Edward B. Davis
Professor of the History of Science
Messiah College
Grantham, PA 17027
tdavis@messiah.edu
717-766-2511, ext 6840

Talk given at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 9 January 1998, in the series, "The Faith of Great Scientists," organized by Dr. Ian Hutchinson.

This document is provided solely for the edification of readers. Not for citation or quotation without written permission. CAUTION: Portions are based on copyrited material I have written, from The Scientific Revolution:  An Encyclopedia, ed. Wilbur Applebaum, Garland Publishing, Inc., forthcoming.  Used by permisssion.  Further reproduction strictly forbidden.

Introduction: On the Integration of Faith and Learning

I begin this talk with an apology: although I am a Boyle scholar, this is not a scholarly essay. It breaks no new ground, introduces very little new information, and says nothing that would surprise anyone with a good working knowledge of Boyle's life. Quite the contrary -- the depth, extent, and sincerity of his Christian beliefs, which I will discuss at some length here, are well known and essentially unchallenged features of his biography.

I offer no apology, however, for putting forth Robert Boyle as an outstanding example of a Christian scientist whose faith interacted fundamentally with his science, in ways that even modern Christian scientists might profitably emulate. Modern science, technology, and medicine raise many tough ethical problems that we cannot hope to address adequately without having a theology of science. In addition, our own personal development as individual persons of faith cries out for thoughtful integration, since modern science raises a number of specific issues that challenge Christian faith (or are often perceived to do so). As lovers of the unity of truth, we should not tolerate what amounts to intellectual schizophrenia -- the separation of two parts of our brains, one for faith and the other for science and/or reason, one for Sundays and the other for the rest of the week.

The integrative task is obviously important for people like me who teach at religious colleges, where we serve as mentors for other Christians who seek to answer their own personal questions about science and faith. But Christian faculty at secular institutions such as MIT also need openly to discuss their faith in relation to science, for they, too, can mentor Christian students -- students who otherwise will assume that they must ignore or even contradict their faith when thinking about science. Furthermore, they can in this way offer nonreligious students and colleagues a witness to the wholeness of Christian thinking and living in an environment filled with the need narrowly to specialize and the fragmentation of the mind that often accompanies this. Non-Christian students need to realize that the modern secular view of science as truth and theology as nonsense is not the only way of understanding how scientific knowledge relates to other forms of knowledge: if Christian faculty do not take it upon themselves to demonstrate this, then who will? All Christian scientists, inside and outside the academy, at all sorts of institutions, should seek to model the transforming power of Christian thinking about science and everything else. Their students, their colleagues, and even the general public will benefit from their witness: the whole culture needs the whole gospel. With all of these reasons, Boyle would have agreed.

It is not simply that people in the modern West often find religion irrelevant to science. For many, including a number of prominent scientists, Christianity and science have for centuries been engaged in open conflict, with science winning the war for cultural and epistemic territory. My own discipline, the history of science, has been instrumental in debunking this myth, which has specific ideological roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it actually tells us more about the people who believe it than about the history it purports to relate. In fact, Christianity has often provided a powerful motivation for the practice of science and medicine, and it has helped to mold science into the highly successful empirical enterprise that it has become in the last three centuries. Both of these points are well illustrated in Boyle, as we shall see.

No less important, much recent scholarship in the history of science serves to "demythologize" the common image of science as purely objective knowledge and faith as purely subjective belief, from which the warfare view easily follows. We now know that scientific knowledge is determined not by observations and experiments, but by the outcome of debates about how to interpret observations and experiments, debates that are influenced by a variety of factors -- philosophical, religious, sociological, political, and personal. It is now possible as never before to see both science and religion as containing deeply held, rationally structured beliefs, some of them not directly testable. Indeed, for many in the modern world, science itself wears the mantle of religion: it provides a creation myth, reveals our true human nature, proclaims the promise of material and cultural salvation, gives us every good and perfect gift, offers eschatological hope, and functions as the ultimate arbiter of truth. For Boyle, too, science performed a religious function: by detailing the intricate constructions of marvelous creatures, it called attention to their creator, in a manner that could not be equalled by other means. Thus the scientist was a type of priest, and the moral character of the scientist was highly relevant to success.

Yet scientists are human beings like everyone else, subject to the same foibles and heirs of the same fallen nature. The proper response to this is not arrogance, but humility -- a quality that was much pronounced in Boyle, though hardly universal among scientists. Although it is important to aim toward the establishment of truth, none of us can be certain that we have acheived it. Humility, and the intellectual openness that accompany it, are the most important attitudes to bring to the integrative task. In practice, this means that no particular way of relating Christianity and science is going to answer all important questions satisfactorily. We must expect to encounter difficulties that have no clear solutions, and we must be careful not to hitch our theological wagons too tightly to any particular scientific or philosophical horses -- while at the same time we must recognize that, without particular horses, we can only stand still. Above all, we must retain that combination of mystery and faith that breathes life into the dry bones of human existence. And once again, we shall see that the diffident, eclectic, and scrupulously honest Robert Boyle has gone before us.

Who Was Robert Boyle?

Who Was Robert Boyle? Perhaps the simplest answer is, the 14th child and 7th son of the 2nd wife of the 1st Earl of Cork. Born at Lismore Castle, Ireland, 25 Jan 1627 (old style), into the wealthiest, most influential family in Ireland and one of the most powerful families in the whole realm.  Spent his early years with a nursemaid; his mother died just a few years later, and he wasn't told for some months. Called "Robyn" by his family.

As a youth, Robyn and his brother Francis studied for three years at Eton College prior to embarking on a Grand Continental Tour under the supervision of Isaac Marcombes, a French Protestant in whose Genevan home they stayed for nearly two years. During this time, Boyle later recalled, he underwent a conversion experience when he prayed like Luther for divine deliverance in the midst of a terrifying thunderstorm, vowing to live piously if he should survive -- a vow he kept with remarkable consistency for the rest of his life.

It was a thoughtful, reflective piety. "I am not a Christian, because it is the religion of my country, and my friends," he wrote, "when I chuse to travel in the beaten road, it is not, because I find it is the road, but because I judge it is the way." He was anxious, always axious, about the dangers of "atheism" -- not only the philosophical variety which was rare in his day, but much more he was concerned with what Henry More called "practical atheism," living as if there were no God to judge one. Observing the widespread abuse of marriage by men, Boyle resented their conduct and perhaps partly for this reason declined to marry himself, remaining chaste. Even his speech was pious. He was known to pause audibly before uttering the name of God, and he sometimes wrote with a similar pause in his prose. Scrupulously avoiding saying or taking oaths (having done the latter only once to our knowledge), he was anxious about blasphemy and subjected himself to intense moral scrutiny, with at least one bishop as his confessor. Two of his earliest writings were A Free Discourse against Customary Swearing, and A Dissuasive from Cursing, both published posthumously.

With Marcombes, Boyle perfected his French while learning the traditional subjects of rhetoric, logic, mathematics, natural philosophy, ethics, history, and the art of fortification. He also read John Calvin and attended the church pastored by the great biblical scholar Jean Diodati, in whose home two of his older brothers had stayed some years before.  When in 1642 the Irish Rebellion and other circumstances rendered their father unable to forward funds for their support, Francis returned to Ireland to fight while Robert went back to Geneva with Marcombes, where he continued his studies on credit. Around the middle of 1644, he returned to England and took up lodging with his sister and closest friend, Katherine Lady Ranelagh, in London.  Katherine was one of the brightest women of her generation. She convened a salon for important intellectuals; she knew John Milton, Samuel Hartlib, and several members of Parliament. She was also deeply pious and well versed in theology.

About 1643, when his father died, Boyle moved to Stalbridge Manor in Dorset, which he inherited.  He lived there until the mid-1650s, though he often visited London and spent almost two years in Ireland. His earliest writings, some of which were published many years later, date from the first part of this period: the essays on swearing (already mentioned); an ethical treatise influenced by Erasmus; an autobiography of his early years; and various essays, reflections, and romances on moral and religious subjects, some of which were published many years later, including The Martyrdom of Theodora and Didymus and early versions of Seraphick Love and Occasional Reflections. The following passage from  the latter is typical of his early writings:  "We must never venture to wander far from God, upon the Presumption that Death is far enough from us, but rather in the very height of our Jollities, we should endeavour to remember, that they who feast themselves to-day, may themselves prove Feasts for the Worms tomorrow." Also consider these, from `Diurnall Observations, Thoughts, & Collections', an unpublished MS from 1647. (BP 44, fol. 95): "The Dialect of Faith runs much upon the First Person or True Faith speakes always in the First Person."  "He whose Faith never doubted, may justly doubt of his Faith."  These writings have an emotional tone and an evangelical fervor to renew the spirituality of his countrymen that are not found to a similar degree in Boyle's mature works, but I think there is a good reason for this: after c. 1650, weakness of the eyes caused him to cease writing himself, in favor of dictating to amanuenses. Thus, it is much more difficult to see the private side of Boyle from this point on. The profound sense of divine sovereignty manifest throughout these works, however, remains undiminished in his later works and had important consequences for his science, as we shall see.

Shortly after this, in 1649-50, for reasons that are still a bit unclear, Boyle discovered science in a serious way, beginning a program of experimentation that continued to the end of his life. From the start, however, a theological motivation was quite evident: science is not done in a moral vacuum, but to improve the human condition. Like Francis Bacon, Boyle believed that the new science held the key to this; like the iatrochemists and the Hartlibians, he had particularly strong hopes for what might come through the application of chemical knowledge to medicine. These beliefs are the central themes of his longest book, Some Considerations touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (1663 and 1671), parts of which were begun at this time and constitute Boyle's earliest scientific writings.  Yet his religious interests were not being neglected. Influenced by his father's friend, the great biblical scholar James Ussher, Boyle began to study biblical languages, acquiring linguistic skills that served him well later in his many theological treatises. About this time he wrote an unpublished "Essay of the holy Scripture," a work about reason and revelation written partly in response to Socinianism, brief passages from which were later incorporated into Some Considerations touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (1661).

In the winter of 1655-6, Boyle moved to Oxford in order to join a group of natural philosophers that met in the rooms of John Wilkins, the Warden of Wadham College. After Wilkins moved to Cambridge in 1659, Boyle hosted the meetings himself, in his rented rooms at a house on the High Street.  Shortly after this, in 1660, Boyle and several like-minded gentlemen began the Royal Society, agreeing in this venture to leave matters of politics and religion aside as too controversial. This may have been one reason why Boyle's theological works were typically published anonymously or pseudonymously; but there can be no doubt that he thought them equally important with his scientific works. Indeed, he actually perceived himself ideally suited to write about theology as a scientist. When on one occasion he declined to take holy orders, he said that his statements about how science aided religious belief would be taken more seriously if he wrote as a scientist rather than as a cleric.

Clearly, regular contact with accomplished natural philosophers in Oxford and London was a great stimulus, for the next twelve years were perhaps the most productive period of Boyle's life. His most famous project was a series of brilliantly conceived experiments on air, inspired by a series of spectacular demonstrations of the force of air pressure done in Germany by Otto von Guericke and reported in 1657 by Gaspar Schott. Ably assisted by a young Robert Hooke, Boyle used an air pump to prove that the properly equipped natural philosopher could indeed produce a vacuum -- a fact which flew in the face of the Aristotelian principle that "nature abhors a vacuum." Boyle published his results in New Experiments Physico--Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects (1660) and in two sequels, one of which contained the first published statement of the inverse relation between the pressure and volume of a gas that has come to be called "Boyle's Law," even though Boyle himself credited others with the original discovery.

Simultaneously with his work on pneumatics, Boyle wrote two other major scientific treatises: Certain Physiological Essays (1661), which includes a splendid account of the practical and philosophical problems posed by experiments, and The Sceptical Chymist (1661), a rambling dialogue in which he weighed the Aristotelian and Paracelsian traditions and called for practical chemists to show greater philosophical sophistication.  A few years later he published two large collections of experiments on cold and colors, drawing heavily on reports from travelers to various parts of the world. The interest Boyle had in travel literature was typical for the period; although the precise contents of his library is not known, his situation was probably not much different from that of Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke, who both owned plenty of reports from travellers.

In the early and mid-1660s, Boyle wrote his two most subtle and analytical works of natural philosophy, The Origine of Formes and Qualities (1666) and A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature, published after much revision in 1686.  Here Boyle stated his reservations about the scholastic mode of explaining natural phenomena and argued for the scientific and theological superiority of what he called "the mechanical philosophy." First, mechanical explanations were more coherent and intelligible than the "vulgar" Aristotelian philosophy, and thus more likely to lead to technological progress. Second, the mechanical philosophy focused our attention on the properties and powers given to brute matter by God, rather than on purposive principles within nature that functioned as intermediaries between God and the creation. Thus it represented an effective foil to various forms of Renaissance naturalism that tended to personify nature and circumscribe the sovereignty of God. Moreover, by denying "Nature" any wisdom of its own, the mechanical philosophy located purpose where Boyle believed it rightly belonged: over and behind nature, in the mind of a personal God, rather than in an impersonal semi-deity, called "Nature," immanent within the world.

Clearly, Boyle was convinced that the mechanistic science he championed was an invincible ally for religion. The support that Christianity and the new science provided one another is indeed the most obvious unifying theme of his voluminous writings. A nice example is The Excellency of Theology (1671), which was published along with a parallel tract, The Excellency and Grounds of the Mechanical Hypotheis.  The best example, however, is Boyle's last major work, The Christian Virtuoso (1690).   In this book, Boyle not only developed this line at length, he also introduced an entirely different line of thinking that elegantly linked the character of the Christian scientist -- the virtuoso -- with the actual practice of science. The Christian virtuoso, said Boyle, was to be known for the following traits: placing the pursuit of truth over personal gain, openness and generosity over secrecy; humility, what Boyle called "a great and ingeneous modesty of mind"; personal honor and trustworthiness; devotion to one's work as a divinely ordained vocation, even a religious duty; and reliance on the "visible testimony of nature," not human opinion. As one scholar has observed (Steven Shapin), "Boyle himself was the Christian virtuoso."

In October 1668 Boyle moved to London, where he lived at Lady Ranelagh's house in Pall Mall for the rest of his life; he had been there often before moving there.  Around this time, he wrote an important treatise, Some Considerations touching the Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion (1675), originally in the form of a long letter to Katherine, though the published version obscures this fact.  A frequent visitor was their sister Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, whose estate at Leeze he had often visited.  Mary was a devout woman and, in her role as a diarist, a person who has attracted considerable scholarly attention, for her writings demonstrate how, through private devotion, a woman could create for herself a world apart from male domination. It is clear that her brother was a significant part of her spiritual life; she speaks of the three of them -- Robert, Katherine, and herself -- as having "holy discourse", or "good and profitable discourse of things wherewith we might edify one another".

Now that Boyle was permanently in London, foreign dignitaries and distinguished natural philosophers routinely stopped by to visit -- his work was well known on the Continent, where he was known as "the English natural philosopher" -- leading Boyle eventually to limit visitors to certain hours of the day. In his rooms and in a laboratory he established on the premises, Boyle continued his investigations in practical chemistry and pneumatics, wrote several treatises on aspects of medicine, natural philosophy and theology, defended himself amicably against various critics, and pursued with some circumspection his alchemical interests, the extent of which is only now being fully realized. He also became involved in various scientific and religious projects --- joining the Hudson's Bay Company to get more information about the effects of extreme cold; helping a nephew in an effort to patent a method to produce fresh water from the ocean; supporting both a Gaelic translation of the Bible for use in Ireland and Scotland and John Eliot's translation of the Bible for the Indians in Massachusetts; serving as Governor of the revitalized Society or Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England; underwriting Gilbert Burnet's History of the Reformation of the Church of England (1680). Above all, in his will, he endowed a lectureship to prove the truth of Christianity against diverse unbelievers, explicitly "not descending lower to any Controversies that are among Christians themselves."   (Incidentally, the ecumenical attitude evident here led me a few years ago to investigate whether Boyle had really been the author of an anti-Catholic work long attitubuted to him, Reasons Why a Protestant should not Turn Papist (1686). It turns out that he didn't write it: it was actually written by a Scottish physician and former Jesuit who had become a Protestant, a man who worked for Boyle in the 1680s.)

Boyle died on 31 December 1691, partly from grief over Katherine's death just eight days before. The enormous set of papers he had accumulated at his death, along with some additional items associated with his eighteenth-century editor Henry Miles, is now housed at the Royal Society.  The recent cataloging of this previously chaotic archive has made possible for the first time a systematic study of its contents. The more this has progressed and the more seriously his entire output of published writings is taken, the more our image of Boyle changes, from that of the systematic "rationalizer" of chemistry with a regrettable tendency to waste his time trying in vain to reconcile the new science with theology, to that of a highly eclectic, somewhat ambivalent thinker, committed equally to moral and scientific reform, with an uncommon openness to new ideas coupled with a sincere desire to be fair to his opponents, driven even in his scientific investigations by an intense piety and a powerful vision of the unity of truth.

Wrapping it up: The influence of Boyle's Christian beliefs on his science

When all is said and done, then, what in fact was the influence of Boyle's Christian beliefs on his science?

Primarily, Boyle's remarkable piety was the driving force behind his interest in science and his vision of science as a particular type of knowledge. Closely tied to Boyle's spirituality was his profound belief in an omnipotent creator who had made the world freely, not out of necessity; thus the laws of nature could not be found a priori from first principles, but had to be discovered from the works of creation. This particular theological orientiation is known as `voluntarism', for it emphasises the voluntary choices of a free creator, rather than ways in which God's choices were determined by the dictates of reason, either human or divine. Indeed for Boyle, one of the most attractive features of the mechanical philosophy was the extent to which it removed mediating influences between God and the world, thereby preserving God's sovereignty more clearly than the `vulgar' notion of nature which elevated nature to the status of a semi-deity.  Boyle's voluntarism is most evident in his strong supernaturalism, according to which God had in the past and might at any time in the future suspend the ordinary course of nature, acting in special ways to achieve particular ends. Thus, Boyle was fascinated by evidence from miracles and fulfilled prophecies, which appeared to vindicate such a role in the world on God's part.

As part of his practical Christianity, Boyle was deeply interested in the power of healing, writing extensively on medical matters. The longest single section of his Usefulness of Natural Philosophy dealt with medicine, and he included there a number of recipes for medicines thought to be effective, in order to make them more widely available, especially among the poor. In the last few years of his life, he published a large collection of such recipes for this very purpose. (It is worth adding that John Wesley later did exactly the same thing.)

Also related to Boyle's piety was his strong advocacy of the argument from design. This is nowhere more evident than in his Disquisition on the Final Causes of Natural Things (1688).  It was his stated desire "that my reader should not barely observe the wisdom of God, but be, in some measure, affectively convinced of it". There was no better way to "give us so great a wonder and veneration for it ... [than] by knowing and considering the admirable contrivance of the particular productions of that immense wisdom, and their exquisite fitness for those ends and uses, to which they appear to have been destinated." Thereby, Boyle believed, "men may be brought, upon the same account, both to acknowledge God, to admire Him, and to thank Him."

I close with the image of Robert Boyle that has come down to us from the mid-18th century, when Henry Miles and Thomas Birch edited his voluminous works: "Ex rerum Causis Supremam cognoscere Causam." ("From the causes of things, to know the First Cause.")

Thomas Birch, The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle. Millar: London, 1744; also available in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch, 5 vols., London, 1744, or 6 vols., London, 1772, the latter reprinted with an introduction by Douglas McKie (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965). This is still the best biography.

Davis, Edward B. and Michael Hunter, eds. Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. See esp. the introduction.

Hunter, Michael, ed. Robert Boyle Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Letters and Papers of Robert Boyle. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1992. A microfilm copy of the Boyle archive at the Royal Society, London.

Maddison, R.E.W. The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle F.R.S. London: Taylor & Francis, 1969.

Walker, Anthony. Memoir of Lady Warwick: also her diary, ... to which are added, extracts from her other writings. London: The Religious Tract Society, 1847.