Tracing the evidence of design: Natural theology through an unpublished manuscript by William Stanley Jevons

Abstract

This paper takes its cue from an unpublished manuscript by the Victorian polymath William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882). I elucidate how he attempted to integrate science and religion through natural theology. I argue that Jevons’s manuscript shows that he took the theory of probability to be the most appropriate tool for finding evidence of divine design in natural phenomena. Jevons thus took part in the nineteenth-century natural theology debate, specifically between William Whewell and Charles Babbage. This debate was about both how to interpret the analogy between natural and human contrivances, and about the tools which should be used in natural theology. After introducing the manuscript, I present Jevons’s religious ideas about Unitarianism and the relationship between chance and design in his writings. I show Jevons’s commitment to natural theology and his idea that humans, due to their finite intellect, should use the theory of probability to investigate divine providence. I then compare Jevons’s position to Whewell’s and Babbage’s Bridgewater Treatises. I show how they had different conceptions of natural theology compared to Jevons, and different ideas about the tools that should be used to investigate natural laws.