Gospel & Universe 🪐 At The Wild & Fog
God Among the Scientists
In the next several pages I’ll explore Dickens’ mix of science and religion in Bleak House. My argument isn't that Dickens is an agnostic, but that he stands at the cusp of agnosticism. A Christian leaning toward ecumenicalism, liberalism, and science, Dickens writes at a moment when science didn't understand dinosaurs or monkeys, yet they were starting to. At the time, people might advance all sorts of fantastic explanations about what humans are and about how they fit into the universe. The line was yet to be drawn from the geology and early evolutionary theory of Lomonosov’s On the Strata of Earth (1763), Hutton's Theory of the Earth (1788), Lamarck's Zoological Philosophy (1809), and Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) to the natural selection of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), the genetics of Mendel’s Experiments on Plant Hybridization (1865) and the DNA of Miescher (1869), Koltsov (1927), Hershey, Chase, Franklin, Watson and Crick (1952-3). An easy way to remember Dickens’ place in this scientific chronology is that he published Bleak House in 1852-3, exactly one hundred years before the mechanics of DNA were identified in 1952-3.
My argument begins with a general — and debatable — point: if science doesn’t supply a complete explanation about the nature of things, one is liable to accept individual facts yet retain a religious explanation which offers completeness. For almost two thousand years Europeans believed that Christianity provided a complete explanation of space (God’s universe) and time (the Bible). Until science could offer a more compelling complete explanation, there was always room to doubt. The agnostic position today is that while science now explains more than religion, it hasn’t yet explained everything, and hence there’s still room for doubt. The proto-agnostic position in 1852, when Dickens published the first 32 chapters of Bleak House (chapters 33-67 were published in serial form in 1953), was that since science had a less complete explanation than religion, there was ample room for doubt. While Hutton’s new geological timeline was largely proven, ideas about evolution weren’t complete enough to challenge the Christian system which had dominated for almost two thousand years. When in 1852 Dickens writes about grandfather Smallweed as a soulless monkey, we have to remember that his model is Jardine’s The Natural History of Monkeys (1833), not Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Jardine goes to great lengths to make sure the reader understands that, unlike monkeys, humans have souls. In depicting grandfather Smallweed, Dickens makes it clear that his monkeyish grandfather is soulless and sub-human, yet there’s a certain amount of ambiguity here, since it opens up the possibility that some humans (especially the tribe of soulless money-grubbing accounting machines) are in fact very much like monkeys.
When it comes to geology and astronomy, Dickens is also in synch with pre-Darwinian scientists. Hutton has solid reasons for presenting a geological timeline which contradicts a literal reading of the Bible, yet he bends over backwards to assure his readers that his discoveries in no way negate the truth of the Bible. In this, he was like Copernicus and Kepler, neither of whom saw their ideas as negating the concepts of God or a divine cosmic order. Dickens falls in line with early astronomy and geology here, for while he uses both, he mocks neither. Rather, astronomy is seen as the larger background in which the Earth and all our little concerns — especially the ridiculously inflated world of dandies and fashion — are located. Geology, a much more recent science, is seen as the bedrock stage on which the ambiguities, beliefs, and doubts of humanity are played out. The imperfect realm of Law may be dust whirling here and there, and the foundations of Class may rumble and crack, yet the ground itself, and the fact that this ground is far older than 4004 BC, isn’t under debate.
What applies to primatologists, astronomers, and geologists applies to scientists in general: they have excellent reasons to believe the facts of science, yet this doesn’t mean they reject religion. The notion of God doesn’t necessarily require the literal sort of interpretation fundamentalists insist on, nor does it require the rejection of religion that atheists and positivists insist on. Why else would Einstein, long post-Darwin, write in a letter to Max Born that “Quantum theory yields much, but it hardly brings us close to the Old One’s secrets. I, in any case, am convinced He does not play dice with the universe.” An agnostic scientist, Einstein didn’t believe in the Bible or a personal God, yet in a 1930 interview he makes it clear that neither of these two disbeliefs preclude the notion of God:
The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.
In time, Dickens may have come up with a similar concept for what he calls in Chapter 17 the Temple of Science, yet it’s impossible to say since he didn’t have the benefit of the years between 1853 and 1930 — 77 years packed with discoveries in genetics, information technology, and astronomy (Hubble’s billions of galaxies). Dickens depicts the Temple of Science in a light-hearted, humorous way, yet under this playfulness lies a more serious concept, one which can’t be fully explored, much less evaluated, because it’s too early in the history of science to see the way the walls and rooms come together to make the Temple complete. One might add that this Temple of Science was more or less complete by 1930, and definitively more so after the decipherment of DNA in 1952-3. Dickens is writing 100 years earlier, and it’s therefore not surprising that he brings up scientific possibilities but maintains an ambiguous, skeptical, even humorous distance from their theological implications.
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Next: Hutton’s Hammer
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