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The Watch on the Heath

In his book Natural Theology, William Paley used the analogy of a watch to argue that living things must have had a designer. In The Watch on the Heath Keith Thomson looks at the context in which Paley's arguments were put forward. Thomson describes the work of earlier writers such as John Ray, Thomas Burnet and many more. There's a chapter on how Robert Plot struggled to make sense of fossils and a look at the different ideas of how to explain geological strata. Thomson also looks at those who came after Paley - Lyell, Buckland, and Charles Darwin himself, who was strongly influenced by Paley's book.

The books gives an interesting description of how people tried to reconcile the biblical account description of Creation with scientific findings, and the insuperable problems which eventually faced such reconcilations. Thomson has clearly a wide knowledge of this area, and I liked how he traced ideas back to their roots - apparently an argument like that of the watch can be found in the works of Cicero. Sometimes I feel that the 'Science v Religion' conflict has never been as strong as works such as this seem to imply, but the book is certainly very useful for those readers wanting to get an idea of the source of such conflict.

Note: This title is for the UK version of this book. The US title Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature doesn't seem so appropriate for the content of the book.

Amazon.com info

Hardcover 336 pages
ISBN: 0300107935
Salesrank: 808996
Weight:1.3 lbs

Published: 2005 Yale University Press

Amazon price $27.00

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Amazon.co.uk info

Hardcover 320 pages
ISBN: 0007133138
Salesrank: 197051
Weight:1.37 lbs

Published: 2005 HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Amazon price £16.00

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Amazon.ca info

Hardcover 336 pages
ISBN: 0300107935
Salesrank: 534799
Weight:1.3 lbs

Published: 2005 Yale University Press

Amazon price CDN$ 17.99

Marketplace:New from CDN$ 17.99:Used from CDN$ 8.81

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Product Description
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.

Product Description

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.

It Didn't Start With Darwin *****
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.

It Didn't Start With Darwin *****

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.