170 life
skeleton perhaps made them anomalous? But no; this was merely a structural
inversion adding to the wonderful variety of adaptations in which a deeper
unity could be discerned. In the work of the Creator had been an “imitation,
a remembrance, a carrying on of the same plan.”^26 We smile at the naı ̈vety
especially when we read that the human epiglottis is so wonderfully designed
that no alderman had ever choked at a feast. But, as recent scholarship has
shown, Paley’s text and the laterBridgewater Treatises, however naı ̈ve their the-
ology, played an important role in popularizing the sciences in a politically safe
form.^27
At a deeper level we can ask more critical questions about the drive for
unification. Surely the consonance between belief in a unified nature and the
espousal of a monotheistic religion was no guarantee that experimental pro-
grams to consolidate a unification would be successful? Geoffrey Cantor has
suggested that Michael Faraday’s convictions about interconvertible forces,
their conservation and their role in the economy of Creation were reinforced
by his Sandemanian religious beliefs. They certainly generated a research pro-
gram. There is a diary entry for March 19, 1849, that reads: “Gravity.Surely
this force must be capable of an experimental relation to Electricity, Magnetism
and the other forces, so as to bind it up with them in reciprocal action and
equivalent effect. Consider for a moment how to set about touching this matter
by facts and trial.”^28 Ingenious trials did ensue. A helix of wire connected to a
galvanometer was dropped a full 36 feet in the Royal Institution lecture theater;
but, as Cantor nicely puts it, the galvanometer remained unmoved. The grav-
itational force retained its peculiarity. Faraday did not preempt Steven Wein-
berg’s title,Dreams of a Final Theory, but he did write in block capitals “ALL
THIS IS A DREAM.”^29
The presence of diversity as a precondition of unification manifests itself
in the natural theology of the early nineteenth century; and I might perhaps
be forgiven for choosing an Oxford example: William Buckland, who fought
valiantly to secure a place for geology in the university.^30 Buckland was the
eccentric who took a blue bag to dinner parties in order to take home fish
bones for further investigation; who so littered his rooms in Christ Church
with dusty fossils that they became impenetrable, and whose culinary empir-
icism resulted in guests dining on hedgehog and crocodile. But how was he
to vindicate geology from a suspicion of irreligion in a university dominated
by its religious traditions? It was a pertinent question given the increasing
evidence for extinction and concerns about what this might mean for belief in
a caring Providence. Did fossil finds not destroy that most pleasing of taxon-
omies, the great chain of being—pleasing in part because diversity was so
elegantly incorporated within an overarching unity? If one followed Georges
Cuvier, the chain had to be fractured into different sections. In Buckland’s
rhetoric, however, a theological drive for unity comes across loud and clear.
The fact of extinction need not compromise a principle of plenitude—that the