief in the supernatural could not halt the process by which the questioning of one long-established truth often, and inevitably, leads to the questioning of another. The unstoppable expansion of doubt, once loosed upon the world, also had a personal dimension: scientists of different religions (whether they were considered heretical or devout by the guardians of their own faiths) often knew one another personally and corresponded directly instead of through intermediaries. Spinoza exchanged letters, displaying a mixture of respect and rivalry, with Chr
istiaan Huygens, the pre-eminent Dutch scientist of the 1660s and 1670s. Born into a wealthy Dutch Calvinist family, Huygens respected Spinoza as a naturalistic philosopher but also looked down on him as a Jew, referring to him in letters as “nostre Juif,” “le Juif de Voorburg,” or, plainly, as “l’Israelite.”13 This prejudice was no less strong for being rooted more in social class than in religion, but the fact is that, a century earlier, it would have been unlikely for Huygens and Spinoza to know each other at all. Moreover, Huygens’s affinity (to the degree that he possessed it) for Spinoza’s mathematically grounded, mechanistic philosophy was made possible by the former’s brand of deism. Like Spinoza, Huygens rejected miracles. Huygens refused to see a Dutch Reformed minister when he was thought to be on the brink of death, and his brother remonstrated with him after his recovery for showing “insufficient concern for the salvation of his soul.”14 (Huygens seems to have been an unusually prickly character even when measured against the other vainglorious geniuses of his era; he broke off correspondence with Newton in 1673 over a dispute probably rooted in the entirely correct perception of Western Europeans that Newton was the greater scientist of the two.)