Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

  Pius XII added . . . that this opinion [evolution] should not be adopted as though it were a certain, proven doctrine . . . Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.2 It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.

  In conclusion, Pius had grudgingly admitted evolution as a legitimate hypothesis that he regarded as only tentatively supported and potentially (as he clearly hoped) untrue. John Paul, nearly fifty years later, reaffirms the legitimacy of evolution under the NOMA principle—no news here—but then adds that additional data and theory have placed the factuality of evolution beyond reasonable doubt. Sincere Christians must now accept evolution not merely as a plausible possibility, but also as an effectively proven fact. In other words, official Catholic opinion on evolution has moved from “say it ain’t so, but we can deal with it if we have to” (Pius’s grudging view of 1950) to John Paul’s entirely welcoming “it has been proven true; we always celebrate nature s factuality, and we look forward to interesting discussions of theological implications.” I happily endorse this turn of events as gospel—literally good news. I may represent the magisterium of science, but I welcome the support of a primary leader from the other major magisterium of our complex lives. And I recall the wisdom of King Solomon: “As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country” (Proverbs 25:25).

  Just as religion must bear the cross of its hard-liners, I have some scientific colleagues, including a few in prominent enough positions to wield influence by their writings, who view this rapprochement of the separate magisteria with dismay. To colleagues like me—agnostic scientists who welcome and celebrate the rapprochement, especially the Pope’s latest statement—they say, “C’mon, be honest; you know that religion is addlepated, superstitious, old-fashioned BS. You’re only making those welcoming noises because religion is so powerful, and we need to be diplomatic in order to buy public support for science.” I do not think that many scientists hold this view, but such a position fills me with dismay—and I therefore end this essay with a personal statement about religion, as a testimony to what I regard as a virtual consensus among thoughtful scientists (who support the NOMA principle as firmly as the Pope does).

  I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution and paleontology). Much of this fascination lies in the stunning historical paradox that organized religion has fostered, throughout Western history, both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heartrending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in an occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held great secular power during so much of Western history. When my folks held such sway, more briefly and in Old Testament times, we committed similar atrocities with the same rationales.)

  I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving, concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA concept. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a merely diplomatic solution. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions residing properly within the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution. This mutual humility leads to important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.

  Religion is too important for too many people to permit any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that the subject of souls lies outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion, and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, our care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us.

  As a moral position (and therefore not as a deduction from my knowledge of nature’s factuality), I prefer the “cold bath” theory that nature can be truly “cruel” and “indifferent”—in the utterly inappropriate terms of our ethical discourse—because nature does not exist for us, didn’t know we were coming (we are, after all, interlopers of the latest geological moment), and doesn’t give a damn about us (speaking metaphorically). I regard such a position as liberating, not depressing, because we then gain the capacity to conduct moral discourse—and nothing could be more important—in our own terms, free from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature’s factuality.

  But I recognize that such a position frightens many people, and that a more spiritual view of nature retains broad appeal (acknowledging the factuality of evolution, but still seeking some intrinsic meaning in human terms, and from the magisterium of religion). I do appreciate, for example, the struggles of a man who wrote to The New York Times on November 3, 1996, to declare both his pain and his endorsement of John Paul’s statement:

  Pope John Paul II’s acceptance of evolution touches the doubt in my heart. The problem of pain and suffering in a world created by a God who is all love and light is hard enough to bear, even if one is a creationist. But at least a creationist can say that the original creation, coming from the hand of God, was good, harmonious, innocent and gentle. What can one say about evolution, even a spiritual theory of evolution? Pain and suffering, mindless cruelty and terror are its means of creation. Evolution’s engine is the grinding of predatory teeth upon the screaming, living flesh and bones of prey . . . If evolution be true, my faith has rougher seas to sail.

  I don’t agree with this man, but we could have a terrific argument. I would push the “cold bath” theory; he would (presumably) advocate the theme of inherent spiritual meaning in nature, however opaque the signal. But we would both be enlightened and filled with better understanding of these deep and ultimately unanswerable issues. Here, I believe, lies the greatest strength and necessity of NOMA, the non-overlapping magisteria of science and religion. NOMA permits—indeed enjoins—the prospect of respectful discourse, of constant input from both magisteria toward the common goal of wisdom. If human beings can lay claim to anything special, we evolved as the only creatures that must ponder and talk. Pope John Paul II would surely point out to me that his magisterium has always recognized this uniqueness, for John’s gospel begins by stating in principio erat verbum—in the beginning was the word.

  15

  BOYLE’S LAW AND DARWIN’S DETAILS

  TWO SCENES FROM FLORENCE BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATE THE POWER OF scientific revolutions to alter our view of the geometry of existence. A painting by the fifteenth-century artist Michellino hangs in the great cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Titled Dante e il suo poema (“Dante and His Poem”—that is, The Divine Comedy), it shows the entire universe on a single canvas. The earth occupies the center, symbolized by the city of Florence, with Dante in the middle and Brunelleschi’s magnificent dome for the cathedral to his left (an anachronism, to be sure, for Dante died in 1321 and Brunelleschi raised the great dome a century later). At Dante’s right, the souls of the damned move downward to the inferno,
while those destined for ultimate salvation slowly mount the spire of purgatory. The seven semicircles at the top represent the seven planets of Ptolemy’s earth-centered system (the five visible planets plus the sun and the moon). The farthest realm of the fixed stars occupies the upper corners.

  If we take a short walk to the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, we find the tomb of Galileo. He looks upward toward his expanded heavens and holds a telescope in his right hand. His left hand envelops the small and insignificant sphere of the earth. In two centuries (Galileo died in 1642), the earth had been displaced from a large and ruling centrality in a limited and subservient universe to peripheral status as a little hunk of stone suspended in the midst of inconceivable vastness.

  In a famous statement, Sigmund Freud argued that scientific revolutions reach completion not when people accept the physical reconstruction of reality thus implied, but when they also own the consequences of this radically revised universe for a demoted view of human status. Freud claimed that all important scientific revolutions share the ironic property of deposing humans from one pedestal after another of previous self-assurance about our exalted cosmic status. Therefore, all great revolutions smash pedestals—and inspire resistance for the obvious reason that we accept such demotions only begrudgingly. Freud identified two revolutions as paramount—Copernicus and Galileo on the nature of the heavens, and Darwin on the status of life. Unfortunately, Darwin’s revolution remains incomplete to this day because we spin-doctor the results of evolution to preserve our pedestal of arrogance by misreading the process as a predictable accumulation of improvements, leading sensibly to the late appearance of human intelligence as a culmination.

  Although we have yet to make our peace with Darwin, the first revolution of cosmic realignment passed quickly into public acceptance. In 1633, Galileo appeared before the Inquisition in Rome, where, under threat of torture and death, he officially abjured his belief in the sun-centered Copernican system. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest on his estate at Arcetri, near Florence, where he died in 1642. In the same year, Robert Boyle, then a wealthy teenager on his grand tour of Europe, but soon to become a great physicist and chemist in his own right, visited Florence and read Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems—just as the master lay dying nearby in Arcetri.

  In 1688, as an elderly man himself, Robert Boyle wrote a famous treatise on science and religion titled A disquisition about the final causes of natural things: wherein it is inquir’d, whether, and (if at all) with what cautions, a naturalist should admit them? In this work, just two generations after Galileo’s death, Boyle demonstrates that the pedestal-smashing implications of Copernican cosmology had already been articulated and accepted, thus completing the first revolution in Freud’s crucial sense. (I regard this timing as important because one might claim that Galileo triumphed, while Darwin remains in limbo, simply because pedestal-smashing takes centuries and Galileo had a two-hundred-year head start. But if the pedestal crumbled during Galileo’s own century, then we have had more than enough time for Darwin—and our failure to smash this second pedestal must record its greater durability in our unwilling psyches.)

  Boyle asks whether the existence and regular motion of the sun and moon provide evidence of God’s creative power and benevolent action. He begins by ridiculing those who would argue for the old geocentric system because God made everything for human benefit:

  I dare not imitate their boldness, that affirm, that the sun and moon, and all the stars, and other celestial bodies, were made solely for the use of man; . . . as when they argue, that the sun and other vast globes of light, ought to be in perpetual motion to shine upon the earth; because, they fancy, ’tis more convenient for man, that those distant bodies, than that the earth, which is his habitation, should be kept in motion.

  Boyle then invokes the smashed pedestal more directly to claim that God would not create something so huge as the sun only to illuminate such a tiny and inconsequential body as the earth:

  But, considering things as mere naturalists, it seems not very likely, that a most Wise Agent should have made such vast bodies, as the sun and the fixed stars, especially if we suppose them to move with that inconceivable rapidity that vulgar astronomers do and must assign them; only or chiefly to illuminate a little globe that without hyperbole is but a physical point in comparison of the immense spaces comprised under the name of heaven.

  We would not expect Boyle, who (after all) wrote 150 years before Darwin, to assault the second pedestal or even to question the creationist view of life at all. Rather, I dedicate this essay to demonstrating that Boyle’s particular view of natural religion provides a distinctively English insight into the historical traditions that make the Darwinian pedestal so impervious to demolition. I then show that Darwin’s philosophical radicalism lies best exposed when we view the theory of natural selection as a direct and purposeful assault upon Boyle’s natural theology.

  Robert Boyle (1627-1691), son of the first Earl of Cork, belonged to a noble and wealthy Anglo-Irish family. After studying at Eton and living abroad for several years, Boyle spent his most scientifically productive decade in Oxford (1656–1668), where he constructed an air pump and performed his major experiments on the properties of gases. (His most famous result, Boyle’s Law, states that, at a constant temperature, the pressure of a given quantity of gas varies inversely to its volume.) In his major work, the Sceptical Chemist (1661), Boyle attacked the Aristotelian theory of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), and developed an important corpuscular theory of matter. (He did not postulate different kinds of basic elements, as later validated and established in the periodic table, but rather argued that properties of different substances arose from variation in the motion and organization of primary particles.)

  Boyle moved permanently to London in 1668, where he continued his organizational work as a founder of the Royal Society (still Britain’s leading scientific establishment), and labored for many other causes close to his heart. (He was, for example, the governor of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England.)

  In science, Boyle’s main reputation rested upon his stern defense of mechanism and his abjuration of Aristotelian forms and essences. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography describes his fundamental philosophy in these terms:

  [Boyle was] a profound believer in the need to establish an empirically based, mechanistic theory of matter and in the possibility of establishing a scientific, rational, theoretical chemistry . . . Boyle was long remembered as “the restorer of the mechanical philosophy” in England . . . What mattered most to him was destroying all Aristotelian forms of qualities . . . and substituting for them rational, mechanical explanation in terms of what he called “those two grand and most catholic principles, matter and motion.”

  But Boyle matched his devotion to science with another controlling and passionate interest—his orthodox Protestant beliefs and his unflagging commitment to the cause of religion. Of all the scientists in Newton’s orbit, Boyle was the most conventionally and sincerely devout. Moreover, Boyle did not consider religion as a merely private matter. He wrote as much about theology as about science, and he composed several treatises on the potentially harmonious relationship between these two disciplines, including the work analyzed in this essay.

  Such a statement may seem contradictory if we accept the false, but commonly held, view that all religion must be inherently mystical, while the mechanistic components of science must be antithetical to such a notion of higher reality. But Boyle’s view of God, widely shared by Newton and most of his scientific contemporaries, neatly married mechanism and religion into a coherent system that granted higher status to both sides. Boyle’s God is a masterful mechanical clock-winder who created the universe with all natural laws so perfectly tuned and contrived at the outset that the entire course of future history could unfold without further miraculous intervention (though neither Boyle nor Newton wanted to constrain God to Hi
s initial decisions, and certainly granted Him the right to interpose a miracle or two now and then, whenever His ineffable wisdom so decreed). Boyle wrote:

  The most wise and powerful Author of Nature, whose piercing sight is able to penetrate the whole universe, and survey all the parts of it at once, did at the beginning of things, frame things corporeal into such a system, and settled among them such laws of motion, as he judged suitable to the ends he proposed to himself in making the world. And by virtue of his vast and boundless intellect that he at first employed, he was able not only to see the present state of things he had made, but to foresee all the effects . . . Nor is this doctrine inconsistent with the belief of any true miracle; for, it supposes the ordinary and settled course of nature to be maintained, without at all denying, that the most free and powerful Author of Nature is able, whenever he thinks fit, to suspend, alter, or contradict those laws of motion, which he alone at first established.

  Since God’s invariant laws can be discovered and studied by science, and since divine omnipotence lies best exposed in these regularities of nature, God’s glory can be apprehended empirically, thus making science a handmaid to religion, and not an adversary at all.

  Boyle’s 1688 Disquisition About the Final Causes of Natural Things, though rarely consulted today (and undoubtedly unknown to nearly all practicing scientists), stands as the classic statement of this English approach to natural theology. Boyle’s book began a tradition that culminated in one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century, William Paley’s Natural Theology of 1802, and collapsed with Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. As the centerpiece of this tradition, Boyle and his colleagues proposed and developed the so-called argument from design—the attempt to identify final causes in nature as proofs both for God’s existence and for His attributes of ultimate power and unceasing benevolence. (Paley subtitled his work Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature.)