Justified True Belief

(●) The man who made chemistry an experimental science, and who left his fortune to pay for a yearly public defense of the Christian faith. + Robert Boyle stands at the place where chemistry stopped being a guild secret and became a science. Before him, the men who worked with furnaces and flasks mostly wrote in code, hoarded their recipes, and reported only their successes. Boyle wrote down what he did, named the glassware, said plainly which trials had failed, and invited other people to repeat the work and contradict him if it would not come out the same way twice. He also took the word "element" away from the philosophers, who had four of them, and from the alchemists, who had three, and gave it the meaning schoolchildren still learn: an element is whatever experiment cannot break down any further. He belongs on a site like this one because he wrote nearly as much theology as chemistry, and because he thought the two jobs were one job. He never took holy orders, though a lord chancellor pressed him to, and he gave a reason worth pausing over: unbelievers brush aside what clergymen say about God on the grounds that it is their trade and they are paid for it, so he hoped to carry more weight by owning nothing of the church’s money. The last book he published on religion is called The Christian Virtuoso. A virtuoso, in his century, meant a gentleman who gave his life to the study of nature, roughly what we would now call a scientist, and the title is doing more work than it looks. People were already saying about men like him that a life spent among furnaces and glassware unfits a man for belief, and the subtitle answers them head on: that by being addicted to experimental philosophy, a man is rather assisted than indisposed to be a good Christian. Addicted, in his English, meant given over to a thing rather than enslaved by it, and indisposed meant made unfit for it. The charge he is denying is that experiment spoils a man for faith. One fact about him is hard to forget. When he died at the end of 1691 he tied the rent of a house he held in London to the cost of eight sermons a year, to be preached for proving the Christian religion against unbelievers. The first course was preached in 1692 by a thirty-year-old scholar named Richard Bentley, who wrote to Isaac Newton for help with the astronomy and got four long letters back. That rent soon failed, so Thomas Tenison, one of the trustees, moved the endowment onto a Buckinghamshire farm instead and the sermons went on. The first long run of them lasted to about 1730. Others were given at intervals afterwards, and in 2004 the series was revived at St Mary-le-Bow in the City of London, where it is given still.

(●) 1627 AD: Born the fourteenth child of the richest man in Ireland, and sent away to Eton before he was nine. + He was born on 25 January 1627, at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, and he liked to note that the day was the feast of the conversion of St Paul. His father was Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, who had come to Ireland from England with very little and died holding the largest fortune in the kingdom, with a motto cut into his houses that read "God’s providence is my inheritance." Robert was his seventh son and his fourteenth child. His mother, Catherine Fenton, died when he was about three, and he counted it among the chief misfortunes of his life that he never knew the woman who gave it to him. Most of what we know about his childhood he wrote himself, in a short memoir drawn up in his early twenties and told in the third person about a young man he calls Philaretus, "lover of virtue." He is oddly frank in it. His father had a horror of children raised soft, the sort who wilt in a hot sun or a good shower of rain "as if they were made of butter, or of sugar," and so sent the baby out to a country nurse to be brought up on plain food and ordinary weather. Later, falling in with playmates who stammered, the boy copied them for fun until he could not stop, and the stammer stayed with him all his life. At eight he went to Eton with his brother Francis and stayed about three years, reading history and romances and being, by his own account, an unremarkable schoolboy who was better at talking than at lessons.

(●) c. 1640 AD: A midnight thunderstorm at Geneva frightened a vow out of him, and he kept it for fifty years. + At twelve he was sent abroad with his brother and a French-speaking tutor, Isaac Marcombes, and settled for a long stay at Geneva. He had been, he says, a decent enough boy: his inclinations were virtuous, his life free from scandal, and the small stock of piety he already had was just enough to keep him from wanting any more of it. Then, in the very heat of summer, on a night that had promised nothing of the kind, he was woken in a fright by thunder so loud he thought the earth would catch an ague from the air, and by lightning so constant that he began to imagine it was the fire that would burn up the world. An ague was a fever that comes on with violent shivering, so the picture in his head was of the ground itself shaking with cold. He lay there convinced the day of judgment had come and that he was not ready for it, and he vowed that if his fears were disappointed that night, the rest of his life would be spent more religiously than the beginning of it had been. Morning came, clear and cloudless. What he did next is the part worth keeping. Safe now, and embarrassed that plain fright had been the occasion of it, he made the vow again on purpose, so that his turning to God might rest on something better than a bad night. From that day, he wrote, he dated his conversion. A remark he made later, to a group of young men joking about sinning freely and repenting on their deathbeds, catches the same temper: piety was to be embraced, he said, "not so much to gain heaven, as to serve God with." The tour went on into Italy. He spent the winter of 1641 and 1642 in Florence, learning Italian, reading the modern historians, and working through the new paradoxes of "the great star-gazer Galileo," whose books Rome had condemned. While Boyle was living in the city, Galileo died within a league of it. Under the same roof lodged several Jewish rabbis, whose arguments gave the teenager his first serious encounter with a reasoned case against the Christian claim, and set him inquiring further.

(●) 1644 AD: He came home to a dead father and a country at war, and turned a manor house into a laboratory. + Rebellion broke out in Ireland in 1641 and swallowed the family estates; the old earl died in 1643; and the remittances that had paid for the tour stopped coming. Boyle and his tutor sold what they could and got back to England in the middle of 1644, into the middle of a civil war, with almost no money and a manor at Stalbridge in Dorset that his father had left him. He was seventeen. He lived there, on and off, for the best part of ten years, and what he did with the time set the pattern for everything after. He read enormously. He wrote moral and devotional pieces, one of which, a long letter on the love of God that he called Seraphic Love, friends passed around in manuscript for a decade before it was printed. And he set up a furnace and taught himself chemistry from the ground up, learning it from practitioners and apothecaries, the men who mixed and sold medicines, rather than from books, in an age when a gentleman was not supposed to do such work with his own hands. He was also drawn into a circle he called, in letters of 1646 and 1647, "our invisible college": a group of men who had agreed to meet weekly and to settle questions about nature by trying things rather than by quoting Aristotle at one another. They had no charter, no building, and no name anyone else would recognize. Fourteen years later that habit of meeting, carried to Oxford and back to London, came out into the open as the Royal Society.

(●) 1655 AD: At Oxford he built a pump that could empty a glass of air, and weighed what nobody could see. + He moved to Oxford at the end of 1655 or the beginning of 1656; his first biographer put the move some eighteen months earlier, in the summer of 1654, but Boyle’s letters do not bear that out. He chose lodgings in the house of an apothecary named Crosse rather than rooms in a college, for his health and because he needed floor space for experiments that no fellow’s staircase would tolerate. Oxford then held the best scientific company in England, and Boyle hired a clever young assistant off the same circuit, Robert Hooke, who had been working for the physician Thomas Willis. Word had reached them of a German burgomaster, which is to say a town mayor, named Otto von Guericke, who had pumped the air out of a copper sphere. Boyle and Hooke built something better: a glass receiver the size of a large jar, mounted over a pump, with a stopper you could work from outside. A receiver is simply the vessel that receives whatever is being tested, and the glass was the point of the thing, because it meant a man could stand there and watch. That let them do something nobody had done before, which was to take the air away from an ordinary object and see what became of it. A candle went out. A bell rang silently. A bird grew ill and had to be let out. A lamb’s bladder, half limp, swelled up as the air around it thinned, which is the whole of the discovery: air is not nothing, it is a crowd of particles pressing on everything, and it can be weighed and measured like water. That push of the air is what his century called its spring. Squeeze a steel spring and it presses back against your hand, and let it go and it stretches out again. The slack bladder swelling in the emptying jar was doing the same thing, which is why the name stuck. The results went out in 1660 as New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, written as a letter to his nephew Charles, Lord Dungarvan, and dated from Beaconsfield on 20 December 1659. Two years later, defending the book against a Jesuit critic, he added the piece of it schoolchildren still meet. He and his helpers poured mercury into a glass tube bent into a J, trapping air in the short closed arm, and added more mercury to squeeze it. The tube was so tall they could not use it in a room and had to run the trial on a staircase. A column in his table is headed "what that pressure should be according to the hypothesis, that supposes the pressures and expansions to be in reciprocal proportion." Reciprocal proportion is the seventeenth century’s careful way of saying what a modern schoolroom says in one short sentence. Halve the room the air has and you double its push. That is Boyle’s law, and Boyle himself, in the same breath, said the idea had come to him from a Lancashire gentleman named Richard Townley, who had read the earlier book and worked out what its author had left undone.

(●) 1660 AD: He helped found the Royal Society, and refused to be ordained so that nobody could say he was paid to defend the faith. + When the monarchy came back in 1660 the weekly meetings surfaced into daylight, and Boyle was among the founders of the society that was chartered as the Royal Society of London two years later. He was the most famous experimenter in it, and his air pump was so identified with him that other men wrote of testing things "in vacuo Boyliano," in Boyle’s vacuum. The same year the Earl of Clarendon, the lord chancellor, urged him to be ordained. It was not an idle suggestion: a man of Boyle’s birth and reputation would have risen fast, and Clarendon argued that the church needed exactly that sort of example. Boyle, then thirty-three, admitted the argument moved him, and then declined for two reasons that show the shape of the man. The first was tactical and clear-eyed. He knew, as Gilbert Burnet, the bishop who would one day preach his funeral sermon, later put it, that the irreligious fortified themselves against everything said by the clergy with the thought that it was their trade and they were paid for it; so he hoped he might have the more influence the less he shared in the patrimony of the church. The patrimony is the church’s inherited property, its lands and rents and salaried posts, and Boyle’s point was that a man who has taken none of it cannot be accused of speaking for his wages. The second was simpler. The first question put to a man at ordination asks whether he is inwardly moved by the Holy Spirit to take up that work, and Boyle had felt no such motion, and would not stand up and say he had. He judged, Burnet reports, that to answer otherwise would be to lie to the Holy Spirit. He turned down other things too. In 1665 he was named to the provostship of Eton and did not take it, the same scruple about ordination standing in the way. In November 1680 the Royal Society elected him its president, and after taking legal advice three times over he wrote to Hooke from Pall Mall on 18 December begging them to elect somebody else: the office required oaths that his conscience would not let him swear, having, as he put it, "a great (and perhaps peculiar) tenderness in point of oaths." He promised to be a useful member instead, and was.

(●) 1668 AD: He moved into his sister’s house in Pall Mall and spent his money on Bibles in languages he could not read. + In April 1668 he left Oxford and settled in London in the house of his elder sister Katherine, Viscountess Ranelagh, in Pall Mall, and there he stayed for the rest of his life. She was his closest friend and his sharpest correspondent, a woman at the center of half the reforming projects in London, and the arrangement suited them both: her house at the front, his laboratory at the back, and a stream of visitors that eventually got out of hand. Near the end he printed a public notice, and hung a board over his door, announcing which days he could not receive anyone. He needed the hours, he explained, because age and sickness were catching up with him, because sitting so long was bad for a man subject to the stone in his kidneys, and because some unlucky accidents had left many of his manuscripts corroded and full of gaps that only he could fill in. The money went outward in a direction his laboratory never explains. He was governor of the Corporation for Propagating the Gospel in New England, and corresponded with John Eliot, the missionary who had learned the Massachusett language well enough to put the whole Bible into it; he gave three hundred pounds in his lifetime toward that work. He was a director of the East India Company and used the seat to push for Christian missions, paying for the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles to be translated and printed in Malay and shipped across the Indies. He paid the Arabic scholar Edward Pococke to render Hugo Grotius’s defense of the Christian faith into Arabic and covered the whole print run. He was at seven hundred pounds’ charge for an edition of the Irish Bible, and contributed largely to a Welsh one and to an Irish Bible for the Highlands of Scotland, and he would have paid for the Turkish New Testament outright if the company had not insisted on doing it themselves and let him give only a large share. He could read none of those languages. He read Hebrew and Greek and worked at Syriac and Chaldee, two forms of Aramaic, so as to get at Scripture in the original, and Oxford, where the great orientalists were, had been part of its attraction. But the Malay Gospels and the Irish Bible were not for him. They were for people he would never meet.

(●) 31 December 1691 AD: He died a week after his sister, and left money for eight sermons a year in defense of Christianity. + Katherine died on 23 December 1691. Boyle, worn out and grieving, followed her three quarters of an hour after midnight on the night of Wednesday 30 December, which is why some accounts give the 30th and most give the 31st. He was sixty-four. They buried him on 7 January in the chancel of St Martin-in-the-Fields, next to her, and Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, preached the funeral sermon from Ecclesiastes 2:26, on the wisdom and knowledge and joy that God gives to the man who pleases him. He had never married. His will left money to his family, to the poor, to the propagation of the gospel among native Americans, and his whole cabinet of raw ores and minerals to the Royal Society, with a sentence of blessing on its work that reads like a summary of his life. Then came a codicil, dated 28 July 1691. A codicil is an addition made to a will after the will itself has been drawn up, and this one charged the rents of his house in St Michael’s Crooked Lane with the salary of a learned divine, which was the ordinary word for a clergyman trained in theology, to be chosen by four trustees, among them John Evelyn the diarist and Thomas Tenison, soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury. The lecturer’s job had two halves. He was to be ready to satisfy real scruples and to answer new objections and difficulties to which good answers had not been made; and he was to preach eight sermons a year, on the first Monday of eight named months, "for proving the Christian religion against notorious infidels, viz. atheists, theists, pagans, Jews, and Mahometans, not descending lower to any controversies that are among Christians themselves." The last clause is the one to notice. "Theists," in 1691, meant what we would call deists, people who granted a God and denied that he had spoken. And the refusal to descend to controversies among Christians was deliberate: Boyle had lived through a civil war fought partly over church government, and he had no intention of buying arguments between Protestants with his own money. The lectures were to defend the faith held in common, against those outside it, and nothing else. Among his papers was found a list in his own hand of twenty-four things he wished could be done. It includes the prolongation of life, the art of flying, the art of staying under water and working there freely, a practicable way of finding longitude at sea, potent drugs to relieve pain and procure sleep, and the transmutation of metals. Most of that list came true within three centuries. One of them did not.

What He Taught

(T1) Nature is not a wise goddess with purposes of her own; the world is an engine, and God is its maker. + Ask most people today why a stone falls and they will answer with a force. Ask a well-taught European in 1600 and the answer would have been that the stone seeks its natural place, because Nature, a kind of wise assistant standing between God and the world, sees to it that things go as they should. That way of speaking is what Boyle attacked in the book he published in 1686, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature. His complaint was not that the word "nature" is useless. It was that people were quietly treating nature as a second-rank deity, giving her foresight and care and even a horror of empty space, and that this was bad science and worse religion at the same time. Bad science, because "Nature abhors a vacuum" explains nothing; Boyle had pumped the air out of a glass and looked at the vacuum nature was supposed to abhor. Bad religion, because every scrap of wisdom credited to the assistant was taken from the account of God, who is the only one with purposes. What he offered instead was the mechanical philosophy: the view that the natural world is made of small pieces of matter with sizes, shapes and motions, and that the way those pieces are arranged and moving accounts for what we see, the way the parts of a clock account for the hands going round. Two things follow, and Boyle insisted on both. Matter has no wisdom of its own, so the order in it has to come from outside. And a world that runs on steady rules is a greater compliment to its maker than a world that has to be nudged along, because the laws themselves were laid down by God and are kept in being by him. Boyle argued this while denying what his critics feared: he kept miracles, he kept providence, and in a separate book on final causes, meaning what a thing is for rather than what it is made of, he kept the old claim that an eye is for seeing and that its maker meant it so. To see what he was reaching for, picture the two options he sets side by side. A puppet show is a world where the artificer has to pull a string for every motion, and stands ready to overrule his own machine. A great cathedral clock is a world where the design was so complete at the start that the figures come out and strike the bell on the hour without anybody touching them. Boyle had one particular clock in mind.

(Q) "'tis like a rare Clock, such as may be that at Strasbourg, where all things are so skilfully contriv'd, that the Engine being once set a Moving, all things proceed according to the Artificers first design." + Source: Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature, Section I (1686 edition; spelling as printed). The astronomical clock in Strasbourg cathedral was the wonder of Europe: a tower of gilded machinery with a calendar, a planetary dial, and carved figures that came out on the hour, a mechanical rooster among them. Boyle’s sentence completes a comparison. Those who make Nature an almost omniscient agent, he says, treat the world as a puppet whose every motion the artificer has to guide by pulling one string or another; on his own view it is a clock of that Strasbourg kind, where the little statues perform their functions at their hours "by vertue of the General and Primitive Contrivance of the whole Engine" (T1).

(T2) An element is whatever experiment cannot break down any further, not whatever a system requires. + In 1661 Boyle published a book shaped as a conversation between friends, The Sceptical Chymist, and set it against both of the going answers about what things are made of. The Aristotelians said four elements: earth, water, air and fire. The followers of Paracelsus, the chemical physicians, who made their medicines at the furnace rather than in the garden, said three principles: salt, sulphur and mercury. Both camps proved their case the same way, by burning a piece of green wood. Flame comes off, so there is your fire; smoke, so there is your air; sap hisses out at the end, so there is your water; ash is left, so there is your earth. Boyle’s answer to this is the reason the book still matters. The trick assumes that whatever the fire happens to divide a thing into must be what the thing was built from, and that is exactly what has not been shown. Some bodies the fire will not divide at all. Gold comes back out of the furnace as gold. Some bodies it divides into more than four parts, or into parts that are plainly compounds themselves, and sometimes the fire puts things together rather than taking them apart. So the four elements and the three principles are not results. They are a list the experimenter brought with him and found because he was looking for it. Then comes the constructive move. If you want to call something an element, Boyle says, here is what the word has to mean, and here is the test. It has to be a body that is simple, unmixed, and not made out of any other body, and everything compounded is compounded out of such bodies and can be resolved back into them. Whether any such body actually turns up in every mixed thing, he adds, is precisely the question he is raising, and he does not pretend to know the answer. He got the definition right and the chemistry, by our lights, wrong; he believed the corpuscles of matter, meaning the particles too small to see that he thought everything was built out of, were all of one stuff, so that one metal might in principle be rearranged into another, which is why gold-making never looked absurd to him. But the working rule survived him and became the rule. An element is not what a philosopher’s system needs; it is what the bench cannot pull apart.

(Q) "I now mean by Elements... certain Primitive and Simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies; which not being made of any other bodies, or of one another, are the Ingredients of which all those call'd perfectly mixt Bodies are immediately compounded, and into which they are ultimately resolved." + Source: Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist, the Sixth Part (1661; spelling as printed). The omitted words are "as those Chymists that speak plainest do by their Principles." Carneades, the sceptic of the dialogue and the voice closest to Boyle’s own, is clearing the ground before his final assault, making sure everyone knows what is being disputed. The sentence immediately after it is the one that makes him a chemist rather than a word-fancier: whether there is any one such body to be constantly met with in all, and each, of the bodies said to be elemented, "is the thing I now question" (T2).

(T3) The world is God’s temple, and the man who studies it is meant to serve as its priest. + In 1663 Boyle published the first part of a long, warm, rambling book arguing that studying nature is useful, and the first thing he says it is useful for is worship. The ancients, he notes, called the world a temple, and Cicero and Seneca and the rest meant it as a compliment to the architecture of the sky. Boyle takes the image and pushes it one step further than they did. If the world is a temple, then somebody in it has to be the priest, and the creature with the eyes to see what is there and the words to say so is the only candidate. The thought is easier to see in an ordinary scene. Think of a school where some wealthy patron has endowed a scholarship. Every boy in the place is better off for it, but most of them are too young to notice and too unlearned to say anything worth hearing, so the master, or the best of the older students, makes the speech of thanks on behalf of them all. Rain falls on fields that cannot thank anyone. Stars burn with nobody underneath them keeping count. A man who has learned to read the workmanship is in the position of the one boy who can make the acknowledgment, and Boyle’s conclusion is that this is not a hobby but an office: he is to celebrate divine service not only in the temple but for it. Two sorts of reader get something out of this, and neither of them is being flattered. The one who assumes that taking an interest in nature crowds God out is told that the interest is itself a way of praising him, which is what Scripture says the sky is already doing without any help: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1). The one who assumes that a laboratory is a holier place than a church is told that his whole work is an act of service offered on behalf of creatures who cannot speak for themselves. Boyle held that the knowledge of God available through the made world is real knowledge, as Paul says it is (Romans 1:20), and also that it is not enough by itself, which is why he spent so much money putting Bibles into other people’s hands.

(Q) "It will not be rash to infer, that if the World be a Temple, Man sure must be the Priest, ordain'd (by being qualified) to celebrate Divine Service not onely in it, but for it." + Source: Boyle, Some Considerations touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy, Part I, Essay III (1663; spelling as printed). The book is addressed throughout to a young friend Boyle calls Pyrophilus, "lover of fire," which was his nephew Richard Jones. The parenthesis is doing real work: the qualification for this priesthood is not birth or office but having taken the trouble to learn what you are looking at (T3). Boyle had already refused the other kind of priesthood, three years before these words reached print, when Clarendon pressed him to take orders.

(T4) Some truths are above reason without being against it. + Here is a puzzle Boyle liked, and it has nothing to do with religion. Take a straight line an inch long. Can it be divided forever, into smaller and smaller pieces without end? Say yes, and you have to swallow that a finite inch contains infinitely many parts. Say no, and you have to name the smallest possible piece and explain why it cannot be halved, when it plainly has a left side and a right side. Very able mathematicians have defended each answer, and each side can load the other with objections it cannot answer directly. Meanwhile the inch sits there on the paper, undoubtedly real. That, said Boyle, is what a thing above reason looks like, and it is worth noticing that we meet such things in geometry before we ever meet them in theology. When Christians say that a doctrine is above reason but not contrary to it, critics grumble that the distinction is a convenient escape hatch, a way of dodging objections that cannot otherwise be met. Boyle’s answer, in a discourse he attached to The Christian Virtuoso, is to take the complaint seriously and then show that the distinction is grounded in the nature of things rather than invented for the occasion. His key point is a small one that changes everything. Being above reason is not a property a truth has in itself, like being green. It is a relation, and the other term of the relation is the size of the mind doing the reasoning. What overtops a human understanding need not overtop an angel’s, and certainly does not overtop God’s. So the fact that a claim outruns us tells us something about our measure and nothing at all about whether the claim is true, any more than a dog’s failure to follow an argument about taxes tells you the argument is bad. Against reason is a different charge and Boyle never confuses the two. A doctrine that is genuinely contradictory, that says a thing is and is not in the same way at the same time, is to be rejected, and he says so. What he refuses is the demand that an infinite God must be fully comprehensible to a finite mind before he may be believed. Scripture had said the same thing in fewer words: "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever" (Deuteronomy 29:29), and "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12).

(Q) "By such things then in Theology, as may be said to be Above Reason, I conceive such Notions and Propositions, as mere Reason, that is, Reason unassisted by supernatural Revelation, would never have discover'd to us." + Source: Boyle, A Discourse about the Distinction that represents some Things as above Reason, but not contrary to Reason, numbered paragraph III, appended to The Christian Virtuoso (1690; spelling as printed). The definition comes early, before the argument begins, so that nobody can accuse him of shifting the terms later. The question at issue, he says a few pages on, is not whether rash or imposing men may misapply the distinction, but whether it is grounded on the nature of things (T4).

(T5) A man given over to experiment is helped toward faith, not hindered. + The last of Boyle’s books on religion begins with a piece of gossip. A friend has written to say that two acquaintances of his, a doctor and a gentleman whom Boyle names only by their initials, find it very strange that Boyle, of all people, should be a committed Christian, given that he is known as a diligent cultivator of experimental philosophy and that several articles of the faith are not only beyond the senses but thought to be above reason as well. The whole book is the answer to that raised eyebrow, and the fact that the eyebrow was already being raised in 1690 is itself worth knowing. The idea that science and Christian faith are natural enemies is not a discovery of the nineteenth century; Boyle was fielding it in his sixties, from men who knew him. His reply has several strands, and the honest one comes first: he grants that experimental philosophy carries a temptation or two, and says only that they are more than outweighed. The main weight is this. A man who spends his life taking things apart to see how they work meets contrivance at a level nobody else sees. The rest of us admire a bird; he has watched what happens to a bird when the air is drawn away, and knows to the ounce how much is being taken care of that we never think about. Familiarity with the workmanship, in his experience, does not wear down wonder. It gives wonder something to hold on to. He adds a condition, and repeats it so that no one will miss it, which keeps the claim from being a boast. The man he has in mind is one with a well-disposed mind, meaning teachable, and inclined to make devout use of the truths he finds. Experiment does not make anybody devout. It furnishes a devout man with better reasons, and it leaves a hostile man with better instruments. He quotes Francis Bacon with approval on the same page: that God never worked a miracle to convince atheists, because in his visible works he had placed enough to do it, if they were not wanting to themselves.

(Q) "I shall endeavour to make them think it at least less strange, That a great Esteem of Experience, and a high Veneration for Religion, should be compatible in the same person." + Source: Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso, The First Part (1690; spelling as printed). The sentence comes in the opening paragraph, answering the two friends who had wondered aloud about him. Boyle’s aim is deliberately modest: not to prove that experiment must lead to faith, only to make it less strange that the two live together in one man, which was the thing his critics claimed to find incredible (T5).

(Q) "Wishing them also a happy success in their laudable attempts to discover the true nature of the works of God, and praying, that they and all other searchers into physical truths, may cordially refer their attainments to the glory of the great Author of Nature, and to the comfort of mankind." + Source: Boyle’s will (1691), the article concerning the Royal Society, as printed in Thomas Birch, The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle (1744). These are the closing words of the clause in which he left the society his raw ores and minerals and his good wishes. Two claims are packed into a blessing: that the things a laboratory studies are the works of God, and that the point of studying them is his glory and other people’s good. Burnet, who knew him for years, said that Boyle never spoke the name of God without a pause and a visible stop in his speech, and that a friend of almost forty years’ standing could not remember him once failing to do it.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His will put natural theology in a London pulpit eight times a year, and the first lecturer wrote to Newton for help. + Natural theology means what can be known about God from the world itself, before any appeal to Scripture: that there is a maker, that he is powerful, that he is wise. Boyle’s endowment gave it a pulpit, a salary, and an audience, once a month for eight months of the year, in the middle of London. The first Boyle Lecturer, chosen in 1692, was Richard Bentley, a young classical scholar who would become the most formidable textual critic in England, which is to say the kind of reader who can look at an old manuscript and say which words the author wrote and which ones a copyist slipped in. His eight sermons were published as The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, and for the last three, which argued from the structure of the solar system, he wanted to be sure he had the physics right. So he wrote to Isaac Newton, whose Principia had come out five years earlier, and Newton wrote back four long letters that are still in print. In the first of them he told Bentley something that has been quoted ever since: that when he wrote his treatise about our system he had an eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a deity, and that nothing could please him more than to find it useful for that purpose. Neither of them pretended the case was finished. Newton said plainly where it stopped: he could describe how gravity behaves, and not what causes it. The lectureship kept going. Samuel Clarke held it in 1704 and 1705 and produced the most rigorous natural theology in English of that generation. William Derham, William Whiston and others followed. A century later, William Paley’s watch found on a heath, the most famous design argument ever written for ordinary readers, was drawing on a stream of argument these lectures had made public, and the Strasbourg clock stands somewhere behind the watch. The endowment eventually faltered, and the lectures lapsed, but they were revived in 2004 at St Mary-le-Bow, one of the original churches, and are delivered annually.

(†) He taught Christians how to say "laws of nature" without meaning a second god. + The phrase is so ordinary now that it takes an effort to see the problem. If the world runs by laws, what is God for? Either he is outside his own machine, in which case he is unemployed, or the laws are themselves a kind of power standing between him and the world, in which case something other than God is holding things together. Deism, the view that God wound the world up and then left it alone, took the first road within a generation of Boyle’s death, and a good deal of later argument has assumed there was no other. Boyle had already blocked both exits. Laws of motion, on his account, are not things; they are God’s own settled way of moving matter, laid down at the creation and maintained by what he called God’s incessant concourse, his continual upholding of the world he made. On that view regularity is not God’s absence but his faithfulness, and the sentence Paul writes about Christ, that "in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17), is a description of what keeps the mechanism running rather than a poetic aside. It is a way of speaking Christian writers have used ever since, and much of its clarity comes from him. His influence ran along ordinary friendships too. John Locke had known him at Oxford, built the corpuscular philosophy into his own account of how we come to know the world, was named by Boyle to take charge of his chemical papers, and saw the unfinished General History of the Air into print the year after he died. Newton, fifteen years younger, corresponded with him and honored him. And the phrase "Christian virtuoso" became, for more than a century, a description of a recognized type. It is worth naming what that type was in Boyle’s hands, since the role was new: a man of no ecclesiastical standing, holding no office in the church and taking no pay from it, funding his own experiments, publishing his own theology, and answerable to nobody, who used the whole apparatus to argue for the Christian faith and paid for other men to go on doing it after he was gone.

(†) Where his own record falls short: the man who demanded proof believed gold could be made, and got Parliament to lift the ban on making it. + Set aside the easy version of this charge first. Boyle worked at what his century called chymistry, and in 1660 that one word covered two things we would now keep well apart. One was the careful assaying of ores, meaning the testing of a rock to find how much silver or gold is actually in it. The other was the search for the philosophers’ stone, the substance that was supposed to turn a base metal into a precious one. Nobody had yet drawn a line between them, and it is not an anachronism in him to have pursued both. Nor was he alone in it. Newton pursued the same search for some thirty years and left about a million words of alchemical notes behind him. The fair charge is narrower and it is his. Boyle’s whole public argument was that claims must be made to face the bench: repeat the trial, report the failures, let the reader judge. On the transmutation of metals, the turning of one metal into another, he suspended that rule in the one place where he most wanted an answer. In 1676 he published in the Philosophical Transactions, anonymously, an account of a specially prepared mercury that grew hot when mixed with gold, which he took for a genuine sign of the process at work. In 1678 he printed a dialogue, An Historical Account of a Degradation of Gold made by an Anti-Elixir, arguing that since a small quantity of a certain powder had degraded good gold into something baser, there was no reason in principle why the reverse powder should not exist. In August 1689 Parliament repealed a statute of Henry IV, passed in 1404, which had made multiplying gold and silver a felony. Thomas Birch, his first biographer, had it from Edmond Halley that Boyle avowed his belief in transmutation to him in conversation, and says it was probably in consequence of that belief that Boyle procured the repealing act by his own interest. Two footnotes keep the ledger honest in both directions. Newton, reading the 1676 paper, wrote to the secretary of the Royal Society urging that Boyle keep "high silence" about it until he knew what he had, in case it proved an inlet to something that could not be published without immense damage to the world; the worry among the men closest to him was not that the work was silly but that it might be true. And Boyle’s error was not credulity about spirits or a failure of piety. It grew out of his physics: if all matter is one stuff differently arranged, gold is an arrangement, and arrangements can be changed. He was wrong for a reason a careful man could be wrong for, and he was wrong in the one area where he wanted the answer badly enough to stop asking his own questions.