Once, not too long ago, the vast majority of scientists (then called naturalists) believed in God. In fact, the more reputable and well-known the scientist, the more likely he was to be a theist – and most theists were Christians. These English scientists, and their political leaders, celebrated science as a way to unite a people who had been torn apart by religious and civil war.

Science could unite the country because science showed that there was a God. It didn’t prove that this God was the Christian God, but that was all right. It showed that God existed, so evildoers would be punished. And since science also showed that God had created a stable, unchanging natural order, people were taught this meant they should submit to the order of the state, rather than destroy the country through strife, like their parents. So science brought in God, and God brought in peace.

And the main reason science proved God was because it revealed a natural order like a machine—a machine that everyone knew couldn’t have simply assembled itself. Both the natural world and the corresponding political order showed evidence of careful design. The greatest expounder of the order in nature, William Paley, was an able synthesizer and popular writer who was (like many) most impressed by the biological world with its adaptations of species to habitats. He compared the wonders revealed by biology to watches, and inferred a watchmaker.

But politics and science changed. Social reformers rejected the idea that the current political order was the good production of an orderly God, for the obvious reason that it was full of oppression. And the newfound complexity of the adaptation of species to environments was no longer thought to prove God, when a shy naturalist named Darwin put forward a thesis plausibly showing how species had adapted to their environments through a process that seemed much more full of pain and chance than divine order and blessing.

So the Victorians had a crisis of faith, and Christianity has never been in the English-speaking halls of power in the same way since. There’s more to the story, of course—nuances, exceptions, qualifiers I’ve missed. But the basic plot shows a people who put their faith in science to ensure their religion and their politics, and how their hopes were bitterly disappointed. Like the pagans before them, they put their hopes in the creation rather than the Creator, and received in due course the penalty for their error.

May we never make their mistakes.

Tags: history, Paley, Darwin