A Priest Serving in Nature's Temple: Robert Boyle's Career Blended Faith, Doubt, and the Use of Science to Heal Disease and Fight Atheism

As published in Christian History 21(4) (November 2002): 28-31.

Bombarded by deafening claps of thunder in the dead of night, an adolescent boy awoke suddenly from a deep sleep, terrified by the loud darkness, punctuated by staccato flashes of light so frequent and dazzling that he imagined himself amidst the fire that would someday consume the world on the day of judgment. Trembling at the hideous thought of being unprepared to face the awesome finality of that dreadful day, he solemnly resolved to live more piously henceforth. Robert Boyle kept that vow with remarkable consistency, and dated his conversion from that awful night.

Within months, however, his faith came under attack. During a casual visit to the original Carthusian abbey of Grande Chartreuse in "those Wild Mountaines" near Grenoble, as Boyle described them a few years later in a memoir of his early life, he became deeply depressed. There "the Devil taking advantage of that deepe, raving Melancholy, [in] so sad a Place," planted in his mind "distracting Doubts of some of the Fundamentals of Christianity," such that Boyle even contemplated suicide, drawing back only for fear of committing such a dreadful sin. Only after "a tedious languishment of many months" did it please God to "restore unto him the withdrawne sence of his Favor."

Religious doubt would henceforth be a defining characteristic of Boyle's personality, yet it played a positive role in the construction of his deeply thoughtful, charitably ecumenical faith. His approach to doubt, the other side of the coin of faith, was frankly precocious. Just three months after his twentieth birthday, he wrote, "He whose Faith never doubted, may justly doubt of his Faith." Throughout his life, Boyle cultivated an active yet reflective piety, forged in communion with the living God whose face he sought daily in the pages of Scripture and whose wondrous works he investigated for the benefit of others.

Most people know Boyle today as the scientist who published "Boyle's Law," the inverse relation between the pressure and volume of what we now call gases that is a standard part of a high school chemistry course. Because of his many important discoveries, we typically think of Boyle as "the father of chemistry and brother of the Earl of Cork," to borrow an old witticism. What is absent from this image is the deeply religious man who wrote as much about God as he did about the nature of air, the man who considered himself a "priest" in the "temple" of nature, the man who paid for translations of the Bible into Gaelic and the language of the Indians in Massachusetts

It was most likely his devotion to God that drove Boyle to become a scientist in the first place--but his family background did not point him clearly in this direction. Born in January 1627, he was the seventh son and fourteenth child of Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, an unscrupulous man who took advantage of English colonialism in Ireland to become one of the very wealthiest men in all the realm. Young "Robyn," as he was called, watched as his thirteen older brothers and sisters became pawns in a game of power, the boys given titles and lands and the girls married off to the sons of other powerful men--who usually had more ardor for their houses and horses than for their wives. Robyn's sister, Katherine, Viscountess Ranelagh, married at fifteen to a drunken brute, lived apart from her husband for many years before his timely death gave her two decades of blessed widowhood. His brother Francis, all of sixteen years himself, was torn from his seventeen-year-old wife, a servant to Queen Henrietta Maria, four days after their wedding at the Royal Chapel of Whitehall and sent with Robyn on the Grand Tour for two and one-half years. With such examples close at hand, it is little wonder that Robyn declined a title and took a dim view of courtly mores; he narrowly avoided an arranged marriage himself, remaining chaste his entire life.

Although she was twelve years older, Katherine became Robyn's closest confidant. A brilliant woman, she convened a salon for important intellectuals, including John Milton, Samuel Hartlib, and several members of Parliament. Her brother lived in her London home for much of his adult life. She was also deeply pious and well versed in theology, traits she shared with their sister Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick. In her role as a diarist, Mary has attracted considerable scholarly attention, for her writings demonstrate how, through private devotion, a woman could create for herself a world apart from male domination. It is clear that her brother was a significant part of her spiritual life. She speaks of the three of them--Robert, Katherine, and herself--as having "holy discourse," or "good and profitable discourse of things wherewith we might edify one another."

Boyle's earliest writings, dating from around his twentieth birthday though not published (if at all) until many years afterward, reflect the intensity of his intimate relationship with God. These include two essays on the spiritual damage done by swearing; an ethical treatise influenced by Erasmus; and various essays, reflections, and romances on moral and religious subjects. One of the latter, The Martyrdom of Theodora, And of Didymus, became the basis for Handel's opera Theodora. Another work begun at this time and dedicated to Katherine, Occasional Reflections Upon Several Subjects, was popular with Puritans and remained in print for almost two hundred years. Richard Baxter told Boyle that "your pious Meditations & Reflections, do call to me for greater Reverence in the reading of them,& make me put off my hatt, as if I were in the Church." Isaac Watts based a four-line hymn upon one section, which was later set to music by the great colonial American composer William Billings as part of his anthem, Creation. The following passage is typical for its tone and content: "We must never venture to wander far from God, upon the Presumption that Death is far enough from us, but rather in the very height of our Jollities, we should endeavour to remember, that they who feast themselves to-day, may themselves prove Feasts for the Worms tomorrow." Here Boyle expresses not a morbid interest in death, but an appropriate Christian recognition that a sense of our mortality is the basis of morality.

It was only after writing such works as these, that Boyle decided to take up serious scientific study. Although he always possessed a profound curiosity about the natural world, his main motivation was a desire to improve the human condition and to ameliorate suffering, particularly through the application of chemical knowledge to medicine. He developed this theme in his first scientific essays, which were published several years later as part of his longest book, Some Considerations touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy. He included a number of recipes for medicines thought to be effective, in order to make them more widely available, especially among the poor. In the last few years of his life, he published a much larger collection of such recipes for this very purpose, just as John Wesley did in the following century.

Once Boyle had begun the investigation of nature, he never slackened, and he found his Christian character ideally suited to his new activities. The highly competitive aspect of modern science sometimes hides the fact that science is a fundamentally cooperative enterprise, in which groups of people work toward common goals. Boyle's unquestioned honesty, unfailing charity, and genuine interest in the public welfare helped him gain the respect and friendship of an important community of "gentlemen," who met regularly in Oxford to view experiments and to discuss the latest scientific discoveries and ideas. In 1660, Boyle joined with many other "gentlemen" to found the Royal Society, the first scientific organization in the English-speaking world.

The next dozen years were the most productive of his life, earning him a worldwide reputation as the outstanding experimental scientist of his generation. His most famous contributions involved the use of an air pump, expertly made for him by Robert Hooke, a brilliant Oxford student who went on to become a great scientist himself. With this apparatus, Boyle demonstrated several properties of the air, confirming in clear and clever ways the hypothesis of Blaise Pascal and others that the atmosphere is a vast fluid like the ocean. Just as water pressure increases with depth, so air pressure depends on the height of the atmosphere. Several other experiments, involving insects and small mammals, clarified the connections among respiration, combustion, and various components of the air. He also published weighty tomes of observations on colors and cold, drawing in part on his extensive collection of reports from experienced travelers to the northernmost parts of the globe, and treatises on good experimental practice and scientific reasoning.

In the same period, Boyle wrote most of a subtle book on the doctrine of creation, A Free Enquiry Into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature, which illustrates some of the reasons why he found the new science of his day so attractive theologically. The book opposed the prevailing "vulgar" (or popular) concept of nature, ultimately derived from the Greek scientist Aristotle and the Roman physician Galen. Adherents of this view tended to personify nature, saying (for example) that "nature abhors a vacuum" or that "nature does nothing in vain." Boyle considered this idolatrous, since it effectively placed an intelligent, purposive agent, "much like a kind of Goddess," between God and the world God had made. Noting that the Old Testment contained no "word that properly signifies Nature, in the sense we take it in," Boyle argued for the theological superiority of what he elsewhere called the "mechanical philosophy," which explains natural phenomena from the purely "mechanical" properties and powers given to unintelligent matter by God at the creation. Such an approach, he believed, more clearly underscored the sovereignty of God and located purpose where it properly belonged: in the creator's mind, not in some imaginary "Nature."

In keeping with his view that the mechanical philosophy was a powerful ally for religion, Boyle was an outspoken advocate of the design argument. Indeed he had a very strong interest in apologetics generally, reflecting the lifelong conversation he had with his own religious doubts. He wrote extensively on apologetic themes, and in his will he established a lectureship for "proveing the Christian Religion against notorious Infidels (viz) Atheists, Theists [that is, deists], Pagans, Jews and Mahometans, not descending lower to any Controversies that are among Christians themselves." Although he often targeted "atheists" in his writings, he realized that genuine philosophical atheism was rare in his day. He was actually more concerned with what he once called "practical atheists," those "baptised infidels" who lived as if there were no God to judge them--and here he thought the design argument had its greatest value. As he stated in A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things, he desired "that my Reader should not barely observe the Wisdom of God, but be in some measure Affectively Convinc'd of it." There was no better way, in Boyle's opinion, to "give us so great a wonder and veneration for it," than "by Knowing and Considering the Admirable Contrivance of the Particular Productions of that Immense Wisdom," by which he mainly meant the exquisitely fashioned parts of animals both great and small. Thereby, Boyle believed, "Men may be brought, upon the same account, both to acknowledge God, to admire Him, and to thank Him." A pious and humble man, Boyle always sought to cultivate the same attitude in others.

Robert Boyle died in his sister's house shortly after midnight on the final day of 1691. She had died herself just eight days before, and it is probably true that grief hastened his passing, although he was never robust and had been in declining health for several years. Laid to rest close to her in the chancel of their parish church, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the precise location of his grave is no longer known. The humility suggested by this fate is entirely fitting to the character of one of the greatest scientists who has ever lived.