The Theology of the Scientists

The religious writings of the men who made the scientific revolution — 11 authors, 31 works, 415 notes, from Bacon’s Confession of Faith to Newton on the prophecies of Daniel. The seventeenth century did not divide these men into a scientific half and a devout half, and neither did they: Boyle published more theology than chemistry, Newton left more words on prophecy than on optics, and Ray’s natural history and his natural theology are the same enquiry under two names. The section is here because the argument between faith and science is usually conducted in ignorance of what the scientists themselves actually wrote.

Authors are in order of birth, and each author’s works in the order the vault holds them.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Lord Chancellor and the man who argued English natural philosophy out of Aristotle and into experiment. He held the study of nature and the study of Scripture to be two books of the same author, and wrote privately on both all his life.

Author index: Francis Bacon

• A Confession of Faith — Bacon’s own creed, written in private and printed in 1641, fifteen years after his death, as penned by an orthodox man of the reformed religion. (1 note)
• An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England — Bacon’s earliest surviving work, written at twenty-eight during the Martin Marprelate quarrel and printed seventy years later as True Peace. (1 note)
• Certain Considerations Touching the Church of England — Written for James I in the first year of the reign, when the Hampton Court conference had just closed. (7 notes)
• The Characters of a Believing Christian — Three short religious pieces printed together at the end of Bacon’s Remaines: the Characters, which sets out the Christian life as a string of paradoxes; a second and fuller recension of the Confession of the Faith; and the prayer Bacon wrote after his fall. (4 notes)
• The Translation of Certain Psalms into English Verse — Seven psalms put into English verse in the last year of Bacon’s life, during a long illness, and dedicated to George Herbert — in respect of our ancient and private acquaintance, and in respect of your gifts, being not only a great wit, but a great poet. The only verse Bacon published. (7 notes)

Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who found the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, and then had to answer for what they meant for the plain sense of Scripture.

Author index: Galileo Galilei

• Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina — Galileo’s defence of the Copernican opinion against the charge that it contradicts Scripture, written to Christina of Lorraine, mother of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1615 — the year before the Congregation of the Index condemned the doctrine. (1 note)

Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Imperial Mathematician, who found the three laws of planetary motion and made the same case about Scripture six years before Galileo.

Author index: Johannes Kepler

• An Abstract of the Introduction upon Mars — The theological part of Kepler’s preface to the Astronomia Nova of 1609, abridged and put into English by Thomas Salusbury and printed with Galileo’s letter to the Grand Duchess. (1 note)

René Descartes

René Descartes (1596–1650), who invented coordinate geometry and set out to rebuild knowledge from what cannot be doubted — and dedicated the result to the Sorbonne’s faculty of theology.

Author index: René Descartes

• Six Metaphysical Meditations — The Meditationes de Prima Philosophia of 1641, dedicated to the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne and offered to it as a proof, by natural reason alone, that there is a God and that the mind is distinct from the body. (9 notes)

Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), physician of Norwich, who wrote down his own religion for himself and produced one of the great books of English prose.

Author index: Thomas Browne

• Christian Morals — Browne’s last work, found among his papers and printed in 1716 by John Jeffery, Archdeacon of Norwich. (4 notes)
• Religio Medici — The religion of a physician — written about 1635 for Browne’s own use, circulated in manuscript, and printed without his leave in 1642, which forced the authorised edition of the next year. (3 notes)

John Wilkins

John Wilkins (1614–1672), Bishop of Chester and first secretary of the Royal Society, in whose rooms at Oxford the Society began.

Author index: John Wilkins

• A Discourse Concerning the Beauty of Providence — Printed in the year of the king’s execution and offered as very seasonable to quiet and support the heart in these times of public confusion. (2 notes)
• A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer — What the gift of prayer is, why it is ascribed to the Spirit, and how far it may be attained by industry — written in the middle of the quarrel over set forms and free prayer, and answering it by teaching the thing itself. (31 notes)
• Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion — Left unfinished at Wilkins’s death in 1672 and completed for the press by John Tillotson. (28 notes)

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), mathematician, physicist, and after the night of fire in 1654 the defender of Port-Royal and the author of the unfinished apology.

Author index: Blaise Pascal

• Pensees — The notes for an apology for the Christian religion that Pascal did not live to write, found after his death in 1662 in bundles pinned together and printed by Port-Royal eight years later. (14 notes)
• The Provincial Letters — Eighteen letters written anonymously and published one at a time during the Sorbonne’s proceedings against Antoine Arnauld: the first three defend the Jansenists of Port-Royal, and the rest turn on the moral theology of the Jesuits — probabilism, directing the intention, mental reservation — largely by the method of… (20 notes)

Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle (1627–1691), founding fellow of the Royal Society and the father of chemistry, who wrote as much theology as natural philosophy and endowed a lecture to go on arguing after his death.

Author index: Robert Boyle

• A Discourse of Things Above Reason — A dialogue between four speakers on whether a philosopher may admit that some things are above reason, and on the difference between a doctrine reason cannot reach and one it can refute. (9 notes)
• A Disquisition About the Final Causes of Natural Things — Whether, and with what caution, a naturalist may argue from the use of a thing to the end it was made for. (12 notes)
• A Free Discourse Against Customary Swearing — Written in Boyle’s twenties and published in the year of his death by John Williams. (26 notes)
• A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature — Boyle’s attack on the word Nature itself, as it was used by the Aristotelians: a wise and provident being standing between God and the world, which abhors a vacuum and does nothing in vain. (10 notes)
• Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects — Meditations made out of whatever happened to be in front of him, with the discourse defending the practice printed before them. (96 notes)
• Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God — On the distance between what God is and what a mind can hold of him, argued from the two attributes a natural philosopher meets first: his wisdom and his power. (2 notes)
• Seraphic Love — Boyle’s first published book, written at twenty-one as a letter to a friend disappointed in love, and the work he was best known for in his own lifetime — it went through six editions. (2 notes)
• The Christian Virtuoso — Boyle’s answer to the charge that experimental philosophy makes men irreligious: that it does the opposite, since the man who has looked hardest at the contrivance of things is the last to think them accidental. (11 notes)
• The Excellency of Theology — Written in 1665 during the plague and printed nine years later. (13 notes)
• The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus — Written in Boyle’s early twenties and published forty years later at the urging of friends: the martyrdom under Diocletian of Theodora of Antioch, sentenced to a brothel for refusing to sacrifice, and of the Christian soldier Didymus who changed clothes with her to get her out and died in her place. (13 notes)
• The Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion — Published under the initials T.E., a lay-man. (12 notes)

John Ray

John Ray (1627–1705), the father of English natural history, whose divinity lectures at Trinity became the founding book of English natural theology.

Author index: John Ray

• A Persuasive to a Holy Life — Ray’s last book, and the only one of his that is straightforwardly practical divinity: that a holy life is also the happy one, argued through every good men actually pursue — health, safety, riches, pleasure, honour, friends — and then through the happiness of the inward man and of the life to come. (13 notes)
• The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation — The book that made natural theology an English habit of mind, grown out of Ray’s divinity lectures in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. (12 notes)
• Three Physico-Theological Discourses — Three discourses on the earth’s own history: the creation of the world, the general deluge — with the question of what fossils are, which Ray was among the first to answer correctly — and the dissolution of the world by fire. (24 notes)

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who gave the world one mathematics for the apple and the moon, and spent as long again on the prophets.

Author index: Isaac Newton

• Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St John — Newton spent more of his life on prophecy and chronology than on optics, and left this unpublished at his death; his nephew Benjamin Smith saw it through the press in 1733. (18 notes)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), co-inventor of the calculus, who coined the word theodicy and wrote the book.

Author index: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

• Theodicy — The only book Leibniz published in his lifetime, written against Pierre Bayle’s argument that the evil in the world cannot be reconciled with a God at once good and almighty. (9 notes)

Missing Works

Kepler’s own words in English are almost all missing. The Astronomia Nova, the Harmonices Mundi with its closing prayer, and the Mysterium Cosmographicum have no public-domain English translation; the only piece here is Salusbury’s 1661 abridgement of one preface. Wallis’s translation of the Harmonies of the World (1939) and the modern Donahue are both in copyright.

Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) wrote Cosmotheoros, printed in English in 1698 as The Celestial Worlds Discover’d — an argument from the plurality of worlds to the greatness of their maker. It is public domain and reachable, and is the obvious next addition.

Nicolas Steno (1638–1686) founded stratigraphy, converted to Rome in 1667 and died a bishop; his devotional and controversial works are in Latin and Danish and have no public-domain English.

The wider Royal Society circle wrote a great deal of theology that is in the public domain and hand-keyed in the Text Creation Partnership, and none of it is here, because the section was scoped to the ten names the century is usually remembered by:

Boyle’s Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (1661) is the one work of his that is named in every account of his theology and is not here: it is not among the Text Creation Partnership’s transcriptions, and would have to come from a scan of Birch’s Works (1772) by way of OCR.

Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek left no theological writings to add.