Bridgewater teatrises. Robson 1990; Topham 1992; Topham 2010

ROBSON 1990

Oitavo Conde de Bridgewater, Francis Henry Egerton, FRS FSA, morre em 1829 deixando 8000 libras para a produção de mil cópias sobre teologia natural em qualquer faceta. No final de 1830 todos os autores foram confirmados. Whewell foi segunda opção depois de Herschel (p.72).

Os livros continuaram vendendo muito bem até o fim do XIX.

This format and longevity help establish three points: (1) the concern and argument about Natural Religion to some extent continued into the latter part of the century; (2) the works were seen as scientific, and not merely homiletic or apologetic; and (3) not only Gilbert, Howley, and Blomfield accepted the Bridgewater authors as authorities. 74

 Cobriram muitos tópicos novos e introduziram muitas evidências.

Visão probabilística respaldada em métodos indutivos, geralmente enumeração em alguns casos métods da diferençça 79

Whewell usa a avalha de Occam e outros também.

Adaptação como pré-adaptação, design. 82

 So of each living being, organ, chemical, geological stratum, the question is asked, not just what, where, when, but how? And the 'how' of secondary causes moves inexorably, for the Bridgewater authors, towards the 'why' of first causes. The goals of science include uniformity, regularity, elegance, simplicity: these are the conditions of order, of law. So each entity and process must be explained not as a singularity, but as a component, fitting into and contributing to a patterned, regular movement- with, for the believer, an end. 83

Essa torrente de fatos é usada retoricamente para mostrar o poder de deus.

Enxurradas de perguntas retóricas também eram utilizadas para guiar o leitor para a percepção de que havia apenas uma resposta para o que era discutido (as adaptações) 90

 Provada a existência das adaptações seguia para a prova de que eram resultado do poder e amor de deus. Usavam analogia, metonimia (efeito como causa), apelos ao leitor. apelos a autoridade (incluse qualificação dos citados), inclusive da bíblia.

 But 'fact' implies authentication. The proper way to get you to believe something depends on my assessment not only of evidence in general, but also on my assessment of your openness to conviction. In an elementary textbook or a general summary, where the unstated contract includes a clause that the reader has suspended disbelief, a mere assertion suffices, and some passages in the Bridgewater Treatises are of this kind. In a more advanced work, or one where many specific details are given and the reader is assumed to be familiar with the background, a reference to an acknowledged expert will be more effective. So one finds in the Bridgewater Treatises (though not equally in all of them) a procession of famous scientific witnesses 95

Nunca dão voz aos inimigos.

The problem lies in one of the two ways in which science works, and in the mental habits it encourages. The 'discoverers' of truth, such as Newton, are inductivists; they are safe and sure: 'The inscription is decyphered; the enigma is guessed; the principle is understood; the truth is enunciated.' After them come the 'developers and appliers', who work by deduction, and who (like d'Alembert, Clairault, Euler, Lagrange, and Laplace) have great powers of mind, but are more liable to the error of attributing all to mechanical causes than is the inductivist: the mind of 'a mere mathematician or logician' is not forced to face reality as is that of 'one who studies the facts of the natural world and detects their laws'. The latter, knowing by experience that his light is imperfect, realises that 'there must be a source of clearer illumination at a distance from him'; the former is likely to 'rest in the mechanical laws of the universe as ultimate and all-sufficient principles', and substitute 'certain axioms and first principles, as the cause of all', for the Deity. This danger being understood, and its explanation given, the errors of these 'mechanical philosophers and mathematicians' need concern us no more 'than those of common men'. Thus, 'with the greatest propriety' their supposed 'authority' may be denied on the matters of supreme importance beyond their special competence. 100-1

Uso de analogias foi criticado como forma de resposta as causas secundárias que passavam a ser respondidas pela cc. Southam disse

Even the Bridgewater Treatises, now so much read and so well worth reading, are but the unconscious sacrifice of decrepit 'revelation,' at the shrine of the physical sciences to implore the youthful vigour of REALITY; and the reverent authors of those treatises may perhaps live to see the day when the omnipotence of the auxiliary forces they so fondly enlisted in the holy cause of blind faith, shall turn around upon them to enthrone THOUGHT, INDUSTRY, and SCIENCE, on the decayed altars of mysticism, as a useful trinity for the human brain, when educed and developed. 113

 Isso levou a outro problema:

Related to this weakness is that of saying 'Nature, a.k.a. God'. The divine cause, of course, does not have only effects: it is purposive; the effects are intended. This view is essential to the design argument, for one reads back (inductively) from the effects so that all phenomena can be included. Chance being (necessarily) excluded, if the identities of God and Nature have been imaginatively melded, the Deistic road is well paved for the evolutionist's purposive Nature. (Once more the logic is not impressive, but virtually all popular presentations of 'nature' - e.g. the splendid television programmes of David Attenborough - smuggle in purposive change.) 114

A mudança no significado de adaptação e o lastro da religião em fatos científicos (por vezes provisionais) também foram criticados. Whewell acreditava que a religião deveria se fazer presente na obra do senhor e que os fundamentos de teorias científica permanecem quando elas caem.

TOPHAM 1992

Muitas sequels não oficiais motivadas pelo sucesso de vendas 397-8

I have argued elsewhere6 that one overriding reason for the extraordinary success of the Bridgewater Treatises was that they presented the pious middle classes with a largely nontechnical and religiously conservative compendium of contemporary science, written by men whose scientific and religious credentials had been vetted by authorities as impeccable as the President of the Royal Society and the Archbishop of Canterbury 397

Criticas a seu preço sendo que supostamente era destinado para as massas.

Age of cheap literature: Th e advent of the steam press had made accessible a whole new class of readers, whose minds were the battle-ground for competing groups of would-be educators. All such paternalist educators, however, had a commo n enemy in the established cheap press: the sensational broadsides and ballad-sheets which were hawked in the streets, and the radical unstamped press which had burgeoned with the Reform Crisis. In those turbulent days the powe r of the written wor d to control the working classes was conceived, if not for the first time, at least with a new conviction; and all parties sought to use the weapon for their own ends. It was in this context that the Bridgewater bequest was seen as an opportunity to publish an 'ennobling ' scientific series which was sufficiently cheap to compete with less wholesome street literature. Indeed, several groups of paternalist educators actually made significant use of the Bridgewater Treatises despite their cost, but commentators were none the less diffuse abou t how the Bridgewater bequest might have been better managed in order to meet educational criteria. 401

Sidenote: Henderson pagando do próprio bolso pra financiar uma edição popular do livro de frenologias de George Combe.

Houve um grande movimento de sugestões para baratear a obra.

Considerado bom instrumento de educação por serem sistemáticos e contemporâneos (melhores metodologicamente do que Paley), introdutórios e altamente legíveis. Alem disso, sua ciencia era inócua e não estimulava a subversão da religião nos jovens.

Cada grupo tinha uma ideia diferente de safe science, mas os Treatises ainda apelavam para todos eles. 404-5

Although the Bridgewater Treatises were much too expensive for working-class readers to buy, their proletarian readership was undoubtedly increased through the efforts of paternalist educators. Workers could read the Treatises in mechanics' institutes, and other such libraries; they could hear them expounded or referred to in lectures and classes; they could follow the argument of Bell's Treatise in that author's earlier publication; and they could read extensive extracts from them in various 'useful knowledge' miscellanies. However, as I have been anxious to point out, none of these media was used chiefly by the working classes, and this paper is not so much concerned with proletarian reactions to the Bridgewater Treatises as the preoccupations of those who made educational use of the series. Both in the rhetoric of literary commentators, and in educational practice, the Treatises were far more widespread in popular education than has been appreciated. This is perhaps not altogether surprising, considering the remarkable public profile of these books in the 1830s. However, neither the price nor the size of the Treatises adapted them to use in such contexts, and one might have expected the many cheaper works of popular natural theology to have been generally more prevalent. The Bridgewater Treatises were, however, considered by most contemporaries to be unique among the natural theology literature in their degree of scientific system. Furthermore, as working-class literacy increased, and as science became a more regular component of working-class education, the Bridgewater Treatises provided science which was culturally appropriate to a wide range of paternalist educators, notwithstanding their great divergence in educational philosophy.

It has been a central claim of this paper that the Bridgewater Treatises presented several groups of educators with science that was safe. In particular, I have striven to describe the divergent visions of safe science entertained by the several constituencies. The essentially secular nature of Broughamite science nicely illustrates that safe science is not simply to be identified as science shaped by an acceptable theology of nature. Quite independently of theological references, science could — in so far as it did not subvert supposed religious and political truths — be accredited as safe. Broughamites were not, of course, by any means unanimous about the higher truths which were thus to be protected. At the same time, however, science without a theological reference was considered dangerous in the extreme both by High Churchmen and by evangelicals. While members of both these parties were more or less resistant to the notion that demonstrative natural theology had a significant role to play in Christian apologetics (especially among the bestial and irrational working classes) they were insistent that the language of science must make explicit reference to divine activity if it was to be safe. Indeed, for the more extreme evangelicals, science could not be rendered safe without direct and continual reference to Holy Writ. By concentrating on this notion of safety in science, I have sought to transcend the sometimes rather sterile discussions of early nineteenth-century natural theology, and to identify some of the nonapologetic functions which works of this type could perform in a society where workingclass scientific education was becoming increasingly prevalent. 429-430

Ver também Topham 1998 

 

TOPHAM 2010

Paley já era meio fora de moda na época.

NT: identificar as verdades de deus e deveres do homem sem o uso da palavra de deus.

The arguments took three main forms: the ontological argument, in which the existence and attributes of God were deduced from the very possibility of conceiving of such a perfect being; the cosmological argument, in which the existence and attributes of a divine first cause were inferred from the existence of the cosmos; and the teleological argument, in which the existence and attributes of a divine designer was inferred from the appearances of design in nature. 90

Funcionava como um middle ground entre cristãos de denominações diferentes. Também justificava o trabalho do cientista (uma abordagem antimaterialista).

Alguns autores viam elementos de design na natureza, mas ainda acreditavam na supremacia bíblica, como Kirby.

Não foi apenas Darwin que desafiou o nt, outras correntes religiosas baseadas na bíblia também tiraram seu espaço. Contudo, esses grupos achavam que a ciência só deveria ser feita e ensinada com referencia a deus.

It was in this climate, however, that William Paley’s Natural Theology was published to great acclaim. As we shall see, it was intended to be a natural theology in the strictest sense of the term, forming the logical foundation of Paley’s whole theological system, prior to the introduction of the evidences of the Christian religion. Designed to complete his set of theological treatises for the use of Cambridge undergraduates, it was written accessibly and with great clarity. Partly in consequence, it reached a far wider audience, running to ten editions in the first four years. Moreover, it continued to sell well for more than half a century, with over 90,000 copies in print in Britain by the publication of Origin of Species in 1859. By dint of its continued production and use, it thus became something of a classic—read by succeeding generations in different ways, but widely familiar within British culture. 92

O projeto de Paley vinha da corrente latitudinariana da igreja, que permitia o uso da razão acima da literaridade búibliva. Isso causou problemas cvomoutras corrrentes mais tradicionalistas.

Argumentos retóricos bem empregados. Acumulação de pontos de vista provando deus. Não apenas o uso do design.

Paley não fazia muita questão de apresentar o estado da arte cientifica. Algo com o que os autores dos BT tiveram que se preocupar.

Cada autor dos BT deus seu spin diferente na abordagem de Paley.

In his treatise on physics, William Whewell observed that the “peculiar point of view” of modern science was “that nature, so far as it is an object of scientific research, is a collection of facts governed by laws.” Whewell’s aim in his Bridgewater Treatise was to “to show how this view of the universe falls in with our conception of the Divine Author.” In so doing, he developed an approach that was by no means entirely original, but was certainly at odds with Paley’s. 93

O bequest do conde de Bridgwater não especificava que deveria ser de NT apenas, então Kirby, por ex., pode colocar suas inerpretações biblicas em seu folume.

As we have seen, Paley’s version of the design argument gave fundamental importance to the functional adaptation of the parts of animal bodies both to each other and to external conditions. Yet in the thirty years between the publication of Natural Theology and that of the Bridgewater Treatises, this ultra-teleological approach to anatomy had been advanced far beyond Paley’s account by the commanding researches of the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and his disciples. Paley was not a naturalist, but a theologian, and, although he included a chapter on comparative anatomy in his Natural Theology, the focus there had been chiefly on the more superficial resemblances of organisms. By contrast, Cuvier had transformed natural history by showing how the deep structure of animals revealed patterns of relationship between them, based on common solutions to the problem of functional adaptation. In so doing, he gave to teleological anatomy a vastly more developed scientific form and status. Cuvier began to codify his new approach around the time that Natural Theology was published, and by the 1810s it was being incorporated wholesale into British natural history. Thus, when such Bridgewater authors as Charles Bell and William Buckland emphasized functional adaptation in their treatises, it was Cuvier’s work and principles, not Paley’s, on which they drew. For this reason, it would be more accurate to describe teleologists of the type represented by Bell and Buckland as “Cuvierians” than as “Paleyites.” 100-1

Roget por outro lado, desviava dessa adaptação perfeita, adotando Geoffroy:

 Cuvier’s great Parisian rival, the deist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), had urged the need for a more philosophical approach to natural history. Animal form needed to be accounted for not in terms of final causes (what is it for?) but in terms of efficient causes (how was it made?). Geoffroy’s view was that animal morphology was not determined by function, but obeyed certain fundamental laws of organization that were to be explained materialistically. In London’s medical schools, the importation of such views had a political edge. Those engaged in supporting the “philosophical anatomy” of Geoffroy were often those marginalized by the Anglican-dominated medical establishment—the corrupt medical corporations and the Anglican universities of Oxford and Cambridge. 106

 Argumento nomológico em Whewell:

As we have seen, Paley’s God was a watchmaker—an artisan who could be known through the analogy between his creation and human artifacts. Consequently, Paley produced a catalog of God’s mechanical handiwork, dominated by the contrivances in living organisms. Whewell’s was a far less anthropo­mor­phic argument. He insisted that in our conceptions of divine purpose and agency we must “go beyond the analogy of human contrivances.” We are, he continued, “led to consider the Divine Being as the author of the laws of chemical, of physical, and of mechanical action, and of such other laws as make matter what it is;—and this is a view which no analogy of human interventions, no knowledge of human powers, at all assists us to embody or understand.” Despite his protestations, however, Whewell did apply an anthropomorphic analogy to the deity, while cautioning that it should not be pushed too far. In place of Paley’s artisan God he substituted a divine legislator. The world was governed by general laws, he explained, and just as a stranger in an unknown land might learn about the nature of its human government from the laws that were in force, so the cosmic stranger might learn about the nature of divine government by studying natural laws. This nomological conception of design had the advantage that it pushed Whewell’s own subject matter into the limelight. Only in two departments of research—astronomy and meteorology—had science been able “to trace a multitude of known facts to causes which appear to be the ultimate material causes, or to discern the laws which seem to be the most general laws.” These, then, were the parts of natural philosophy “in which we may hope to make out the adaptations and aims which exist in the laws of nature; and thus to obtain some light on the tendency of this part of the legislation of the universe, and on the character and disposition of the Legislator.”39 [...] Whewell’s self-proclaimed purpose in his treatise was, after all, to show “that the notion of design and end is transferred by the researches of science, not from the domain of our knowledge to that of our ignorance, but merely from the region of facts to that of laws.” 108-9

 Whewell e Buckland chegam a comentar sbre a origem das sps após cataástrofes, mas não estendem suas leis até lá. O BT tinham um fixismo que corria em todos os vols.

Sidenote: Ver argumento do calculating engine de Babbage 110-1

Darwin’s notebooks from the 1830s suggest that, as a still-devout theist, he too was convinced that “the Creator creates by laws” as he formulated his transmutation theory. Indeed, despite the subsequent erosion of his belief in God into a somewhat vacillating form of agnosticism, Darwin used an excerpt from a Bridgewater Treatise in a prominent position opposite the title page of the Origin of Species in support of this view. “But with regard to the material world,” he quoted from Whewell, “we can at least go so far as this—we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.” Of course, the strategic nature of Darwin’s quotation is plain to see. Yet the notion that natural theology, or at any rate a theology of nature, might in this way be found consistent with natural selection motivated a number of Christian evolutionists in the later nineteenth century.44 111

Criar uma oposição ente Darwin e Paley mascara o desenvolvimento das ideias de Paley nos BT.