CREATIVE NONFICTION 69to certain events in men and women’s lives,
and certain paragraphs in their writings, made
Sunday’s sermon, in particular, stick in my mind.
I began to wonder: What role has what is said to,
or believed by, parents at the bedside of a dying
child played in individuals’ perceptions of the
relationship between science and religion? Have
the available stances on both God and Nature
amid these tragic confrontations with suffering
influenced individuals’ decisions on whether
that relationship is one of harmony, conflict, or
something in between? These questions are, in
many ways, impossible to answer, for often such
loss is accompanied mainly by profound silence.
But asking them revealed what I find to be a very
meaningful thread in many of the primary sources
I use in my research and teaching.
The thread begins in the seventeenth century,
amid the grand theories associated with the Sci-
entific Revolution, but to notice it one must pay
close attention to the diaries and correspondence
of famous figures in the history of science, and not
just their classic works. Consider, for example,
that six years after the first edition of his famous
natural theology, The Wisdom of God Manifested in
the Works of Creation, appeared, John Ray lost one
of his four beloved daughters to jaundice. “My
dear child,” he wrote to Hans Sloane in early
1697, “for whom I begged your advice, within a
day after it was received, became delirious, and at
the end of three days died apoplectic, which was
to myself and wife a most sore blow.” A month
later Ray wrote of the continued influence of this
“sad accident” on his ability to work. His wife, he
wrote, “is full of grief, having not yet been able
fully to concoct her passion.” He blamed himself,
for he had not given the little girl a remedy that
had proved effectual for himself in the same
disease. But he does not seem to have blamed or
questioned his beloved all-powerful, all-wise, and
benevolent God.
I have often assigned The Wisdom of God as an
example of seventeenth-century natural philoso-
phers’ devout belief that science and religion are in
harmony. Ray reveled in detailed descriptions of
animal and human anatomy and used the ex-
traordinary fitness of animal parts to their uses to
demonstrate the existence and attributes of God.
And indeed his work is a good example of the
belief—common at the time—that God gave men
two books through which to know Him: the Book
of Scripture, and the Book of Nature. Nature, Ray
argued, helped one make “out in particulars” what
Scripture asserted in general concerning the Works
of God, namely In Wisdom hast thou made them all.
In describing human anatomy, Ray dwelled on the
purposeful parts of the body as beautiful examples
of the effect of wisdom and design. Thus, he
concluded, the body of man was “proved to be
the Effect of Wisdom because there is nothing
in it deficient, nothing superfluous, nothing but
hath its End and Use.” Indeed, Ray insisted that
a man who could look upon Nature and yet still
disbelieve in God “must needs be as stupid as the
Earth he goes upon.”
My students tend to want to throw counter-
arguments at John Ray: What about snakes?
What about predators? What about disease?
But inevitably Ray knew a lot more about
disease and suffering than they do. His was not
a naïve theodicy (an explanation of why a good,
all-powerful, all-knowing God permits evil and
suffering). When Ray reflected upon the fact that
sleep alleviates pain as evidence of the wisdom
of a God, he spoke from experience. At the time
of writing his famous book, he suffered from
blisters and chilblains; ulcers on his legs sometimes
prevented him from walking; and his stomach
gave him digestive trouble that incapacitated him
for days. Illness, disease, and death were close,
familiar, and ever-present to men and women
in the seventeenth century. Nearly a third of
children died before age fifteen. The bubonic
plague still periodically swept through London
and its outskirts. John Ray knew all too well that
human beings die from diseased organs, succumb
to madness, and suffer from malfunctioning parts.
But that by no means vitiated his argument:
indeed, the whole point of his book was that in the
face of widespread pain and suffering, the marks
of design proved God’s benevolence, wisdom, and
goodness. Toward the end of his life, Ray was at
times so reduced to weakness by the sharp pain of
chronic sores on his legs that he could not stand
alone, and he even confessed to despairing of life
itself. Some days his sores so spoiled his memory
that he could not pay sustained attention to the
animals and plants he so loved to study. Yet even