LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 211

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

⤓ Download .txt · copy text

IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

innate beliefs about the nature of reality—such as our belief in the external
physical world and in other minds.
On the one hand, Descartes’ reasoning did make room for God, whom
Descartes viewed as the creator and continuing sustainer of the world.153 Yet,
on the other hand, his method assumes that reason can disclose the structure
of reality without the illumination of revelation or the regeneration of faith.
In the Meditations, Descartes’ main contribution to the foundations of science
was the idea that the essence of matter was extension in space. This led him to
think that the idea of a vacuum (empty space) was self-contradictory and that
all motion was by direct contact (mechanical causes) in a plenum packed with
matter. Unaided reason led Descartes to conclusions scientists now regard as
false (e.g., they acknowledge that vacuums exist and that neither gravitation
nor electromagnetism require a mechanical medium). Descartes’ limited reason was unable to disclose many marvelous things about the natural world
undreamed of in his philosophy.
But much more disturbing than the specific errors of specific modern
thinkers is the general tendency to suppose that reason can “go it alone.” Like
Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, modern man has attempted to sever
one of God’s greatest gifts, human reason, from its root in the divine reason.
The result is a lack of humility, an overreaching pride that supposes humans
can solve their various problems by themselves. What this neglects is that all
reasoning requires assumptions, and that its conclusions are only as good as
those assumptions permit. If our foundation is what seems indubitable to
fallen, finite reason, we are ignoring the clear light from above that discloses
reality from a vantage point unconditioned by finitude and sin. It is only by
starting with God’s revelation about the nature of creation, including ourselves and the nature of our sin, that we can hope to discern reality as it is.
As Jastram argues, we can learn an important lesson about the proper
role of human reason in science by reflecting on the Greek myth of Daedalus
and Icarus.154 Daedalus builds artificial wings of feathers, wax and string, and
urges his son Icarus to fly with him, cautioning him to find a path midway
between heaven and earth.155 But Icarus ignores the warning and flies too close
to the sun: the wax melts, the wings disintegrate, and Icarus plunges to his
death. The point of the story is not that humans should scorn their reason
and turn away from science. If this were right, then humans would never
have learned to build aircraft and space shuttles. Rather, Daedalus’ advice
to Icarus was to find a middle way for reason, one that allows investigation of
153
See the masterful analysis of Daniel Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1992).
154

Nathan Jastram, “Scientists Called to be Like God,” in Menuge, ed., Reading God’s World,
243–269, 264–266.
155

See the portion of Ovid’s retelling of the Greek myth in his Metamorphoses, quoted in
Nathan Jastram, “Scientists Called to be Like God,” 265.

new possibilities but does not, like the people of Babel (Gen. 11), attempt to
achieve godlike knowledge that is beyond our creaturely limitations. In other
words, our reason is sufficiently above nature that we can hope to understand
it well enough to be its stewards, but it is sufficiently below God that it cannot
achieve the absolute certainty of an omniscient God. As the great Jesuit historian and theologian of science Stanley Jaki argued, this middle road gives
just the right balance of confidence and humility to support sound scientific
investigation.156 It is neither so timid that science seems beyond our ability,
nor so proud that it promotes hubris, claiming that science provides the ultimate answers that are God’s alone.

4. The Newtonian world machine
Descartes hoped that his mechanical natural world still left God in
charge as the primary cause of motion.157 Likewise, Isaac Newton (1643–1727)
believed that his physics captured the motions of the planets but did not
explain their wise arrangement in a stable solar system. He said in the General
Scholium: “This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets could not
have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful
Being.”158 As we will see, a great irony of history is that Newton, who was
devoutly religious, developed his physics in such a way as to refute materialism and make room for God, yet what was later called “the Newtonian world
machine” appeared to be a closed, autonomous, materialistic system in which
even God could not intervene.159
Like Robert Boyle, Newton believed in both mechanical causes (which
require the contact of particles) and active principles which could operate
without any such medium. 160 Newton rejected the Cartesian paradigm
according to which all causation is by contact because it supported the materialism of Thomas Hobbes and seemed to lead inevitably to atheism. He boldly
proposed that the force of gravitation was an active power which could act
across empty space with no mechanical medium. He was careful to say that
gravity in no way excluded God’s governance of the universe: on the contrary, gravity was itself a means by which God controlled the phenomena.161
156
Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God, cited in Jastram, “Scientists Called to
Be Like God,” 267.
157
This case is well made by Daniel Garber in chapter 9 of his Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. While some of Descartes’ ideas may have encouraged deism, Garber shows that Descartes
himself was far from deism, believing that it was only because of God’s continuing, sustaining
influence that the cosmos remained in existence moment by moment.
158
“General Scholium,” in eds. Timothy McGrew, Marc Alspector-Kelly and Fritz Allhoff,
Philosophy of Science: an Historical Anthology (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 177.
159

See Pearcey and Thaxton, The Soul of Science, chapter 4.

160

Ibid., 89–90.

161

Ibid., 90.

61

62

When he said hypotheses non fingo (I feign no hypotheses), he intended that
gravity was simply a postulate that could be used to account for the relative motions of bodies and was not an ultimate explanation for the motions
observed. In other words, gravity was proposed as a means by which God
controlled those motions. Indeed, Newton also expressed an early version of
the fine-tuning argument, because he realized that the masses and velocities
of the heavenly bodies in the solar system were finely tuned to support a
stable system.162 While his universal laws of motion explained many things,
they did not explain the specific value of the gravitational constant, and he
was aware that a significant increase or decrease in that constant would cause
the solar system either to collapse or to fly apart.

the primary qualities of matter, but matter itself does not have the secondary
qualities. In other words, most of what human beings call “life”—the way
we experience things—is not the way things really are. Instead, we live in a
virtual reality of subjectivity that creates a barrier between us and the natural
world conceived as a world-machine devoid of subjectivity.165

As the Enlightenment progressed, the ideas of active principles and the
providential control of God were increasingly rejected. It did not help that
Newton made the mistaken suggestion that God’s periodic intervention
would be necessary to maintain the stability of the solar system because of
perturbations in planetary orbits. This view led him to be ridiculed by other
scientists and philosophers, who thought that Almighty God would not
design a cosmos that requires constant adjustments and tinkering.163 PierreSimone Laplace (1749–1827) showed that these perturbations were in fact
quite regular and did not lead to long-term instability or require intervention. This demonstration was later regarded as iconic of the ability of
physical systems to maintain themselves, and to reject appeals to special
divine providence as a “God of the gaps” fallacy, that argues erroneously
from our ignorance of a natural cause to the conclusion that there must be
a supernatural cause. At the same time, active principles were reinterpreted
as fundamental powers of matter itself, so that matter did not need a special
intermediary for God to govern it:

At the same time, a self-sufficient world does not seem to need God’s
presence and on-going guidance. In the 18th century, the French Encyclopedists—like Jean-Baptiste d’Alembert (1717–1783), Denis Diderot (1713–1784),
and Baron Paul-Henri d’Holbach (1723–1789)—used the Newtonian worldview to attack the “superstitions” of the past. By this they meant revealed
religion, arguing that autonomous reason had triumphed in disclosing an
autonomous nature. Some of the thinkers of this time, like François-Marie
Voltaire (1694–1778), embraced deism, believing that God could be known
from reason and nature alone. Voltaire held that God had created the world as
a vast clockwork system that ran on by itself and did not require, or allow, further intervention. Others, like d’Holbach, embraced full-fledged materialism
and atheism. As a result, reason was used to dismiss miracles as impossible,
pre-scientific ideas, and religious texts that included miraculous accounts
were subjected to historical criticism and assumed to contain legendary
material.

Matter came to be regarded as self-sufficient, and Newton’s
active powers were absorbed in the materialistic philosophy he
had hoped to refute. The irony is that this materialistic, mechanistic philosophy then came to be called the “Newtonian”
worldview.164

Despite their low view of revelation, at least those Enlightenment thinkers who were deists thought they had some good arguments for God’s
existence. They thought that a mechanical world that does not need God’s
constant intervention gave greater testimony to His wise craftsmanship.
Many people followed Descartes in holding that human beings clearly
transcend the physical world because they had souls. The subjectivity that
physical science could not find in the material world showed that we are
something more than a material being. So it seemed for a while that we had
good evidence in ourselves that there was something more than the Newtonian world machine. This could allow us to reconcile ideas like free will
and our moral responsibility to God’s laws with an otherwise impersonal
universe that was deterministic and amoral.

This brash attempt to reduce the natural world to matter in motion came
at a huge cost. Since the only properties of matter which could be studied by
natural science were impersonal ones—like the extension, location, figure
and motion of particles, the so-called “primary qualities”—the entire inner
mental life of people was excluded from scientific reality. The colors, sounds,
tastes, smells, and textures a person experiences were relegated to the subjective realm of “secondary qualities” that arise when our senses interact with

Deism, however, proved to be an unstable halfway house as naturalistic
thinking expanded its domain.166 In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume (1711–1776) cast doubt on any attempt to argue from the
character of the natural world to the nature of deity. For example, if we argue

162

Ibid., 91.

163

Ibid.

164

Ibid., 92.

211

5. The rise of Naturalism

165
For a well-known critique of this view, see C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York:
Macmillan, 1947).
166
On the rise of Enlightenment naturalism, see also the CTCR report, The Natural Knowledge
of God: In Christian Confession and Christian Witness, 21–24.

63

64

2016 Convention Workbook