Joseph Priestley

From Philosopedia

Priestley, Joseph (13 March 1733 - 8 February 1804)

Priestley, chemist and co-discoverer of oxygen with Swedish pharmacist Karl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–1786). was born in Fairhead, England, near Leeds, the oldest of six children. Destined for the ministry, Priestley realized he rejected much of Calvinism and decided to attend a Dissenting seminary, Daventry Academy. He worked as a minister while conducting scientific experiments, then secured a position at the Dissenting Academy, Warrington. He was eventually ordained in the Dissenting ministry, and became an early founder of Unitarianism in England, at time when Dissenters could be deprived of their citizenship and Unitarianism was not lawful.

Priestley wrote The History and Present State of Electricity (1767) at the encouragement of his colleague, Benjamin Franklin. Priestley explained the rings (now known as Priestley’s rings) formed by a discharge upon a metallic surface. The importance of his discovery of “dephlogisticated air,” the gas Lavoisier later named oxygen, Priestley did not fully appreciate. He produced carbonated water, and isolated eight gases in the air, including oxygen, and is considered to have laid the foundation for the science of chemistry.

In 1774, Priestley published his Examination of Scottish Philosophy, followed in 1782 by History of the Corruptions of Christianity. The latter book was considered blasphemous and was burned in public, for it rejected predestination and the Trinity, and it refused to accept the view that the Bible is divinely revealed.

This was followed by History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ (1786). In 1790 he wrote two volumes of A General History of the Christian Church to the Fall of the Western Empire and in 1803 finished another four volumes.

At one time he wrote of his regret that Benjamin Franklin was not only an “unbeliever in Christianity” but also refused to read books and pamphlets purporting to “prove” the truth of Christianity.

He opposed the slave trade and favored the French Revolution, which led in 1791 to people storming his house, wrecking his library, and destroying his scientific apparatus. As a result, Priestley - once a Presbyterian and now a convert to Unitarianism - led in 1794 to the United States, residing the rest of his life in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where his sons lived. Here, he received a warm welcome, continuing his scientific experiments and becoming the last defender of the phlogiston theory, one which postulates that in all flammable materials a substance (phlogiston) without color, odor, taste, or weight is given off in burning.

Priestley, who despite a problem with stammering had been a Unitarian preacher in England at Needham Market, Leeds, Birmingham, and Hackney, also preached from 1794 to 1804 in Northumberland. A lecture he gave in Philadelphia led to the establishment of that city’s first Unitarian Church and, in 1796, the first church so named in the Americas.

David Berman relates the reaction by Matthew Turner to Priestley’s "Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever" - the two discussed deism, atheism, and Unitarianism. Priestley hoped that his History of the Corruptions of Christianity, which concluded that much accepted Christian dogma was in fact a “corruption” of the original Christian truth, would clear away theological error to exhibit the version of Unitarianism that he thought would eventually predominate as the Christian faith. Although his definition of “God” was unorthodox, Priestley believed in human survival after death; in fact, he reasoned that inasmuch as animals live in such misery here, “a merciful God will make them some recompense for it hereafter.”

In England, Priestley is revered as a founder of the Unitarian movement. In the United States, his version of Enlightenment Unitarianism became a significant part of the American liberal heritage.

A defender of the French Revolution, Priestley lost his laboratory and home in Birmingham when they were stormed and burned down by mobs. Priestley's membership in the Royal Society was also withdrawn and he was burned in effigy. Priestley and his family immigrated to the United States in 1794, with hopes of setting up a model community, but settling for building a house in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, that contained a built-in lab.

After weathering so much criticism himself, Priestley is notorious even today among today's freethinkers for writing of Benjamin Franklin: "It is much to be lamented that a man of Dr. Franklin's general good character and great influence, should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done so much as he did to make others unbelievers."

(See a 2009 book by Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air, A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. The author describes Priestley as a chemist, theologian, and perennial agitator.

{BDF; CE; EG; FFRF; FUS; HAB; HNS2; JMR; JMRH; TYD; U; U&U; UU}