Robert Boyle

"The experimental philosophy, far from indisposing a man to be a Christian, gives him peculiar advantages and assistances to be one." — The Christian Virtuoso (1690)

Why he matters

If Bacon wrote the charter, Boyle made the charter inhabitable. With Boyle, the Christian-affirmative tradition acquires a face — a person you could imagine being. The Christian Virtuoso, in his coinage, is a Christian who pursues experimental philosophy as an act of worship, who treats the laboratory as a place where the works of God become legible to the patient inquirer, and who connects all of this to ordinary practices of medical charity, alms, and pastoral concern. Boyle is the reason the Royal Society could claim, at its founding, that its work was for “the glory of God the Creator, and the advantage of the human race” without the claim sounding empty.

Who he was

Boyle was born in 1627 in Ireland to one of the wealthiest peerages of the period, and he died in 1691 in London. He was a foundational figure in modern chemistry — Boyle’s law on the relation between pressure and volume of gases is his most-remembered scientific contribution — and one of the earliest fellows of the Royal Society. He was a layman of the Church of England, theologically literate enough that his religious writings fill several volumes, and he poured significant resources into Bible translation, Christian apologetics, and the medical care of the poor. He never married and never took orders. His life looks, in retrospect, like an early prototype of the scientific vocation as something whole — research, theology, charity, and friendship held together by a single intention.

The position

Boyle’s argument is less systematic than Bacon’s and more lived. Three claims are doing most of the work.

First, experimental philosophy and Christian faith are not rivals but allies. The book of nature and the book of Scripture are both written by the same Author. Studying nature carefully and devotionally is a way of knowing the Creator, not of replacing him. Boyle takes the time to argue this explicitly because, even in the 1690s, the rumor that science erodes faith was already a live thing he needed to answer.

Second, the Christian inquirer is a particular kind of person. The “virtuoso” of his title is not a celebrity, not a court intellectual, and not a hireling of patrons. He is a person whose curiosity is disciplined by piety, whose use of instruments is governed by truthfulness, whose communications are governed by candor, and whose results are shared because knowledge is for the relief of mankind. Boyle is trying to describe a character, not just a method.

Third, the proof of the vocation is in the life adjacent to it. Boyle funded medical experiments, paid out of pocket for medicines for the poor, supported the translation of Scripture into vernacular languages including Irish, and made charity a regular practice. He did not separate his laboratory from his almsgiving. The integration is the argument.

Where he sits on the maps

On preserve-limits versus accelerate-transformation, Boyle is moderately to the accelerate side — not as far as Bacon, partly because his temperament is gentler and his pace is patient. He believed in the steady accumulation of useful experimental knowledge over generations, not in dramatic transformation.

On idolatry concern, he is low, like Bacon, but for a slightly different reason. Boyle’s piety is so thoroughly integrated with his science that the question of technical idolatry does not really arise for him. He thinks of his instruments and methods as means of attention to a created order he did not invent. That orientation makes the worry about technique-as-idol mostly invisible to him.

The best case against him

The strongest critique of Boyle is not personal but structural. His model of the Christian scientist is one of disciplined intention — a virtuous person, doing virtuous work, with virtuous results. It does not theorize what happens when experimental science is embedded in markets, militaries, and corporate research apparatuses far larger than any individual’s intention. Boyle’s century did not yet need to think about this. Ours does.

A second critique, more historically specific, is that Boyle’s confidence in the harmony of natural philosophy and Christian faith depended on cultural conditions — a relatively settled Anglican world, a small and personally-known scientific community, a society where charity was a recognized vocation — that no longer obtain in the same way. Reviving the Christian Virtuoso as a working model today requires reconstructing some of what Boyle could simply assume.

Neither critique discredits Boyle. They locate him: he gives the Build and Heal strand its most attractive personal image, and that image still functions, but it needs structural support that he himself did not provide.

Primary texts

• The Christian Virtuoso (1690).
• Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (1663).
• Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (1688).
• Selected works in The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, 14 vols. (Pickering & Chatto, 1999–2000).

Secondary sources

• Edward B. Davis, multiple essays on Boyle, the Bible, and natural philosophy.
• Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (Yale University Press, 2009) — the standard modern biography.
• Peter Harrison, on religion and the early Royal Society.
• Peter R. Anstey, The Philosophy of Robert Boyle (Routledge, 2000).

Related thinkers

• Bacon — the predecessor whose program Boyle made livable.
• Dessauer — the twentieth-century inheritor who extends the Christian Virtuoso into the figure of the Christian engineer.
• Francis — the contemporary papal voice on integral human development that, read carefully, is closer to Boyle than to the Boyle-suspicious caricature would suggest.
• Scherz — the current moral theologian working on what virtue ethics in science and technology might look like now.