The Watch on the Heath: Science and Religion before Darwin

CHAPTER FOUR John Ray: Founding Father

‘When you look at a sun-dial or a water clock, you consider that it tells the time by art and not by chance; how then can it be consistent to suppose that the world, which includes both the works of art in question, the craftsmen who made them, and everything else besides, can be devoid of purpose and of reason.’

Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 77 BC

‘If the number of Creation be so exceedingly great, how great nay immense must needs be the Power and Wisdom of him who Form’d them all.’

John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Worksof Creation, 1691

‘What absolute Necessity [is there] for just such a Number of Species of Animals or Plants?’

Samuel Clarke, Demonstration of the Being andAttributes of God, 1705

The central proposition of natural theology is what David Hume, in Dialogues, put in the mouth of Cleanthes (the most ‘accurate and philosophical’ of his protagonists):

[The world is] nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines … all these various machines, and even their most minute parts are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men … the curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance, of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence … By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.

This is the essence of an argument from design and a hundred years later, Paley’s watch analogy said the same thing: ‘As for the watch, so for nature there must exist a Creator.’ By extension, the same conclusion must apply to ‘every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design … in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.’ As the watch has a maker, so we have a Maker. As the watch exists for a purpose, so do we.

When Charles Darwin sat at the window of his rooms at Christ’s College in 1831 reading Natural Theology, he found the arguments ‘conclusive … the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door.’ Camped a year later in the Brazilian forest and seeing at first hand the biological riches of the tropics that the explorer-naturalist Humboldt had extolled, he wrote in his journal that ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind’.35 A contemporary anonymous reviewer of the first edition of Paley’s book noted: ‘No thinking man, we conceive, can doubt that there are marks of design in the universe.’36 Similarly, in 1876, that quintessentially Victorian critic Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) praised it – but as if trying not to get his hands dirty: ‘The book, whatever its philosophical shortcomings, is a marvel of skilled exposition. It states, with admirable clearness and in a most attractive form, the argument which has the greatest popular force and which, duly etherialised, still passes muster with metaphysicians.’37 In 1996, the biochemist Michael Behe continued the argument seamlessly: ‘The reason for the conclusion [that the watch had been designed] is just as Paley implied: the ordering of separate components to accomplish a function beyond that of the individual components.’38

The same anonymous reviewer of Natural Theology had also grumbled: ‘On the subject of Natural Theology no one looks for originality and no one expects to find it.’ Given Paley’s broadminded approach to borrowing other people’s sermons, we should not be surprised to learn that the great watch analogy originated elsewhere and that natural theology itself belonged to a long-standing tradition to which his book simply gave its greatest and most popular expression. Leslie Stephen acidly noted, ‘The argument is familiar, and probably has been familiar since the first days when it occurred to anyone to provide a logical basis for theology.’ Paley himself called the watch analogy ‘not only popular but vulgar’ and for contemporary readers it was so familiar an analogy that they would not have thought of attributing the idea exclusively to him. (Fifty years later, enough history had been forgotten that he was accused of plagiarism, the source of these suspicions no doubt lying in the fact that, in accord with the custom of the time, Paley did not supply footnoted references to his sources.) In fact, the watch analogy can be traced back a long way.

In Paley’s time, the most immediate exponents of the watch analogy may have been Baron d’Holback (The System of Nature or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World, 1770)39 or Bernard Nieuwentyt (The Religious Philosopher, or the Right Use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator, 1709),40 who wrote of a man ‘cast in a desert or solitary place, where few people are used to pass [coming upon] a Watch shewing the Hours, Minutes and Days of the month’. Hence the charge of plagiarism. Before Nieuwentyt’s quite explicit use of the analogy, it occurs in a host of works, including Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), which we shall visit in some detail in a later chapter. Burnet wrote: ‘For a thing that consists of a multitude of pieces aptly joyn’d, we cannot but conceive to have had those pieces, at one time or another, put together. ’Twere hard to conceive an eternal Watch, whose pieces were never separate one from another, nor ever in any other form than that of a Watch.’ Perhaps the earliest use of the analogy is in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum (one of the models for Hume’s Dialogues) where his Stoic philosopher asks: ‘Suppose a traveller to carry into Scythia or Britain the orrery recently constructed by our friend Posidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets … would any single native person doubt that the orrery was the work of a rational being?’41 In fact, as we go along, we will frequently see that several arguments of eighteenth-century scholars consist of little more than a reiteration of what various classical authors had said two millennia before.

One of the great assets of natural theology and the evidence it drew from the world of living animals and plants, is that it was understandable to a broad following who did not have to know code words of contemporary philosophy, or have mastered calculus and chemistry to follow the argument completely. Natural history enjoys a privileged position among the sciences both in its broad accessibility and in the extraordinary aesthetic pleasure inherent in the subject. This is obvious to amateur and professional alike, and only increases the more deeply one probes into the complexities of life. One has only to think of the mechanical perfection underlying the flowing grace of a cheetah in full stride, or the whorled mathematical perfection of a sunflower. It has therefore always had an extremely wide appeal, whether for a clergyman such as the Reverend Gilbert White who, with his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), defined the role of the careful observer of local nature in ways that had not been thought about since Virgil and Pliny, or for explorers to the far reaches of the globe like Joseph Banks who travelled with Captain Cook and brought back new natural wonders to test our grasp of the limits of creation.

Above all, nature is always fascinating for what seems to be the common sense, the transparent obviousness, of the fit of its forms to their functions. The elephant’s trunk, sometimes powerful, sometimes delicate, is a masterpiece of dexterity far exceeding that of the human hand. The sabre-tooth’s canine was a lethal weapon. The barn owl not only has huge forward-directed eyes for detecting its prey, it can also use its supersensitive ears to pinpoint the source of the slightest rustle of leaves caused by a mouse – in the dark. Some orchids have patterns on their petals that we cannot see, but a wasp, using ultraviolet light and seeing there a picture of another wasp, alights to try to copulate with it and thus unwittingly helps pollinate the flower. Charles Darwin, knowing of a flower with a particular shape, famously predicted that there must exist a kind of moth with a foot-long proboscis to feed deep within it: eventually it was discovered. This is but a tiny set of examples of the exquisite ways in which living organisms are ‘adapted’ to their environments and ‘fitted’ to particular ways of life. Such glories of nature have always been the principal evidence that natural theologians adduce for the existence of a creating God – the argument a posteriori that Hume allowed as the only possible proof. The vast bulk of writing in natural theology is taken up with elucidating and sermonising upon long lists of such examples from nature; they are the basic evidence for the prosecution’s case: such perfections of design and function appear to require us to conclude that a master creator has been at work.

Paley was a logician who lived by the cut and thrust of argument. He added the abstractions of philosophy to the science-versus-religion debate but, as in any great court battle, the case for natural theology was first grounded in hard evidence and that base had long since been constructed by John Ray (1627–1705), its founding father. In many ways Ray and Paley were complementary and opposite. While Paley, at the end of the Age of Reason, depended upon the tightness of his logic, Ray, at the beginning of the scientific revolution, was someone who revelled in facts – both in getting them straight and getting them in order. While Paley was a man who fitted somewhat awkwardly in the machinery of the Church of England, he was nonetheless a true churchman. John Ray was a man of his time – a dissenter.

For every person who is happy to conform, to belong, to submit to the group will, there is always at least one who will not compromise: someone who is sure enough of their own ground to stand apart independently, usually on a matter of principle. It is a great tradition, reinforced periodically by governments who try to force us into what the American poet Emerson called ‘a foolish consistency’ (‘the hobgoblin of feeble minds’). Such was John Ray. He was not just a dissenter; he was a Dissenter. In order to prepare for the Church, he had attended Cambridge in 1644 where his brilliance in science, languages and mathematics quickly showed. He was made a Fellow of Trinity College in 1649, Lecturer in 1651, and sub-Dean in 1658. In 1660 he was ordained as a priest. A stellar career as a Cambridge scholar seemed in prospect, with the living of a rural parish or two to support him and to provide the freedom to pursue his great interest, natural science. Happily for us, although he had already published his first book – a compilation of the plants of Cambridge – his timing was bad.

Those were tense years within the state religion and the state itself. The English Civil War was ended, but bitter ill-feelings persisted, particularly among those aristocratic, royalist Cavaliers and their supporters who had lost their lands to the regicide Puritan Roundheads (thus creating a new landed middle class). The broad church that Elizabeth I had carefully nurtured through dozens of compromises had been thrust aside in a passion of radical Puritanism. With the restoration of the monarchy (in the form of Charles II) and election of a reactionary, strongly Cavalier Parliament in 1661, the formal process of retribution began. The obvious target was Puritanism itself and legislation, rather than the sword, was the tool. The Act of Uniformity passed by Parliament in 1662 was not just religious; it was also political, restricting the civil and religious freedoms by codifying the nature of the Church of England and its practices and imposing severe sanctions on dissenters. Instead of a broad church that could tolerate a range of ways of practising Christianity, Parliament opted for conformity. Non-conformists became liable to severe sanctions, including prison or transportation.

All clerics and teachers (and most definitely all fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges) were obliged to conform. This meant that they had to worship according to the restored 1549 Book of Common Prayer and swear to the Thirty-nine Articles of 1571 that defined the core doctrines of the Anglican Church. Back in 1643, as a price for their support, Scottish Presbyterians had forced the Roundheads to swear the Solemn League and Covenant which, among other radical measures, abolished bishops and allowed individual congregations to ordain their own priests. The 1662 Act required all clerics of the Church of England to adjure this oath.

Ray had not sworn the oath and had in fact been ordained by a bishop. He was certainly comfortable with the Thirty-nine Articles. But he objected to the coercion; he could not agree that someone who had sworn a sacred oath should be forced to abandon it. At the same time he may already have been restive for greater independence to continue his scientific work. For reasons, particular or principled, that are now unclear, along with 2,000 others he refused to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity.42 With this, he gave up his fellowship at Cambridge and could no longer teach or preach, although he retained a lay membership of the Anglican Church.

Ray’s father was the village blacksmith at Black Notely in Essex, where Ray was born in 1627. Little else is known about his father, but we know that Ray’s mother was ‘a very religious and good Woman, particularly to her Neighbours that were lame or sick’. Elizabeth Ray was a herbalist healer, which required her to have an excellent working knowledge of botany. From her, Ray acquired a love of plants, of all nature, of enquiry, and above all an appreciation of the value of precise knowledge. For example, a herbal healer must be able instantly to tell the difference between two very similar looking plants, one edible, the other lethal: the wild parsnip and water hemlock. As Nicolas Culpepper described them in his famous 1652 herbal, The English Physitian or an astrologo-physiscal Discourse of the vulgar Herbs of this Nation, the former ‘easeth pains and stitches in the sides, and dissolveth wind both in the stomach and bowels’. The latter is ‘exceeding cold and dangerous, especially to be taken inwardly’.

If we look at Culpepper or another typical herbal of the period, John Gerard’s Historie of Plants (1597),43 with its delightful prose and 1,800 woodcut illustrations, we can guess that John Ray had considerable command of a wide range of plants and their properties, medical and otherwise, even before he entered Cambridge. A lengthy recuperation from an illness in 1650 seems to have given Ray the leisure to explore the countryside and the world of plants more fully. ‘First I was fascinated and then absorbed by the rich spectacle of the meadows in spring time; then I was filled with wonder and delight by the marvellous shape, colour and structure of the individual plants.’ This soon grew into a systematic study of nature.44

Ray’s first scholarly book was Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam, a synopsis of the plants of Cambridge published in 1660 while he was still at Trinity. The obvious next subject would be a botany of all England, an ambition in which he was encouraged by his former pupil and now close friend, Francis Willoughby. In 1662, in his new freedom, he poured himself into this work. His now independent career eventually took him beyond the countryside around Cambridge to further destinations, both geographically and intellectually, than he might otherwise have imagined. Willoughby, no mean naturalist himself and by now not only a friend but a benefactor, proposed a scientific tour of the Continent and in April 1662 Ray, Willoughby and two other Cambridge friends set off on a three-year journey that would take them through France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Austria and Italy. They collected, they discussed science with all the famous men of Europe, and they made notes and drawings of everything they saw and did. This journey set Ray’s career firmly on a course that would contribute to changing the religious as well as scientific world.

By 1660, the tightly circumscribed view of the richness and goodness of God’s creation as demonstrated by the natural history of Europe had begun to be overshadowed by the abundance of plants and animals brought in from the rest of the world by explorers and merchants. For Ray and his contemporaries across Europe, exploration in every corner of the globe had opened a Pandora’s box of nature. If this was God’s creation, suddenly it had unfathomable, incomprehensible depths of diversity. Noah’s ark could not have held a thousandth part of the living animals and plants with which natural philosophers were confronted, as travellers brought back to Europe every kind of unimagined creature – some real but improbable (like the kangaroo), others (like the mermaids and unicorns) fabulous yet all too believable. In the last half of the seventeenth century it was relatively easy to know at least eighty per cent of the plants of Britain and difficult but not impossible to know sixty per cent of the plants of western Europe. Ray thought that there were some 10,000 kinds of insects, 1,300 other kinds of animals and 20,000 species of plants in the world. By 1750, those estimates were debatable; by 1850 they were laughable. Today the worldwide total of known living species is 1.8 million and rising.