God of the Gaps - A Few Rough Notes Toward a Brief History of a Concept
While these hapless critters may themselves have been asking where God was amidst the massacre, naturalists at the time were particularly vexed regarding what the implications of these hydras were for the location of the soul: did the soul multiply amongst these newly created clones? Or were these dopplegangers in some sense unfortunate inheritors of only remnants of a now tattered spirit? Around the same time, the Christian physician Albrecht von Haller caused a similar stir when he discovered that cadaverous muscles would contract when given a prod with a generous helping of electricity. What, then, of the vital force of the spirit supposed to animate the flesh? Was it naught but that which lit the clouds and moved them during storms? These speculations would lead to such classics like Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus and embody many perennial themes about what truly makes us human. Yet, from another angle such concerns today, even by the most zealous of Christian, may come across as quaint if not outright misguided. Surely the existence of the soul is not something that can or cannot be proven by scientific means but, as qualitatively different, is patient only of metaphysical or theological reflection that may or may not incorporate scientific findings as premises, illustrations, or just general data to be interpreted? At any rate, with the so called “Hard Problem of Consciousness,” the debate is hardly settled.
The point of this hydra mania is to bring our immediate attention to the fact that the categories contemporary to us are not, in fact transhistorically or transcontextually stable, and this applies to all of the so-called “arguments for God’s existence.”[2] Many things will be revealed once this is realized: one is how recent the very notion of a “God of the gaps” is, having been invented in the modern period when metaphysical arguments began generally collapsing into more physical ones. This allowed both for immediate physical refutation and the rise of so-called “scientific atheism,” or the writing-out of natural theology for its intrinsic redundancy over-against physical explanation. Another is that drastic changes in the notion of both “form” and “matter” while seemingly arcane and unimportant, underlay what many have incorrectly described as the “warfare between science and religion.”[3]
Third, we will also see how supposed counterarguments against design—such as evolutionary theory and Darwinism—were themselves intrinsically theological and constituting their own type of “Design argument.” One scholar has recently gone so far as to say that Darwin’s Origin of Species is, in fact, the last example of “Victorian natural theology.” The story of Darwin killing design is improperly told when narrated from a vision of science vs. religion. Where evolution did displace design, it was more often than not in the form of a Romantic evolutionary natural theology of organic change and design replacing a mechanistic artisanal vision of design—one that had been severely reduced in scope from prior projects.[4]
Design arguments, in other words, might form something of a family resemblance across time, but their contents, means, and goals have drastically changed. As Edward Feser has recently argued, for example, not all teleologies are created equal, and that of Thomas Aquinas or really the tradition at large differs radically from, say, the arguments supposedly bested by Darwin in the 19th century.[5] Few today will find in electricity a foe worthy of God’s steel, or one that is even at odds with more spiritual notions of creatures. Our horror comes from elsewhere than finding out God is not immediately responsible for the animation of the creatures. In fact, a whole sequence of grand changes had gone into crafting what is now termed the “physico-theological” tradition, where the activity of God was translated from theological into directly physical concerns, and often God himself was given a physical or almost physical body as He went about his business checking off a daily list of cosmic to-do’s. Precisely because of the mutations that allowed the rise of the ill-fated physico-theological train of thought, theology was held up as fortune’s newest hostage, and it seemed its newly physicalized explanatory capacity receded as science advanced. “Design” as such is most often a reference (without specifying) to 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.”[6] The problem was that such mutations in thought, whether we want to call it the fizzling out of a research trajectory (like Wolfhart Pannenberg does) or the self-marginalization that came as a byproduct of an illicit or heterodox but ultimately internal transformation of theology (as John Milbank does), specifically of metaphysics into physics, began to be read back into the tradition at large. If Paley fell, in other words, it was thought (wrongly) that he took the whole tradition with him. Such is not the case of course, as design is not a single thing through the tradition, and it at best was a single instrument within the grand orchestra of natural theology.[7]
Our investigation hopes to unpack why this is not so by noticing many of the differences in different design arguments over time as well as attend to differences in the larger contexts of thought and practice surrounding them. This must be addressed by theologians and scientists alike in the coming days. For we are in a similar position that Etienne Gilson describes of scholasticism: “Scholastic philosophy has been dead now for nearly five centuries, philosophers don’t even care to remember how it died. Nevertheless, there was something queer about its death. Scholastic philosophy actually died to the whole extent to which its philosophy of nature had been mistaken, both by itself and its adversaries, for a science of nature.”[8] Whether spoken of in terms of “triangulation,”[9] or “transplanting,”[10] or “porous borders,”[11]or “the domestication of God”[12] or another term, in modernity, the distinction between a properly theological (or metaphysical) and physical explanation, began to collapse as divine attributes and activities were given “physical meaning”[13] which “inspired a fusion between theology and physics to an extent unknown earlier and later.”
Design arguments, in other words, might form something of a family resemblance across time, but their contents, means, and goals have drastically changed. As Edward Feser has recently argued, for example, not all teleologies are created equal, and that of Thomas Aquinas or really the tradition at large differs radically from, say, the arguments supposedly bested by Darwin in the 19th century.[5] Few today will find in electricity a foe worthy of God’s steel, or one that is even at odds with more spiritual notions of creatures. Our horror comes from elsewhere than finding out God is not immediately responsible for the animation of the creatures. In fact, a whole sequence of grand changes had gone into crafting what is now termed the “physico-theological” tradition, where the activity of God was translated from theological into directly physical concerns, and often God himself was given a physical or almost physical body as He went about his business checking off a daily list of cosmic to-do’s. Precisely because of the mutations that allowed the rise of the ill-fated physico-theological train of thought, theology was held up as fortune’s newest hostage, and it seemed its newly physicalized explanatory capacity receded as science advanced. “Design” as such is most often a reference (without specifying) to 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.”[6] The problem was that such mutations in thought, whether we want to call it the fizzling out of a research trajectory (like Wolfhart Pannenberg does) or the self-marginalization that came as a byproduct of an illicit or heterodox but ultimately internal transformation of theology (as John Milbank does), specifically of metaphysics into physics, began to be read back into the tradition at large. If Paley fell, in other words, it was thought (wrongly) that he took the whole tradition with him. Such is not the case of course, as design is not a single thing through the tradition, and it at best was a single instrument within the grand orchestra of natural theology.[7]
Our investigation hopes to unpack why this is not so by noticing many of the differences in different design arguments over time as well as attend to differences in the larger contexts of thought and practice surrounding them. This must be addressed by theologians and scientists alike in the coming days. For we are in a similar position that Etienne Gilson describes of scholasticism: “Scholastic philosophy has been dead now for nearly five centuries, philosophers don’t even care to remember how it died. Nevertheless, there was something queer about its death. Scholastic philosophy actually died to the whole extent to which its philosophy of nature had been mistaken, both by itself and its adversaries, for a science of nature.”[8] Whether spoken of in terms of “triangulation,”[9] or “transplanting,”[10] or “porous borders,”[11]or “the domestication of God”[12] or another term, in modernity, the distinction between a properly theological (or metaphysical) and physical explanation, began to collapse as divine attributes and activities were given “physical meaning”[13] which “inspired a fusion between theology and physics to an extent unknown earlier and later.”
This fusion of theology and physics resulted in new problems “which grew out of the need to invest certain theologoumena with precise physical meaning.”[14] Such “transformations of metaphysical axioms into prescriptions for the natural world were extremely common in early modern science” but also as one historian has eloquently put the consequence at hand: “Once God regained transparency or even a body, he was all the easier to identify and so kill.”[15] This rediscription and rewriting of God and God’s actions goes a long way to explain what Kathryn Tanner and others, including John Webster, have observed of the three primary elements that creation from nothing along with God’s design and God’s providence informed us about—the identity of the Creator, the act of creation, and the natures and ends of created things—when they note that as history progressed there tended to be “hypertrophy or atrophy of a given element” such that “it would be possible to trace how modern theologies of creation have often suffered a series of such misperceptions and misapplications on the part of the proponents as well as despisers.”[16]
Indeed, in a certain sense things like the doctrine of divine simplicity, already contentious on its own, were retained but in this newly confused manner. Johannes Kepler, for example, used it to justify the claim that geometry—without qualification or hesitation—simply was the divine ideas by which God must have created the world: “Geometry is God himself … for what is there in God except God himself?”[17] Ironically, DDS was originally meant to elucidate the Trinitarian relations, as well as God’s aseity. In the modern period the logic is taken to a point in which this appears to flip. Metaphysical notions of perfections in God—that God Himself was—were physicalized, and often became a priori constraints that creation must scientifically exemplify and adhere to, to properly exemplify design. In this sense, the combination of infinity and perfection in the modern period not only created a series of theological problems that scholars like Philip Clayton, Jean-Luc Marion, Robert Brennan, and Eberhard Jüngel have recounted at a theological level[18]—the particular notions of perfection at play caused a valence switch so that when the criteria for perfection in science changed, or was discarded, or was simply not met, this fed back into God and problematized the notion of this world as exemplifying design because and only because an artificial standard had been set up through an illicit use of a transformed theological notion. Precisely at the moment when theodicy began to emerge and increasingly place an explanatory burden on a sort of synoptic worldview with God as the cornerstone,[19] science was revealing that the notions of “goodness” and “perfection” were disastrous when transmuted from their proper domains into a scientific index to understand the world. As Kenneth Surin aptly summarizes the matter: “It is certainly no exaggeration to say that virtually every contemporary discussion of the theodicy-question [which often involves design arguments] is premised implicitly or explicitly on an understanding of ‘God’ overwhelmingly constrained by the principles of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophical theism.”[20]
Take the example of Pierre Simon de la Place and the “Nebular hypothesis” of solar-system formation, which is still more or less accepted today. The idea was that it was not God “putting-together” the solar system, but this formation could be explained “purely naturally” by the eventually coalescing of nebular material into suns and planets. Take la Place’s pithy reply to Napoleon as our guide: when the tiny tyrant asked regarding the place of God in la Place’s cosmology, la Place replied: “I have no need of that hypothesis.” Though the apocryphal saying is not “supported by textual evidence”[21] it nonetheless is entirely consistent with la Place’s system, and what’s more certainly does not read friendly toward the theistically inclined as, especially in the theories of the time, it makes the solar system appear to not be designed or the handiwork of God. 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”[22]
Yet, as Ronald Number’s thoroughly analyzes in his overlooked Creation by Natural Law: La Place’s Nebular Hypothesis in American Thought, despite a complex reception history, 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.[23] What we have is a curious example of how debates that were happening internal to theology affected natural philosophical decisions. But this history has subsequently been pushed aside, so that the picture is skewed to look like the simple overcoming of God by natural reason. But the God whom la Place rejected was the God of Isaac Newton, who occasionally adjusted orbits and provided an explanation for the principle of gravitation, and not, for example the truly transcendent biblical God as pictured by Augustine or Thomas Aquinas. Much as with the starfish and hydras, the notion that the solar system formed as it cooled while rotating, forming planets, stars, comets, and other phenomena without invoking God at any particular stage to make sure it all happened physically speaking will not strike the modern reader—no matter how zealously Christian—as necessarily atheistic. But such was not the case originally, with La Place making as much stir as Darwin did in his own day—at least in certain circles (indeed the two were often paralleled illicitly as part of a single story of the overcoming of the God of the gaps). To claim la Place as one of the bright lights for the eventual victory of secular scientific reason over the credulity of faith has pieces of truth to it, but ultimately ignores that a more interesting observation lay in the fact that the grounds and conditions for la Place’s commentary on the non-necessity of this particular God as a physical hypothesis, were themselves given historical precedent by discussions and transmutations (however illegitimate) made within theology itself. Ignoring this has consequences for historiography, as John Hedley Brooke points out:
All Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle, took Parmenides’s dictum “from nothing, nothing comes” as axiomatic. The question they would ask is not “why something, why not nothing?” but “why this order?” “If there is one belief Greek thinkers shared,” says Louis Dupré, “it must be the conviction that both the essence of the real and our knowledge of it consists ultimately of form. This means that it belongs to the essence of the real to appear, rather than to hide, and to appear in an orderly way.”[28] Thus the Greeks spoke of the ordered whole of the world as kosmos. Dupré cautions modern translators who might be tempted to utilize the phrase “physical nature” as an approximation for kosmos, however—for it was not just physical meaning, but theological and anthropic as well.[29] Even the gods, despite their power, were a part of and ultimately subservient to the cosmic ordered-whole.[30] As Christian theology slowly settled into the second century, it became clear that Aristotle’s view of the eternal universe, Origin of Alexandria’s notion of the necessity of creation, as well as the rising threat of the rather decadent gnostic Christian cosmologies picturing the world as a degradation, needed countering. It was in these contexts that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo (from nothing) was first formulated, and the importance of God as Creator began waltzing front and center into theologian’s notice.[31] In fact, it is these contexts in which “Christian theology” first came into existence at all, as Eric Osborne has argued.[32]
It was in this context that Christian notion of creation ex nihilo could be seen as precisely antithetical to any notion of design at all, a danger to the rational order of the world as the Greek mind envisioned as the Christian lexicon of God’s transcendence swelled to try and describe the undescribable. This is an important point not just because this led directly into the controversies prior to Nicaea and remained absolutely essential in the pro-Nicene debates leading up to Constantinople and beyond;[33] as it happens, the theme of creation also formed one of the earliest conflicts between Christianity and the reigning design science of the day (if we are to label it such) was the philosopher Galen’s (c. AD 130) opposition to the doctrine of ex nihilo creation.[34]
Up until around 200 AD, it was the general consensus of theologians and philosophers “that God and matter were coeternal … God is not responsible for the existence of the eternal pre-cosmic chaos, but only for its organization into a rational world.”[35] The debate up until that time was whether “the organization was eternal.” That is, did God organize the world according to pre-existing patterns, as in many forms of Platonism, or were the ideas (as Christians tended to prefer) somehow in God Himself, were God Himself?[36] An important issue that must be bypassed for the moment. The problem that emerged with the Greeks is that ex nihilo creation seemed precisely antithetical to design, because in their minds it made God capricious, answerable to nothing, an artist doing whatever he damn well pleases with no accountability. During his investigation On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body [De Usu Partium], his reflections on the usefulness of a part was based upon the interconnected harmony of the whole of the body. In the course of this investigation, Galen turns to an aside and chides Christians for their “arbitrary” God who created the world out of nothing. For Galen, creation from nothing can only ever be the product of a capricious will: “Did your demiurge simply enjoin this hair to preserve its length? And does it strictly observe this order either from fear of its master’s command, or from reverence for the God who gave it this order?” (De Usu Partium 11.4). Since each part would be what it is only at the command of God, and not from some property intrinsic to its nature as it collaborated with the whole, Galen feared this would lead to anarchy. In this, Galen, like many Greeks at the time, was following the thoughts of Plato as expressed in the Timaeus, where the fabricator god (demiurgos) is accountable to ultimate principles intrinsic in the universe as he brings order from arranging chaotic pre-existing matter: “For God, wishing that all things should be good and not evil insofar as that was possible, took over all that was visible, that which was not at rest but in a discordant and disordered motion, and brought order out of disorder, thinking that the one was better than the other” (Plato, Timaeus, 30a). Galen contrasts this to the Christian understanding: “[Instead of investigating the harmony of parts] it seems enough [for the Christian] to say God simply willed the arrangement of matter and it was presently arranged in due order; for he believes everything to be possible with God, even should he wish to make a bull or a horse out of ashes” [De Usu Partium 11.14].
In this concern, Galen was not totally off base. Later, in the late-tenth, early-eleventh century, the natural philosopher and theologian William of Conches expressed his impatience with those who continually and directly invoke God to account for physical explanations by writing: “You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has he ever done so? Therefore show some reason for why a thing is so, or cease to hold it [as an opinion].”[37] However, ever since a series of three path-breaking essays by Michael Beresford Wallace,[38] and the herculean labor of Pierre Duhem,[39] a small cottage industry has arisen arguing that, in fact, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, far from causing Christians to abstain from investigating the natural world, both instituted the idea of “natural law” and gave theoretical pressure to a posteriori investigation.[40] This is because ex nihilo automatically cuts off a priori concepts of what the world must be like—for God could have created it however He wanted. Thus, we must investigate how God actually made the world.
La Place’s notion that God is unnecessary as a physical hypothesis thus would have been fine with Thomas Aquinas, but for example in the East as well with, say, Gregory of Nyssa who has an “argument from design” of sorts.[41] 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.[42] Pelikan notes Nyssa’s arguments stand in radical contrast to any theory of chaos or disorder. Indeed, as a sort of Paley argument of the watch 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 and of a builder is suggested to anyone who sees the building …”[43] 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.”[44]
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.”[45] 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:
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.[46] Creation was seen 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.”[47] 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.”[48] 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.”[49]
Finally, “Design” for Nyssa is not an explanation for things, per se. Lactantius in his Divine Institutes for example is adamant that God’s way of making things is unlike any causality that we know, so we may not “inquire by what hands, by what machines, by what levers, by what contrivance [God] made this work of such magnitude.” 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.”[50] Thus this “argument from design” ultimately leads to union with God. As A.N. Williams puts it:
Indeed, in a certain sense things like the doctrine of divine simplicity, already contentious on its own, were retained but in this newly confused manner. Johannes Kepler, for example, used it to justify the claim that geometry—without qualification or hesitation—simply was the divine ideas by which God must have created the world: “Geometry is God himself … for what is there in God except God himself?”[17] Ironically, DDS was originally meant to elucidate the Trinitarian relations, as well as God’s aseity. In the modern period the logic is taken to a point in which this appears to flip. Metaphysical notions of perfections in God—that God Himself was—were physicalized, and often became a priori constraints that creation must scientifically exemplify and adhere to, to properly exemplify design. In this sense, the combination of infinity and perfection in the modern period not only created a series of theological problems that scholars like Philip Clayton, Jean-Luc Marion, Robert Brennan, and Eberhard Jüngel have recounted at a theological level[18]—the particular notions of perfection at play caused a valence switch so that when the criteria for perfection in science changed, or was discarded, or was simply not met, this fed back into God and problematized the notion of this world as exemplifying design because and only because an artificial standard had been set up through an illicit use of a transformed theological notion. Precisely at the moment when theodicy began to emerge and increasingly place an explanatory burden on a sort of synoptic worldview with God as the cornerstone,[19] science was revealing that the notions of “goodness” and “perfection” were disastrous when transmuted from their proper domains into a scientific index to understand the world. As Kenneth Surin aptly summarizes the matter: “It is certainly no exaggeration to say that virtually every contemporary discussion of the theodicy-question [which often involves design arguments] is premised implicitly or explicitly on an understanding of ‘God’ overwhelmingly constrained by the principles of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophical theism.”[20]
Take the example of Pierre Simon de la Place and the “Nebular hypothesis” of solar-system formation, which is still more or less accepted today. The idea was that it was not God “putting-together” the solar system, but this formation could be explained “purely naturally” by the eventually coalescing of nebular material into suns and planets. Take la Place’s pithy reply to Napoleon as our guide: when the tiny tyrant asked regarding the place of God in la Place’s cosmology, la Place replied: “I have no need of that hypothesis.” Though the apocryphal saying is not “supported by textual evidence”[21] it nonetheless is entirely consistent with la Place’s system, and what’s more certainly does not read friendly toward the theistically inclined as, especially in the theories of the time, it makes the solar system appear to not be designed or the handiwork of God. 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”[22]
Yet, as Ronald Number’s thoroughly analyzes in his overlooked Creation by Natural Law: La Place’s Nebular Hypothesis in American Thought, despite a complex reception history, 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.[23] What we have is a curious example of how debates that were happening internal to theology affected natural philosophical decisions. But this history has subsequently been pushed aside, so that the picture is skewed to look like the simple overcoming of God by natural reason. But the God whom la Place rejected was the God of Isaac Newton, who occasionally adjusted orbits and provided an explanation for the principle of gravitation, and not, for example the truly transcendent biblical God as pictured by Augustine or Thomas Aquinas. Much as with the starfish and hydras, the notion that the solar system formed as it cooled while rotating, forming planets, stars, comets, and other phenomena without invoking God at any particular stage to make sure it all happened physically speaking will not strike the modern reader—no matter how zealously Christian—as necessarily atheistic. But such was not the case originally, with La Place making as much stir as Darwin did in his own day—at least in certain circles (indeed the two were often paralleled illicitly as part of a single story of the overcoming of the God of the gaps). To claim la Place as one of the bright lights for the eventual victory of secular scientific reason over the credulity of faith has pieces of truth to it, but ultimately ignores that a more interesting observation lay in the fact that the grounds and conditions for la Place’s commentary on the non-necessity of this particular God as a physical hypothesis, were themselves given historical precedent by discussions and transmutations (however illegitimate) made within theology itself. Ignoring this has consequences for historiography, as John Hedley Brooke points out:
[Andrew Dixon White and John William Draper’s] preconception that, as science has advanced, phenomena once considered supernatural have yielded to naturalistic explanation, is not without support. But it assumes a dichotomy between nature and supernature that oversimplifies the theologies of the past. If a supernatural power was envisaged as working through, as distinct from interfering with, nature, the antithesis [between science and theology] would partially collapse. … The significance given to explanations in terms of natural causes depends on higher-level assumptions embedded in a broader cultural framework. In the history of Western culture, it has not simply been a case of nature swallowing supernature. Something had to happen to change the higher-level assumptions if the conflict between science and religion was to achieve the self-evident status proclaimed by Draper, White, and their successors.[24]In his seminal essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” Quentin Skinner cautions against treating ideas as if they constituted perennial problems. Doing so often lifts them out of their formation, transmission, and reception contexts and allows a sort of a priori free-association about how best to approach and study the issue at hand.[25] A particularly relevant example of this is the question nearly all students taking an introduction to philosophy course are plied with: “Why something? Why not nothing?” A mysterious and difficult question, to be sure—but it is not “perennial” to the human condition. Rather, this specific form of the question is a legacy bequeathed to history by Christianity. And I do not simply say that because this variation of the question was formulated by Leibniz. Wonderment regarding origins has always existed, of course; but this particular form of the question is taken from the distinctly Christian legacy of ex nihilo creation—“When God reveals himself, then man experiences his existence and the being of his world as a being which has been plucked from nothingness.”[26] Thus ironically, when Karl Giberson and Mariano Artigas survey the works of several (atheist and agnostic) popularizers of science and remark that these authors give the impression that science is mainly about the study of origins, one would not be without cause in thinking this is because those scientists are not just doing science per se but are explicitly engaged in a post-Christian framing of said science.[27]
All Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle, took Parmenides’s dictum “from nothing, nothing comes” as axiomatic. The question they would ask is not “why something, why not nothing?” but “why this order?” “If there is one belief Greek thinkers shared,” says Louis Dupré, “it must be the conviction that both the essence of the real and our knowledge of it consists ultimately of form. This means that it belongs to the essence of the real to appear, rather than to hide, and to appear in an orderly way.”[28] Thus the Greeks spoke of the ordered whole of the world as kosmos. Dupré cautions modern translators who might be tempted to utilize the phrase “physical nature” as an approximation for kosmos, however—for it was not just physical meaning, but theological and anthropic as well.[29] Even the gods, despite their power, were a part of and ultimately subservient to the cosmic ordered-whole.[30] As Christian theology slowly settled into the second century, it became clear that Aristotle’s view of the eternal universe, Origin of Alexandria’s notion of the necessity of creation, as well as the rising threat of the rather decadent gnostic Christian cosmologies picturing the world as a degradation, needed countering. It was in these contexts that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo (from nothing) was first formulated, and the importance of God as Creator began waltzing front and center into theologian’s notice.[31] In fact, it is these contexts in which “Christian theology” first came into existence at all, as Eric Osborne has argued.[32]
It was in this context that Christian notion of creation ex nihilo could be seen as precisely antithetical to any notion of design at all, a danger to the rational order of the world as the Greek mind envisioned as the Christian lexicon of God’s transcendence swelled to try and describe the undescribable. This is an important point not just because this led directly into the controversies prior to Nicaea and remained absolutely essential in the pro-Nicene debates leading up to Constantinople and beyond;[33] as it happens, the theme of creation also formed one of the earliest conflicts between Christianity and the reigning design science of the day (if we are to label it such) was the philosopher Galen’s (c. AD 130) opposition to the doctrine of ex nihilo creation.[34]
Up until around 200 AD, it was the general consensus of theologians and philosophers “that God and matter were coeternal … God is not responsible for the existence of the eternal pre-cosmic chaos, but only for its organization into a rational world.”[35] The debate up until that time was whether “the organization was eternal.” That is, did God organize the world according to pre-existing patterns, as in many forms of Platonism, or were the ideas (as Christians tended to prefer) somehow in God Himself, were God Himself?[36] An important issue that must be bypassed for the moment. The problem that emerged with the Greeks is that ex nihilo creation seemed precisely antithetical to design, because in their minds it made God capricious, answerable to nothing, an artist doing whatever he damn well pleases with no accountability. During his investigation On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body [De Usu Partium], his reflections on the usefulness of a part was based upon the interconnected harmony of the whole of the body. In the course of this investigation, Galen turns to an aside and chides Christians for their “arbitrary” God who created the world out of nothing. For Galen, creation from nothing can only ever be the product of a capricious will: “Did your demiurge simply enjoin this hair to preserve its length? And does it strictly observe this order either from fear of its master’s command, or from reverence for the God who gave it this order?” (De Usu Partium 11.4). Since each part would be what it is only at the command of God, and not from some property intrinsic to its nature as it collaborated with the whole, Galen feared this would lead to anarchy. In this, Galen, like many Greeks at the time, was following the thoughts of Plato as expressed in the Timaeus, where the fabricator god (demiurgos) is accountable to ultimate principles intrinsic in the universe as he brings order from arranging chaotic pre-existing matter: “For God, wishing that all things should be good and not evil insofar as that was possible, took over all that was visible, that which was not at rest but in a discordant and disordered motion, and brought order out of disorder, thinking that the one was better than the other” (Plato, Timaeus, 30a). Galen contrasts this to the Christian understanding: “[Instead of investigating the harmony of parts] it seems enough [for the Christian] to say God simply willed the arrangement of matter and it was presently arranged in due order; for he believes everything to be possible with God, even should he wish to make a bull or a horse out of ashes” [De Usu Partium 11.14].
In this concern, Galen was not totally off base. Later, in the late-tenth, early-eleventh century, the natural philosopher and theologian William of Conches expressed his impatience with those who continually and directly invoke God to account for physical explanations by writing: “You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has he ever done so? Therefore show some reason for why a thing is so, or cease to hold it [as an opinion].”[37] However, ever since a series of three path-breaking essays by Michael Beresford Wallace,[38] and the herculean labor of Pierre Duhem,[39] a small cottage industry has arisen arguing that, in fact, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, far from causing Christians to abstain from investigating the natural world, both instituted the idea of “natural law” and gave theoretical pressure to a posteriori investigation.[40] This is because ex nihilo automatically cuts off a priori concepts of what the world must be like—for God could have created it however He wanted. Thus, we must investigate how God actually made the world.
La Place’s notion that God is unnecessary as a physical hypothesis thus would have been fine with Thomas Aquinas, but for example in the East as well with, say, Gregory of Nyssa who has an “argument from design” of sorts.[41] 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.[42] Pelikan notes Nyssa’s arguments stand in radical contrast to any theory of chaos or disorder. Indeed, as a sort of Paley argument of the watch 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 and of a builder is suggested to anyone who sees the building …”[43] 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.”[44]
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.”[45] 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.[46] Creation was seen 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.”[47] 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.”[48] 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.”[49]
Finally, “Design” for Nyssa is not an explanation for things, per se. Lactantius in his Divine Institutes for example is adamant that God’s way of making things is unlike any causality that we know, so we may not “inquire by what hands, by what machines, by what levers, by what contrivance [God] made this work of such magnitude.” 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.”[50] 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.[51]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.
Not so for William Paley and the (in)famous Victorian design arguments. “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].”[52] 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.”[53]
It was design as perfect pre-adaptation, especially as exemplified by Paley, which were the theories threatened by Darwinian natural selection.[54] 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.”[55] The vast difference between Paley’s mechanical universe and the cosmos of the ancients like Nyssa “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.”
In fact, “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:
It was design as perfect pre-adaptation, especially as exemplified by Paley, which were the theories threatened by Darwinian natural selection.[54] 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.”[55] The vast difference between Paley’s mechanical universe and the cosmos of the ancients like Nyssa “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.”
In fact, “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’[56] 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].[57]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.[58]
[1] This story is related in John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 234.
[2] Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Migration of the Theistic Arguments: From Natural Theology to Evidentialist Apologetics,” in Robert Audi, William Wainwright, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds., Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 38-81
[3] Norma E. Emerton, The Scientific Reinterpretation of Form (New York: Cornell University Press, 1984); Adrian Pabst, Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing 2012); Larry Chapp, God of Covenant and Creation
[4] John Hedley Brooke, “The Relationship Between Darwin’s Science and His Religion,” in John Durant, ed. Darwinism and Divinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 40-75; Neal Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Chris Cosans, “Was Darwin a Creationist?” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 48 (2005): 362-371; Robert J. Richards, “Theological Foundations of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution,” in P.H. Theerman and K.H. Parshall, eds., Experiencing Nature (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 61-79; John Cornell, “God’s Magnificent Law: The Bad Influence of Theistic Metaphysics on Darwin’s Estimation of Natural Selection,” Journal of the History of Biology (1987): 381-412; Idem, “Newton of the Grassblade? Darwin and the Problem of Organic Teleology,” Isis 77 (1986): 405-421; Stephen Dilley, “Charles Darwin’s Use of Theology in the Origin of Species,” British Society for the History of Science (2011), 1-28; Richard England, “Natural Selection, Teleology, and the Logos,” Osiris 16 (2001), 270-287; Momme von Sydow, “Charles Darwin: A Christian Undermining Christianity?” in David M. Knight and Matthew D. Eddy, eds., Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700-1900 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 141-156; Paul Nelson, “The Role of Theology In Current Evolutionary Reasoning,” Biology and Philosophy 11 (1996): 493-517; Abigail Lustig, “Natural Atheology,” in Abigail Lustig, Robert J. Richards and Michael Ruse, eds., Darwinian Heresies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 69-83.
[5] Edward Feser, Neo-Scholastic Essays (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), 3-192.
[6] Hanby, No God, No Science, 170.
[7] Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 377.
[8] Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952), 108.
[9] Gaukroger, Emergence of a Scientific Culture, 507: What emerged,” he says, “was …the two ‘books’ superposed into a single volume, as it were.”
[10] Margaret Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World(Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 11.
[11] Eva Marie Garroutte, “The Positivist Attack on Baconian Science and Religious Knowledge in the 1870s,” in Christian Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 200.
[12] William Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong (Louisville: Westminster John-Knox, 1996) e.g. 71-88; see also D. Leech, The Hammer of the Cartesians: Henry More’s Philosophy of Spirit and the Origins of Modern Atheism (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
[13] 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.”
[14] Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 72–73.
[15] Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 116.
[16] John Webster, “Love is Also a Lover of Life: Creatio Ex Nihilo and Creaturely Goodness,” in Darren Sarisky, ed., Theologies of Retrieval: An Exploration and Appraisal (New York: T&T Clark, 2017), 229–43 (quote at 230); Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988), esp. 81-120.
[17] Michael J. Buckley, Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 14-15.
[18] Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2000); Jean-Luc Marion, “The Incoherence of Descartes’ Definition of Divinity,” trans. By Frederick P. van den Pitte in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Descartes’ Meditations (California: University of California Press, 1986), 297-338; Jean-Luc Marion, “The Idea of God,” in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayres, eds., The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 265-304; Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundations of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Atheism and Theism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1983), 105-151; Robert Brennan, Describing the Hand of God: Divine Agency and Augustinian Obstacles to the Dialogue Between Theology and Science (Eugene: Pickwick, 2015).
[19] See Derrick Peterson, “A Glass King: Theodicy as a Modern Problem, Modernity as Theodicy,” forthcoming.
[20] Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 4.
[21] Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg, eds., God & Nature: Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (California: University of California, 1986), 256.
[22] Numbers and Lindberg, God & Nature, 270.
[23] See especially, Numbers, Creation by Natural Law, 77-87. And for how la Place was used in the Darwin debates, 105-119.
[24] Brooke, Science and Religion, 47-48.
[25] Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 no. 1 (1969): 3–53.
[26] Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 33; cf. 31–35.
[27] See Karl Giberson and Mariano Artigas, Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 7.
[28] Louis Dupré, The Passage to Modernity: An Essay on the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale, 1993), 18.
[31] Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1-38.
[32] Eric Osborne, The Emergence of Christian Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
[33] R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318-381 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 60-99; Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 33-98; Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy & Tradition rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2001), e.g. 181-232; Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter With Hellenism (New Haven: Yale, 1993), 200-215, 248-262; John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends & Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979), 129-137; Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 273-343.
[34] Here I am indebted to the wonderful introductory discussion of Galen in Wilken, Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 68–93.
[35] Williams, Arius, 184.
[36] See Vivian Boland, Ideas in God According to Saint Thomas Aquinas: Sources and Synthesis (Leiden: Brill, 1996); for a helpful summary of this neglected topic, see: Matthew Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 29-72.
[37] Quoted in Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), 63.
[38] M. B. Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Natural Science,” Mind 43 (1934): 446–68; “Christian Theology and Modern Science of Nature (I),” Mind 44 (1935): 439–66; “Christian Theology and Modern Science of Nature (II),” Mind 45 (1936), 1–27. Cf. also “Greek and Christian Ideas of Nature,” The Free University Quarterly 6 (1959): 122–27.
[39] The best introduction and biography of Duhem remains Stanley L. Jaki, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem (Dordrech: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987). For an excellent selection of Duhem’s work, see Pierre Duhem, Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Infinity, Place, Time, Void, and the Plurality of Worlds, ed. and trans. by Roger Ariew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
[40] Margaret Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: CUP, 2005); Francis Oakley, Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights: Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Ideas (New York: Continuum, 2005); Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order: An Excursion into the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); T. F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: OUP, 1969), esp. 55–105; Eugene M. Klaaren, Religious Origins of Modern Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1977); Reijer Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972).
[41] 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.
[42] Quoted in Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 68.
[43] Quoted in Ibid., 69.
[44] Nyssa, De Anima, PG XLIV, 124C.
[45] Gregory Nazianzen, Orations, 28.6.
[46] 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.
[47] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2003), 189.
[48] Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 163.
[49] Lossky, Mystical Theology, 103.
[50] Quoted in Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 70.
[51] A.N. Williams, The Divine Sense: The Intellect in the Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 122.
[52] Hanby, No God, No Science (Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 163. Cf. 156.
[53] Ibid., 35.
[54] Brooke, Science and Religion, 377.
[55] Stephen J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), 188.
[56] 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.
[57] 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.”
[58] 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:”
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