Abstract
It is hard to overstate the impact of Paley’s Natural Theology on the discourse of natural theology as a whole. As Colin Jager notes, the book went through 20 editions in 18 years.
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Notes
Colin Jager, The Hook of God: Secularization and Design in Romantic Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 105.
D. L. LeMahieu, William Paley: A Philosopher and Elis Age (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 272.
See chapter 4, XX and note 49 above. Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 31–32n, describes the prolonged impact of Paley on the argument from design, noting that “‘Paleyism’ or ‘Paleyite’ in the text refers oly to the design approach.”
William Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man; Delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons (London: J. Callow, 1819), 8.
The idea that Lawrence was a proto-evolutionist was given credence by Cyril D. Darlington, Darwin’s Place in History (1959; New York: Macmillan, 1961), 19–20.
Peter G. Mudford, “William Lawrence and the Natural History of Man,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 29, no. 3 (1968): 430–36, argues convincingly that Lawrence is no such thing, citing, among other passages, the following one from Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, 94:
Quoted in David Knight, Science and Spirituality: The Volatile Connection (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 42–43. As Knight observes, the terms of the bequest appeared in the front matter of each of the eight authorized treatises.
Charles Bell, The Hand, Its Vital Mechanism and Endowments, as Evincing Design (Philadelphia, PA: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833), 28–29.
William Prout, On Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Eunction of Digestion, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, 2nd ed. (1834; London, William Pickering, 1834), 9.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Eavoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 4th ed. (1859; London: John Murray, 1866), 87.
John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15.
Drawing on Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 130, Brooke and Cantor note that William Thomson, Lord Kelvin’s work on the Second Law of Thermodynamics was influenced by “the engineering career of his brother James [who] encouraged William to examine technical concepts such as ‘work’ and ‘waste.’” A factory converting heat to work and dissipating that heat in the process is certainly a type of the closed system that the Second Law assumes.
Anonymous [i.e., Robert Chambers], Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation: With a Sequel, 2nd American ed. [3rd London ed.] (1844; New York: William H. Colyer, 1846), 86–87.
Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998), 171.
See also Neal C. Gillespie, “Divine Design and the Industrial Revolution: William Paley’s Abortive Reform of Natural Theology,” Isis 80 (1990): 214–29, esp. 228.
Peter Mark Roget, Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, 2 vols. (London: W. Pickering, 1834), I, 38.
Delvin Ratzsch, “Intelligent Design: What Does the History of Science Really Tell Us?” in Scientific Explanation and Religious Belief: Science and Religion in Philsophical and Public Discourse, ed. Michael G. Parker and Thomas M. Schmidt (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 126–49, esp. 128.
Chambers, Vestiges, 255. See also John Willis Clark and Thomas McKenny Hughes, The Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), 2:87. Sedgwick, writing to Mcvey Napier on April 10, 1845, called Vestiges a “rank pill of assafoetida and arsenic covered with gold leaf.”
William Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History, 2 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1840), 2:136–37. For Whewell’s discussion of the nebular hypothesis see 131–32, 145–46.
See Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth, 3rd ed. (1813; London: William Blackwood, 1817), 115. “Since the bowels of the earth have not preserved monuments of this strange genealogy, we have a right to conclude, That the ancient and now extinct species were as permanent in their forms and characters as those which exist at present; or at least, That the catastrophe which destroyed them did not leave sufficient time for the production of the changes that are alleged to have taken place.”
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© 2012 Stuart Peterfreund
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Peterfreund, S. (2012). From Paley to Darwin: Systems and the Ramifications of Design. In: Turning Points in Natural Theology from Bacon to Darwin. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015273_6
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