Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature [Hardcover]

Keith Stewart Thomson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2005

For 200 years before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, findings in the sciences of the earth and of nature threatened religious belief based on the literal truth of the Bible. This book traces out the multiple conflicts and accommodations within religion and the new sciences through the writings of such heroes of the English Enlightenment as David Hume, Robert Hooke, John Ray, Erasmus Darwin (Charles’ grandfather), Thomas Burnet, and William Whiston.

Keith Thomson brings us back to a time when many powerful clerics were also noted scientific scholars and leading scientists were often believers. He celebrates the force and elegance of their prose along with the inventiveness of their arguments, their certitude, and their not infrequent humility and caution. Placing Charles Darwin’s work in the context of earlier writers on evolutionary theory, Thomson finds surprising and direct connections between the anti-evolutionary writings of natural theologians like William Paley and the arguments that Darwin employed to turn anti-evolutionist ideas upside-down. This is an illuminating chronicle of an important period in the history of ideas and one that casts interesting light on the anti-evolution/creationist controversies of our own time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When aspiring naturalist and onetime divinity student Charles Darwin departed on HMS Beagle in 1831, tensions between religious and scientific accounts of the origins of life had already been building for at least two centuries. Thomson, emeritus professor of natural history at Oxford, sketches these tensions along with various attempts, ranging from conventional through ingenious to eccentric, to resolve them. Focusing on William Paley's Natural Theology, one of the young Darwin's favorite books, Thomson shows how conundrums about the age of the earth, nature's dark side and social ferment in Britain had complicated the search for divine design in nature even before Darwin's voyage began. Thomson's strong point is not philosophical analysis but historical scope, especially in discussing the British roots of historical geography and evolutionary theory. This volume includes not just the usual suspects—Hooke, Hume, Malthus and Lamarck—but also lesser known figures such as physico-theologians Thomas Burnet and John Woodward; pioneering naturalists John Ray, Gilbert White and James Hutton; and proto-evolutionist Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather. The book's most engaging chapter relates the lively 17th-century controversy over the "enigma" of fossils: were they the remains of real creatures, or "figured stones" bearing only "a coincidental resemblance to real organisms"? Although Thomson is generally a clear writer, his habit of switching between thematic and chronological organization can be disorienting at times. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American

The challenge of scientific findings to religious beliefs goes way back. Thomson, professor emeritus of natural history at the University of Oxford, describes the rapid intensification of the struggle during the 200 years culminating in the heavy blow delivered to Bible-based beliefs by the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859. Thomson's focus is on how thinking about evolution developed during those centuries. He reviews the arguments pro and con of such writers as David Hume, Robert Hooke, Erasmus Darwin and William Paley, many of them both clerics and scientific scholars troubled by the ambiguity of their position in the struggle. But evolution, he says, "is part of a much broader and older enquiry and a deeper contest for our intellectual commitment, a contest between a world system that expects every part of the cosmos ultimately to be explainable in terms of natural properties and processes and one that maintains the existence of a fundamental core of unknowability, of supernatural mystery and the controlling hand of an eternal non-worldly Being." The contest continues today, and Thomson builds a historical foundation for thinking about it.

Editors of Scientific American

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1 edition (June 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300107935
• ISBN-13: 978-0300107937
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,862,947 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It Didn't Start With Darwin, July 20, 2005

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature (Hardcover)

Caught up in our own times, we can easily be deceived into thinking that the battle between those who view the Bible as literally true and the scientists who come up with demonstrations that it is not is something that started sometime around the Scopes trial. We might push back and concede that the controversy began with Darwin and his famous theory, but this is wrong, too. The battle between Galileo and the church had been fought centuries before (the church nominally won, to its shame), and then Christianity versus science was stilled, but it wasn't Darwin who reactivated it. For 200 years before Darwin, scientists and philosophers had faced the difficulties that Enlightenment thinking had brought for those who thought the Bible literally true. In _Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature_ (Yale University Press), Keith Thomson has given the history of the conflict before Darwin's Theory of Evolution was proposed and became the cornerstone of biology. He examines thinking on both sides of the issue, and is fair to both; after all, science came up with flawed evaluations for, say, the age of the Earth or for heredity, and the clerics came up with explanations that only seem absurd with the hindsight we have the luxury of displaying from the twenty-first century. It is a great story of a march toward eventual understanding, full of odd personalities and dramatic events.

The main figure in this book is William Paley (1743-1805), a "somewhat shy, shambling figure, built short and square," who wrote many books on faith, but it is his final book, _Natural Theology_, that made him famous, and its ideas are still used by creationists and those who favor Intelligent Design today. Even Darwin was impressed by it, before he toured the world and started coming up with his own ideas. He said it gave him as much delight as Euclid did. Paley's famous contribution to the argument was that of finding a rock on a heath versus finding a watch; it is all too clear that the watch has a designer. (In England, indeed, Thomson's book is titled _The Watch on the Heath_.) Similarly, anything as complex as a living organism must obviously have a designer, and of course the world had a designer, too. This argument was not original to Paley (it goes back at least as far as Cicero) but he expressed it so forcefully as to make it his forever. There was more to Paley's book, and he accepted as an intellectual ally Thomas Malthus. He helped promulgate Malthusian ideas, such as how people showed overproduction of their numbers and that the environmental economy changed in the struggle for existence. Paradoxically, therefore, Paley was advocating two of the fundamentals that would power Darwin's ideas. The theme of such connections between those promoting faith and thereby eventually assisting the triumph of science runs throughout Thomson's book.

Christians had to reconcile their faith with what scientific evidence demonstrated to them, not only about the age of the earth but about the imperfections within creatures and the amorality of animals in competition for resources. Thomson shows that the way forward for Christians devoted to their Bibles as well as to natural history was to accept that the sacred texts were not scientific texts, and were metaphorical. Science and religion would deal with two different realms. They could always satisfyingly trump science with a "That's the way God made it" or "That proves God's benevolence," but this in itself indicated a basic acceptance of the scientific truths first. The alternative of rejecting science's findings entirely remains attractive to many, but also rejects the simple fact that over the centuries, science has proved to be a better way of explaining the way the universe works (setting aside such fields of enquiry as ethics or salvation). Those who make such a rejection loudly insist that there is controversy over Darwin's ideas when actually there is no such scientific controversy, but Thomson's fine book shows that they are merely participating in a long losing battle. The battle didn't start with Darwin.