# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S184
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

184 Toward the Grounding of a New Physico-Theology.

superficially, in their more rigorous investigations, as in the handbooks and textbooks and the popular writings, must have become convinced that from year to year its detachment from every connection to a divine Creator has grown greater. Among the French this phenomenon is even older and more general. It counts as almost improper, in a work of natural science, to speak of a Creator at all, and even in England, where this way of looking at things still has a much firmer footing and the word Creator is still frequently heard in strictly scientific works, a natura naturans takes the place of the living God as the Creator of all things. It is German natural philosophy which first made such language and manner of viewing things unpopular among us, to which, admittedly, the triviality of the physico-theological literature at the end of the last and the beginning of this century also contributed its share. The writer of this essay recalls from his own youth how little edification he took home from confirmation instruction, when the clergyman, instead of giving him a firm foundation in the doctrines of salvation, demonstrated the wisdom of God from the bitterness of earwax, which prevents foreign creatures from crawling into the ears. Similar experiences may have moved Schelling, in his lectures on academic study, to call out to the natural scientist: "Least of all should he, in imagining that he is admiring the wisdom and reason of God, betray his own unreason and unwisdom." *)

The great natural scientists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, who discovered the laws of cosmic motion, show themselves in their immortal works to be always filled with thoughts of God, and when they speak of laws of nature, they also always speak of the divine Lawgiver. Modern natural science has immersed itself so exclusively in the detail of phenomena and their causal relations that it either banishes final causes altogether from the domain of natural science as unfathomable — which might still be granted — or formally denies a legislative origin of natural phenomena and a divine Creator. This way of viewing things has then had a further influence on the whole domain of psychic phenomena, of the mental powers, which are all increasingly regarded as resultants of material movements of matter. A further consequence of this view was the denial of all moral freedom, out of which then the whole edifice — if we may call a heap of ruins an edifice — of modern scientific materialism grew up, which followed the nature-philosophical pantheism of the beginning of this century. Natural scientists, the Germans especially, belong nowadays nine-tenths, or perhaps even ninety-nine hundredths, more or less to the pantheistic or materialistic tendency, and differ

*) Loc. cit. Tübingen 1803, p. 301.