This short essay is dedicated to one of the founding fathers of modern botany, the British botanist John Ray (1627-1705). He was a son of a blacksmith and his mother was a healer and herbalist. May be that this early acquaintance with nature made him a naturalist. Pursuing the exploration of nature with scientific methods he developed himself, he understood his science as a means to better understand God and to serve the church.

In 1660 he was ordained as a priest of the Anglican Church. As an innovative scientist he belongs to the movement of natural theology from which in the 17th century in Britain the scientific revolution emerged - as well as the Royal Society, to which John Ray belonged as a fellow since 1667. It is worthwhile to remember why these early innovative scientists pursued their science at all. In 1660 he confessed:

There is for a free man no occupation more worthy and delightful than to contemplate the beauteous works of nature and honor the infinite wisdom and goodness of God.

In fact John Ray indicated he would have loved to serve the Church. In his introduction to his major work on botany “The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation”, publishes in 1691 he writes:

For being not permitted to serve the Church with my tongue by preaching I know not but it may be my duty to serve it with my hand by writing.

And indeed he wrote about how he could trace the glory of God in his creation.

In this book about botany in fact he very often speaks about God and how he wants him to discover by studying nature and the wonderful design in nature. But not only design is interesting for him in addition he feels attracted by the beauty and harmony and wisdom in nature - one feels reminded of Greek religious admiration of the harmonious cosmos, but more to the praise of God as documented in psalms, which he quotes in his book quite often. Studying nature to understand God was at his time at the one hand in tune with the theological tradition to prove God’s existence by putting forward the teleological argument by empirical evidence but at the other hand an innovative approach because empirical research had to be defended against pure book knowledge in particular against the still well established Aristotelian paradigm of science, in which knowing and quoting this authority sufficed to substantiate a truth claim. In this context he wrote in his book The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation:

Let it not suffice to be book-learned, to read what others have written and to take upon trust more falsehood than truth, but let us ourselves examine things as we have opportunity, and converse with Nature as well as with books.

Sentences like

I come now to take a view of the works of creation and to observe something of the wisdom of God discernible in the formation of them in their order and harmony (p. 57).

Science thus is rooted in the admiration of the creator.

... in diligently viewing and contemplating the works of the creation, that we may discern and admire the footsteps of the divine wisdom (p. 387).

After this book he wrote to other treatises concerning the argument of design: "Three Physico-Theological Discourses", published in 1692. One may ask if this kind of outdated or old fashioned motivation to pursue science could bear any valuable scientific fruit. This however was the case in Ray’s work. He created after a scientific journey across Europe from 1660-1671 the first system of classification of plants based on morphology, a natural system which should reflect the wisdom of the creator. And this system was a forerunner of Linné’s system successfully established later. And in fact later naturalist could draw on his classification system by using his morphological investigations to as for their function in terms of adaptation and fitness.

Also in another respect his work as a theologically motivated naturalist paved the way for subsequent evolutionary thought. Concerning the fossils, which became more and more known in natural science he claimed that these miraculous stones had once been living organisms - thus opposing other contemporary theories who taught that these stones were lusi naturae, created by God for his pleasure or by the devil to deceit people. Without the idea that nature would reflect divine wisdom he would have not attained his classificatory system.

Thus again we see, how early theological thinking in natural theology were pointing towards later insights in evolutionary theories of nature. Next short essay will be about Lorenz Heister a German surgeon who studied God’s wisdom and order in the human body.