The roots of Victorian doubt take us far into the eighteenth century, when scientists and philosophers began openly to question biblical accounts of the Earth’s creation. Geologists studying cliffs and ravines publicly doubted whether a single flood could have covered the entire planet, much less whether one man and his family could have rescued every species of animal on Earth from it. Philosophers, too, openly challenged the idea of the miraculous. In doing so, they also cast doubt on the truth and reliability of the Gospels and Old Testament.
In 1781, after both lines of inquiry crossed, rattling the Established Church, an anonymous pamphlet appeared bearing the startling title, The Doubts of Infidels; or, Queries Relative to Scriptural Inconsistencies and Contradictions. The author called himself “A Weak but Sincere Christian” who was submitting his questions to “The Bench of Bishops for Elucidation.” As a self-described infidel, however, the author captured both the word’s flavor of heresy and its suggestion of infidelity (infidel comes to us via the Old French infidèle).1 Bristling with anger, the author was doubtful of the bishops’ ability to answer pages of well-documented concerns about scriptural inconsistency, which he detailed for them chapter and verse.
The pamphlet has been attributed to William Nicholson, a renowned London chemist and philosopher, and its anger is best understood as responding to an act of Parliament passed the same year. After the bishop of Chester, Dr. Beilby Porteus, rallied in 1780 to stop freethinkers and doubters from meeting on Sundays, he helped to create a new law called “An Act for Preventing Certain Abuses and Profanations on the Lord’s Day, Called Sunday.” The law wasn’t amended until 1932, when the Sunday Entertainment Act began to chip away at its broad powers, and it had a significant effect on British culture and society in the decades in-between. Public institutions such as museums, art galleries, libraries, and public gardens were required to stay closed on Sundays. Even public lectures were banned on such days. As the free-thinking philosopher John Stuart Mill later complained in his influential treatise On Liberty (1859), the act also encouraged “repeated attempts to stop railway travelling on Sundays.” What one sees in such attempts, he complained, is a form of “religious bigot[ry]” and “persecution”: “The notion that it is one man’s duty that another should be religious, … a belief that God not only abominates the act of the misbeliever, but will not hold us guiltless if we leave him unmolested.”2
The 1781 act seemingly began with more limited powers, but they were easily misinterpreted. The law authorized the government to fine—even to imprison—landlords and proprietors who allowed “public entertainment or amusement upon the evening of the Lord’s Day.” According to the bishop, the chief concern was this: groups were meeting “under pretence of inquiring into religious doctrines, and explaining texts of holy Scripture” when they were “unlearned and incompetent to explain the same.”3
If that sounds over the top, even a fraction paranoid, consider that Bishop Porteus, an avid reformer and abolitionist, with interests also in the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, had sought the aid of Parliament to crack down on religious criticism in Britain. In the bishop’s own words, which his biographer uncovered a few years later, “The beginning of the winter of 1780 was distinguished by the rise of a new species of dissipation and profaneness.”4
Figure 1. Henry Meyer, portrait of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, bishop of London, 1834, stipple engraving after a 1787 portrait by John Hoppner. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
On Sundays, the bishop noted with dismay, groups across London would assemble in public meeting rooms, using names such as “Christian Societies, Religious Societies, [and] Theological Societies” (LBP, 72). “The professed design of the former,” writes the man later appointed bishop of the capital, “was merely to walk about and converse …; but the real consequence, and probably the real purpose of it, was to draw together dissolute people of both sexes … [for] the amusement [of] discuss[ing] passages of Scripture” (72-73; emphasis in original).
The bishop insisted that these meetings “gave offence … to everyman of gravity and seriousness …, several of whom I have heard speak of it with abhorrence.” Foreigners apparently had been “shocked and scandalized … considering it a disgrace to any Christian country to tolerate so gross an insult on all decency and good order” (LBP, 72-73).
Anyone wondering what Bishop Porteus meant by “good order” should recall that, just a few decades earlier, Robert Walpole’s regime had closed theaters it deemed critical of the Crown and Parliament. Nor was it easy to voice even mild doubt about Christianity.5 A few decades earlier still, an eighteen-year-old university student named Thomas Aikenhead had been tried, convicted, and hanged in Edinburgh for blasphemy. His crime: “denying the Doctrine of the Trinity.”6
In June 1780, just months before the bishop inveighed about moral decay, riots broke out in London after a huge crowd, numbering between forty and sixty thousand, marched to Parliament to protest the repeal of anti-Catholic legislation. Among other things, the laws had prevented Catholics from serving in Britain’s military, a deficit felt strongly at the time, with the American colonies five years into a war of independence and war looming against France. Led by Lord George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association, the crowd descended on Westminster with banners warning “No Popery” and statements of concern that Catholics might band with Britain’s European enemies rather than support their own army.
The rioters attacked numerous Catholic churches and homes, as well as a large number of other buildings in the city. But the bishop, obviously aware of the volatility of Protestant sentiment at the time, chose to focus instead on meetings that were allegedly sowing religious doubt. As he put it, the meetings were set up to be “a school for Metaphysics, Ethics, Pulpit Oratory, Church History, and Canon Law” (LBP, 73).
“It is easy to conceive what infinite mischief such debates as these must do to the younger part of the community,” he railed, “who, being unemployed on this day,… would look upon every doubt and difficulty started there as an unanswerable argument against religion, and would go home absolute sceptics, if not confirmed unbelievers.” Bishop Porteus didn’t seem especially confident about the resilience of Anglicanism after even mild discussion. He also imagined that doubt stemmed entirely from these meetings. But nor was he happy about the rise of devout nonconformists and, a separate but related concern, the growing popularity of free thought. “The Theological Assemblies were calculated to extinguish every religious principle,” he explained, and thus “threatened the worst consequences to public morals” (LBP, 74).
If one still doubts Bishop Porteus’ panicked resolve, consider what he did next. “It was,” he insists, “highly necessary to put a speedy and effectual stop to such alarming evils. I mentioned it early in the winter to several persons of rank and authority.” But as “no one [seemed] inclined to take the matter up,” the bishop turned to eminent lawyers and magistrates, all of whom assured him that “nothing but an Act of Parliament, framed on purpose, could effectually suppress” the meetings and the ideas they were propagating (LBP, 75). After hiring another lawyer to have “a proper Bill sketched out,” the bishop approached various lords and, finally, the solicitor-general, who undertook to have it moved and seconded in the House of Commons.
The bill was “violently opposed” by several members of Parliament, Bishop Porteus recalls, “but it passed without a division” (LBP, 76). In the House of Lords, too, heated exchanges broke out over whether existing laws weren’t sufficient. Yet there also the bill was finally approved, so passing into common law across the country. Wrote Robert Cox, Victorian author of The Literature of the Sabbath Question, “By the comprehensiveness of its enactments and the severity of its penalties, the statute was at once effectual. It is now,” he added wryly, meaning in the mid-1860s, “the barrier which prevents the admission of the public on Sundays to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham—an institution very different in its character and tendencies from those which inflamed the zeal of Bishop Porteus.”7 But the act had far more sweeping effects on British culture. Because the law forbade the performance even of music in churches on such days, a National Federation of Sunday Societies was formed in Leeds in May 1894, seeking to “remove all [such] vexatious restrictions.”8 It would take almost four more decades before the 1781 law was amended and the British public was allowed to visit museums, zoos, and picture galleries on Sundays, and as recently as 1972, with the passing of the Sunday Theatre Act, for that freedom to extend to seeing theatrical performances on those days.9
According to the bishop, the new law was meant to take away “no other liberty but the liberty of burlesquing Scripture, and making religion a public amusement, and a public trade” (LBP, 82). But at a time when Catholics were barred from joining Britain’s judiciary, civil service, and Parliament; when Methodists were harassed and persecuted for preaching “unofficially” in fields and schoolrooms, without the sanction of the Established Church; and when the moral climate in Britain would soon spawn groups like the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the bishop’s notion that the magistrates and courts would not abuse the latitude that his act granted them seems naive or disingenuous.
That may help explain the vehemence of Nicholson’s reaction in The Doubts of Infidels, which he addressed to every bishop because of their colleague’s appeal to Parliament. Writing as a freethinker rather than a devout nonconformist (a position which reveals that many of the roots of unbelief reached far into the eighteenth century), Nicholson proved to be a rhetorical match for Bishop Porteus, not least because he was well versed in scripture and natural philosophy.10 A chemist by training, he was also a journalist, publisher, scientist, and inventor who had briefly set up a law practice, then moved to Amsterdam to sell pottery. After returning to England a few years later, he turned his abundant energy to writing essays for light periodicals, translating Voltaire, and finishing An Introduction to Natural Philosophy, an impressive treatise that took off soon after it appeared in 1781. The same year, obviously incensed by the bishop’s “Sunday Bill,” which he described as amounting to “zealous exertion against the infidels,” he condemned the “prosecutions and pillory against infidel writers and publishers” that had occurred as a result.11
Figure 2. T. Blood, portrait of William Nicholson, chemist, philosopher, journalist, and inventor, by 1812, stipple engraving after a portrait by Samuel Drummond. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
The anonymous pamphlet excoriates the suppression of religious discussion and dissent. “Your late zealous exertion,” Nicholson charged, “must have convinced [you] that you are in earnest in your attempts to propagate and establish our holy faith. An act of parliament is an excellent engine for producing that kind of uniformity of opinions, which consists in holding the tongue…. It is carrying the notion of liberty too far, to suppose, because we are free-born Englishmen, that we may choose our own faith and go to heaven our own way!” (DI, v–vi).
Nicholson reminded the bishops of the excesses of “the holy inquisition,” when zealots in southern Europe imprisoned, tortured, and burned alive tens of thousands who refused to vow allegiance to Catholicism. Representing himself as a “weak but sincere Christian,” he stated: “It happens unfortunately for us, that these mechanical and persuasive arguments are unknown in Britain. Instead of that most strong and logical argument, called the torture, we are obliged to adopt plain reason, or, at most, when that fails us, the prison, fine, and pillory” (DI, vi–vii; emphasis in original). Nicholson’s “Epistle Dedicatory” to the bishops, clergy, “and All Other Supporters of the Church Militant Here on Earth” turns out to be brilliantly controlled satire (v).
The rest of his pamphlet—the main body of its twenty-four-page argument—is a list of strong objections to taking the Bible as absolute truth. These too are presented as “The Doubts of Infidels,” and so can appear as the valid concerns of a doubter wishing ardently to believe. The list of questions begins: 1. How can the attributes of God be vindicated, in having performed so great a number of miracles, for a long succession of very distant ages, and so few in latter times? (DI, 1).
Question 2 invites a thought experiment: “Suppose a book to be published, containing assertions of historical facts long past, which had no collateral testimony of other authors; suppose those facts in general to be improbable and incredible; suppose the book to be anonymous, or, which is worse, ushered into the world under the name of a person who, from the internal evidence of the thing, could not have written it; can it be imagined, that such a book would find credit among people, who have the least pretensions to reason or common sense?” (DI, 2). Question 3 is blunter still: “Is the account of the creation and fall of man, in the book of Genesis, physical or allegorical?” (3).
And so on, for twenty-one more pages. It is a relentless, rigorously precise list of anomalies and contradictions in the Bible. The experience of reading it is similar, one imagines, to auditing one of the best meetings that the bishop of Chester managed to make illegal: one’s sense of Christian history is likely to shift dramatically as a result.
Nicholson’s study of natural philosophy had brought him close to the ideas of David Hume, a key member of the Scottish Enlightenment who had written a remarkable essay on miracles four decades earlier. Hume was just twenty-six when he wrote it in 1737, the year Thomas Paine was born. Its impact upon publication eleven years later was swift and severe, leading to charges of atheism and suggestions of heresy. Allegedly, Hume was—as Nicholson had claimed to be—an infidel.
Hume’s other work on religion and skepticism, including his Natural History of Religion, stirred such controversy that his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion weren’t published until three years after his death. Initially they bore no mention of his or even his publisher’s name. Friends such as Adam Smith, the renowned philosopher and economist, had refused to go near it.
Ever since, Hume’s religious position has been subject to much debate. He was reckoned to be an atheist, at least by the Church of Scotland, which considered bringing charges of heresy against him. Even so, as one present-day scholar points out, while Hume “did not believe in the God of standard theism … he did not rule out all concepts of deity.”12
The Victorian biologist Thomas Huxley later dubbed Hume “that prince of agnostics,” because he wrote, concerning religious principles: “doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject.”13 Even so, many have called his position deist—a religious and philosophical belief that a supreme being created the universe and that the act can be known by reason and observation, without need for religion.14
One thing is clear: Hume recoiled from blind faith. He found its state of acceptance alarming, because it short-circuits discussion and doubt, a point where he and Bishop Porteus could almost agree. “A wise man … proportions his belief to the evidence,” Hume insists in the essay on miracles.15 He inclines to hesitation and holds judgment until he is fully persuaded. Having reached that state by his midtwenties, Hume concluded: a miracle is a “violation of the laws of nature.” It resembles an intervention by “some invisible agent” that cannot be confirmed or disproved but whose probability is highly unlikely (“M,” 135, 121).
Hume’s essay on miracles is fascinating for other reasons, too. In addition to his prevailing skepticism, he paid close attention to psychological factors that predispose us to believe in the incredible. Indeed, he sounded a wise note in describing our tendency to turn the unusual into an omen and good fortune into a sign of heavenly favor. From Hume’s point of view, “the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and the marvelous” (“M,” 124) is a serious problem, given the number of people that it affects. “The Syrians worship[ped] … a fish,” the Roman philosopher Cicero observed, in examples Hume later adapted, “and the Egyptians deif[ied] … almost every species of animal; nay, even in Greece they worship [ped] a number of deified human beings.”16
Hume’s examples were blunter, and his rhetoric less forgiving. “Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine and death,” from the perspective of the devout, “are never the effect of those natural causes which we experience.” Rather, they are turned into “prodigies, omens, oracles, [and] judgments” that falsify cause and meaning (“M,” 125). Equally troubling to Hume: the tendency of humans to exaggerate what portentous information they may have the opportunity to convey. “What greater temptation than to appear a missionary, a prophet, and ambassador from heaven?” (144).
Although Hume carefully removed the essay on miracles from his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), that work was still thought so anti-religious that it caused, in his words, a “Clamour” of charges of “Scepticism, Atheism, &c.” Pamphlets soon appeared, attacking him for “doubt[ing] every Thing,” including by promoting “principles leading to downright Atheism, by denying the Doctrine of Causes and Effects.”17 Indeed, when Hume received encouragement to apply for a chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, his candidacy stirred such resentment from the clergy that, despite resolutely defending his positions in A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh (1745), he was denied the post.
Although the “Clamour” helped to ensure passage of Bishop Porteus’ legislation several decades later, Hume was not one to back down. He included the essay on miracles in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), making clear that his doubt about organized religion had, if anything, hardened. “I flatter myself,” he couldn’t resist adding, “that I have discovered an argument” that should be “an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion” (“M,” 115).
As the Church was still clamping down on dissenters and turning Sundays into days of worship, without music or science, it didn’t take kindly to seeing its venerated God portrayed as “some invisible agent.” Still, Hume faced the onslaught with courage. To the young philosopher at loggerheads with an ecclesiastical community as powerful as the one that Nicholson later railed against, his opponents’ bid to view miracles as exceptions to normal standards of proof was exactly the problem. Suspending “sense and learning” made it look as if the Church encouraged blind assent (“M,” 125).
There were, he noted, enough reasons to distrust accounts of the extraordinary—from the tendency of witnesses to exaggerate what they see to the susceptibility of listeners to trust all that they hear. Given our all-too-human biases, he concluded, miracles and prophecies should be judged on grounds of credibility, just like any other historical report.
Not surprisingly, the Church didn’t see it that way. It continued to insist that miracles are a special case, exempt from investigation. According to their defenders, normal standards of proof simply do not apply. Nor, they add, do such standards have any hope of capturing the “meaning” of events labeled “miraculous.”
Hume considered such moves evasive, even pernicious. The devout create legends to fit their beliefs, he argued, and in the process disregard more plausible explanations for the extraordinary. To that end, miracles are really a subset of broader religious beliefs. To investigate a miracle logically is to “put it to such a trial as it is, by no means, fitted to endure” (“M,” 137).
“To make this [problem] more evident,” Hume continued, making clear why he became such a powerful influence on Nicholson and other turn-of-the-century freethinkers:
Let us examine those miracles, related in scripture…. Here then we are first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts, which every nation gives of its origin…. It gives an account of a state of the world and of human nature entirely different from the present: Of our fall from that state: Of the age of man, extended to near a thousand years: Of the destruction of the world by a deluge: Of the arbitrary choice of one people, as the favourites of heaven; and that people the countrymen of the author: Of their deliverance from bondage by prodigies the most astonishing imaginable. (“M,” 137)
Hume concluded his essay by asking whether “the falsehood of such a book, supported by such a testimony, would be more extraordinary and miraculous than all the miracles it relates.” His incendiary conclusion must also be left in his own words, to avoid any risk of misstating it: “The Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one” (“M,” 138).
“What Hume” did, A. N. Wilson recently observed, “was remove any philosophical necessity for believing in God.”18 That’s one reason his work on religion caused such a furor and threatened charges of heresy. In the Old Testament in particular, Hume observed, God exhibits a range of emotions—vehemence, jealousy, favoritism, and mercilessness—that are conspicuously absent from the New Testament. To that end, he implied, the differences between our Old Testament God and the capricious acts of Greek and Roman deities are less than we might suppose. When God speaks to Moses as a burning bush on Mount Horeb, for example, it seems doubtful that monotheism left paganism centuries behind.
“Were anyone inclined to revive the ancient pagan theology,” one of Hume’s characters explains in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), he would learn from the poet Hesiod that the “globe was governed by 30,000 deities, who arose from the unknown powers of nature.”19 But thirty thousand gods was too many for humanity to appease. (“The Gods are hard to reconcile,” one of Tennyson’s Homeric choruses laments, with provocative capitalization.)20 If humanity were to worship properly, it needed to satisfy fewer gods, which finally meant limiting its adoration and expectations of favor to just one. Conflict nonetheless erupted rapidly over how that one rather jealous and punitive god would be viewed and interpreted, especially by those who worshipped differently or not at all.
For Hume, the parallels between paganism and monotheism—stoked by the Greeks’ skeptical tradition—opened a path to criticizing all forms of religious dogma, including, most provocatively, the existence of God. Nor did withholding judgment on that issue stop him from asking how others formed theirs. Still, if religion were indeed an emotional response to distress and uncertainty, as Hume insisted, then dismissing faith in miracles as excessive credulity would be incendiary but ultimately futile. For believers simply apply their own preferred criteria, calling the miraculous a nonnatural event. To them, as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it in the Authorized King James Version of the Bible, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).
Even so, there are striking differences in how that celebrated statement has been rendered and translated. In 1881, the English Revised Version of the Bible changed two key words. Faith became “the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen,” which dramatically lessened the contrast between hope and assurance, evidence and proof. In the 1901 American Standard Version, by contrast, the emphasis shifted from “substance” and “assurance” to “things” as a whole: “Faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.” In 1973, the New International Version decided to render that idea even more conspicuously: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see,” a statement that thoroughly transforms the meaning of the King James Version, equating faith with certainty as if the two were identical.
Although to a skeptic these and other revisions cast doubt on what exactly one is putting one’s faith in, the same is not always held true for believers, as the same epistle repeatedly underscores, however confusingly: “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:2, King James; emphases mine). With such lines in mind, philosophy professor Robert Baird argued in 1980, “The very fact that faith can be misplaced, … that one can take as ultimate that which is not ultimate at all, is a reflection of the logical possibility that a person may be mistaken.”21 Groups, communities, and of course nations can be, too.
In eighteenth-century Britain, as among believers today, the devout argued that Hume’s emphasis on reason disqualifies itself.22 A deadlock ensued over the status of reason itself and whether it could be a yardstick for assessing what are, to believers, signs and evidence of God.23 Hume’s supporters have since wondered: Is it excessively rational to ask how beliefs are turned into explanatory forces? Should it also be off-limits to wonder how such beliefs comfort or reprimand the believer, depending on temperament, behavior, or cultural tradition?
For many believers, however, an attachment to religion is capable of withstanding doubt from others and from oneself. Indeed, faith commonly prizes the resilience needed to overcome such doubt, sometimes even before it can be registered as such. As Hume put it, people are largely motivated by “the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst for revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature, especially the latter, men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and… in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity.”24 Although Hume considered such emotions entirely understandable, he let them rebound on theology by suggesting that the latter is, at bottom, inseparable from human need. As a philosopher, moreover, he wanted us to pay attention to that need. If “religion originates in our emotional responses to the uncertainties of life, in our feelings of insecurity and vulnerability in a hostile world,” as one of Hume’s editors puts it, capturing his position, then emotion is not a viable or appropriate platform for establishing whether God exists.25
Hume was certainly right about one point: miracles have been, and in many cases still are, integral to theology. A foundation for intricate, far-reaching religious structures, they are often so sacrosanct that it is considered anathema to scrutinize them. Even today, doubt about their probability is frequently deemed offensive to religion as a whole. Still, as Baird reminds us, “Even if one refers to his ultimate concern as ‘God,’ humility insists upon the question: Does one’s understanding of God correspond to reality? Creative doubt encourages this question. Dogmatism suppresses it.”26
Despite the uproar that greeted Hume’s work on religion, one of his friends and literary executors, the influential geologist James Hutton, found in it permission to challenge existing preconceptions about creation. Hutton did so also from a deist perspective. Unlike Hume, however, he detailed the religious implications of his findings with great reluctance. Doubtless with Hume’s fate in mind, he tried to preempt such criticism over the reception of his own geological treatise, Theory of the Earth. His concerns turned out to be justified. Since he “limited the role of Genesis to a general celebration of divine creative power,” scholars noted recently, Hutton was—like Hume and Nicholson—charged with the “infidel purpose to subvert the credit of Scripture.”27
Published in two parts in 1788, Hutton’s treatise sparked passionate debate. Drawing from “principles of natural philosophy” that he had outlined in his earlier System of the Earth (1785), Hutton’s Theory also changed the course of geology.28 In offering a view of earth history without a clear beginning or end, it was “uniformitarian” in focus and comprehensive in a way that was breathtaking and provocative. Influential Victorian thinkers such as Charles Lyell were still praising the work far into the nineteenth century, and it is worth addressing why. “When we trace the parts of which this terrestrial system is composed,” Hutton wrote carefully, “we perceive a fabric, erected in wisdom, to obtain a purpose worthy of the power that is apparent in the production of it.”29
Every balanced phrase, here as throughout his argument, hits at key ideas circulating at the end of the eighteenth century, including that the world’s intricate design reflects the glory of deliberate intention. Hutton doubted many things but not the existence of God. He viewed the Earth almost as an organism that operates in cycles. With ideas about soil erosion and deposition drawn from the English scientist Robert Hooke, who had devised them more than a century earlier, Hutton advanced a challenging thesis: the Earth could not have been created out of one enormous flood. Indeed, far more than just a few thousand years old, the planet has a history that recedes infinitely.
Hutton’s theory was some twenty-five years in the making. As one of five sons by Edinburgh’s city treasurer, he was almost as precocious as Hume, attending the city’s prestigious university at the age of fourteen (Hume had been twelve, possibly younger) to be a “student of humanity.” Instead of turning to law or philosophy, as his friend had, he opted for medicine, completing a dissertation on blood circulation at Leiden after several years of preliminary research in Paris. He returned to Scotland to look after the family estate, a lowland farm in remote Berwickshire. This responsibility gave him ample opportunity to study the winds, tides, and rugged landscape.
Hutton pointed to the minute, nearly invisible effect of deposited sand and shale, which the outgoing tide partly washes away before the incoming tide can deposit it anew. Over a considerable period, this endless motion slowly and unevenly raises the seabed, creating land. Yet the addition and erosion are so microscopic as to take eons to accomplish.30
Hutton’s belief that geology was in no way concerned “with questions as to the origin of things” almost inevitably brought his interest in geological processes and unconformities into conflict with the opening verses of Genesis.31 And though theological debates over free thought broke out toward the end of the eighteenth century, many of them inspired by Hume, most Christians accepted those verses literally, as confirmation that the world was no more than a few thousand years old. To the devout, after all, God had created the world rapidly, in just one day. The Bible said so, and weekly sermons told them to accept that postulate.
Hutton’s ideas about cycles of erosion and deposition were threatening because they left the Earth with neither a strict sense of design nor a precise date stamp. Not that Hutton was reluctant to provide one; he discovered instead how difficult it would be to establish and measure one. The logical, somewhat terrifying conclusion of his Theory of the Earth was an infinite regression of minute patterns of soil elevation and erosion. “We find no vestige of a beginning,” he declared poetically, and “no prospect of an end” (TE, 75).
Because of such statements, the geologist Richard Kirwan, then president of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, denounced Hutton as an atheist—indeed, an illogical one to boot. “Modern geological researches,” he opined, had “proved too favourable to … various systems of atheism or infidelity.”32 “Dr. Hutton,” he added, “suppos[es] … the world we now inhabit to have arisen from the ruins and fragments of an anterior, and that of another still prior, without pointing at any original. If we are thus to proceed in infinitum I shall not pretend to follow him.”33
One year earlier, John Williams, a mineral surveyor from Wales, had similarly misrepresented Hutton’s theory, accusing him of “warp[ing] and strain[ing] every thing to support an unaccountable system, viz. the eternity of the world.” Hutton should be thought pernicious, he continued, because he wanted nothing less than to “depose the almighty Creator and Governor of the universe from his office.”34
The attacks didn’t stop there. The geologist was roundly derided for arguing that the inside of the Earth was scalding hot, even that molten lava was partly responsible for the fusion of scarp and rock. Experts at the time preferred Abraham Gottlob Werner’s “Neptunist” belief that all rocks stemmed from a single, enormous flood. That was what scripture told them.
Werner’s theory is now obsolete, but in the 1770s and 1780s, when the Prussian taught at the Freiberg Mining Academy, students from all over Europe would flock to his classes, then return to their respective countries almost disciples, to broadcast his theory. Werner published little but a textbook on fossils and minerals, but his brilliant teaching inspired his students to publish books of their own on related theories.35
Though he recognized different kinds of rock formation, Werner stuck rigidly to the idea that there was once an all-encompassing ocean, which receded, leaving land. The transition was for him relatively uncomplicated, and its details didn’t concern him. But they greatly troubled Hutton, who devoted much time and energy in Theory of the Earth to speculating on its likely causes. Unlike Werner, he credited volcanic activity as a likely cause of such a flood. Hutton also joined Hume in using such activity to tackle a superstition that is still with us today: “A volcano is not made on purpose to frighten … people into fits of piety and devotion, nor to overwhelm devoted cities with destruction; a volcano should be considered as a spiracle to the subterranean furnace, in order to prevent the unnecessary elevation of land, and fatal effects of earthquakes” (TE, 55).
For Hutton, volcanoes were an “excellent contrivance” and a testament to nature’s “amazing power” (TE, 56). In giving nature such power, however, he contradicted those who considered a volcano’s unpredictable eruptions signs of disorder in the universe. The accusations of atheism were unfair and off the mark. Given his deism, Hutton wanted desperately to reconcile new scientific discoveries to theology, not oppose them. As he put it, “We … 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” (12). The question haunting Theory of the Earth was whether he finally succeeded in presenting such order and thus in answering those who stressed the stronger likelihood of chance and random chaos.
An empiricist strongly committed to shaping his theory to the geological evidence before him, Hutton was convinced that the Neptunist argument about a cataclysmic flood was wrong. After all, if it takes the ocean millennia to create rock formations from minute deposits, then why would the creation of entire continents be entirely different? Hutton did not fully intuit the influence of shifting tectonic plates; their importance was not established until the mid-twentieth century. In the eighteenth century, the Earth’s major features were generally assumed to be fixed. And even though his description of tides washing away much of what they leave behind complicated that idea, Hutton found himself wanting to imply that there is a guiding rationale for this movement that makes it all balance out.
So strong was that theological assumption that when a major earthquake struck Lisbon in November 1755, destroying half the city and with it hundreds of thousands of lives, writers and intellectuals from England’s Henry Fielding to France’s Voltaire found no religious justification for the quake and rapidly lost their faith. Like Hutton, they shared an Enlightenment belief that “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” (TE, 16). The widespread destruction and loss of life in the earthquake shattered that belief, leaving notions of man’s preeminence in doubt, if not yet in tatters.
Prior earthquakes had of course caused equal or greater devastation. In 1737, the year Hume wrote his essay on miracles, a major quake (9.3 magnitude) off Russia’s eastern peninsula caused a tsunami in the Pacific that also killed tens of thousands. But the Portuguese were devout Catholics and eager explorers, with a culture strongly committed to the pursuit of empirical knowledge. With Lisbon that much closer to Paris, London, and Edinburgh, the impact on faith of its earthquake was greater in England than that of the earlier eruption.
Writing in the aftermath of the Lisbon crisis, Hutton learned that earthquakes and even simple land erosions raise large metaphysical questions: “Why make such a convulsion in the world in order to renew the land?” he wondered. “If, again, the land naturally decays, why employ so extraordinary a power, in order to hide a former continent of land, and puzzle man?” (TE, 49). The questions go to the heart of his difficulty in reconciling science and religion.
Having failed to dispel such unwanted doubt, Hutton’s treatise repeatedly alights on it. “Although there be no doubt with regard to some power having been applied in order to produce the effect, yet we are left … to conjecture at the power” (TE, 52). Hutton also wonders, with notable use of the passive voice, whether the world has been “intentionally made imperfect, or has not been the work of infinite power and wisdom,” a significant last query that intensified the charge of atheism. After all, it hides the creative agent and thus challenges the argument for design (15).
That is one reason John Williams, responding to Hutton’s thesis, restated so ostentatiously his love for “the indulgent providence of Almighty God.” He did so a few years before William Paley followed suit in Natural Theology; or, Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802). “Almighty, wife and benevolent Creator!” Williams burst out in his second volume. “How excellent are thy works!—how convenient for needy man!—how suitable to answer the designs of thy providence!”36 Even so, the devastation in Lisbon made it harder for other writers and thinkers to voice that sentiment with equal confidence.
Hutton tried in the end to follow Williams, pushing a thesis that his geological evidence flatly contradicted (that nature was systematic and thus ultimately beneficent to man). But it was his friend and fellow geologist John Playfair who better caught the drift of Hutton’s more vexing proposition. In contemplating his point about endless, bottomless time, Playfair conceded, “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”37 Planetary time was now an abyss, not a carefully ordered sequence of six days. The age and breadth of the universe, which skeptical perspectives on religion had broached but not resolved, grew almost sublime in scale.
Not all who studied that abyss came up empty. Later referencing Hutton, a young Percy Bysshe Shelley invoked it reverently as a pantheistic force in “Mont Blanc” (1817), his remarkable account of the strength and majesty of the Alpine peak. Shelley’s poem opens in quasi-Huttonian language with an address to the Ravine of Arve, the cleft through which the Arve River cascades with impressive force:38
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendor.39
The lines, sharp and eloquent, draw on connective dashes to link the elements haphazardly. In Shelley’s poem, such “glittering” combinations reenact the erratic movement of the tumultuous river. “Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled / The veil of life and death?” his speaker asks provocatively. Indeed, the poem departs radically from Hutton in its willingness to consider the mountain and the river tumbling off it as manifesting energies different from—even in competition with—the Old Testament God. That comes as less of a shock to modern readers, given knowledge today of Shelley’s tract The Necessity of Atheism, which he published anonymously in 1811, an act that resulted in his immediate expulsion from Oxford University. (“God is an hypothesis,” he had argued, “and, as such, stands in need of proof.”)40
Shelley’s poem was similarly provocative in referring less to monotheism than to the “heresy” of pantheism. Once there, he let readers contemplate why such a move “teaches awful doubt” about the history of the planet —doubt that Shelley renders the catalyst for a new relation to the natural world. That relation stems from his acknowledging that the planet’s “scarr’d and riven” surface raises questions that man cannot answer and, indeed, is likely never to answer:
None can reply—all seems eternal now.
The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with Nature reconcil’d.41
“Instead of faith in God,” comments Michael Erkelenz, glossing these lines, “the wilderness teaches faith in an uncreated and never-ending Nature.” In Shelley’s poem, Nature appears “self-sufficient and self-sustaining,” and “therefore no god need be invented to explain its existence.”42
For others, though, including some of his Victorian readers, Hutton’s Theory of the Earth —combined with Hume’s intense philosophical skepticism—helped to bring their beliefs to a crisis. What clinched it for many was Hutton’s poetic conclusion, “We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” (TE, 75). That alone raised urgent questions about scientific truth that clashed with almost everything the Victorians had been taught about the origins of the world.
