by Bruce E.R. Thompson.
The London Museum of Natural History is built in the shape of a cathedral. When I first saw it, I assumed that some old neo-medieval cathedral had inconveniently been built (probably during the 18th Century) on a corner that was later designated for the Natural History Museum, and (as often happens in London) it could not be torn down because of its historical significance. Hence, the old cathedral was simply re-purposed to house fossils.
This turns out not to be true. In fact, the London Museum of Natural History was built in the shape of a cathedral on purpose.
It is a classical cathedral. It has Romanesque arches. The nave (the main body of the building) has tall, arched ceilings that draw the mind upward to the glory of Heaven. There is a transept with even higher arches, and an apse, where one would expect to find an altar and a crucifix. Instead, there is a statue of Darwin, sitting morosely on a pedestal, looking not a little out of place, and frankly a little embarrassed to be there at all. Clearly the statue is a more recent addition, not something the original architect intended or would have approved.
The museum was intended from its conception to be a cathedral to the worship of the natural world. In the panels between the arches, and in the carvings decorating the pillars—where one might expect to find images of saints, or carvings of demons and satyrs, such as one finds at the Wells Cathedral, or the various “Notre Dame” cathedrals of Paris, Chartres, Bayous, etc.—instead one finds fish, birds, lizards, and flowers as if they had been rendered by St. Audubon himself. It seems to be a joke; and, given the trouble and expense that went into it, a joke in very bad taste. But, of course, it is not a joke. It is, rather, a relic of a moment in the history of science—and a moment that is both important and overlooked. It is a relic of what was called “the natural theology movement,” which dominated European and American science during the first half of the 19th Century, and survives to this day as so-called “scientific creationism.”
The building of the museum was proposed by Richard Owen, the man who coined the word “dinosaur.” A contest was held in 1865 to pick an architect, and the winner was civil engineer Francis Fowke, with a cathedral-style proposal. However, he died soon afterward, and the project was awarded instead to Alfred Waterhouse, who was known for his mastery of Renaissance and Medieval revival architecture. He revised Fowke’s plans and built the neo-Romanesque building that stands on Cromwell Road in South Kensington today.
Richard Owen was a genius. It was said that he could reconstruct an entire animal from a single bone. He taught modern paleontologists their craft. However, he was a committed anti-Darwinist. He believed that one could not understand the natural world without seeing in it the designs of a divine creator. To him the idea that the creation of species might proceed without the guidance of a divine power was little short of blasphemy. The selection of a “cathedral” to house England’s greatest collection of fossils and specimens was an intentional stick in the eye of Charles Darwin. The timing makes this obvious: Darwin’s theory was first presented to the world in 1859; the London Museum was proposed a few years later, just as Darwin’s theory was becoming widely understood.
Owen was not alone in his views. He was part of a “natural theology” movement that had begun fifty years earlier. It was sparked by the publication in 1802 of a book by Anglican clergyman, William Paley. That book was titled Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. It contained an argument for the existence of God (called the Design Argument) which was considered so persuasive at the time that it created a framework for the practice of natural science. The movement had its own academic journals, and the most prominent scientists of the day were affiliated with it.
Curiously, Paley’s argument is not nowadays highly regarded by philosophers. It is considered at best a reworking of an argument previously given by Aristotle, and then by St. Thomas Aquinas, and then definitively refuted in 1779 by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, twenty years before Paley had even picked up his pen. But, if Paley’s argument was so unoriginal, and so recently and definitively refuted, how could it have been so influential? I believe Paley’s argument deserves a closer look.
The Design Argument, as given by Aristotle and Aquinas, proceeds in two steps.
The first step is an argument by composition. An argument by composition is an argument that proceeds from the characteristics of the parts to the characteristics of the whole. For example, my desk has legs, a back, drawers, a surface, etc. All are made of wood. Hence, the desk (as a whole) is made of wood. Renaissance philosophers reasoned that, since the elements of the natural world—organs, organisms, and ecosystems—are like machines, the natural world (as a whole) is itself a machine. But arguments by composition are usually fallacious. For example, all the cars in this junkyard are machines; it does not follow that the junkyard itself is a machine!
The second step is an argument by analogy. Argument by analogy is an argument that proceeds from characteristics of one thing to the characteristics of a similar thing. For example, frogs have hearts that pump blood, and frogs are like humans in many ways. Therefore, humans have hearts that pump blood. The Design Argument argues that, just as human-made machines have a designer and builder, the natural world (which, we have established, is also a machine) must also have a designer and builder. And that, of course, is God. But arguments by analogy are also often fallacious. For example, trees are living things, and so are humans. Trees have sap that ebbs and flows. But it does not follow that blood ebbs and flows in humans like sap in trees!
So, both steps in the classical Design Argument are fallacious and easily refuted. But Paley reversed the order of the steps, creating an entirely different argument.
Paley’s argument begins with an argument by analogy. Biological organs and organisms are like machines. They have complex parts that interact with each other in complex ways to serve a definite purpose. Hearts pump blood, lungs take in oxygen, etc. All human-made machines also have complex parts that interact and serve a purpose. Human-made machines have an intelligent designer and maker; hence, biological organisms must also have an intelligent designer and maker.
And, indeed, they do! They are designed and built by their mother. A mother may not consciously know how to build a baby—but her body knows. At this point in the argument Paley is not trying to leap all the way to God. The intelligent maker of each biological organism is simply the “intelligence” manifest in the structure of a previous biological organism. No scientist would dispute the validity of the argument so far.
Next Paley gives us an argument by composition. The first step in the argument gave us a sequence of self-replicating machines: each machine building the next generation of machines. If each machine in the sequence has a maker, then surely the sequence itself must have a maker. And that maker can only be God.
It is hard to see where the fallacy in this step of the argument could be. Even so, Paley was aware that there might be one. It might be possible for the first member of a sequence to fall together entirely by accident. That first member would, of course, need to be incredibly simple. Then, to explain the natural world as we see it, later replicas in the sequence would have to become more complex. Paley could not imagine that such an accident could really happen, or that there could be a process by which complexities could gradually accrue, and—in 1802—neither could anyone else. So, Paley’s argument won the day. The natural theology movement dominated natural science in England and the United States for the next fifty years.
And then, in 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
The theory of natural selection torpedoed Paley’s argument and eventually brought an end to the Natural Theology movement as serious science, though—as the London Museum of Natural History attests—the movement did not go down without a fight. The irony is that Darwin rather liked William Paley. While studying theology—with the idea of becoming an Anglican clergyman himself—Darwin remarked that Paley’s Natural Theology was the one book on his reading list from which he learned something. The idea that species are adapted to their environments was originally Paley’s idea—central to his argument that God took great care in designing his creation. The concept of adaptation is also, of course, central to the theory of natural selection.
As a cathedral, the London Museum of Natural History enshrines the contributions to science made by the Natural Theology movement. Yet Darwin presides over the main hall, looking embarrassed and out of place, but nevertheless, very much in charge.
