Thomas Chalmers’s Bridgewater Treatise
On February 11th, 1829 the Englishman Francis Henry Egerton died. Egerton was the 8th Earl of Bridgewater, and as such, the possessor of a large fortune. As a part of the bequest granted in his will, he left 8000 pounds (over 1.1 million pounds today) to be distributed by the President of the Royal Society (an elite society promoting scientific endeavors in England):
to write, print, and publish, one thousand copies of a work On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation; illustrating such work by all reasonable arguments, as, for instance, the variety and formation of God’s creatures in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; the effect of digestion, and thereby of conversion; the construction of the hand of man, and an infinite variety of other arguments: as also by discoveries, ancient and modern, in arts, sciences, and the whole extent of literature.
In the end, there were eight books published between 1833–36 under these auspices, which have come to be known as the Bridgewater Treatises. Although the treatises are not well known today they were widely read and highly influential at the time. To give just one example: Charles Darwin, as Jonathan Topham has noted, opened The Origin of the Species with a quote from William Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise entitled Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology.
The first of the Bridgewater Treatises was by the Scottish Presbyterian theologian and polymath Thomas Chalmers. Chalmers, if he is known today, is usually remembered for his most famous sermon, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” a powerful discourse on how Christians will never make progress in the Christian life simply by ceasing sin. In addition to our duty to fight sin (the pursuit of which is certainly necessary), Christians must come to delight in Christ; they must find in him an affection that pushes out their former love of sin.
In his own time Chalmers was well known as a scientific, political, and cultural thinker, in addition to as a pastor and professor of moral theology at the University of St. Andrews and eventually as professor of theology at the University of Edinburgh.
It was not surprising, then, that the President of the Royal Society assigned Chalmers the first of the Bridgewater Treatises, which took the opening lines of Egerton’s bequest as its title: On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God: As Manifested in the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man. The work is an extended study of what today, through the work of scholars such as Michael J. Behe, Stephen C. Meyer, William A. Dembski, and many others associated with the Discovery Institute, is known as the theory of Intelligent Design.
The scholars who have popularized the modern version of the theory of Intelligent Design often bring into their arguments what they call the principle of irreducible complexity. Very simply irreducible complexity is the idea that in “any system of interacting parts . . . the removal of any one part destroys the function of the entire system.” For example, human life on Earth would be impossible if our atmosphere was not composed of exactly the same proportion of gasses it actually contains, just as it would be impossible if the Earth was any closer to, or further from, the sun. Examples from biology reveal the workings of irreducible complexity as well. A common example is the human eye, which could not grant sight without the exact structure that it has. It would be impossible, proponents of intelligent design maintain (rightly to my mind), for the eye to be part of an evolutionary process because for it to function at all, it must be fully developed. Anything less would not be a sight-producing organ, nor would it be a step on the way to such a thing. There are countless ways in which the world God made displays irreducible complexity. Everything in the universe, in fact, is “finely tuned” in order to make organic life on Earth possible.
Chalmers presents his own argument for irreducible complexity, though he does not call it that. It is very different, however, from the modern arguments for irreducible complexity in nature. It is, instead, an argument about the moral constitution of man. First, however, Chalmers presents a popular form of the argument for divine design in nature: the watchmaker analogy made famous by William Paley. Paley’s argument is as follows:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. … There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. … Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
It is only rational, then, on examining nature itself, which has far more signs of artifice, or design, than a watch, to reason that a designer made the world; that designer is God.
Chalmers makes an important improvement on the watchmaker analogy when he writes that it is not the existence of the raw materials of any system that provides the primary evidence of design but rather the exact way in which each particular item of raw material interacts with all of the rest in a system. For example, in discussing the human eye, Chalmers writes that it is “the dispositions which are indispensable to [the eye]” (emphasis added), dispositions, or relationships (On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, pp. 20–21),
such as the rightly sized and shaped lenses of the eye; and the rightly placed retina spread out behind them, and at the precise distance where the indispensable picture of external nature might be formed, and presented as it were for the information of the occupier within; and then, the variety and proper situation of the numerous muscles, each entrusted with an important function, and all of them contributing to the power and perfection of this curious and manifoldly complicated organ. It is not so much the endowment of matter with certain properties, as the arrangement of it into certain parts, that bespeaks here the hand of an artist; and this will be found true of the anatomical structure in all its departments.
This is Chalmers’ version of what will eventually be called the argument for design from irreducible complexity.
In the rest of his work, Chalmers applies this argument, as I’ve noted, not to bodily anatomy but to an anatomy of the soul (as it were). The argument is simple yet profound: in all human moral actions, there are essential and inviolable laws. Chalmers puts this argument forward not as something only taught in Scripture but as something known to all from the workings of the conscience. There is a kind of moral cause and effect that cannot be circumvented by any man (On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, pp. 40–41):
That the sight of distress, for example, should be followed up by compassion, is an obvious provision of benevolence, and not of cruelty, on the part of Him who ordained our mental constitution. Again, that a feeling of kindness in the heart should be followed up by a feeling of complacency in the heart, that in every virtuous affection of the soul there should be so much to gladden and harmonize it, that there should always be peace within when there is conscious purity or rectitude within; and, on the other hand, that malignity and licentiousness, and the sense of any moral transgression whatever, should always have the effect of discomforting, and sometimes even of agonizing the spirit of man—that such should be the actual workmanship and working of our nature, speaks most distinctly, we apprehend, for the general righteousness of Him who constructed its machinery and established its laws.
In short, just as in nature, so in man’s moral nature there is clear evidence of intelligent design. The human body as a system must be exactly (and only) what it is for human life to be possible. Comprehensive evolution is not possible because life itself would not be possible in the proposed earlier stages of development. So, too, with the world (and universe) as a whole: as a system, everything must be precisely what it is, or life would never have been possible to begin with. For Chalmers, this reasoning should be applied to the human person as well: the human mind and conscience work according to set laws created by a supreme designer. Man can attempt to suppress these laws, but he can never suppress them wholly (Romans 1:19–21). Chalmer’s argument is very significant for Christian apologetics: while we may point to the staggering evidence for divine design in nature, we must not forget the evidence of divine design in the moral constitution of man, evidence that is even more important with regard to our interactions with other human beings made in the very image of the divine designer. It is in the human mind and conscience as designed by God that we will be most able to press home the claims of God on man.
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