Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
prepared to endure the fate of the threatening punishment (20 years in
Siberia) with a martyr-like attitude, inspired by the idea that God will
help him, as he later confesses to his brother Alyosha (pt. 4, bk. 11, chap.
4). But then the atheist Rakitin visits him in prison and tells him about
the latest news regarding the chemical physiology of nerves - Dostoy-
evsky mentioned Claude Bernard. When Alyosha arrives shortly after
Rakitin's departure, he finds his brother crying in confusion and despair:
“I am sorry to lose God [… and the belief that] I've got a soul, and that I
am some sort of image and likeness […]. It's chemistry, brother, chemis-
try! There's no help for it, your reverence, you must make way for chem-
istry.”
Now that chemistry was regarded as the protagonist of atheism, in the
literature as well as in public discourses, how did contemporary chemists
respond to that accusation? In a remarkable topic entitled
Chemistry and
Religion
(1864),
33
Harvard professor of chemistry Josiah Parsons Cooke
(1827-94), a very pious Christian with profound knowledge of theology,
tried not only to reconcile chemistry with religion but also to prove that
modern chemistry reinforced belief in God. His theological arguments
were not original, but he combined the old approach of natural theology
with the new chemical and physical knowledge of the time. First, he de-
veloped the chemical complexity of the atmosphere as global circles of
great harmony in order to provide “numberless indications of adaptation
in the materials of our atmosphere” (p. 8). Since there are two possible
explanations for such adaptation, divine design and material self-organi-
zation, Cooke tried to exclude the latter in order to argue for the former.
By referring to contemporary approaches of kinetic theory (his main
source was John Tyndall's
Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion
, 1863),
Cooke argued for a strict mechanistic-atomistic reduction of all chemical
phenomena. This accepted, the divine designer is required as creator of
the atoms and the mechanical laws and as the prime cause of motion in
the mechanistic universe - here, Cooke could easily follow traditional
lines of deism or Leibnizian natural theology. Thus, chemistry provides
“evidences of design, and therefore evidences of the existence of a per-
sonal God, infinite in wisdom, absolute in power” (ibid.) only if it be-
33
New York: Scribner, 1864; 2nd ed. 1880.
