Bridgewater Treatises

"[5] In 1781, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society;[6] after 1802 he lived mostly in Paris, where he amassed a collection of manuscripts later donated to the British Museum[7] and gained a reputation as an eccentric.

[8][9] He died in February 1829, leaving a will dated 25 February 1825, in which he directed that £8000 was to be used by the President of the Royal Society to appoint a "person or persons":...to write, print, and publish, one thousand copies of a work On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation; illustrating such work by all reasonable arguments, as, for instance, the variety and formation of God's creatures in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; the effect of digestion, and thereby of conversion; the construction of the hand of man, and an infinite variety of other arguments: as also by discoveries, ancient and modern, in arts, sciences, and the whole extent of literature.

[10]The President of the Royal Society at the time was Davies Gilbert, who sought the assistance of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, and the Bishop of London, Charles James Blomfield, in selecting authors.

The two other medical authors, Peter Mark Roget and William Prout, wrote lengthier contributions considering how the emergence of physiological laws enhanced the belief in divine design, rather than diminishing it.

[25] In his treatise on "animal and vegetable physiology," Roget argued that the laws of "philosophical anatomy" provided a grander vision of divine action.

High Churchman Kirby's treatise on the "history, habits, and instincts of animals" began with a quotation from German naturalist Heinrich Moritz Gaede stating: "It is Bible in hand that we must enter into the august temple of nature.

[29] In stark contrast, the University of Oxford's Professor of Geology, William Buckland, declared in his first chapter that there was nothing in the Bible to suggest that the earth may not be ages old.

Robert Knox, an Edinburgh surgeon and major advocate of radical morphology, referred to them as the "Bilgewater Treatises", to mock what he called the "ultra-teleological school" of anatomy.

As Babbage's preface states, this volume was not part of the series, but rather his own considerations on the subject written in response to the claim in Whewell's treatise that "We may thus, with the greatest propriety, deny to the mechanical philosophers and mathematicians of recent times any authority with regard to their views of the administration of the universe.

"[44] Babbage drew on his own work on calculating engines to represent God as a divine programmer setting complex laws as the basis of what we think of as miracles, rather than miraculously producing new species by creative whim.