Deleting Theology: Examining a Curious Historiographical Phenomenon (Part 5)

The same anti-theological fate has struck other major figures, even some so explicitly theological as Leibniz. As Christia Mercer has demonstrated at length, our understanding of the scope and nature of Leibniz’ system has been acutely influenced by analytic historians of philosophy—in particular the interpretations of Bertrand Russell and Louis Couturat. Mercer concludes her lengthy study by pointing out it has too often been forgotten and obscured that “Leibniz was only one among a number of thinkers in the seventeenth century who were wedded to traditional theological doctrines, eclecticism, and truth.”[1] Other figures, like Thomas Hobbes, have recently been rehabilitated as well. Though A.P. Martinich notes he does not want to use the term “secularists” in a pejorative sense, nonetheless most interpreters of Hobbes have been secularists and thus “produce a bowdlerized version of his philosophy in which all the religious elements have been expurgated.”[2]More generally, Jason Josephson storm has recently shown in regards to sociology and the human sciences the theological and even magical and theosophical histories are often denied, suppressed, forgotten.[3]Timothy Larsen likewise in his recent monograph regarding how anthropology emerged as a historical discipline in relation to Christianity concludes that: “perhaps one of the more counterintuitive findings of this study is how much theology not only has been but continues to be a conversation partner for anthropology.”[4]

More examples present themselves almost endlessly for our observation. Isaac Newton’s work and life have been narrated and re-narrated so many times that his theology and alchemical oddities were parsed away. Here, even as even-handed a commentator as Richard Westfall notes:

Before the Scientific Revolution, theology was queen of all sciences. As a result of the Scientific Revolution, we have redefined the word ‘science,’ and today other disciplines, which once took their lead from Christian doctrine, strive to expand their self-esteem by appropriating the word in its new meaning to themselves. Theology is not even allowed on the premises anymore. … A once Christian culture has become a scientific one. The focus of change, the hinge on which it turned, was the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[5]

Yet far from separation, the scientific revolution and the enlightenment were often seen as the perpetuation of a “divine science.” Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs helpfully points out that the exploratory and foundational aspects of Newton’s alchemy and theology subsequently were completely ignored—even deleted—by historians “subtly and deeply” in the light of Newton’s success in the mathematical and physical sciences.

Thus [theology and alchemy] became a curious anomaly [to historiography]—and one to be explained away [by later historians]—that Newton’s studies in astronomy, optics, and mathematics only occupied a small portion of his time. In fact most of his great powers were poured out upon church history, theology, the chronology of ancient kingdoms, prophecy, and alchemy.[6]

And later in her workThe Janus-Face of Genius, she hypothesizes, “perhaps because of the remarkable success of the Principia itself in restoring true natural philosophy, Newton shifted his focus to more study of natural philosophy as the best way to restore true religion. He sought the border where natural and divine principles met and fused.”[7]

In fact these narrations were such a trend that the genre of “meta-biography” was essentially invented to take an inventory and sort through the mess of sketches and caricature.[8]It wasn’t really until P.M. Rattansi and J.E. McGuire’s seminal 1966 paper “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’” that Newton’s deep concern with biblical interpretation, alchemy, and the so-called prisca theologia were no longer just that awkward hobby he would put away when polite company came over. They were rather a core feature of his entire life’s work, and provided a natural theological structure that framed his physical and mathematical theory.[9]Indeed both these and his alchemy were considered by Newton to be “a study of the modes of divine activity in the world.”[10]

We might also turn to the “Father of Modern Economics” Adam Smith, about whom Jacob Viner famously wrote in his The Role of Providence in the Social Order:

Modern professors of economics and ethics operate in disciplines which have been secularized to the point where the religious elements and implications which were once an integral part have been painstakingly eliminated. … [scholars] either put on mental blinders which hide from their sight these aberrations in Smith’s thought, or they treat them as merely traditional and in Smith’s day fashionable ornaments to what is essentially naturalistic and rational analysis. I am obliged to insist that Adam Smith’s system of thought, including economics, is not intelligible if one disregards the role he assigned to the teleological elements.[11]

Given the complexity and subtlety demanded by the task, responses to Viner’s rallying cry have been slow to arise until a recent spate of essays on the general theological and religious character of Adam Smith’s thought,[12]while others like Peter Harrison have detailed the theological origins of concepts like Smith’s “Invisible Hand.”[13]More recently, a groundbreaking volume of essays entitled Adam Smith as Theologian,[14]edited by Paul Oslingtonexplores the theological influences on Smith, the theological themes integral to his work, and directions that future research on these topics may take. This has been followed up by Oslington himself with his Political Economy as Natural Theology: Smith, Malthus, and their Followers.[15]

This reconsideration also bleeds over into Darwin, who made free use of both Smith and Malthus’ theory and—so we can extend the thought—the theology behind them. The interpretation and reception of Darwin has likewise been filtered to both eliminate its theological and religious contexts. Apropos to our discussion of Positivism above, David Depew and Bruce Weber note “Just as the hardening of the modern synthesis was facilitated by the ascendancy of logical positivist philosophy of science, so the idea of an expanded synthesis has been facilitated by the decline of positivist ideals among contemporary philosophers of biology.”[16]

As Dov Ospovat demonstrated, Darwin inherited a picture of the world common to the natural theologians of his day like Paley, asked the questions they asked, and right up to the origin of species operated with many of their assumptions.[17] “To ignore or attempt to explain away Darwin’s theism is to cut oneself off from understanding much of Darwin’s science,” as Ospovat has written elsewhere.[18]And despite the anti-religious reputation that Darwinian theory has earned, a recent surge of theorists have likewise pointed to the immense theological and religious currents at play that have often been ignored or overlooked in evolutionary historiography.[19]One cannot ignore these even if they are interpreted metaphorically:

[It] is just because metaphors play roles in explanation that one is not entitled to simply say, ‘Oh, that’s just my way of putting it.’ Even when they perform little or no explanatory work, moreover, metaphors carry a good deal of metaphysical and epistemological freight. Indeed, wherever there is a deficit between theoretical reach and empirical support the difference is usually made up by invoking ontology to the missing work. Similarly, epistemological or methodological ideals are sometimes used to intimate on highly general grounds that the theory in question must be true.[20]

Features of Darwin’s theory that appear to maximize its antagonism to religion in general and Christianity in particular, such as the claim that Darwinian evolution must reduce all altruism to a deeper abiding current of selfishness,[21]or that evolution must be fundamentally non-teleological, tend to be emphasized both in historical presentations and scientific ones. Design theory for example—especially that of William Paley or associated with the “Bridgewater Treatises”—is often mistakenly equated with notions of teleology traditionally held by theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (it isn’t),[22]or that the function of “proofs for God” and “natural theology” remained constant in the modern period and in fundamental continuity with traditional uses (they were not). All the while at the same time the extensive teleological language and reason utilized by Darwin himself is ignored.[23]This creates the caricature I am sure we are all familiar with and related to us by Owen Chadwick of the harrowed schoolboy who learned Darwin defeated the Bible.[24]

Much of this is an illusion wrought by historians. In particular, through the tireless efforts of “Darwin’s Bulldog” T.H. Huxley, whose major plan was, as Matthew Stanley has eloquently demonstrated in a recent brilliant monograph, to “reinterpret the history of science and erase its theistic past,” making “methodological naturalism” appear as solely the province of the naturalist.[25]Huxley and his friends in the so-called “X-Club” wanted to “make it look like [science] had always been naturalistic. … Naturalism was given a long history to make it seem impossible that science was ever practiced any other way.”[26] As such, “[the] strategy of appropriating historical figures as protonaturalists (or, less charitably, as mouthpieces for himself) was one Huxley often displayed when attacking orthodoxy.”[27]Perhaps no statement more famously encapsulates this mentality than a seminal remark by Huxley:

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules: and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated, scotched, if not slain.[28]

This despite the fact Huxley shared nearly identical scientific and philosophical values and procedures to theistic scientists contemporary to him, most notably James Clerk Maxwell.[29]We might add that this overlooks the lengthy, charitable, and indeed often favorable engagement with Darwin by major evangelical theologians.[30]As a matter of course, Darwin’s theory of evolution was widely accepted by a huge array of individuals who nonetheless had no interest in “natural selection” and easily assimilated it into categories that allowed (and even demanded) progress, teleology, and an array of other “theologically loaded” concepts.[31]Because of this the Origin of Species has been remarked to itself be the last example of Victorian natural theology.[32]This isn’t merely some trite declaration. The rampant neo-Darwinian, anti-religious biological paradigm has actually had some significant feedback into the scientific method and understanding of evolutionary biology.[33]

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[1]Christia Mercer, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 472.

[2]A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 14.

[3]Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment.

[4]Timothy Larsen, The Slain God: Anthropology & the Christian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 225.

[5]Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 2.

[6]Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundation of Newton’s Alchemy or, ‘The Hunting of the Greene Lyon.’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 170.

[7]Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 170.

[8]Rebekah Higgit, Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007).

[9]P.M. Rattansi and J.E. McGuire “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan,’” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 21 (1966): 108-143.

[10]Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius, 13; Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[11]Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977), 81-82.

[12]Kwangsu Kim, “Adam Smith: Natural Theology and Its Implications for His Method of Social Inquiry,” Review of Social Economy, 55 (1997): 312-336; Lisa Hill, “The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 8 (2011): 1-29; Idem, “Further Reflections on the ‘Hidden Theology’ of Adam Smith,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 11 (2004): 629-635; A.M.C. Waterman, “Economics as Theology: Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations,” Southern Economic Journal 68 (2002): 907-921.

[13]Peter Harrison, “Adam Smith and the History of the Invisible Hand,” Journal of the History of Ideas vol.72, no. 1 (January 2011): 29-49.

[14]Paul Oslington, ed., Adam Smith as Theologian (New York: Routledge, 2011).

[15]Paul Oslington, Political Economy as Natural Theology: Smith, Malthus, and their Followers(New York: Routledge, 2017). E.g. 14: “Theology is the crucial ingredient in this rewriting of the connection between 18th-century English economic thinking and the successful emergence of political economy in 19^th-century Britain. This is especially so of the doctrine of providence, and debates about the relationship between self-interest and the good of society.”

[16]David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber, Darwinism Evolving: System Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Massachusetts: Massachusetts Insttute of Technology, 1997), 388-389.

[17]Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838-1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

[18]Dov Ospovat, “’Darwin’s Theology’, review of Neil Gillespie’s Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation,”Science (1980): 207, 520; cf. Idem, “God and Natural Selection,” Journal of the History of Biology13 (1980), 169-194.

[19]John Hedley Brooke, “The Relationship Between Darwin’s Science and His Religion,” in John Durant, ed. Darwinism and Divinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 40-75; Neal Gillespi, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Chris Cosans, “Was Darwin a Creationist?” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 48 (2005): 362-371; Robert J. Richards, “Theological Foundations of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution,” in P.H. Theerman and K.H. Parshall, eds., Experiencing Nature (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 61-79; John Cornell, “God’s Magnificent Law: The Bad Influence of Theistic Metaphysics on Darwin’s Estimation of Natural Selection,” Journal of the History of Biology (1987): 381-412; Idem, “Newton of the Grassblade? Darwin and the Problem of Organic Teleology,” Isis 77(1986): 405-421; Stephen Dilley, “Charles Darwin’s Use of Theology in the Origin of Species,” British Society for the History of Science(2011), 1-28; Richard England, “Natural Selection, Teleology, and the Logos,” Osiris 16 (2001), 270-287; Momme von Sydow, “Charles Darwin: A Christian Undermining Christianity?” in David M. Knight and Matthew D. Eddy, eds., Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700-1900 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 141-156; Paul Nelson, “The Role of Theology In Current Evolutionary Reasoning,” Biology and Philosophy11 (1996): 493-517; Abigail Lustig, “Natural Atheology,” in Abigail Lustig, Robert J. Richards and Michael Ruse, eds., Darwinian Heresies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 69-83. 

[20]Depew and Weber, Darwinism Evolving, 374.

[21]For some correctives, see the excellent set of essays in Martin A. Nowack and Sarah Coakley, eds., Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

[22]Edward Feser, Neo-Scholastic Essays (New York: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), 147-193; Idem., Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017).

[23]Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993).

[24]Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19^thCentury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 164.

[25]Matthew Stanley, Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 8.

[26]Ibid.

[27]Ibid., 214-215.

[28]Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Origin of Species,” in Collected Essays of T.H. Huxley (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001) 2:52.

[29]See in particular Stanley, Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon, 34-119.

[30]David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought(Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1987); Bradley J. Gundlach, Process and Providence: The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845-1929 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2013); Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 252-343.

[31]See: Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 217-346.

[32]John Durant, “Darwinism and Divinity: A Century of Debate,” in John Durant ed.,Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 16.

[33]Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why The Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010); Perry Marshall, Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design (Texas: BenBella Books, 2015); Lynn Margulis, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Dazzle Gradually: A Reflection on the Nature of Nature (Vermont: Chelsea-Green Publishing, 2007); James Shapiro, Evolution: A View From the 21^stCentury (New Jersey: FT Press, 2011); Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solutions: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Idem., The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe Became Self-Aware (Pennsylvania: The Templeton Foundation Press, 2015); Michael Morange, The Misunderstood Gene (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001); Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Denis Noble, The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Idem., Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes The Animal World – And Us (New York: Doubleday Press, 2017); Kevin N. LaLan, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made The Human Mind (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017); Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates (New York: Current, 2015);Jean Gayon, “From Darwin to Today in Evolutionary Biology,” in Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 241f; Scott, Eugenie, and Glenn Branch, “Don’t Call It Darwinism,” in Evolution, Education, and Outreach 2 (2009): 90-94; Olivia Judson, “Let’s Get Rid of Darwinism,” New York Times, July 15, 2008; Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwinian Fundamentalism,” New York Review of Books, June 12, 1997.