The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering Page B

eighteenth-century theologian-philosopher William Paley’s natural theology by showing clearly how mechanical evolutionary processes can create the appearance of creative intent without any forethought or intelligence being involved at all. But all those pre-Darwinian, “ecumaniacal,” and unenlightened thinkers such as Paley weren’t just swooning over some basic insinuation that God produced order simply for the sake of producing order. That in itself wasn’t terribly interesting. Rather, these naturalists wanted to know why He organized things this way and not some other way.
    One of the more intriguing implications of Newman’s work, therefore, is its relevance to our search for meaning in nature. For the faithful, God is seen not only as a tidy homemaker who makes things nice and orderly, but as having left us clues—a sort of signature in the seams—so we’d know and understand His intentions in His use of order. If Julie went into her little brother’s room and made a mess, for example, it’s hard not to see this act as her also giving Billy a sneering message (“this is what you get when you tattle on me”), just as she would be sending a more positive message by thoughtfully organizing his toys (“I don’t say it enough, but you’re not half-bad as little brothers go”). Likewise, God is seen as embedding messages in the secret language of plants, organisms, genes, and all the poetic contingencies threading these things continuously together. At least, that’s been the view of many famous naturalists throughout history who’ve strained to use their empiricism to solve the riddle of God, especially, of course, those employing their craft before the mainstreaming of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
    On his deathbed in 1829, for example, an eccentric British aristocrat named Francis Egerton (also known as the 8th Earl of Bridgewater)—eccentric, among other things, because he was known to throw dinner parties for his dogs while dressing them up in the day’s trendiest couture—left the Royal Society a portion of his financially swollen estate. The money was to be used to commission a group of prominent naturalists to write a major apologist creed “on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.” 29 (In other words, let’s have a look at the natural world to see what’s going on in God’s mind.) Eventually, eight authors were selected as contributors, each paid a thousand pounds sterling, a handsome sum at the time. The individual books that were published as part of the project—what became known as The Bridgewater Treatises —trickled out over a period of seven long years (1833–1840). One of these, a hefty two-volume work by noted entomologist William Kirby, 30 sought to reconcile popular theological teachings with the extraordinary and subtle biological diversity in the animal kingdom that was so apparent to him. Kirby, an original member of the Linnean Society who had made a name for himself studying English bees on the grounds of a rural parsonage in Suffolk, seems to have seen himself more as detective than naturalist:
    Since God created nothing in vain, we may rest assured that this system of representation was established with a particular view. The most common mode of instruction is placing certain signs or symbols before the eye of the learner, which represent sounds or ideas; and so the great Instructor of man placed this world before him as an open though mystical book, in which the different objects were the letters and words of a language, from the study of which he might gain wisdom of various kinds. 31
     
    Even in their day, The Bridgewater Treatises were so larded with Christian propaganda that they were dismissed by most members of the scientific community. The anatomist Robert Knox, a known critic of natural theology (but better known as the anatomy professor involved in the infamous Burke and Hare body-snatching case, in which Knox paid