Indications of a Creator: Whewell as Apologist and Priest

Abstract So confident was William Whewell of the durability of natural theology that in his History of the Inductive Sciences he would describe a hymn to the Creator as the ‘perpetual song’ of the temple of science. However misplaced that confidence proved to be, it stands in sharp contrast to the perceptions of those historians and philosophers who have treated natural theology, with its repertoire of design arguments, as a force already spent by the close of the eighteenth century. Those who have expressed astonishment that William Paley, the noted Anglican apologist, could write with such jaunty assurance after Hume had so devastated the foundations of natural religion, must find it even more astonishing that hymns to a Creator remained a prominent feature of scientific culture, in Britain at least, until Whewell’s generation had passed away. How does one account for the longevity of a tradition which, whilst not confined to Britain, was nevertheless so conspicuous here that observers have sometimes spoken of a peculiarly British propensity to proclaim a holy alliance between science and religion?.