Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes (Part Six)
Theology and Natural Explanations
The point of
all this is not that we should accept this as good science today (or even good
theology for that matter). It should
hardly shock us that however brilliant these men and women were, their attempts
appear in many aspects, flawed or in need of revision. Lest we forget, our point here is not to hold
these attempts up as flawless science and theology, but rather to show that the
endeavor of human understanding in the historical record cannot be so easily
summarized by the picture of “Warfare.”
Let us pause and summarize what we have said so far, since a lot of
ground has been covered but our overall points
have been simple. The first: our
attention to historical details have often been captured by “images” of events
typically thought to embody the ethos of warfare. These images in turn not only exemplify, but
often drive investigative prejudices.
Yet many of these images are, as we have seen, distorted, even outright
false.
Thus the second point: Warfare is too
simple because it fails to understand the multiple relationships that have
occurred not just between religion and science, but also between all of the
other areas which are intricately connected to them, like politics, economics,
even personal and cultural identity. The
third point, related to the second, is that historiographically speaking, that
is, when we attempt at a more abstract level to understand how we should proceed investigating history, it is not just that the relationship between
religion and science has been “more complex.”
It is rather, also the fact
that many of the distinguishing lines between discrete areas were not yet in
existence, or were understood by other distinctions and groupings like “natural
philosophy.”
Natural Philosophy (and one
explicitly written to the glory of God) is what Isaac Newton thought he was
doing writing the Principia Mathematica,
for example. To project any ideal typology of the relationship
between science and religion is already to
smuggle in the very concepts “science” and “religion” for which we are
attempting to discover their historical origins and emergence as distinctive
concepts. We have already suggested the
very phrase that pairs them as “religion
and science” whether at war or amiably related, did not emerge until the mid-19th
century. We have to be very careful
then, regarding how we treat the self-understanding of those we are inquiring
about, and the histories subsequent to them, which can often be swept under the
rug for more popular fables.
Let us turn briefly to a fourth point
that builds on all of the prior ones.
Part of the misguided nature of using any sort of “Warfare thesis” is
that if theology and science could be related in complex ways, as we saw with
Francis Bacon for example (indeed, in ways that seem to even defy our ability
to specify the categories), then the
Warfare thesis is also blind to see that many conflicts were internal to
theology itself—or more broadly speaking within “natural philosophy.” When this is excluded from our
historiographical lenses, the rise of “naturalistic explanations” that seem to
exclude God as part of their explanatory mechanism are automatically assumed to
sort themselves out into “secular” and “theological” or “religious” camps
respectively. But this is not the
case. The priority of “naturalistic”
explanations in the realm of science can have—and indeed has had, explicitly
theological reasons given to it. The
fact that God cannot be numbered among the furniture and forces of the
universe, as a discrete physical object or force, to anticipate, is hardly a
delivery of modern science: the entire Christian tradition could have said as
much.[1] Nonetheless, let us turn to a particular
example.
Take the example of Pierre Simon de la
Place and the “Nebular hypothesis” of solar-system formation, which is still
more or less accepted today. The idea
was that it was not God “putting-together” the solar system, but this formation
could be explained “purely naturally” by the eventual coalescing of nebular
material into suns and planets. Take la
Place’s pithy reply to Napoleon as our guide: When the tiny tyrant asked
regarding the place of God in la Place’s cosmology, la Place replied: “I have
no need of that hypothesis.” Though the
apocryphal saying is not “supported by textual evidence”[2]
it nonetheless is entirely consistent with la Place’s system, and what’s more
certainly does not read friendly toward the theistically inclined. Those who look for conflict between religion
and theology have ample opportunity to find it: “In less than a century, both
celestial mechanics and probability theory had been turned on their heads, they
no longer served … believing in the Deity, but were now put to work to confirm
the brilliance of human effort to penetrate nature’s secrets”[3]
Yet, despite this, la Place’s exclusion
of God is no pure victory for the Warfare Metaphor regarding the history of
science and religion, or for the idea that the advance of science inevitably
requires the subtraction of religious belief.
What we have is a curious example of how debates that were happening
internal to theology affected natural philosophical decisions. But this history has subsequently been pushed
aside, so that the picture is skewed to look like the simple overcoming of God
by natural reason. But the God whom la
Place rejected was the God of Isaac Newton, who occasionally adjusted orbits
and provided an explanation for the principle of gravitation, and not, for
example the truly transcendent biblical God as pictured by Augustine or Thomas
Aquinas. To claim la Place as one of the
bright lights for the eventual victory of secular scientific reason over the
credulity of faith has pieces of truth to it, but ultimately ignores that a
more interesting observation lay in the fact that the grounds and conditions
for la Place’s commentary on the non-necessity of this particular God as a
physical hypothesis, were themselves given historical precedent by discussions
and transmutations (however illegitimate) made within theology itself.
Ignoring this has consequences for historiography, as John Hedley Brooke
points out:
[Andrew Dixon White and John William
Draper’s] preconception that, as science has advanced, phenomena once
considered supernatural have yielded to naturalistic explanation, is not
without support. But it assumes a
dichotomy between nature and supernature that oversimplifies the theologies of
the past. If a supernatural power was
envisaged as working through, as
distinct from interfering with,
nature, the antithesis [between science and theology] would partially collapse.
… The significance given to explanations in terms of natural causes depends on
higher-level assumptions embedded in a broader cultural framework. In the history of Western culture, it has not
simply been a case of nature swallowing supernature. Something had to happen to change the
higher-level assumptions if the conflict between science and religion was to
achieve the self-evident status proclaimed by Draper, White, and their
successors.[4]
At least as early as Augustine
(arguably, the book of Genesis as well) the idea of a “natural explanation” was
in no way in competition with God, who sustained everything in its regularity.[5] God, as Creator, did not rely on prior
material to bring the cosmos into existence.[6] Therefore, He could not be in competition
with secondary causes, because He is the initiator and sustainer of their very
being in its entirety. In a particularly
compelling example, Rabbi Gamaliel II (c. 90/110) is in dialogue with a
philosopher who notes “Your God was indeed a great artist, but surely He found
good pigments which assist him.” To
which Rabbi Gamaliel replies, “God made the colors too!”[7]
God,
in His transcendence, is the only self-existent thing—all other things, as
contingent upon His act of creation and subsequent sustenance “are not their
own existence but share in Existence itself” (Aquinas, Summa Theologia, I.3.4). God
was neither compelled to create, nor constrained by prior circumstances. The consequence of this is that God is not in
competition with “natural” causal sequences since He is the foundation of
causal order itself. God stands in a
radical and free relation to creation, and just so He is intimate to it in a
way no element of the created order could be. Just so, the necessity of making a sharp
distinction between natural and supernatural causes was not one that anyone
asked: nature simply exemplified the will of God. To ask:
did God, or nature, do this, was—to put it in terms of
grammar—improperly structured, and would not so much be unanswerable as
indecipherable to early thought. This
principle carried through Thomas Aquinas and many others who, though they made
increasingly subtle distinctions, never saw God or created agency in
competition with one another. This
tradition did not die, but carried even into the Scientific Revolution and
beyond.
Gottfried Leibniz could, for example,
reject Newton’s claim (via Newton’s student Samuel Clarke) that God must be
invoked as an explanation for what maintains the regularity and precision of
planetary orbits, and this on theological
grounds: namely it impugns the dignity of the Creator to assume God was not
competent enough to create a perfectly self-sustaining system. Thomas Aquinas had earlier argued exactly the
same thing by noting that to speak of God, and to speak of natural causes, was
not to talk about two “things” on the same plane or level. For example Aquinas says of an effect: “[it
is] wholly done by both [a natural cause and a divine power], according to a
different way, just as the same effect is wholly attributed to the instrument
and wholly to the principle agency.” (Summa
Contra Gentiles 3.70.8.). For
Aquinas, to say secondary causes (that is, created causes which are not God)
have no power to shape and change the world, is an affront to the sovereignty
and creativity of God to make the world make itself. There is a wonderful image invoked by Thomas
Aquinas in his Sententia Super Physicam (II.14.268):
“It is clear that nature is a certain kind of divine art impressed upon things,
by which these things are moved to a determinate end. It is as if a shipbuilder were able to give
to timbers that by which they would move themselves to take the form of a
ship.”[8]
In the time leading up to Newton,
however, there was a widespread theological transition where—though the surface
level syntax was shared with Aquinas—the meaning
of their respective views regarding the integrity of creation was no longer a
metaphysical, but a physical one:[9]
“The marvelous contrivances of nature reinforced orthodox beliefs in the wisdom
of the Creator,” writes Roger Hahn, “further replacing the traditional views,
which had drawn more heavily on metaphysics, by one based on empiricism”.[10] In this sense, we have something of a
hybrid-discourse of theology and science where “theological and physical
arguments become nearly indistinguishable.”[11]
[Just so] how ironic it is to read in
popular histories of the ‘antagonisms of religion and the rising science.’ That was precisely what the problem was
not! These sciences did not oppose
religious convictions, they supported them.
Indeed, they subsumed theology, and theologians accepted with relief and
gratitude this assumption of religious foundations by Cartesian first
philosophy and Newtonian mechanics.[12]
There was with Newton, Samuel Clarke,
and later the British physico-theologians like William Paley, a collapsing of
the supernatural into the natural. Even
when God was spoken of as transcendent, He was now considered an agent whose
specific actions could be indexed alongside other forces like gravity. But just so, there were theologians like
Leibniz who opposed these explanations with naturalistic ones, precisely for
theological reasons. Thus when la Place
has “no need of that hypothesis,” we cannot affirm that this is evidence of
“Warfare” with “religion” per se,
because, though he is not acknowledging it, la Place is in a sense picking up
one end of a theological debate without acknowledging the precedent and
pedigree of his position. In this sense,
the fizzing-out of certain theological explanation is due to a type of
self-marginalization made by illicit theology that “physicalized” explanations
of God, who thus became a hostage to the fortunes of competing physical theory
in a way that early Christians would have found bizarre. As Amos Funkenstein puts it:
The medieval sense of
God's symbolic presence in his creation and the sense of a universe replete
with transcendent meaning and limits had to recede, if not to give way totally
to the postulates of univocation and homogeneity in the seventeenth century.
God's relation to the world had to be given a concrete physical meaning. ... It
is clear why a God describable in such unequivocal terms, or even given
physical features and functions, eventually became all the easier to discard.
... Once God regained transparency or
even a body, he was all the easier to identify and kill [emphasis added].[13]
[1] Cf. David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness,
Bliss (New Haven: Yale, 2013); Tanner, God
and Creation; Torrance, Divine and
Contingent Order; Pannenberg, Toward
a Theology of Nature.
[2]
Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg, eds., God
& Nature: Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (California:
University of California, 1986), 256.
[3]
Ibid., 270.
[4]
Brooke, Science and Religion, 47-48.
[5]
Augustine, De Trinitate, III.1.6
(translation taken from The Trinity,
trans. Edmund Hill (New York, New City Press, 1991), 130: “The order of nature,
to be sure, declares itself in various ways; in all of them it serves the
divine command, but in those changes and permutations of bodies which happen
with steady regularity it ceases to astonish; as for example the changes that
take place at frequent or at least regular intervals in the sky and the sea and
on the earth, when things are born and die, rise and set, or regularly change
their appearance. Other events, however,
through products of the same natural order, are less familiar because they
occur at longer intervals. Many people
of course are amazed at them, but secular scientists come to an understanding
of them, and as they are often repeated over several generations and known to
more and more educated people, so they have come to seem less marvelous. As examples of such phenomena take eclipses
and comets and earthquakes and monstrous births and similar things. Not one of them occurs independently of God’s
will, though many people do not see this.
And so it has always been feasible for superficial philosophers to
explain such things by other causes, true
ones perhaps [emphasis added], but proximate and secondary, while the cause
that transcends all others, namely the will of God, they have been quite unable
to discern.”
[6] On
the early history of the doctrine, cf. Gerhard May, Creation Ex Nihilo (New York: T&T Clark, 1994); for more
general historical, theological, and philosophical surveys, cf. Paul Copan and
William Lane Craig, Creation Out of
Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Grand
Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004); David Burrell and Carlo Cogliati et. al., eds., Creation and the God of Abraham(Cambridge:
Cambridge University, 2010).
[8]
Quoted in Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s
Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010), 151.
[9]
Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific
Imagination, 23-117.; cf. 72: “[O]nly in the seventeenth century did both
trends converge into one world picture: namely the Nominalists’ passion for
unequivocation with the Renaissance sense of the homogeneity of nature—one
nature with forces to replace the many Aristotelian static natures. Protestant theology may have acted at times
as a catalyst to the fusion. Once both
ideals of science converged, the vision of a unified, mathematical physics
could emerge, in which Euclidian space was the very embodiment of both
ideals. Now and only now, a clear-cut
decision has to be made as to how God’s ubiquity—to which the Lutherans added
the ubiquity of Christ’s body—had to be understood; to decide whether God must
be placed within the universe, with or without a body, or outside it.”; Cf. Grant,
The Foundations of Modern Science in the
Middle Ages, 125-126: “The split between the medieval and early modern
scholastic interpretations of infinite space, and that of the scholastic
authors … concerned the nature of space and the God that filled it: were they dimensional or
non-dimensional? Ideas about the vacuum
drawn from the ancient world, from experiments on atmospheric pressure, and
from the construction of artificial vacua, led non-scholastic scientists and
philosophers inexorably to think of void space as three-dimensional. Many of them had to judge the nature of the
God that was omnipresent in that three-dimensional void space. Some inferred that he was as three-dimensional
as the space he occupied. Henry More,
Isaac Newton, Joseph Raphson, Samuel Clarke, and Benedict Spinoza … were among
those who concluded that, in order to fill an infinite, three-dimensional void
space, God himself had to be a three-dimensional, extended being. … Although God was characterized as a
three-dimensional, infinite being, More, Newton, Raphson, and others thought of
him as immaterial. It was Benedict
Spinoza who took the final step and converted the deity into a
three-dimensional, infinite, material, and corporeal entity. The divinization of space, which began in the
late Middle Ages, was initially non-dimensional, or transcendent ... By the time this infinite divinized void
space became the space of Newtonian physics, the God who occupied it, and whose
attribute it was, had been transformed into a corporeal being.” And also cf. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of
Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
159-160: “Posterity has not looked
favorably upon these physico-theological accounts of the mutations of the earth
and its inhabitants. … These failed syntheses nonetheless represent an
important phase in the history of the relationship between biblical
hermeneutics and the natural sciences, a phase during which the literal truths
of scripture and the theoretical truths of the new science were believed to
coincide exactly. The two books were
held to be in complete accord, and as the knowledge of nature could aid in the
interpretation of scripture, so knowledge of scripture could assist in the
understanding of nature. Scripture had
provided a rudimentary sketch of all the mutations of the earth. Cartesian and subsequently Newtonian science
had filled in the details. … Here we see Christian doctrine … divested of its
metaphorical elements and imported virtually intact into the realm of
nature. The timetable of the last days
[for example] was explained in terms of cosmological theories, the resurrection
of bodies accounted for within ordinary operations of nature, physical locations
were provided for heaven and hell, a geological account given of the formation
of the new earth: even the purging of sin and torments of the damned were
explained in physical terms. The genre
of physica sacra thus exemplifies the
collapse of a number of related dualisms.
Spiritual readings of scripture are reduced to a single literal sense,
the ontological dualism of Plato is replaced by monism, the distinction between
the natural and supernatural becomes blurred as the realms of nature and grace
merge, and the temporal dualism of the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition is
accommodated within the single dimension of historical or geological time.”
[10]
Lindberg and Numbers, God & Nature,
263, italics added.
[11]
Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific
Imagination, 72-73.
[12]
Michael Buckley, At The Origins of Modern
Atheism (New Haven: Yale, 1987), 347.
[13]
Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific
Imagination, 116.
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