# LCMS Convention Workbook_St. Louis Missouri_2016_S209
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

(section 4). At first this was usually combined with a belief in a remote deity
who started the whole system in motion (deism), but as time went on, God
seemed redundant even in that capacity. It appeared to many that the only
thing necessary to understand any natural phenomenon was some other
natural phenomenon that caused it. This fueled naturalism, according to
which either nature is all there is—philosophical naturalism—or, if there is
something more, like God, still He is irrelevant to understanding the natural
world—methodological naturalism (section 5). With this foundation in place, it
no longer seemed appropriate to speak of scientists as “priests in the book of
nature.” Increasingly, science was not viewed as a vocation. Instead, it was
seen as a profession in the contemporary, secular sense: a scientist is a functionary in the modern, industrial state (section 6). So the severing of nature from
God’s providential care and of reason from divine illumination yielded science as a non-vocation. This has done damage not only to faithful scientists,
who experience angst because they do not see how to relate their faith to their
work in meaningful ways, but also to the general public, who suffer from a
disconnect between what is most valuable to them, and what they can claim
to be fact. It is one of the many reasons that the default belief system of many
religious people in countries like America today is what leading sociologist of
religion Christian Smith dubs “moralistic therapeutic deism”125: God has been
evacuated from nature and almost all of life, hanging on only as a therapeutic
life coach if times get bad (section 7).

2. The attack on final causes and the decline
of natural theology
In surveying his philosophical predecessors, Aristotle discerned a gap in
the type of causes they discussed.126 Many fixated on material and efficient
causes. For example Thales (625–545 BC) suggested that everything was
made of water while Empedocles (490–430 BC) suggested Earth, Air, Fire
and Water for material causes and Love and Strife for efficient causes. A few
thinkers realized that one must also account for the shape or structure of
the outcome (formal causes). Thus Pythagoras (570–495 BC) suggested that
nature is governed by an underlying mathematical harmony (an idea which,
much later, the Lutheran astronomer Johannes Kepler [1571–1630] saw as
deeply congruent with the Christian idea of a world governed by a rational
Lawgiver). But none of them, thought Aristotle, had considered the most
important causes of all, those that provided the purpose or goal of things
(final causes). The idea of final causes dominated subsequent thought during
the scholastic period, and even many thinkers of the modern period, such as

125

William Paley (1743–1805), saw its value for natural theology.127 However,
natural theologians were concerned that Aristotle’s own scheme, which
located final causes within nature, was not compatible with God’s sovereign
rule over creation. For example, as early as the 13th century, Etienne Tempier,
the Bishop of Paris, expressed his recognition that the Aristotelian account of
Forms, as natures within substances that dictated their final purpose, would
abridge God’s freedom to govern creation as He saw fit.
In 1277 Etienne Tempier … issued a condemnation of several
theses derived from Aristotelianism… . The condemnation of
1277 helped inspire a form a theology known as voluntarism,
which admits no limitations on God’s power. It regarded natural law not as Forms inherent within nature but as divine
commands imposed from outside nature.128
At the same time, some natural theologians supposed, not without
reason, that the created world was designed to support those made in God’s
image, and so they attempted to read off God’s final causes for things from
their evident benefits to humanity.
No doubt this led some natural theologians to forget that God made all
things good—so that all of nature has an intrinsic value regardless of whether
it serves human interests. But it was very helpful in some areas of science,
including medicine. For example, Walter Charleton’s (1619–1707) study of
the uses of blood, respiration, and muscles assumed that these structures
existed for a purpose: “Walter Charleton, sometime physician to Charles I,
spoke of ‘the Uses of the Blood,’ ‘The Final Cause, or Use of Respiration,’ ‘the
Use of the Muscles.’” 129 Likewise, William Harvey’s (1578–1657) investigation
of the heart assumed that it had a discernible function. End-directed thinking was vitally important not only in anatomical studies like Charleton’s
and Harvey’s but also in the history of botany and zoology, as shown by the
pioneering work in taxonomy by John Ray (1627–1705), and Carl Linnaeus
(1707–1778). The work of these scientists was strongly guided by their natural theological beliefs in an ordered, purposive creation. As Peter Harrison
concludes, “The search for divine purposes in the natural order provided a
clear religious warrant for a pursuit that might otherwise have been regarded
as the accumulation of vain and futile knowledge.”130 Today, and despite the
fact that final causes are typically rejected by science, they are still a useful

127
Paley’s most famous work is Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of
the Deity, published in 1802.
128
Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 31.

Smith and Denton, Soul Searching.

126
See Antony Kenny, A New History of Ancient Philosophy, Volume 1: Ancient Philosophy (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapters 2 and 6.

129

Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, 170, italics in the original.

130

Ibid., 184.

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construct for understanding complex, biological systems. As even the contemporary naturalistic philosopher of biology Michael Ruse concedes:

It was only later that the pioneering work of Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–
1865) and Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) established that some microorganisms
are responsible for disease, and saw the need for disinfectant and the sterilization of medical instruments. And it was not until the twentieth century that
the incredible complexity within each living cell was uncovered.

We treat organisms…as if they were manufactured, as if they
were designed, and then try to work out their functions. Enddirected thinking—teleological thinking—is appropriate in
biology because, and only because, organisms seem as if they
were manufactured, as if they had been created by an intelligence and put to work.131
On the other hand, some natural theology over-reached by claiming to
read God’s intentions directly from a beneficial consequence that might be a
coincidence. For example, Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688–1761) went so far as to
claim that
the woodworm, which eats the hull of ships, actually contributes
to harmonious international relations, for it provides opportunities for some countries to sell to others pitch with which to
protect ships’ hulls: ‘Thus does this little Animal, which we so
much complain of as being troublesome and injurious to us,
become the very Cement which unites these distant nations in
one common Interest.’132
This is a nice story, but is there any way to test it? And has God Himself
revealed to us that this is the real reason for the woodworm? The answer to
both questions is negative. It is at this point that appeal to final causes invites
fanciful speculations that cannot be checked against hard evidence. More cautious natural theologians, similar to today’s proponents of Intelligent Design,
realize that one should carefully distinguish between inferring design and
inferring intention. An archaeologist may discover an item which is obviously
designed—an artifact of some sort—without immediately knowing why it
was made. For example, an item in the shape of a blade might be a utensil,
a tool for working leather or wood, a weapon, or a ceremonial item with no
ordinary use. Likewise, with the invention of the microscope, many saw evidence of a world brimming with design long before they had any knowledge
of what microorganisms do.
[T]he microscope was able to show that even the most modest
of creatures had been designed with a remarkable precision…
and the world of minute creatures came to exercise a unique fascination over seventeenth-century minds.133

131

Michael Ruse, Darwin and Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 268.

132

Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, 175. The embedded quote
is from Noël Pluche himself, Spectacle de la Nature: or Nature Display’d, 5th revised and corrected
edition, volume III (London: 1770), 318.
133

209

Ibid., 172–173.

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The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is
composed of a set of large protein machines. Why do we call the
large protein assemblies…machines? Precisely because, like the
machines invented by humans…these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts.134
The tendency of some natural theologians to claim too much—to peer further into providence than fallen man is capable of—led some to be skeptical
of the whole approach. And there was a concern that if all of nature reflected
God’s design, this would make God complicit in the natural evils of predation, parasitism and disease.135 As Cornelius Hunter has argued, Darwin and
others who were skeptical of natural theology objected to design (or final
causes) at least in part for theological rather than scientific reasons, because of
a conviction that God would not be intimately involved in conforming such
an imperfect world to His purposes.136 Apparently, there was insufficient
attention paid to how the Fall complicates our understanding of design in the
world: we are not seeing the world as God originally intended it to be, since
creation itself is distorted, subject to the Fall’s effects (Rom. 8:20–21). Our
own faculties are also prone to error in judging how God “ought” to have
done something.137 While some proponents of natural theology undoubtedly
claimed too much, Hunter argues that the theological assumption that God
is not actively at work in His world may have led scientists to the opposite
extreme: have they developed a naturalistic “blind spot” that makes it impossible to infer design no matter what the evidence.138
Even before Darwin, it seemed to many of the early modern philosophers
and scientists that appeal to final causes was liable to anthropomorphic
134
Bruce Alberts, “The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the Next Generation of Molecular Biologists,” Cell, vol. 92 (1998), 291.
135
For example, Charles Darwin wrote to Asa Gray on the 22nd of May, 1860: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars,
or that a cat should play with mice." Available at: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/
entry-2814.
136
Cornelius Hunter, Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Ada, MI: Brazos Press,
2002).
137
Since death came through the Fall, nature before the Fall would have been quite different
than it is presently.
138
Cornelius Hunter, Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism (Ada, MI:
Brazos Press, 2007).

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2016 Convention Workbook