Science and Nature

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, William Paley published Natural Theology (1802),the text in which he expounded the theory that natural objects such as humans and animals show evidence of design. Paley presented nature as God's creation, and thus the study of the natural world as comparable to the study of the Bible, because both provided evidence for the existence of God.

Natural Theology situated nature as an important and reliable source of proof in support of the Biblical theory of creation described in Genesis. It was not until Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 that the use of nature as evidence shifted from supporting Genesis to supporting evolutionary theory. The publication of Darwin's Origin acted as the catalyst which ignited the simmering debate between science and natural theology that was to rage across the Victorian period. However, whilst Darwin's radical text did have a profound effect on religious and scientific thought, many simply responded to his evolutionary theory by adapting Darwin's discovery to fit within a Christian framework. Read more