The Philosophical Breakfast Club (36 page)

At the same time, earning so much money made Whewell more apprehensive than usual about the quality of his work. Generally, as he had explained to Jones during Jones’s struggle to complete the book on political economy, “while you work for years in the elaboration of slowly developing ideas, I take the first buds of thought and make a nosegay out of them.”
³¹
This time, however, he fretted, “In this matter, where I am to receive a thousand pounds, it is by no means enough that
I
should know that I am right.”
³²
He sent his manuscript to Jones for comments and suggestions. Jones procrastinated in his reply—so much so that Whewell grew exasperated with him, reminding his friend sharply that “it much concerns me what you think!”
³³
Whewell spent more time on this work than on his other books, taking over one and a half years to complete it.

The hard work paid off. Whewell’s book,
Astronomy and General Physics, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology
, became the most popular of the Bridgewater Treatises, going through nine editions in Whewell’s lifetime.

His goal in the book was, as he wrote, to show how “every advance in our knowledge of the universe harmonizes with the belief of a most wise and good God.”
³⁴
He started off right on the frontispiece with a quote from Isaac Newton, showing that even the most famous scientist of all time had agreed with the natural-theology position. In his
Principia Mathematica
, the book in which he proved the law of universal gravitation, Newton had explained, “This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.” Two years earlier, Brewster’s
Life of Newton
had introduced the British reading public to the religious side of Newton,
which had been downplayed by French writers on Newton (who tended to be atheists themselves) such as the physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot.

Whewell used examples originally employed by Newton to show how the structure of the universe indicates the handiwork of its Creator. All the planets circle the sun in their nearly circular orbits, all in nearly the same plane.
³⁵
The sun is in the center of the solar system, an arrangement necessary for us to receive the amount of light and heat needed for life on our planet; this could not have been by chance.
³⁶
Whewell quoted from a letter of Newton to Richard Bentley (reproduced in Brewster’s book from the originals held at Trinity College), in which Newton admitted that he could accept the possibility that matter may have formed into separate bodies merely by the force of gravitation; but he still could not see how the “luminous” matter of stars and sun could have separated, by itself, from the darker matter forming planets and their satellites. This, Newton noted, “I am forced to ascribe to the counsel and contrivance of a voluntary agent.”
³⁷

Whewell argued further than Newton had done that even the relation between the celestial and terrestrial realms indicates the work of an intelligent Creator. The length of a solar year is determined by how long it takes for the earth to orbit the sun. As Whewell pointed out, this period of time could easily have been other than it is, if the earth were closer to or farther from the sun, or if its speed were faster or slower. If, however, the solar year were different from what it is, then it would be a disaster for fruits and vegetables. If the summer and autumn were shorter than they are, fruit would not ripen on the trees. Moreover, plants and animals are adapted to the climate of the areas in which they are found. Tropical plants and flowers thrive in the warm climate of tropical zones; but if the temperature in those zones were colder, those plants and flowers would all die off.
³⁸
Like Paley, Whewell argued that this could not all have been arranged by chance.

Yet Whewell’s version of natural theology was more sophisticated than Paley’s, reflecting Whewell’s superior knowledge of science. The most compelling evidence to be found in nature for God’s existence, Whewell argued, was not the existence of individual cases of fitness to environment, such as the white fur of the polar bear, but the workings of natural law. “Nature acts by general laws,” Whewell explained, pointing to examples such as the law of universal gravitation—he even cited Herschel’s work on the double stars, as proving that the inverse-square law
of gravitation really is a universal law, reaching beyond the confines of our solar system.
³⁹
The existence of natural law implies the existence of a law-giver, some intelligent mind that formulated a general law and created the universe in accordance with it.

Indeed, because studying the laws of nature gives so much confidence in the existence of a law-giving God, science is not only consistent with religion, but is an important pathway to religious belief. Whewell thus embarked on a discussion about the proper way to do science, showing that the use of an inductive method was most likely to lead to the strengthening of religious faith. In two chapters, Whewell contrasted what he called the inductive and deductive “habits of the mind,” arguing that the former are more likely than the latter to lead to belief in God. With Rose’s criticisms of scientific inquiry in mind, Whewell was trying to show that science—properly done science—does not lead to irreligious views. As far as it is true that some men of science have been atheists, Whewell insisted, they have been mainly from the camp of deductive, not inductive, thinkers.
⁴⁰
This section of his Bridgewater Treatise was very much part of the Philosophical Breakfast Club’s project of defeating the “downwards mad” writers who wished to make scientific method primarily deductive; here he is giving a religious justification for following an inductive scientific method.

The inductive mind, Whewell reminded his readers, studies the facts of nature in order to try to discover lawful connections between them. As he had put it in his review of Herschel’s
Preliminary Discourse
two years earlier, the facts of nature are like individual pearls, which need to be strung on a connecting thread, an organizing principle, or law. When the scientist discovers a law of nature, what happens is that “a mass of facts which before seemed incoherent and unmeaning assume, on a sudden, the aspect of connexion and intelligible order.”
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All facts are suddenly seen as “exemplifications of the same truth”—as when Newton realized that falling bodies, projectiles, orbiting planets, and the movement of the tides were all particular instances of the inverse-square law of gravitation. “This step,” Whewell explained, “so much resembles the mode in which one intelligent being understands and apprehends the conceptions of another, that we cannot be surprised if those persons in whose minds such a process has taken place, have been most ready to acknowledge the existence and operation of a superintending intelligence.” That is, our recognition of the lawlike nature of the world almost forces us to the
realization that the world must have been created by an intelligent being who imposed these laws on His Creation.

Whewell allowed that deductive reasoning is valuable in science. Once a law is discovered by inductive reasoning, it is important to use deduction to find “a train of consequences,” or empirical predictions, that can be used to test the truth of the law. As Bacon, and more recently Herschel, had argued, there is a “double ladder,” requiring ascent (to a law) by induction and descent (to testable consequences of the law) by deduction.
⁴²
Whewell went out of his way to praise mathematicians, “men well deserving of honor,” who, Whewell emphasized, “have labored with such wonderful success in unfolding the mechanism of the heavens”—d’Alembert, Clairault, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace.
⁴³
But this deductive work does not add to knowledge anything not already contained in the laws themselves; it is like unfolding “right triangles have 180 degrees” out of the law “all triangles have 180 degrees.” Deduction is useful for testing theories arrived at by induction; but deduction itself, as Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell had all argued against the Ricardian political economists, cannot be used for finding new truths in the first place.

So the man of science who uses only deductive reasoning is not a real discoverer, not someone who will uncover new laws of nature. The deductive scientist is also at a disadvantage in religious belief. By not doing the work of discovering new laws of nature, the deductive scientist or mathematician is not in a position to realize that there must have been an intelligent law-giver who created the world. It was not surprising, Whewell concluded, that many famous mathematicians (mostly French, as it happens) have been atheists.
⁴⁴

Whewell was most concerned about the reception of these two chapters.
⁴⁵
Gilbert, who had commissioned the work from him, told Whewell that he was delighted with the book. He was “much pleased” with the chapters on the inductive and deductive habits of the mind, Gilbert assured him, but warned, “I hear that some mathematicians are quite violent against them.”
⁴⁶
He surely had in mind Babbage—who had recently published his screed against the Royal Society—as one of these “violent” mathematicians.

To Babbage, ever on the lookout for slights aimed at him, this book seemed to be denigrating his very essence as a mathematician—indeed, it appeared to him that Whewell was dismissing his Difference Engine, created in order to perfect and mechanize mathematical reasoning, a form
of deductive thought. In expressing his anger toward Whewell, Babbage made it clear that the project of the Philosophical Breakfast Club—to bring about a revolution in science, partly by promoting inductive scientific method—had become secondary to Babbage’s main project: his own self-promotion.

O
N BEHALF OF
mathematicians everywhere, Babbage resolved to show that deductive reasoning—even when done by a machine—did not inevitably lead to atheism. He may have argued as an undergraduate at Cambridge that “God was a material agent,” but he was not about to concede the realm of religion to Whewell. In response to his friend’s work he wrote what he cheekily called his
Ninth Bridgewater Treatise
—cheeky because it was not one of the books in the official Bridgewater series—published in May 1837. The title page of this work displayed the quotation from Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise that had most provoked Babbage: “We may thus, with the greatest propriety, deny to the mechanical philosophers and mathematicians of recent times any authority with regard to their views of the administration of the universe; we have no reason whatever to expect from their speculations any help, when we ascend to the first cause and supreme ruler of the universe.”

On the contrary, Babbage believed, deductive reasoning could be used in support of religious views. Specifically, one could use deductive mathematical reasoning to demolish Hume’s famous argument against the existence of miracles, making a much stronger case against it than Paley had done in his
Evidences of Christianity
. Indeed, one
must
use mathematics to defeat this argument, Babbage claimed, making mathematical reasoning actually
necessary
for religious belief.

Hume had famously argued that the existence of miracles—defined as specific acts outside the laws of nature created by God—could not be rationally supported. Given the evidence for any such miracle, which generally includes the testimony of witnesses, it is always more reasonable to believe that the miracle did not in fact happen. Witnesses can be incorrect, or lying.

Making reference to works on mathematical probability theory by Laplace, Poisson, and De Morgan, Babbage translated the issue into statistical terms, noting that Hume’s argument amounts to the claim that miracles are extremely improbable. Once Babbage does this, he can use
mathematical reasoning to show that the argument is fallacious. If “miracle” means something very improbable, then it follows that one
should
believe in miracles if the evidence in their favor makes them more probable than the evidence against them.

Babbage considered Hume’s example of Christ’s alleged resurrection. Babbage claimed that the improbability of this event was 200 billion to one against its occurrence. (Babbage reached the number 200 billion by estimating the number of human beings who had ever lived; the probability of only one of them being resurrected was supposed, therefore, to be 200 billion to one.) Babbage next showed that if there are six normally reliable, independent witnesses (that is, none is influenced by the testimony of the others) to a miraculous event, the probability of all six lying is 100
⁶
to one, or 1 trillion to one (assuming that each witness will tell a falsehood one out of one hundred times, making the probability of lying in a given situation for each witness one hundred to one, according to Babbage). So it is actually far
more
probable that the miracle is true than that all six witnesses are lying: specifically, it is five times more improbable that all the witnesses are lying than that the dead man rose up (one trillion to one versus two hundred billion to one).
⁴⁷

Herschel complained to Babbage about these calculations: Why should he count only the total number of human beings who have ever lived, and not the total number of mammals, or other vertebrates, or indeed all other living things, since only one living thing has ever been resurrected? Moreover, he chided Babbage that “I have objections in toto to any application of the calculus of probabilities to the case in question, as a ground for belief one way or the other.”
⁴⁸
As Herschel complained to Jones, “The real fact is that it is not a question of which any numerical computation applies at all!”
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Babbage also took issue with Whewell’s view of miracles. Whewell’s position on this topic was not fully articulated in his Bridgewater Treatise. In that work, Whewell had mainly described God as acting in a lawful way, by creating a world that runs by natural laws; indeed he argued that the existence of these universal laws, which do not require God’s constant intervention, is the best evidence for the existence of a law-giver. From this it would seem to follow that God does not need to intervene each time an object is dropped, or every time a projectile is flung, or during the never-ceasing orbits of the planets. Rather, God merely had to create the law of universal gravitation that governs these actions.