The Book of Books (14 page)

Charles gave the society the right to publish its learned papers without censorship, a rare and invaluable gift in that period and one which rapidly gave it fame in both Europe and America. It virtually invented professional scientific publishing. English became a leading language of science. And the Royal Society systematised experiments. Its declared intention was ‘for the Promoting of physico-mathematico experimental learning'; its motto ‘Nullius in verba' – ‘take no man's word for it'. Experimenting was believing. Its experiments aimed to reveal the works of God.

I'll use the words ‘science' and ‘scientists' here although those
engaged in the experiments at the time would have been called ‘natural philosophers'.

Some of the greatest experimental scientists were there at the outset. Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, soon to be joined by Isaac Newton, and later Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Paul Dirac, James Clerk Maxwell, Stephen Hawking and, over 350 years, 8,000 more.

What distinguished the pioneers in the seventeenth century was that they were united in a determination to study nature and a conviction that a radical reading of the King James Bible went hand in hand with that aim. Their guiding star was Francis Bacon who had died several decades before the society was formed. He coined the phrase ‘knowledge is power'; he called scientists ‘merchants of light'. Most of all, however, he asserted that life could be fully understood through two books: the Scriptures and the Book of Nature. Between these two the Fellows of the Royal Society set out to compose a new world.

Both these books had to be questioned. Nature had to be put to the test; ‘interrogated' was another word used by the lawyer in Francis Bacon. And the King James Bible, also, had to be put to the test. It bears emphasising that the Bible in English had revitalised the way people saw the world and their own place in it. The Civil Wars had seared it into the minds of men and women throughout the land. The intensity of thought and the extremes of opinion which the Bible both provoked and enabled had probably made more people in the country more actively and consciously religious than at any time in history.

The Protestant notion that you could have personal and direct contact through the Bible, that you, without any intermediary, could make up your own mind on these sacred matters, became an open invitation. Fellows of the Royal Society and like-minded men and women took it to be an invitation to scrutinise the
Bible for evidence that would underpin their science: and vice versa.

Despite what some now see as an unbridgeable rift between the two, in 1660 and for many years on (for some, up until the present day) the King James Bible authorised the work of a substantial number of the finest and most influential early modern scientists. The scientists made increasing use of instruments – the telescope, the microscope and so on – to investigate nature and, equally, in the Royal Society employed a new way of examining the Bible.

This ‘modern' period in Western history saw the movement over centuries from one dominating system of thought – Christianity – to what emerged as its successor – science. It was neither a rapid nor an abrupt transition. Medieval scholars like Thomas Aquinas, who attempted to integrate the classical thought of Aristotle and the Christian thought of Augustine, still had a powerful impact on the way in which thought was cast. Oxford University was the seedbed of the Royal Society, as it had been the centre for centuries of the struggle to translate the Bible into English and see it accepted by the crown and Parliament.

Oxford also deserves credit for an intellectual vigour which began in the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century it had been famous in the Latin-speaking Christian world for its philosophers – Duns Scotus and William of Occam, for instance. The theology they worked on is now largely ignored or discredited. Yet we cannot deny that they were thinkers of the highest order. They worked on the material they had and their processes of thought were strong. This was not an inheritance to be lightly thrown over. Nor was it, as Wycliffe and Tyndale, and then Wren, Boyle and Hooke proved.

There was also in the medieval Church the recorded tradition of intense and what were thought of as mystical experiences of faith. Thinking the unthinkable in a way which might be considered a
herald of science. This medieval theology was at that time a bedrock factor in a way that the secular elements in our society today can scarcely imagine or take seriously. But then they did.

Aquinas, for example, the volume and the quantity of whose work is a monument to theological scholarship, experienced a vision towards the end of his life which, he said, brought him closer to an understanding of God than all his scholarship had done. He would not discuss it but the impact it had on him was respected and in some measure understood by those – the majority at that time – who saw faith as innate and as valid a way to understand the world as reason later became. That later medieval world was rooted not only in the Bible but in much classical and preclassical thought that had become entwined in the making and the interpretation of the Bible.

All the key players in the advancement of early modern science – Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo, Newton – understood what was at stake in the revolution they were engineering. This was the
place
of the soul. Where did it exist? The nurturing and the salvation of the soul was the fundamental duty and joy of Christians. Newton's proof that all space obeyed the same laws abolished the essential separation and different space for God and the soul.

This separate space had been argued for by Aristotle. The soul, a non-material part of being human, had a long prehistory before Aristotle and a fervent history in Christianity where Augustine and Aquinas were only two of those who constructed systems of thought designed to prove its existence and its essentiality. Now where were these arguments? If there was no special, separate
place
in the universe for God and the soul, where and in what way could they be said to exist? And therefore what to do about God and the soul in the quest for new knowledge?

The Royal Society's way for many years until, in some cases, this day was to hold the faith and through the King James
Version find historical and other proofs. Robert Boyle, one of the original group, a man whose work led him to be called ‘the father of chemistry', published an enormous book on the intimate relationship between his admiration for the works of God and the advantages experimental philosophy would bring to religious faith.

Joseph Priestley, another Fellow of the Royal Society in the late eighteenth century and the man credited with the discovery of oxygen, saw a direct link between the right religion (in his case Dissenting Protestantism) and the right kind of natural knowledge. He used his chemical and electrical experiments to promote his Dissenting views about the character of divinity. In the nineteenth century, Michael Faraday saw no gap between his world-changing experiments and his severe nonconformist Sandemanian religious faith. In the twentieth century, Arthur Eddington, another Fellow, was clear about the basic unity of his own spirituality as a Quaker and the principles of modern physics. He argued that mystical religious experience and modern physical science were entirely consistent. Newton saw God as the direct cause of gravity and as for God's place, he argued that space itself was ‘as it were, God's sensorium'.

There were others, and among the most distinguished and radically innovative of the Fellows was the botanist John Ray, who wrote
The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation
. James Clerk Maxwell (1831 – 79), such a seminal influence on Einstein, underwent an evangelical conversion as a student in Cambridge. His biographer wrote that ‘he referred to it long afterwards as having given him a new perception of the Love of God – one of his strongest convictions thenceforward was that “Love abideth, though knowledge vanish away”.' Even Darwin was sure that his account of speciation with natural selection as one of its engines was not logically connected with atheism.

Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907), an important contributor to thermodynamics, gave a famous affirmative address to the Christian Evidence Society. Sir Robert Boyd (1922 – 2004), pioneer in British space science, founded the Research Scientists' Christian Fellowship. Of those still living, Charles Hard Townes won the Nobel Prize in Physics and wrote
The Convergence of Science and Religion
. John Polkinghorne, a prize-winning British particle physicist, is an Anglican priest and author of
Science and the Trinity
. Simon Schaffer, the Cambridge Professor of the Philosophy of Science, believes that there is an aspect of natural theology that characterised the emergent function of the Royal Society. He talks of early modern providentialism.

In 1649, a king had been executed, but only after a trial and that trial had been seamed with references to what was accepted as the ultimate authority, the Bible. If you could execute a king who claimed to rule by Divine Right, what could you not do? But the Bible had been the key to that and it was believed that it would also unlock the new knowledge. There seemed so much in common. The need for science to discover a First Cause, for example, seems to have been transferred directly from religion into science. Newton's search for an order, a single unifying force in the universe, came from his faith in Genesis. Gravity was God's other face.

In his book
The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science
Peter Harrison has written convincingly on this theme. He writes of the collapse of previous interpretations of the Bible at about this time. ‘The Protestant reformers . . . in their search for an unambiguous religious authority insisted that the book of scripture be interpreted only in its literal, historical sense.' He argues that ‘the new way in which the bible was read by Protestants played a central role in the emergence of natural science in the 17th century.' And he points out that the majority of those who
formed the Royal Society were hard-reading Bible men; Protestantism had a direct influence on the emergence of modern science.

This is a new way of reading the Bible – for its history, and for verification of the science of the day. Moses, for instance, Harrison writes, became ‘the father of history', an author and natural philosopher, a historical figure who had written ‘a factual account of the first ages of the earth'. He goes on to say, ‘the contents of the Book of Genesis attracted new descriptions: “the history of creation” ; “scripture history”; “surpasses all the accounts of Philosophers as much in Wisdom as it doth in authority”.' Moses was seen as an author and his intentions were taken to be at the very least on a par with those of the Fellows of the Royal Society.

Within this ‘history' was to be found all sorts of knowledge including knowledge of the sciences which would reinforce what the seventeenth-century scientists were doing and put them in the tradition of true faith as well as providing a tradition out of which their new science could validly grow.

The Garden of Eden, which in medieval interpretations had been full of allegorical and psychological meanings, was now seen as a particular place on the planet, though there were complaints that not enough information had been provided as to where exactly it was. Seventeenth-century authors tried to remedy that with numerous suggestions as to the precise location. The Bible was being tested in a similar way to that in which the scientists were testing the weight of air or the content of various seeds.

Similarly with Noah's Flood. Out went the charming elaborations of the Middle Ages. The new literalism and the confidence which Bible readers now had led directly to scientific probing. Where was the Flood? Other questions followed. ‘Where did the waters come from?' writes Peter Harrison. ‘And where did they eventually go? What mutations of the earth took place as a result
of the Deluge? How, wondered the moderns, could the great catalogue of creatures whose lives were to be preserved for the impending inundation be physically housed in a vessel of the specified dimensions? . . . How was the craft constructed, how navigated, by what means did Noah assemble his cargo, where were the provisions stored, how were fox and fowl kept apart?' And if they could not quarry the evidence out of the Bible, the assumption would be that the original author had not wanted to confuse his largely ignorant readership with too much detail. The new, modern readers were very ready to supply this out of their own scholarship. Or it was argued that the gaps were due to faulty transmission, patchy texts, omissions which again could be repaired by the moderns.

Some of the scientists, especially among the Presbyterians, were already well practised in finding their own present in the Bible's past. The villainous kings of the Old Testament, Ahab, Saul, Nimrod, Nebuchadnezzar, had been vigorously likened to Charles I and, in the case of some of the Puritan extremists, with every other king who had ever sat on a throne.

Yet the balance was kept. The demands on the Bible were not so fierce as to kill the scientific or natural philosophical goose that laid the golden egg. Its primary purpose was to teach the most important matter in this earthly life – the way to attain salvation and enjoy eternal life. It reinforced and intellectually spurred on scientific enquiry, but the divergences were already apparent to those who wanted to winkle them out.

Harrison writes: ‘Isaac Newton also believed that the new discoveries in the sciences were in fact re-discoveries of ancient truths, traces of which could be found in a variety of texts, including Scripture. The priest-scientists of antiquity, he believed, had known of atomic theory, the existence of the vacuum, universal gravitation and the inverse square law.' One task the new
scientists had was, through their experiments on the Book of Nature, to reinforce the respectability of that other book, the Scriptures, passages of which had been lost or adulterated. Newton's belief that the fate of the solar system, following his theory, would bring it to destruction and then restoration was exactly what had been predicted in the Bible. Q.E.D.