No True Scotsman (Part Six): The Role of The Scotus Story in Theology and Philosophy of Science
III.d.
Scotus and Science
But what of science?
Surely the “scientific revolution” itself is the shedding of antiquated
metaphysical speculation in the name of clear-sighted reason? Without wanting to tend toward an
anti-realist direction, nonetheless the evaluation of the scientific revolution
and its relation to preceding medieval Christian thought has itself become
something of a cottage industry.[1] What is important for our purposes is the
aspect of this historiographical transition in the history and philosophy of
science that itself has an element of the broader “Scotus Story.”
Gillespie continues his thoughts, which provide a good
introduction into this section:
This scientific turn, however, could
not simply reject or abandon everything that had been hitherto included under
theology. Purely supernatural matters
could be set aside or relegated to the province of a wholly scriptural theology
separate from science, but previous theology had not merely been concerned with
man’s spiritual fate in another world, but also with explaining what happened
in this world. Nominalists, for example,
understood God as freely acting, infinite, and radically omnipotent creator of
heaven and earth, the first cause and source of all motion, the unity of all
things, and the source of all standards of good and evil … All or at least most
of these characteristics must be included in any coherent and comprehensive
explanation of actuality. To simply
erase God and all of his attributes from the mix would have left gaping holes
in any purportedly comprehensive account of the whole. … [As such] the
so-called process of disenchantment is thus also a process of reenchantment in
and through which both man and nature are infused with a number of attributes
and powers previously ascribed to God.
To put the matter more starkly, in the face of the long drawn out death
of God, science can provide a coherent account of the whole only my making man
or nature or both in some sense divine. … Indeed, Enlightenment thinkers
repeatedly ‘discovered’ powers and capacities in man and nature that had been
previously ascribed to God.[2]
Indeed Gillespie can conclude “in the earlier [debates] the
central question was the extent of divine power, which was always understood to
be a matter of faith.” In later
“scientific” discourse, “the truth of natural causality, in this [post-Kantian]
context, is not taken as a matter of faith to be believed or not, but as a
self-evident truth of reason. In this
way, the theological foundations of the two sides in the debate are concealed
and thus cease to be open to debate. The
contradiction at the heart of the antinomy [freedom vs. necessity] is
solidified and made insoluble by the forgetfulness of its theological origin.”[3]
Typically here the “Scotus Story” is often seen in a much
more positive light than the narratives of Radical Orthodoxy. For univocity, nominalism, and voluntarism
are part of a wider complex of thought that led to scientific investigation of
the natural world, even if this is later forgotten to be part of the
theological inheritance of modernity.[4]
Charles Taylor writes in A
Secular Age for example on the importance of Ockham (which he spells in its
alternative as Occam) as an important figure in moving into a “mechanical” view
of nature in what Taylor calls “objectification.”[5] In Taylor’s massive story Ockham plays a
relatively subdued, if important, role, alongside a myriad of other factors
like neo-Stoicism.[6] In fact Taylor wants to locate many aspects
of the modern age more generally as the (contingent) realization of much
earlier forces of what he (following Karl Jaspers) terms the “Axial age” of
religions.
Similar to Agamben’s pointing out the novelty of the
Christian elevation of God’s will, here Taylor points to the uniqueness of the
Judeo-Christian concept of creation “ex nihilo” which “took God out of the
cosmos and placed him above it” which meant “that potentially God can become
the source of demands that we break with ‘the way of the world’ …”[7] or
even the Christian notion of agape based on the Imago Dei and the incarnation, along with the parable of the “Good
Samaritan.”[8] All of these indicate Christianity has
exposed us to an “open universe” as opposed to the self-enclosed,
self-referential cycle of interlocked cosmic events in, say, Greek mythology, where
even the gods are subject to Fate. In
this sense nominalism and voluntarism are merely one stream of Christianity placing
emphasis on this component.
Taylor as such has mixed sympathies for the Radical Orthodox
“Scotus Story”, and explicitly says so. On
the one hand he is sympathetic to many of the changes suggested by the “Scotus
Story” (or what Taylor titles the “Intellectual Deviation” model of
secularization).[9] On the other hand, he feels it leaves quite a
bit out, and fails to place intellectual changes within their broader contexts:
We can see that the [Intellectual
Deviation model of secularization] fits in a way with [Taylor’s own work], but
that it develops things which I have barely mentioned, and also leaves out the
things which I have spent the most time on.
Now I believe that this story explicates some very important truths, and
draws some crucial connections. But I don’t think this can suffice as the main
story behind secularity.[10]
Taylor instead terms his own (quite complex) story the “Reformed
Master Narrative” in which the “Scotus Story” is but a part of an entire series
of reforms (mostly internal to
Christianity itself) which also happens to include the scientific revolution:[11]
Now the irony is, that this clear
distinction of natural from supernatural, which was an achievement of Latin
Christendom in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, was originally
made in order to mark clearly the autonomy of the supernatural. The rebellion of the ‘nominalists’ against
Aquinas’ ‘realism’ was meant to establish the sovereign power of God, whose
judgments made right and wrong, and could not be chained by the bent of
‘nature.’ Likewise the Reformers did
everything they could to disentangle the order of grace from that of
nature. But this idea, which runs so
much against the understandings of an enchanted world, and of cosmic orders,
which have been dominant in all previous civilizations, only becomes deeply
established in our understanding of our world through the set of connected changes
I have … been describing. These
represent profound changes in our practical self-understanding, how we fit into
our world (as buffered, instrumental, disciplined agents) and into society (as
responsible individuals, constituting societies designed for mutual
benefit). But they are all the more
firmly entrenched in that they dovetail perfectly with the major theoretical
transformation of post-Galilean natural science. This finally yielded our familiar picture of
the natural, ‘physical’ universe as governed by exceptionless laws, which may
reflect the wisdom and benevolence of the creator …[12]
Others have placed much more emphasis on the (usually
positive) relationship that Scotus, nominalism, and voluntarism have played in
the rise of the natural sciences. Reijer Hooykaas in his 1972 work Religion and the Rise of Modern Science, stresses
emphasis on the will of God and the “Biblical World-View” in the rise of
science. While fully affirming that the
Bible has no notion of “science” it has “all the ingredients necessary” to
combat what Hooykaas calls “Greek rationalism.”
For much of Greek thought nature remains hidden under its divine
aura. Christianity, by emphasizing the absolute
Creator/creature distinction, and the absolute Will of God, “de-deifies” nature
and closes the path to understanding nature through “purely a priori”
rationalization.[13] In addition, by honoring working with one’s
hands (as opposed to the Greek snobbishness at manual labor), the Bible thus
sanctified a precedent for empirical experimentation. Kepler is Hooykaas’ exemplary Christian
scientist in this respect: “he submitted to given facts, rather than
maintaining an age-old prejudice; in his mind a Christian empiricism gained the
victory over platonic rationalism.”[14]
Likewise Eugene M. Klaaren devotes a monograph-length study
to the idea that divine creation—and more specifically voluntarism[15]—
helped the pathway toward modern science by developing many of its conceptual
tools. Klaaren notes that this
contribution of theology to the sciences has been neglected for—quite
ironically—very theological reasons. The first being that “the demeaning of the
grand achievement” of Patristic theology “by historical theology” in the
nineteenth century as a “sell-out to speculative Greek metaphysics” was in fact
“due to the epochal loss of belief in creation.”[16] Whereas “classical Christian thought always
respected creation as an original divine mystery, the eighteenth-century
exchange of the Creator for a mere Maker scuttled the mystery and ushered in
the great nineteenth-century reduction of belief in creation.”[17] On the other hand, “many Christians have
tended to slight the fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries” so that “Thomists,
Calvinists, and Lutherans alike have not found their heroes in these periods.”[18]
Klaaren acknowledges that “although the distinction [of
potential and actual power in God] was not original to Ockham, or late medieval
theology, it was particularly in his theology that the marginal potentia absoluta came into the
foreground.” An “increasing awareness of
the eschatological openness of such a radically contingent creation emerged …
opposition to the older theology of divine ideas (or essences), which Scotus
has criticized, was extended when Ockham rejected even the Scotist formal distinction in Deity,
highlighting not only the freedom and will of God, but also his simplicity,
which became a special concern of the new theological orientation.”[19]
This creates the (admittedly complex, indirect, and
contingent) pathway to modern science.
Taking J.B. van Helmont as an example, his voluntarism and spiritualism
led him to be “empirical” as well as generated a series of mystical and
philosophical views “conducive to the emergence of modern science. In addition to his hard discoveries, he
opposed Aristotle and the scholastic natural philosophy, directed study to the
particulars of creation, championed experimental inquiry, and stressed the
humane as well as divine purpose of natural philosophy.”[20] As such the Scientific Revolution in 17th
century England was permeated by voluntarist thought: “insofar as the rise of
modern natural science was manifest in the middle decades of the seventeenth
century, it presupposed both the voluntarist and the spiritualist theologies of
creation … voluntarist presuppositions were dominant because they gave rise to
a thorough critique of tradition and at the same time contributed a relatively
new understanding of God to the formation of modern culture.”[21]
A similar story can be told of the Continent side of things,
and just such a story is told by Margaret Osler in her Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Descartes and Gassendi on
Contingency and Necessity in the Created World.[22] Her argument is that “Gassendi and Descarte’s
version of the mechanical philosophy reflected the differences in their
theological presuppositions. Gassendi’s
view of the utter contingency of things and the need for a posteriori investigation “can be traced back to the 14th
century nominalists,” while Descartes’ proclivity for natural laws embedded in
creation “can be linked to the Thomist tradition he imbibed [during his
studies] at la Fleche.”[23] This is itself an interesting claim, not just
for the fact that scientific principles are being derived from theology, but
also for the fact that here Descartes is linked to Thomism, whereas above we
saw in Gillespie and Marion a link to nominalism and voluntarism. Though we cannot get into it here, this
peculiar oscillation in presumed pedigree itself turns on an interest pivot of
just how one is to interpret certain historical figures. For the Thomism that Descartes “imbibed at la
Fleche” was the work of Francisco Suarez, whom we shall see below is often
implicated in the “Scotus Story” by beginning to read into Thomism nominalist
and voluntarist tendencies while interpreting these shifts as in fact faithful
to Thomas himself.
Nonetheless Osler’s wonderful study argues that the
metaphysical assumptions that lay in the debate of Gassendi and Descartes are
firmly embedded in scientific theorizing even if scientists themselves are only
dimly aware (or not at all) of the presuppositions involved in their practice:
Throughout the seventeenth century,
assumptions about contingency and necessity in the world were translated from
theological conceptions about God’s relationship to the creation into different
styles of approaching scientific investigation.
In the centuries after Newton, scientists have generally abandoned the
theological concerns that had dominated seventeenth-century thought. The styles took on lives of their own, losing
connection with the theological roots from which they had grown.[24]
The unpredictable actions of an
omnipotent God have been replaced by unpredictable variations, which respond to
selective pressure in ways only empirical study can determine. [Much as in voluntarism] contingency rather
than reason is the basis for explanation in this world. … The metaphysical
assumptions underlying this style of evolutionary science can be traced back to
a voluntarist interpretation of the biblical world-view. Although theological language has dropped out
of scientific discourse, contemporary styles of science are linked to the dialectic
of the absolute and the ordained power of God.
The interplay between necessity and contingency in the world is now
constructed entirely in naturalistic terms, but it grew from roots embedded in
an earlier, theological understanding.[25]
Among works arguing for the place of voluntarism and nominalism
in the rise of scientific theory, none is more important than the watershed
work of Amos Funkenstein. We will not
repeat some of the claims already made in regards to the theological
contribution to science: that of the contingency of the world, the undoing of
Aristotelian physics, the need for a
posteriori investigation, and the like.
In addition to these, several fascinating claims on the influence of
voluntarism and nominalism are put forward.
The first is that voluntarism and the notion of God’s absolute power
created a fertile theological environment for the emergence of “counterfactual
reasoning” and modal logic:
Medieval theology introduced the
distinction between the two aspects of God’s power so as to enlarge as far as
possible the horizon of that which is possible to God without violating reason. In the later Middle Ages, schoolmen were
driven by an almost obsessive compulsion to actually devise orders of nature or
orders of grace different from the one admittedly existing. …if God so wanted,
the earth would cease to be the center of the universe … Late medieval
Scholasticism was intoxicated with varieties of hypothetical reasoning:
theologians and philosophers pursued the systematic development of imaginary
orders and states so as to emphasize the utter contingency of the world.[26]
This may seem inconsequential, but this theological context
is precisely the one in which “laws of nature” begin to be discovered. For what is a law of nature? The very term law implies universality and a
sort of necessity. But just such
conditions are typically absent from any given phenomenon, which are so
contextually qualified as to be subject to innumerable mitigating factors. “Laws” are themselves counterfactuals in a very real sense (though undoubtedly this does
not exhaust description) for example “that every body tends to preserve a
uniform, rectilinear motion in a given direction is plainly a counterfactual
conditional proposition,”[27]
as are a variety of other imaginary experiments like a frictionless plane “that
isolates a phenomenon and allows one or more variables to assume different
values.[28]
Indeed Aristotle and the schools of Aristotelian physics
could not envision such a thing “not because Aristotle or medieval
[Aristotelian] physics neglected altogether the mathematical analysis of
motion, nor because he and his followers failed to consider imaginary
conditions, but rather because they saw no mediation—either in principle or in
practice—between the factual and counterfactual conditions of the same ‘body’
(or as we would say, the same phenomenon).”[29] Precisely that connection is what had been
forged within the theological conditions of voluntarism and nominalism: objects
and their surrounding conditions could always have been otherwise at that very
moment (this was, we might recall, Scotus’ definition of contingency).
Whereas for Aristotle the whole world was constructed in an
interlocked manner, where removing a piece or two would alter the whole, this
was not so for nominalists and voluntarists who would continually theorize
(with what is known as the “principle of annihilation”) what would happen to
any given object should the whole around it disappear.[30] Hence in this sense the scientific revolution
can again be seen as continuing habits begun in the High Middle Ages.[31] Take Galileo for example:
Though we should be cautious not to
credit Galileo with a precise notion of force, denying it altogether would be
likewise mistaken. Galileo constructed
an elaborate imaginary experiment to prove that there is no difference between
natural and coerced motion, gravity and impetus. Imagine, he says, a hole through the center
of the earth, and a body falling through it, passing the center due to the impetus
it has accrued. Once having passed the
center, the motion, hitherto natural (gravity), becomes of itself ‘coerced’ or
artificial, that is ‘by force only.’[32]
In addition to this, nominalism “de-essentialized”
mathematics. That is, mathematics no longer
was seen as “an inventory of ideal entities” but became a “language.”[33] As such mathematics no longer dictated what
was possible for physics a priori,
but was rather a tool or a language to describe problems related to physical
states. As such, it came to be seen as
capable of describing change instead of merely ideal geometrical relations.
Funkenstein’s work is full of so many insights one is almost
at a loss to list them all. For our
continuing purposes of the “Scotus Story” in its broadest outlines however,
perhaps one of the more interesting observations is that nothing typifies the
transition from the Middle Ages into the Modern world more than the answer to
the question: “can God create a better world?”[34] Quite succinctly, Funkenstein names the
transition into the Leibnizian question as the difference between Thomas
Aquinas on the one hand, and Duns Scotus and William of Ockham on the other:
Thomas admitted that God could have
created other worlds, but each of the worlds that God could have created, much
as ours, is such that the singular things that inhabit it are necessarily bound
by some mutual reference structure. For
Ockham, all things are immediate of God.
For Thomas it is meaningless if not logically impossible to conceive of
a good number of things out of any context.
Ockham [on the other hand] forces us to perform such ideal experiments with
a critical intent: that which cannot pass the test of being conceived toto mundo destructo is not a ‘thing’ (res).[35]
Indeed to the question of a better universe in essence
Aquinas argues we cannot know, because to know this would be to know the
interconnected purpose of the whole.
With Scotus, and especially with Ockham, the interconnected whole no
longer matters, and parts and pieces can be re-arranged ad hoc, creating the potential to envision a “better” system
relative to some goal.[36] Susan Neiman acknowledges this as the
transition into the modern world as well:
[Quoting Hume]: ‘If you find many
inconveniences and deformities in the building, you will always, without
entering into any detail, condemn the architect.’ We’ve entered the modern world. For all of [Pierre] Bayle’s obscenity, or
Voltaire’s patent rage, a touch of awe endured.
God remained a sovereign against whom one might with reason rebel. He had not yet become a contractor whom one
might decide to fire. Apart from
infrequent exceptions like the Lisbon earthquake, the eighteenth century
extolled His workmanship as a matter of course, convinced that all its
qualities were evident on its face.
Human suggested that we look more closely. The roof leaks. The stairs slope. The windows jam. Make your own inventory.[37]
Here we can see in part why the Radically Orthodox might be
uneasy at such a transition: in their mind the new definitions of
contingency—whatever their upside in scientific theorizing—can be seen to lead
to a Hume. Simon Oliver has made the
interesting observation regarding 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.”[38] 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, “Although Newton’s work on motion is studied almost exclusively as
a physical theory … like Aquinas’ understanding of motion it was accompanied by
a very particular theological vision.”[39] As
such 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.[40]
Oliver, who is our case study for why the Radically Orthodox
are uneasy with voluntarism and the science it produced (and hence aids in our
teasing out what they see at stake in the “Scotus Story”), is the claim 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,[41]
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.”[42] 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 dominion
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.[43]
Newton’s theological interpretation of his laws of motion
thus renders any distinction between Aristotelian “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.[44] 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.[45]
But just so the very nature of the term “express God” 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.[46] 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.”[47]
“Newton’s [Non-Trinitarian] God is utterly remote and
transcendent,” says Oliver.[48] 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 Jon Robertson’s description
of the Fourth century as a crisis of mediation, fits here too: Newton needs a
mediator. He gave two answers. The first “typically Arian”[49]
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:[50]
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.[51]
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].”[52] 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.
Yet such “physicalization” or “clarity” is precisely a part
of the “Scotus Story” that Radical Orthodoxy fear. “Once God
regained transparency or even a body, he was all the easier to identify and so
kill”[53]
as Funkenstein says. And from many other
studies it is quite clear that Divine attributes and activities were
indeed given “physical meaning.”[54] Indeed after Descartes “theological and
physical arguments” in many sectors become indistinguishable.[55] Even without a dog in the fight of the
“Scotus Story” Funkenstein narrates the eventual decline of God to just such a
conflation, and finds at least a partial precedent in Scotus’ search for
univocal concepts. Of course that later
permutations of an idea (ones that Scotus himself would have been horrified at)
can be blamed on Scotus seems unreasonable, the general transitions
(improperly) attached to Scotus’ name are nonetheless worthy of our attention
even without the Scotus scapegoat. As
Mary-Jane Rubenstein aptly summarizes the fear: “Christianity produces modern
science, in a staggering gesture of self-sabotage, as its consummation and
destruction.”[56]
[1] Given the immense upsurge in the literature in the past two
decades alone, it is now somewhat dated, but an excellent place to start is
still H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific
Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
[2] Gillespie, Theological
Origins of Modernity, 274.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Cf. 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), 167-192; Michael B. Foster, “The Christian
Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science,” Mind 43 (1934): 446-68; Francis Oakley,
“Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of The Concept of Laws
of Nature”: Church History 30 (1961):
433-457; Peter Heimann, “Voluntarism and Immanence: Conceptions of Nature in
Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Journal of
Historical Investigations 39 (1978): 271-283; Henry Guerlac, “Theological
Voluntarism and Biological Analogies in Newton’s Physical Thought,” Journal of Historical Investigations 44
(1983): 219-229. See as well the
excellent collation of references in Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 16n.25, to which I am indebted.
[5] Charles Taylor, A
Secular Age (Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2007), 284.
[6] Ibid., 90-146.
[7] Ibid., 152.
[8] Ibid., 158, 430.
[9] Ibid., 774.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., 775: “I
would see our two stories, ID and RMN, as complementary, exploring different
sides of the same mountain, or the same winding river of history.”
[12] Ibid., 542.
[13] Reijer Hooykaas, Religion
and the Rise of Modern Science (British Columbia: Regent College
Publishing, 2000), 108.
[14] Ibid., 36.
[15] Eugene M. Klaaren, Religious
Origins of Modern Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1977),
29-53.
[16] Ibid., 31.
[17] Ibid., 32.
[18] Ibid., 32-33.
[19] Ibid., 35-36.
[20] Ibid., 83.
[21] Ibid., 85.
[22] Margaret Osler, Divine
Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and
Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005).
[23] Ibid., 222-223.
[24] Ibid., 234.
[25] Ibid., 236.
[26] Amos Funkenstein, Theology
and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 122-123.
[27] Ibid., 121.
[28] Ibid., 154.
[29] Ibid., 155.
[30] Ibid., 135.
[31] Ibid., 178: “Rather
than confronting ‘idealism’ with ‘realism’ in the Middle Ages as against the
seventeenth century, I suggest we attend to the shift of function of imaginary
experiments. In the Middle Ages their
function was throughout critical—except in some of the work of the fourteenth
century. In the seventeenth century’s
science and philosophy, they become a tool for rational construction of the world.”
[32] Ibid., 176.
[33] Ibid., 34.
[34] Ibid., 153.
[35] Ibid., 135.
[36] Ibid., 201: “Only
God guarantees the validity of Leibniz’s [Principle of Sufficient Reason]. Leibniz’s God is a methodological guarantee
for the utter rationality of the world. Hardly can we find a better expression for
the distance between medieval theology and seventeenth-century philosophers of
nature than in the employment of the very same figure of thought—the
distinction between physical and logical necessities. To he medieval theologians it was ultimately
the source of utter contingency of the world.
Even Thomas, for whom everything created by God must bear some order,
could not conceive of a best order: the decision which possible world would
come to exist must be totally arbitrary [that is, free or relative to the total
system created]. But this, says Leibniz,
is impossible by virtue of the [Principle of Sufficient Reason]. There must be a reason why our universe was
created; it therefore must be the best of all possible worlds. From the source of all contingency, God became
the source of all rationality—a methodological guarantee that nature is
thoroughly intelligible.”
[37] Susan Neiman, Evil In
Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002), 160.
[38] Simon Oliver, “Aquinas and Newton on Motion,” Modern Theology vol.12 no.2 (2001): 164.
[39] Ibid.,164.
[40] Ibid., 177-178.
[41] Ibid., 178.
[42] Ibid., 180.
[43] Ibid., 180-181.
[44] Ibid., 186.
[45] Ibid., 186-187.
[46] Simon Oliver, God and
Motion (London: Routledge, 2006), 148.
[47] Funkenstein, Theology
and the Scientific Imagination, 151.
[48] “Motion According to Aquinas and Newton,” 188f.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Ibid., 189.
[51] Ibid., 190-191.
[52] Ibid., 191.
[53] Ibid., 116.
[54] 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.”
[55] Funkenstein, Theology
and the Scientific Imagination, 72-73.
[56] Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds
Without End: The Many Lives of the Multi-Verse (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014), 234.
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