(A Very Brief) History of the Trinity and the Argument from Design (Part Four)

Whereas in the last section we sketched a transition from an understanding of God’s “immanent transcendence” as Trinity, to a non-Trinitarian understanding of God as efficient mechanical cause.  We also sketched how this problem that arose in the mechanical philosophy of Newton, paralleled the outlines of Fourth Century Trinitarian debates.  In this section we want to build on this discussion, by looking at how these general transitions cause terms to mean different things in their respective contexts. To do this, we will look at how Gregory of Nyssa in particular viewed living creatures, and the natural world, in relation to God.  In particular we will focus on instances where he speaks of the order of creation as showing evidence of God as artisan, and how this relates to spiritual transformation and participation in God’s life as Trinity.  We will then briefly look at the work of William Paley, who also is quite famous for putting forward arguments about how the world shows evidence for God’s design and handiwork.  Despite the surface similarity, there is a world—and indeed a God—of difference between them.

            To begin, Gregory[1] has an “argument from design” of sorts.[2]  Reflection on the design and order in the universe produces “a consideration of the harmony of the whole” and of “the concert resulting even from opposite movements in the circular revolutions”  in the sky.[3]  Pelikan notes Nyssa’s arguments stand in radical contrast to any theory of chaos or disorder.  Indeed, as a sort of Paley before himself, Nyssa puts into the mouth of his dying sister Macrina a design argument from a garment: “the sight of a garment suggests to anyone the weaver of it, and the thought of a shipwright comes to mind upon seeing the ship, and the hand of a builder is suggested to anyone who sees the building …”[4]  And yet, creation is not a series of artifacts.  By “design” here the analogy to craftsman—a weaver, a builder, a shipwright—falls apart under its apophatic qualifications.  For God is the creator of the whole creation—therefore whereas a garment stands out from, say, a rock as designed, such a criteria of distinction cannot apply to God’s relation to creation.  “Design” does not therefore refer to a concept that holds that natural law can explain things only so far, but then runs into a roadblock where it fails and something—or someone—else must account for it.  Such a distinction between nature and grace is alien to Gregory.  Nor does it to merely the material constitution of a thing.  Rather the material and the ideal are here united in Gregory’s concept: “No one thing in the body—neither its shape nor its size nor its bulk nor its weight nor its color, nor any of its other qualities taken in themselves are the body: they are in themselves simply intelligibles.  Their concourse (sundromh), nevertheless, does make the body.”[5]

It was, rather, the harmonious and interconnected “normal” course of things that suggested the Creator.  Such was also certainly the case for his friend, Gregory of Nazianzus who wrote: “Sight and instinctive law” showed “the existence of God, the creative and sustaining cause of all.”  This was the plain teaching of sight, when it would “light upon things seen as nobly fixed in their courses [emphasis added] borne along in, so to say, motionless movement [that is, natural law].”  In fact “it was the teaching of instinctive law” says Nazianzus, “to infer their author through seeing things in their orderliness.”[6]

If “Design” for Gregory does not reference a specific mechanism for creation, or a purely material description, neither does it indicate the automatic wholeness of what is “designed.”  Gregory writes of something akin to seed-like potencies:

The sources, causes, and potencies of all things were collectively sent forth in an instant, and in this first impulse of the Divine Will, the essences of all things assembled together; heaven, earth, star, fire, air, sea, earth, animal, plant—all beheld by the eye of God. … There followed a certain necessary series according to a certain order … as nature created nature required … appearing not by chance … but because the necessary arrangement of nature required succession in the things coming into being.

All things were virtually in the first divine impulse for creation, existing as it were in a kind of spermatic potency, sent forth for the genesis of all things.  For individual things did not then exist actually.[7]

Creation is in its every aspect a movement, where things strive upwards, “a conversion from the darkness of nonbeing toward the light of God, a kind of ontological heliotropism.”[8]  In fact movement is not just of a creature, but within a creature as well, the creature dies at every moment, writes Gregory, to be reborn in the next (In Canticum Canticorum 12) and if it ceased to change, it would cease to exist (De Hominis Opificio 13).  “Being both divine and creaturely [for Gregory]” says Anatolios, “ is a dynamic movement of self-announcement that cannot be superseded by the knower’s grasp and announcement of it.”[9]  Indeed, in the course of the world “the material elements pass from one body to another, so that the universe is in fact but a single body [of many qualities].  All things exist together, says St. Gregory of Nyssa, and all things mutually support each other, for there is a kind of transmuting power which, by a movement of rotation causes the terrestrial elements to pass from one to the other and gathers them in again to the point from which they started.”[10]

Finally, “Design” for Nyssa is not an explanation for things, per se.  It is not a hypothesis of function, for the providential arrangement of the world is so obvious to Nyssa that he believes everyone must simply acknowledge it.  Rather in perceiving the whole one is led to perceive God: “He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who had learned to see the kala in due order and succession will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty … beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which is imparted to the ever growing and perishing beauties of all other beautiful things.”[11]  Thus this “argument from design” ultimately leads to union with God.  As A.N. Williams puts it:

The dual emphasis on wisdom’s manifestation in creation and the appropriation of wisdom to the Second Person indicates that Nyssen conceives of it more as a divine power working ad extra than as an attribute chiefly constitutive of divine nature … In Christ, wisdom and power are woven together, and because this is so, he is the one through whom all things were made; contemplation of these indescribable wonders leads us to worship the wisdom of that maker, so the Incarnation itself reveals divine wisdom, particularly its linkage to goodness and justice.[12]

            Thus to reiterate our points on what “design” seems to mean for Gregory: design does not enumerate a specific mechanism, or delineate that which has been produced in an unusual circumstance apart from the normal course of things.  Rather it indicates the harmonious interconnection of nature’s normal succession, which is intimately related to God at all times.  It also does not name a specific material constitution, but relates the ideal elements of quality that make up a body.  “Design” does not indicate whatever is viewed as “designed” be a complete and irreducible whole—rather for Gregory though things have complete integrity, this integrity is won through dynamic teleological movement and integration of parts straining toward God.  And finally “design” does not name a sort of hypothesis of why things are the way they are, rather it is more a theological attitude that when things are properly understood in their order, they will lead one to a better knowledge of God by being incorporated through the Son, the same Wisdom that imbued nature with its order.  Let us now turn to William Paley.

            Sometime in the middle third of the nineteenth century, some observers began to suspect that “every new conquest achieved by science involved the loss of a domain to religion.”[13]  This retreat of religion is rendered picturesque by Matthew Arnold’s famous poem Dover Beach.  First published in 1867, Arnold describes the general dwindling of religious faith in the world at large as akin to a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar/ Retreating, to the breath/ of the Night-wind, down the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world.”  Though Arnold seems to have taken no notice that seas, in fact, eventually change their minds and turn back round again, the visceral nature of the imagery is clear enough: the ambient religion of Arnold’s day is retreating.  But where Arnold heard a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” his contemporary John Ruskin was haunted by hammers digging into the deep edges of a time seemingly far beyond what the Bible predicted: “[My] faith, which was never strong, is being beaten into mere gold leaf, and flutters in weak rags from the letter of its old forms; … if only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers!  I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verse.”[14]  But for our purposes this transition is best illustrated by a once rising, if somewhat obscure, fad.

As fads are wont to do, it hit the upper classes of the mid-19^th century first.  Like a breath of fresh air it surged through bourgeois boredom.  It had been shown that the hydra (a freshwater polyp) could regenerate itself when cut into pieces.  This became amply confirmed by what may somewhat too generously be called “lay experimentation” when “a wave of polyp-chopping swept across Europe” due to extreme curiosity at this most unexpected trait.  Matter no longer appeared in need of God’s mechanical “input” or external design.[15]  Moreover, experiments on cadaverous muscles by Albrecht von Haller had shown that, even separated from the body, they still contract when given a hearty poke.  And so it was thought the soul as an animating force was abolished.  And yet, from what we have seen of Gregory of Nyssa, Aquinas, and Augustine (one could add many other names to this list, say, Maximus the Confessor) such conclusions would no doubt have perplexed them.  It is here that we receive a clue to a key transition to the differences that lay between two different epochs of “design argument.”  Indeed, to recall the observation of Brooke regarding the transformation of the concepts “natural” and “supernatural” so that they became competing hypotheses, Paley in a sense represents the historical culmination and azimuth of this trajectory:

Paley, in effect, had thrown down a challenge.  No natural law, comparable to, or derivable from, other genuine natural laws, he tacitly claimed, would ever be found to explain organic function and adaptedness, including the morphological co-adaptnedness of parts to one another and the ecological fittingness of organisms to their niches.[16]

            Thus, (to exaggerate slightly) the outcome of this polyp-chopping fad was that “natural theology [of the physical sort we briefly described] was not so much destroyed by science as eased out of scientific culture by a growing irrelevance.”[17]  We have to be careful what is meant here.  It is not that somehow science “disproved” God’s activity (though many of its cruder physical theorizations were rightly discredited).  It is rather that the questions that arose due to assuming design in nature “simply became too blunt an instrument to yield precise information at the rock face of research.”  This growing sense of irrelevance came both from within theology and from without.  From within, many sensed a sort of inanity at the lengths many would go to try and correlate every feature of the universe to some purposeful end.  Alfred Russell Wallace “grew impatient” for example, when some praised the soft-scar on a coconut as a wise contrivance of design, which allowed the embryonic shoot to emerge instead of being trapped within.  Far from equating a denial of design with a denial of God, here Wallace thought the extremity of the design argument insulted God—“it was like praising an architect for remembering to put a door in his house.”[18]

More seriously, specific assumptions that went into design arguments seemed to forestall the investigative process by disallowing certain questions to be asked—such as the famous example of “Darwin’s finches” and the general populations of the Galapagos archipelago.  Each island had distinctive species that closely resembled those on the other islands and mainland South America—but not elsewhere.  Why?  This seemed “too tantalizing a puzzle to be solved by invoking the will of God.”[19]  But again let us be specific with what is meant: design of a metaphysical sort is not ruled out here, for it is not even in the purview of the discussion; for “the case for reinterpreting traditional concepts, like that of form, in mechanical terms, had been developing over several decades.”[20] “Form” no longer meant that something participated in its ideal archetype, or perhaps an idea in God’s mind or purpose as in earlier Christian Platonism and Aristotelianism.  “Form” now was meant in a purely physical-chemical sense of composition.[21]  “Paley exemplifies a fundamental shift, commenced in the seventeenth century, toward extrinsicism in the meaning of law itself.  As a consequence, the so-called laws of nature in Newton’s and Paley’s sense are incidental to the things they govern, just as the things governed are ‘internally’ indifferent to [the laws].”[22]

This “axiomatic extrinsicism” as Hanby calls it, “makes misunderstanding all but inevitable.  It determines in advance what these terms [God, man, nature] can mean to contemporary minds …” so that “Once God ceases to be the fully transcendent and thus the fully immanent source of being and becomes instead a finite object within being extrinsically juxtaposed to the world … then the question of creation ceases to be about creation in its proper sense and becomes instead a question of manufacture.” Creation is no longer understood as a question of “ontological constitution but is rather misinterpreted as a question of temporal origins in a series of causes and effects which culminate in the manufactured artifact.”[23]

“Paley dramatically alters the meaning of the relation [of God and world] as such, and therefore the meaning of the relation between the parts of organic beings and the whole of being.”  Hanby continues:

The first and most obvious change is that Paley has defined relation in purely functional terms, as the ratio of means to ends.  The second is that Paley identifies the unity of the parts in these same terms, as the result of their ‘unified action.’  This effectively makes the part prior or more basic than the whole whose part it is, and conversely, makes the unity of the whole a unity of function or effect consequent upon the interaction of parts.  Relation as such is therefore a secondary and extrinsic qualification of the relata, which, so far as we can tell, are internally unaffected in their own identity or meaning by the relation.  In other words, the identity of parts precedes and excludes relation to the wholes of which they are parts and to the world …  In themselves, living things now lack the indivisible unity conferred on them by physis.  In the act of being, living, and doing, they no longer comprise a single actuality with the world that is their essential presupposition.  Relation, then, of whatever species is extrinsic and accidental, as it were, to a more basic ‘inertial’ indifference which precedes and excludes that relation.  Relation is something ‘superadded’ when ‘unconscious particles of matter [that] take their stations, and severally range themselves in an order, so as to become collectively plants or animals, i.e., organized bodies’[24]  This ‘superaddition’ of relation then becomes the problem requiring an explanation, a problem whose very formulation determines in advance that an explanation takes the form of an extrinsic force or mechanism [emphasis added].[25]

“Design” as such references a particular sequence of physico-theology that collapsed the metaphysical into the physical, equating the ability to discern theological “meaning” in the world with one’s ability to describe an organism exhaustively in terms of perfect physical pre-adaptation to fit an environment: “Paley’s natural theology … is not the antithesis to modern naturalism.  It is modern naturalism in its theological guise.”[26] It was design as perfect pre-adaptation, especially as exemplified by Paley, which were the theories threatened by Darwinian natural selection.[27]  It is largely through Paley’s influence upon Darwin that the problem of “pre-adaptation”—the fit between ‘biological insides and environmental outsides”—would become, in Stephen J. Gould’s words, the “primary problem of evolution.”[28]

Moreover, Paley runs into the fundamental problem we mentioned briefly regarding the apophatic qualification to Macrina’s “garment” argument: identifying design for human artifacts only works on the basis of the assumption that it can be distinguished from the category “not designed.”  A sweater is designed, a rock is not.  But this fundamentally breaks down as an analogy attempting to designate something as designed by God, who created and sustains everything.  But by the necessity of its logic, this distinction must show up in Paley’s argument in order for it to function.  As a result it unintentionally creates some disastrous theology:

Paley ambles across his imaginary heath in the opening pages of the Natural Theology undisturbed by his surroundings.  The heather, the stones, the blue sky above elicit no commentary from him [aside from his later comment: “Dead matter is nothing.” (Natural Theology, 253)].  Paley finds nothing remarkable in the utter contingency and irreducible uniqueness of all that exists [in fact: “the metaphysics of that question can have no place” (Natural Theology, 12)] … in other words Paley’s project does not evince the slightest curiosity in the question of being or the slightest evidence that he can even formulate the question properly. …For all his interest in the difference between a watch and a stone, Paley exhibits remarkably little interest in the difference between a watch and a man.[29]

            In order to tie this in to our other sections, Hanby also comments on how all this relates to Paley’s conception of God.  We have already seen that Paley favors a sort of extrinsicism that is alien to Nyssa or Augustine.  In part, this is because the Trinity plays no part in his view of God, and so the true apophatic nature of God’s transcendence and works is lost:

There is a similar loss of analogy in Paley’s treatment of the divine attributes. Though Paley seeks to justify the traditional attributes of goodness, omnipotence and eternity, they acquire meanings in his thought which depart substantively from the tradition and are even fundamentally at odds with it.  Owing to this loss of analogy, Paley’s understanding of these attributes is substantially more anthropomorphic than the tradition’s.  Indeed, as theology, Paley’s treatment of the divine attributes scarcely merits consideration …His treatment is of deep historical interest, however, for it reveals both the extent to which the metaphysical revolution of modern natural philosophy had rendered thought about God incoherent and the nature of the ‘God’ against whom modern evolutionary biology has constituted itself. … Paley’s explanation of the relationship between ‘mind’ and ‘personhood’ is egregiously anthropomorphic and departs radically from traditional theological reflection.  The tradition has never treated so-called ‘attributes’ such as ‘mind’ or ‘reason’ as constituting some sort of specific difference for God, as if ‘reason’ differentiated God as ‘a person’ in the way that it might differentiate a human being from the Aristotelian genus ‘animal.’ … God does not ‘have mind’ or any other attributes but is mind as well as those attributes.  He does not ‘perceive’ the world and thus use it to teach him what he did not know, but knows the world into existence through being and knowing his own superlative perfections.[30]

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[1] For the record, most of the citations of Gregory were found through secondary sources, though I tracked down anything I quoted for context.  If I could not locate the source to read or translate for myself, I will cite the source of quotation.  A lot of recent work on Gregory has been done.  For introductions to the discussion, cf. Sarah Coakley, ed., Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003); Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[2] I am here reliant on the account of Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter With Hellenism (New Haven: Yale, 1993), 68ff.

[3] Quoted in Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 68.

[4] Quoted in Ibid., 69.

[5] Nyssa, De Anima, PG XLIV, 124C.

[6] Gregory Nazianzen, Orations, 28.6.

[7] Quoted in Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010), 299.  Quoting from Apologetic on Hexameron.

[8] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2003), 189.

[9] Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 163.

[10] Lossky, Mystical Theology, 103.

[11] Quoted in Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 70. 

[12] A.N. Williams, The Divine Sense: The Intellect in the Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 122.

[13] Ronald Numbers, “Aggressors, Victims, and Peacemakers: Historical Actors in the Drama of Science and Religion,” in Harold W. Attridge, ed., The Religion and Science Debate: Why Does it Continue? (New Haven: Yale, 2009),20.

[14] Quoted in Brooke, Science and Religion, 32.

[15] Ibid., 235.

[16] D.J. Depew and B.H. Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 102.

[17] Brooke, Science and Religion, 298.

[18] Ibid., 299.

[19] Ibid., 300.

[20] Ibid., 176.

[21] Chapp, God of Covenant and Creation, 78: “The medieval mind saw the qualitative and teleological elements of form as a real representation of God’s agency in the world, not just his image, and the reduction of formal causation to mathematical relations among natural entities seemed to call the entirety of God’s agency in the natural world into question.”

[22] Hanby, No God, No Science (Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 163. Cf. 156: “The vast difference between Paley’s mechanical universe and the cosmos of the ancients is indicated by the fact that he overwhelmingly identifies the good with the useful, in spite of glimpses of a higher sense of the good, and that he is led by this to conceive of the question of the world’s ‘proportioning’ as a question of the odds of it arising by accident.”

[23] Ibid., 35.

[24] Here Hanby is quoting William Paley, Natural Theology: Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature (New York: Sheldon & Company, 1854), 235.

[25] Hanby, No God, No Science, 158-159.  Cf. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, 194: “It is hardly surprising that the expression ‘book of nature is ubiquitous in works of theology and natural philosophy alike.  Yet it is important to attend to the discontinuities between the medieval and the early modern uses of the metaphor [emphasis added].  The triumph of literalism contributed to a widening gap between the written text of God’s word and the book of creatures.  For this reason ‘book of nature’ takes on a quite different meaning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Medieval uses of the image are more or less uniform: the idea that nature is a book underlines the fact that things act as signs just as words do.  Nature and scripture must be read together for the meaning of words of scripture is given by the meanings of the natural objects to which they refer.  The key to the meanings of natural objects, in turn, was provided by references to scripture.  Hermeneutics was a dialectical enterprise which always entailed a knowledge of both books.  In the early modern period, by way of contrast, the metaphor is used in a variety of ways.  The general tendency now is to elevate nature over some alternative authority—such as scripture or the writings of Aristotle—or to contrast nature with written authorities by arguing that it has a different purpose, that it is to be interpreted by a different strategy, that it enjoys particular advantages over written texts.”

[26] Ibid., 170.

[27] Brooke, Science and Religion, 377.

[28] Stephen J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), 188.

[29] Hanby, No God, No Science, 153.  Though it is beyond the scope of this paper, Del Ratzsch, Nature, Design, and Science: The Status of Design in Natural Science (New York: State University of New York, 2001), 163, says nearly the same the about Intelligent Design proponent William Dembski: “That exclusive character [this, not that, is designed] is essential to the operation of the Explanatory Filter, as Dembski constructs it, but that benefit, it seems to me, comes with a significant cost.  What it immediately means is that anything produced by nature (whether by law or by chance) can be neither classified as designed in Dembski’s sense, recognized as designed by Dembski’s Explanatory Filter, nor epistemically justified as designed by Dembski’s design inference.  Anything produced by natural law simply sticks at the first point of the filter. … If a supernatural agent deliberately structured natural laws and regularities to produce specific, patterned phenomena, such phenomena would surely count as designed, but need not be at all improbable with respect to the relevant laws and structures of nature.  It seems to me, in fact, that designed and improbable are simply orthogonal notions, and that making improbability a necessary condition for designedness, as Dembski does, is simply to mistake two different concepts.”

[30] Hanby, No God, No Science, 166-167.