LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 210

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210

IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

speculation and was in any case unnecessary for empirical science. Thus,
quite early in the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) argued that
humans have a tendency to project their own agency onto the world, supposing that a being like themselves is the ultimate explanation of anything
mysterious:
As it strives to go further, [the human mind] falls back on things
that are more familiar, namely final causes, which are plainly
derived from the nature of man rather than of the universe….139
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) made much the same point in critiquing the
use of final causes in dynamics:
[M]en measure, not only other men, but all other things, by
themselves; and because they find themselves subject after
motion to pain, and lassitude, think everything else grows
weary of motion and seeks repose of its own accord.140
It was not only materialist philosophers like Hobbes, but also Christian
scientists, such as Galileo (1564–1642) and Robert Boyle (1627–1691), who
worried that it was inadvisable to read final causes into nature. Their concern,
like Etienne Tempier’s, was that if final causes were understood as implanted
within nature, this would threaten God’s sovereignty. For if these causes
operate independently of God, then apparently not even He can alter their
effects. By contrast, if God is free to direct nature as He sees fit, and these final
causes remain under the governance of His will, then science must adopt a
humble, empirical method, content to discover what God has chosen to do in
the natural world.
Thus, Galileo (1564–1642) believed that the only way to discover the Law
of Descent governing the rate of acceleration of objects in free-fall was by
empirical testing.141 One had to look and see how God had chosen to govern
the world, rather than speculate a priori on the supposed essential natures of
the falling objects. Boyle argued that matter is in itself completely passive,
unable to give an ultimate account of its motion, and that it was also affected
by non-mechanical “active principles,” which he thought were involved in
some chemical reactions and life processes. In this way, God was the final
cause of all motion in the world and was also immanently involved in it, via
these active principles.142
For Boyle, in both the case of matter and active principles, God works
through means. Standard physical science (e.g., typical physics and
139

Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Bk. I, XLVIII.

140

Hobbes, Leviathan I.2 in Works, ed. William Molesworth (Aalen: Scientia, 1962) III, 3 f.

chemistry) is focused on these means (secondary causes) and so has no
need to appeal to primary final causes. But since biology is interested in the
origin of life, it pushes us beyond secondary causes. This explains why Boyle
thought final causes had no value in understanding ordinary physical causation, and yet at the same time was an enthusiastic supporter of the argument
for divine design in biology.143 He realized that passive matter does not itself
explain its complex, functional organization in the organs and body plans of
living beings. For this, only the primary, final causation of God would suffice.
The ultimate reason that such organization exists is that God designed it for
a purpose.
Although it had a number of rationales, a tragic consequence of the
well-intended exclusion of final causes from science, quite often advanced by
Christians and on theological grounds, was a weakening of the understanding of God’s providence. If we cannot talk about what natural events are
for in science, how do we visualize God as actively shaping those events to
His ends? It is technically compatible with such a scientific account that the
eyes of faith can discern a providential pattern, but if people look to science
for objective knowledge of the world, and science finds final causes to be
redundant, some may conclude that God’s providential care of the world is
an illusion. This already seems a very different vision of science than Kepler’s.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Kepler did not make a rigid distinction
between science and natural theology, seeing the laws of nature as God’s
“providential plans.” Although the causal connection between particular
pairs of events need not disclose any divine purpose, Kepler thought that the
existence of general laws governing the cosmos in reliable ways was a clear
sign of that purpose.
A second problem is that the anti-anthropomorphic arguments against
final causes go too far. Christians understand that we are made like God (in
His image), and that although His thoughts and ways are above our own
(Is. 55:8–9), we can learn about God by what He is like. Our clearest source
is the revelation of God in the man Jesus Christ. To the charge that all talk
of God’s purposes is anthropomorphic, we may reply that God made us
theomorphic (in His likeness), and also that in Christ, God Himself is anthropomorphic (He made Himself like one of us), thus creating a built-in affinity
between human beings and God. Informed by this faith, and mindful of the
limitations of finitude and sin, we should affirm that we can know something
of what God has done in nature, and may indeed see signs of His providential
hand. Although we may sometimes read into natural events motives that are
not there, that does not make us incapable of ever discerning God’s work in
the world.

141

For details, see chapter 6 of Rom Harré's Great Scientific Experiments: Twenty Experiments that
Changed our View of the World (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002).
142
See Pearcey and Thaxton, The Soul of Science, 87–88 and Angus Menuge, “Interpreters of the
Book of Nature,” in Menuge, ed., Reading God’s World.

143
See Edward B. Davis, “Science as Christian Vocation: The Case of Robert Boyle,” in Reading
God’s World, ed. Angus Menuge, 206–207.

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It is a great irony of history that philosophers and scientists who were
for the most part practicing Christians set in motion a train of thought whose
unintended consequence was a diminution of the sense of God’s providential
care of the world and of our special status as beings made in the image of
God. By fixating on the gift and not its Giver, even devout Christians have
repeatedly found ways to increase their distance from God.144

samples of facts, so that his conclusion is an interpretation of the phenomena
driven by those facts and tested against them.149

3. The rise of autonomous reason
Another example of the same trend is the exaltation of human reason as
a faculty capable of discerning objective truth independent of divine revelation.145 Two of the most audacious philosophical works of the early modern
period are Francis Bacon’s The New Organon, and Rene Descartes’ Meditations. In both works, there is a rejection of tradition and external authorities
as a basis for knowledge in favor of the use of our unaided faculties, such as
reason and experience.
In The New Organon, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is merciless (and often
unfair) in his critique of the Aristotelian paradigm for science that had
dominated the scholastic period. He says that “the sciences we now have
are no more than elegant arrangements of things previously discovered, not
methods of discovery or pointers to new results.”146 In other words, scholastic
science was stagnant and unfruitful because it deferred to the authority of the
past instead of devising better methods for discovering new knowledge. He
charges that the scholastics were guilty of attempting to “anticipate” nature
on the basis of preconceived metaphysics and erroneous methods of scientific
reasoning, when they should have been content merely to “interpret” nature
through a patient accumulation of data.147 Bacon is audacious enough to claim
that what we need is to construct a whole new method of scientific inquiry.
Just as whole new worlds were found by use of the lodestone, Bacon thought
that a reformed inductive method would accelerate the pace of scientific
discovery. His approach had two major components. First, the investigator
must purge his mind of preconceived bias—the idols of the mind148—so that
he does not try to anticipate what nature must do, but is open to discovering
the truth about natural phenomena. Then he must collect large and varied

144
Consider also St. Paul’s warning in Romans 1:18–25 about the perennial human tendency
to focus on the gift and not the Giver, to worship created things rather than the Creator.
145

On the wages of Enlightenment rationalism, see also the CTCR report, The Natural
Knowledge of God: In Christian Confession and Christian Witness (St. Louis: The Lutheran Church—
Missouri Synod, 2013), 21–24.
146

Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34 ( Book I, aphorism VIII).
147

Bacon, The New Organon, 38–39 (Book I, aphorisms XXVI–XXX).

148

Ibid., 40–56 (Book I, aphorisms XXXIX–LXVII).

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2016 Convention Workbook

On one hand, there is something admirable about Bacon’s insistence that
we should interpret nature rather than anticipate its course. This fits well with
the ideas that nature is a book which God freely inscribed with His messages,
and that we are called to read and interpret them. On the other hand, by
disconnecting this rational method from the revealed truth about ourselves,
Bacon is surely tempted to exaggerate our ability to purge our minds of bias.
We cannot remove the original sin that infects all of our faculties, and which
constantly biases our reason to accept falsehoods that it wants to believe in
and attempt to rewrite reality after our own preferences.
Like Bacon, René Descartes (1596–1650) was unashamed in his disdain
for his intellectual predecessors.
Medieval philosophers had seen themselves as principally
engaged in transmitting a corpus of knowledge … Renaissance
philosophers had seen themselves as rediscovering and republicizing the lost wisdom of ancient times. It was Descartes who
was the first philosopher since Antiquity to offer himself as a
total innovator; as the person who had the privilege of setting
out the truth about man and his universe for the very first time.
Where Descartes trod, others followed: Locke, Hume, and Kant
each offered their philosophies as new creations, constructed for
the first time on sound scientific principles.150
Descartes boldly proposed that, independent of past authorities, our own
reason can provide an antidote to our vulnerability to error. In the Meditations,
Descartes observes that our senses and dreams can deceive us into thinking
there are realities which are not there.151 But even if there were a supremely
powerful demon that deceives us as much as possible, still we must exist as
thinking things in order to be deceived. Descartes goes on to argue for the
existence of a perfect God who would not allow people to be systematically
deceived about the natural world. This does not mean that we cannot make
mistakes: errors occur, Descartes explains, because we do not restrain our
will to affirm or deny only those things which we understand.152 However, a
perfect God would not so make us that we are mistaken in our involuntary,

149
This is the main topic of the second book of The New Organon. Bacon shows how his
method of “true induction” applies to scientific investigation of the nature of heat by gathering
various tables of data in which heat is present, absent, or present in varying degrees.
150
Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy, Volume 3: Modern Philosophy (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 40.
151
René Descartes, “The Meditations,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume
II, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1984).
152

René Descartes, “The Meditations,“ Meditation IV.

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