Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature

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.

Scientists and thologians had long been debating the religious implicaitons of evolutionary theory when Darwin announced his theory of natural selection.

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 2005 Reed Business Information.

Keith Thomson is professor emeritus of natural history, University of Oxford; senior research fellow, American Philosophical Society; and research associate, Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.