Gospel & Universe 🪐 At The Wild & Fog
Hutton’s Hammer
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In the next two pages I’ll argue that Dickens’ mix of science and religion isn’t surprising, since Dickens lived during a time when religious explanations of the universe still held sway, and when the explanations of natural science were yet to dominate our understanding of life on earth. Dickens’ science therefore quite naturally gets mixed up in religion, just as it did in the late 19th century geology of Hutton and in the 1830s psychology and primatology of Abercrombie and Jardine.
In Chapter 17 Dickens refers to geology in a humorous, light-hearted way, at once acknowledging and making fun of the great scientific advances which occur bit by bit, trial by trial, experiment by experiment. It’s as if the momentous theories were uncovered by a million little hammers in the hands of obsessed geologists like Professor Dingo:
‘People objected to Professor Dingo, when we were staying in the North of Devon, after our marriage,’ said Mrs Badger, ‘that he disfigured some of the houses and other buildings, by chipping off fragments of those edifices with his little geological hammer. But the Professor replied, that he knew of no building, save the Temple of Science. The principle is the same, I think?’
‘Precisely the same,’ said Mr Badger. ‘Finely expressed! The Professor made the same remark, Miss Summerson, in his last illness; when (his mind wandering) he insisted on keeping his little hammer under the pillow, and chipping at the countenances of the attendants. The ruling passion!’
The Temple of Science is a contradictory term today, yet in 1850 it was merely paradoxical, since for the previous centuries it was assumed that science exposed the working of God’s universe. One might recall Pope’s 18th century couplet, Nature and Nature’s Law lay hid in Night. / God said, “Let Newton Be!” and all was Light. Yet as Professor Dingo’s little hammer suggests, geology was exposing something different than God’s Light. One might say, Earth and earth’s law lay hid beneath ground. / Time said, “Let Hutton be!” and all was found. Although Dickens hides the huge import of geology behind humour, the science of rocks was chipping away at the old certainty of God’s Creation in 4004 BC and at the notion that Divine Law supersedes natural laws.
In looking at Bleak House and the 19th century debate between religion and evolutionary science, one might start with astronomy, since it focuses on how the earth got to be where it is, and how it got to contain land, water, and air. Yet 19th century natural scientists already accepted the astronomical discoveries that were so revolutionary in the 17th century. They were more concerned with how the elements on earth combined, over time, to create life. The geological work of James Hutton (1726-97) is central here, since it established the large time-line which later evolutionary scientists were to use, and since it also contained early versions of the evolutionary theory itself.
We see the tension between science and religion in the writings of James Hutton, often considered the father of geology. Hutton is at pains to note that what he says about the long stretches of Earth’s time should be seen in subservience, and not in opposition, to the higher truths of religion. In the first volume of his 1795 Theory of the Earth, Hutton writes:
When we trace the parts of which this terrestrial system is composed, and when we view the general connection of those several parts, the whole presents a machine of a peculiar construction by which it is adapted to a certain end. We perceive a fabric, erected in wisdom, to obtain a purpose worthy of the power that is apparent in the production of it.
Today we would debate the certain end and purpose he assumes, given that both of these have been usurped by the survival of natural selection, at least as far as literal biblical timelines and geology are concerned. Hutton clarifies his point about a divine Plan in a later paragraph:
It is not only by seeing those general operations of the globe which depend upon its peculiar construction as a machine, but also by perceiving how far the particulars, in the construction of that machine, depend upon the general operations of the globe, that we are enabled to understand the constitution of this earth as a thing formed by design. We shall thus also be led to acknowledge an order, not unworthy of Divine wisdom, in a subject which, in another view, has appeared as the work of chance, or as absolute disorder and confusion.
Pope’s wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot crops up here in the form of a misunderstood disorder and confusion, which if seen in terms of theological coherence, is seen as order. As Pope puts it, All nature is but art, unknown to thee; / All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; / All discord, harmony, not understood; / All partial evil, universal good: / And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, / One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. Hutton tries to see nature in light of Pope’s Deist God who has a Plan, yet it’s increasingly difficult not to see it in the light of science. Perhaps because what Hutton is uncovering is deeply threatening to biblical literalism, he goes even further than Pope in his assertion that Divine wisdom is operating for the benefit of humans:
The globe of this earth is evidently made for man. He alone, of all the beings which have life upon this body, enjoys the whole and every part; he alone is capable of knowing the nature of this world, which he thus possesses in virtue of his proper right; and he alone can make the knowledge of this system a source of pleasure, and the means of happiness. / Man alone, of all the animated beings which enjoy the benefits of this earth, employs the knowledge which he there receives, in leading him to judge of the intention of things…
Hutton agrees with Pope that there is an intention of things, yet he omits Pope’s more severe Deist notion that God’s plan doesn’t necessarily centre around humans: Ask for what end the heav'nly bodies shine, / Earth for whose use? Pride answers,"'Tis for mine: / For me kind Nature wakes her genial pow'r, / Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev'ry flow'r; / Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew, / The juice nectareous, and the balmy dew; / For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings; / For me, health gushes from a thousand springs; / Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise; / My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies."
Hutton seems to be behind Pope in understanding the implications of science in regard to human superiority and exceptionalism, yet I’d argue that Pope is in a secluded, earlier, less informed position, one in which he can afford to assert a Plan despite the wilderness. Hutton, on the other hand, is taking a giant swing with a forty pound sledgehammer at the Plan itself. He swings, but because the effect of his swing is so great, he feels the need to reassure his audience (and perhaps himself) that no matter how hard he swings, his might cannot match the might of God.
Hutton avoids referring directly to the Bible, yet he can’t stop himself from asserting that the old biblical timeline somehow fits with the eons of earthly time that he explains in his geological study. In the following case, he avoids precise biblical timelines, asserting instead that inferior animals have existed for a long time while the superior animal, man, has existed for a relatively short time:
Now, if we are to take the written history of man for the rule by which we should judge of the time when the species first began, that period would be but little removed from the present state of things. The Mosaic history places this beginning of man at no great distance; and there has not been found, in natural history, any document by which a high antiquity might be attributed to the human race. But this is not the case with regard to the inferior species of animals, particularly those which inhabit the ocean and its shores. We find, in natural history, monuments which prove that those animals had long existed; and we thus procure a measure for the computation of a period of time extremely remote, though far from being precisely ascertained.
Today we know that the beginning of man is very old indeed, far older than the traditional religious Creation date of 4004 BC. Nor can we accept that “we are to take the written history of man for the rule by which we should judge of the time when the species first began.” Hutton couldn’t have been aware of the Mesopotamian texts deciphered in the mid 19th century, yet these texts take the notion of Moses’ “written history of man” in a different direction from that taken in the Bible. If we were to use Hutton’s logic, we would note that the earliest Hebrew texts are later developments in “the written history of man,” and that they’re predated by the non-Semitic Sumerian and the Semitic Akkadian. We would be forced to conclude that our understanding of human origins ought to begin, and to be judged, by the account of Gilgamesh in Uruk.
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Next: Jardine’s Monkeys
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