La Théologie naturelle de Louis-François Jéhan (1803-1871) : sciences, apologétique, vulgarisation / Claude Blanckaert.
Abstract:
The principal editor of the scientific dictionaries of Abbé Migne's Encyclopédie théologique, Louis-François Jehan (1803-1871) popularized among an ecclesiastical readership the traditional proof of the existence of God drawn from the goal of Nature. In the Dictionnaire d'Anthropologie (1853) he plagiarized at length from the French translation of William Paley's Natural Theology in order to show better the "power, wisdom, and goodness" of the Creator. In the guise of presenting a scientific text, he thus popularized the "argument from design" of the British physico-theologians by giving theoretical and educational weapons to Christian apologetics. He thereby accorded to revelation of God in Nature a kind of logical evidence which was able to reconcile science and the search for final causes. In his fight against "atheistic", materialistic, and evolutionary doctrines, he simultaneously sought to obtain for a traditional and often hostile clergy, a synopsis of contemporary knowledge. This article examines the social and mediating functions of natural theology in the context of French science in the 1850's
Nuncius A. 5, fasc. 2 (1990), p. 167-204