Boyle: Between God and science

Boyle: Between God and science

Michael Hunter

London: Yale University Press 2009 | Pp366 | £25.00 | ISBN 978 0 30 012381 4

Our view of Boyle as simply 'the father of chemistry' and the most famous British natural philosopher before being eclipsed by Isaac Newton has been completely transformed during the past 30 years. Hunter and his acolytes have played their part by trawling through the huge archive of Boyle's papers at the Royal Society to produce new editions of his published and unpublished works, correspondence and laboratory notebooks. 

We now know that Robert Boyle (1627-91), a rich and privileged Anglo-Irish aristocrat, only began to be interested in science when he was in his early twenties. Before then he was a religious ascetic and cerebral moralist. His devoutness remained when he became an ingenious experimentalist devoted to the demonstration that an atomic or corpuscular philosophy was a better way of understanding God's creation than the pagan Aristotelianism and Paracelsianism of his day. Of the latter, he believed, was propelling scholars towards atheism and infidelity.