(A Very Brief) History of the Trinity and the Design Argument (Part Three)
This distinction between a properly
theological (or metaphysical) and physical explanation, began to collapse,
however, as Divine attributes and activities were given “physical meaning.”[1] Such “transformations of metaphysical axioms
into prescriptions for the natural world were extremely common in early modern
science.” Yet this was not the
impingement of science upon theology, but lay within the ambit of previous
theological transformations in the concepts of God and nature.
Perhaps the most bizarre instance of this
was Kepler’s transformation of the meaning of the Trinity as relating to a
threefold spherical layout of the cosmos.[2] We might also mention the strangely material
and historical form of the Trinity that Thomas Hobbes gave the doctrine, where
the Trinity is meaningful only as an essentially unknowable God is “Personated”
(that is, represented) in turn by Moses, Christ, and the Apostles.[3] Whatever idiosyncrasy lay in these two
positions, they represent on the whole a much larger trend of transition from
metaphysics to physics which was catalyzed and accelerated in the seventeenth
century.[4]
Despite popular representation, however, this transition into mechanism was not
automatically a secularization in the sense of a diminution of religion. Rather, it occurred within the field of belief, and mechanism could (initially at
least) serve, and indeed be driven by, the arguments of piety:
[T]he
Mechanists’ insistence that the laws of nature might have been different [was]
a continuation of the of the nominalist emphasis on divine freedom. Seen in this light, the mechanists’ belief
that God imposed laws of nature on the world was not simply a timely answer to
the need for conceptual grounding of mathematical methods, but also a
culmination of theological changes begun four centuries earlier. … The
mechanical philosophers turned to the Protestant doctrine of the radical
sovereignty of God in arguing for the passivity of matter. The conviction that matter could not possess
active powers if God were sovereign in the Reformation sense provided
mechanical philosophers with an important argument against Aristotelianism.
…[Thus] the mechanists’ belief in the passivity of matter gained prominence in
the seventeenth century in part because of the recognized affinity between it
and the [Nominalist, and later] Protestant doctrine of the radical sovereignty
of God.[5]
Part of the problem of the mechanistic
conception is that it had been linked from quite early on to the revival of
ancient Greek Atomism in the Renaissance.
This meant that the mechanistic picture of the universe brought with it
problems regarding the supposed randomness of events, and an inherent atheism
associated with the Greek Atomists Lucretius, Democritus, Leucippus, and
Epicurus. “The move that circumvented
[randomness and atheism] and established atomism as a viable worldview was the
introduction of God as a cosmic lawgiver, who imposed laws on atoms for the
purpose of creating an orderly universe.”
By giving God this function, “the mechanists provided cosmic principles
and purposes that had been lacking in the ancient doctrine, removed its
atheistic associations, and cleared the way for the establishment of a mechanical
worldview.”[6]
Robert Boyle, for example, saw evidence
for the activity of God precisely through a mechanistic “lens” to read reality;
for as long as the assumption that motion was in no way necessary to the
essence of matter (for “matter is no less matter, when it rests, than when it
is in motion”) then the mechanical philosophy was evidence for God’s direct
intervention and injection of energy and motion into creation to sustain and
order “so curious an engine” appropriately.[7] And Isaac Newton, “even more than his
mechanist predecessors” came to see nature as a “lifeless world,” but one
“permeated by the life of God” precisely because “active principles become a
manifestation of God’s sovereign power, providing vitality to senseless, inert
matter.”[8]
In a recent study Simon Oliver has made
the interesting observation of Newton (though it can be extended to many other
of the ‘mechanists’) that his mechanical concept of motion is actually
conceptually related to his “voluntaristic Arianism.”[9] In saying this Oliver is not suggesting, for
example, that Newton’s laws of physics, or his mathematical equations
necessitate Arianism, or that they are false because they are associated with
it. Rather he is calling our attention
to the ways in which our perception as to what constitutes God’s activities in
the world has changed:
It
will be seen that a number of contrasts [between Aquinas and Newton] will
emerge: no qualitative distinction of motion occurs in the work of Newton, and
in the categorization of motion as a simple phenomenon he deflects attention to
the notion of changes in motion and
their concomitant cause in force.
However, under the surface, lies Newton’s God of Dominion. Whereas for Aquinas motion is in a sense the
means of self-actualization and therefore participation in God’s eternal and
perfect actuality known in the procession of the Son, Newton has difficulties
in outlining the nature of the relationship between a moving universe and a
divine Pantokrator.[10]
Oliver’s essay thus represents the
opportunity of a very interesting case-study for what we have been arguing more
generally: that changes in the conception of the Trinity result in changes of
how the God-world relation, so too the world, are themselves conceived. In Aquinas, much as for Athanasius, the
entire world is held in the divine ideas, which are themselves contained in the
“Pure Act” that God is, which is nothing other than the generation of the Son,
the Logos. As such, “natural” motion in
the world (that is, motion not imposed from without, but caused by the nature
of an agent—like fire warming, or bees flying) is seen as creation moving
“toward” God and expressing God Himself by their very “normal” activities of
being-themselves.
We might see this as an extended
Trinitarian form of Aquinas’ notion that grace “perfects, not destroys,
nature.” That is, there is some sense of
“final causes” operating here—where things do not simply move because they are
“pushed” but in the very act of their existence moving in this or that way (“movement”
here expanded to almost any change whatsoever, including growth, or learning). Ordinary things declare the extraordinary
God, precisely because of the “closeness” of the transcendent God to creation:
creation required no distance, no degradation from God, no mediators, but was
an immediate (albeit finite, and now fallen) expression of God’s truth, beauty,
and love. Motion is not an extrinsic
consideration of bodies, but part of a greater theological context that sees
wisdom in a seamlessly ordered nature striving toward its fulfillment.
Newton would have none of this. He declared his Arianism in secret fifteen
years before the Principia Mathematica was
written,[11]
and spoke heatedly of the “Athanasian corruption of the church,” by which he
meant Trinitarianism. Newton thus
expressed his faith in a written creed stripped of its “Nicene accretions.”[12] But even more than his antipathy toward this
“corruption” Newton’s Arianism stemmed from his commitment to the absolute
sovereignty of God’s will:
It
was a supremely free and sovereign will which, for Newton, was the supreme
attribute of God. Because this will was
supremely free, this entailed its inscrutability and arbitrary character. It was because of God’s omnipotent willful dominon
alone that he was worthy of worship. … A theological interpretation of the laws
of nature within this voluntaristic context would see them not as something
integral to the universe, but as measures of an otherwise inscrutable divine
will.[13]
Newton’s theological interpretation
of his laws of motion thus renders any distinction between natural and violent
motion as meaningless: everything is violent motion (that is, all motions are
extrinsic and unrelated to the nature of what is moved). In a sense Newton has rendered the entire
world “passive” except in the sense that billiard balls collide and move one
another given an initial impetus.[14] But just so motion in its expanded
sense—which means essentially ordered coming-and-going, births, play, flight,
dance—are no longer expressions of God’s wisdom, expressed by participation in
the Son. They merely represent the
exterior legislation of an arbitrative will.[15]
But just so the very nature of the term
“express” is here changed from one conveying that things by their own internal
integrity or a “being-in-itselfness” as natural creatures display God’s wisdom. Rather “express God” now means they display
an event of energy extrinsically imbued by God’s will sometime in the past; a
will that could have created otherwise.
As Oliver puts it elsewhere: “[now] there is no significant difference
between a stone falling and an eagle swooping,” save for the pertinent
mathematical variables.[16] And as Funkenstein writes, entities disappear
in and of themselves, “as the very notion of things” was increasingly made “to
fit the mathematical relations between them.”[17]
“Newton’s [Non-Trinitarian] God is
utterly remote and transcendent,” says Oliver.[18] But this left Newton with a gap, the same gap
experienced in the Trinitarian debates of the Fourth century, now transposed
into the new mechanistic cosmology: How was he to describe a mode of divine
action in the world so as to not make God incidental to cosmology? We might say then, that Robertson’s
description of the Fourth century fits here too: Newton needs a mediator. He gave two answers. The first “typically Arian”[19]
answer was that Christ was God’s vice-regent, equal not in essence but will,
and given a deputized dominion. His
second answer is a direct action of God through Newton’s concept of “absolute
space.” This space is “immutable in
nature and eternal in extension” because it is “the eminent effect of an
eminent being [God].” Some have
interpreted Newton in a pantheistic direction due to such phrases. Oliver sees the appeal in this interpretive
option, since God is never without His sensorium,
that is, the absolute space that contains all relative space and time. Oliver takes another, more intriguing interpretive
route, however: Newton appears to consider absolute space the “eternal
begotten” of God. In this instance it
becomes a surrogate for the displaced Trinitarian identity of Christ, and so
now mimics Aquinas’ conceptuality but deconstructs its logic:[20]
Thus
it can be seen that in the absence of a fully divine Christ, absolute space
becomes the basis of creation, forming the ‘disposition of being qua being’ for such space is ‘eternal in
duration and immutable in nature, and this because it is the eminent effect of
an eternal and immutable being.’ While
space may not be literally God’s sensory medium, it is difficult to avoid the
conclusion that Newton has described a spatial and three-dimensional Godhead. Whereas, for Aquinas, God created and sustains
the world through Christ’s emanation from the Father, so for Newton, God
creates the world in a co-eternal and
uncreated absolute space through the exercise of his will. Therefore, absolute space coupled with the
action of the divine will is the ontological precondition of all being. It is by means of co-eternal and infinite
space that God is able to operate and instantiate a material cosmos. This may seem to reflect the view of divine
creative action in Aquinas, for Newton understands God’s action in creating the
world as one of formal causation—the divine actualizes in matter a form which
exists eternally in the divine mind.
However, whereas for Aquinas the motion of a body was itself a
participation and effect of the knowledge of the body’s form in the perfect
‘motionless motion’ of God, namely in the emanation of the Son from the Father,
for Newton creation occurs through the inscrutable and arbitrary motions of the
divine will. … The lack of Trinitarian relationality in Newton’s conception of
God means that the universe cannot be thought of as a hierarchy and system of
relation motions which are images of the divine life, but rather as the action
of one being, God, within absolute space to instantiate a material body,
whereupon the created being retains a primitive state of motion.[21]
For our purposes this Trinitarian point
Oliver makes is coupled with another: “It is therefore not surprising that as
Newtonian physics became the basis of enquiry into nature and motion in the
decades following Newton’s death, the
role of God in the cosmos came to be seen as incidental to any explanation of
the cosmos in natural philosophy [emphasis added].”[22] It is just this transposition that makes
advances in naturalistic explanation seem to make God unnecessary. This is something that would be unthinkable
in the Patristic and Medieval tradition, not just because of antiquated
science, but because God was simply not seen to be that specifically “locatable”
as doing some particular physical task at some particular physical location.
Take Pierre Simon de la Place’s supposed bon mot to Napoleon: 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”[23]
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”[24]
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.
Rather the God whom la Place rejected was the Newtonian God who
occasionally adjusted orbits and provided an explanation for the principle of
gravitation. 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 God as a physical hypothesis
were themselves historically grounded by discussions and transmutations made within theology itself. 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.
But even here there was a further,
subtler change. For earlier Thomas
Aquinas had made much the same claim as Leibniz (for example Summa Contra Gentiles III.70.6) because
the integrity of secondary causes are themselves to the glory of their Creator;
to evacuate secondary causes of either their regularity or efficacy is
ironically to impugn God’s power, not exalt it.
Yet, Thomas meant this as a metaphysical
claim, where, in the words of Kathryn Tanner, “God’s transcendence
prohibits talk of God’s working with created causality in any way that implies
parity of divine agency and created causality within a common causal nexus or
plane,” since the entirety of created being
is conferred ex nihilo by divine
agency “God’s creative agency extends immediately
to every created being in every respect,” and is not contrasted in a zero-sum
game with finite creaturely agencies.[25]
Leibniz, however, was participating in
the same theological transition commented upon above, 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 an
empirical one: “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”.[26]
The debate of Leibniz with Clarke regarding God’s intervention and correction
of the orbits was not a metaphysical question, rather Leibniz meant the
integrity of creation and God’s relation to it mechanically.
Hence if La Place could say he had no
need for “that hypothesis,” of God for his Nebular Theory of cosmic formation,
this statement is not a resolute victory for atheism understood as the
necessary culmination of naturalistic science, but is itself only
understandable as a reactionary statement based within and upon a certain
constellation of theological changes
that increasingly gave its theological pronouncements physical-empirical
meaning. In this way la Place confirms
the hypothesis argued at length by Michael Buckley in his magisterial work At the Origins of Modern Atheism, that
all atheisms which emerged in the Modern period are in fact dialectically
related to the theistic environment they incubated in:
Atheism does not stand alone. The term and the persuasions which
cluster around it take their meaning from the divine nature which has been
asserted by the religions and the philosophies, by the superstitious practices
and mystical experiences of those who adhere to the divine existence. ... The
conflict between [atheism and theism] is mortal because of a more general unity
of meaning. If the antagonism does not bear upon a single subject there is no
contradiction. Affirmation and denial are only possible if the subject remains
the same. This subject is determined not by the atheist but by the theist, by
the going beliefs. ... by the sense of the divine which is the issue of
religious and philosophical sensibility and argument, or by the proclaimed
personal God of the monotheistic religions. Any or all of these can be objects
of skepticism, denial, or uncommitted opinion, but outside these affirmations
the correlative negative loses any meaning whatsoever. ... Theism and atheism
are not merely an accidental conjunction, a successive conjunction of
contradictory opinions. A bond of
necessity stretches between them: atheism depends upon theism for its
vocabulary, for its meaning, and for the hypothesis it rejects. …[27]
[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.[28]
Thus do alterations in understanding
of the Trinity seem to correlate to translations in understanding of the
God-world relation, here in a very mechanical direction. Of course in some respects our discussion
will remain both too broad and too specific: those who hold to Trinitarian
doctrine will not necessarily be consistent in upholding transcendence in the
way described, and those who hold to mechanism will not necessarily be anti- or
non-trinitarian. In fact Philip Dixon
in his Nice and Hot Disputes traces
what he believes to be the origin of the infamous “Cube” analogy (where the
length, breadth, and depth serve as analogues for how God can be one and three)
to just such a proponent of the Trinity who happened to also have mechanical
inklings, Dr. John Wallis (1616-1703).
This “gave great sport” to one of Wallis’ more bemused critics, who
wrote a Monty Python-esque hymn in honor of Wallis’ God, praising “God the
Father, who is the length of the cube.”[29]
Nonetheless our argument so far has
shown that given the fact that God’s absolute transcendence as Trinity also
means He is absolutely immanent and seen in and through creatures—which express
the Logos as the finite creatures they are—a pressure is exerted on this
concept in the transition to mechanism.
This pressure molds understanding of the God-world relation in an
extrinsic, (quasi-)physical, and univocal manner. Conversely, a non-trinitarian interpretation
of a God who is actively involved will
always have difficulty accounting for the God-world interaction that does not
either supplant scientific explanation for God’s direct action, or push God
into the background as getting the whole show started and politely
retiring. In fact it is quite
interesting—though we cannot get into it here, that the Medieval historian Edward
Grant noted that despite certain scientific progress among Muslim theologians
(who were obviously not Trinitarian): “the term ‘philosopher’ was often
reserved for those who assumed with Aristotle that natural things were capable
of causing effects … By contrast, most Muslim theologians believed, on the
basis of the Koran, that God caused everything directly and immediately and
that natural things were incapable of acting directly on other natural things.”[30]
These mutations are not as such necessary, but their correlativity in history
is suggestive.
[1] John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspective (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014). 99.
Cf. Edward Grant, The Foundations
of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and
Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
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.”
[2] Ibid., 124.
[3] Cf. Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the
Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (Bloomsbury: T&T Clarke, 2003) 75ff.
[4] Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination:
From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985), 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.”
[5] Gary B. Deason,
“Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature,” in David
Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, eds., God & Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science
(Berkley: University of California, 1986), 170.
Deason qualifies his explanation of the relation of mechanism to the
Reformers later on: “Even though natural philosophy was not central to their
theology and their view of nature cannot be called ‘mechanistic’ their
understanding of natural things as passive recipients of divine power was
entirely consistent with the mechanical philosophy” (175). Cf. Francis Oakley, “Christian Theology and
the Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature,” in Creation: The Impact of an Idea, ed.
Daniel O’Connor and Francis Oakley (New York: Scribners, 1969), 53-84.
[6] Deason, “Mechanistic
Conception of Nature,” 179.
[7] Brooke, Science and Religion, 180f.
[8] Deason, “Mechanistic Conception
of Nature,” 184.
[9] Oliver, “Motion
According to Aquinas and Newton.”
[10] Ibid., 177-178.
[11] Ibid., 178.
[12] Ibid., 180.
[13] Ibid., 180-181.
[14] Ibid., 186.
[15] Ibid., 186-187.
[16] Simon Oliver, God and Motion (London: Routledge,
2006), 148.
[17] Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination,
151.
[18] “Motion According to
Aquinas and Newton,” 188f.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., 189.
[21] Ibid., 190-191.
[22] Ibid., 191.
[23] Ronald Numbers and
David Lindberg, eds., God & Nature:
Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (California:
University of California, 1986), 256.
[24] Ibid., 270.
[25] Tanner, God and Creation, 94. 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.)
[26] Lindberg and Numbers, God & Nature, 263, italics added.
[27] Michael Buckley, At The Origins of Modern Atheism (New
Haven: Yale, 1987), 14-15. Cf. Charles
Taylor, A Secular Age, (Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 2007), 269: "Of
course there could be a society without any sense of that they do not believe
in the God of Abraham. There are many such today. But the intervening issue is
whether there could be unbelief without any sense of some religious view, which
is being negated...If so it would be different from our present world in one
crucial respect. Unbelief for great numbers of contemporary unbelievers is
understood as an achievement of rationality. It cannot have this without a
continuing historical awareness. It is a condition that cannot be only
described in the present tense, but which also needs the perfect tense: a
condition of 'having overcome' the irrationality of belief [in a specifically
defined God].”
[28] Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 347.
[29] Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes, 118.
[30] Grant, Foundations of Science in the Middle Ages,
178.
Comments