Arri Eisen and Gary Laderman - Science, Religion, and Society
New York: Routledge, 2007. – 888 p.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7656-8064-8
ISBN-10: 0-7656-8064-5 (set: he: alk. paper)
Today, our world requires us to accept the oneness of humanity. In the past, isolated communities could afford to think of each other as fundamentally separate. But nowadays, whatever happens in one region eventually has repercussions elsewhere. Within the context of the new interdependence that globalization has brought about, self-interest clearly lies in considering the interests of others.
Many of the conflicts and problems that challenge us today arise because we have lost sight of the common experience that binds us all together as a human family. We tend to forget that, despite our diversity of race, religion, ideology, and so forth, people share a basic wish for peace and happiness.
The very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very core of our being, we desire contentment. However, since we are not solely material creatures, it is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development alone. The key instead is to develop inner peace. To achieve it we need to nurture and cultivate such basic human qualities as love and compassion. Because human beings naturally possess diverse temperaments and interests, our different religious traditions emphasize different philosophies and modes of practice. However, perceiving forgiveness, patience, and compassion as practical qualities of great value, all religions counsel ways to cultivate them. Since the essence of these diverse religious traditions is to achieve our individual and collective benefit, it is crucial that we maintain harmony and mutual respect among them. I am convinced that religious differences should not be grounds for antagonism. Religion should rather be the basis for friendship, for brotherhood and sisterhood.
With the advent of science in the seventeenth century, spirituality suffered setbacks in that some religious traditions lost followers. Since then, many people have felt that science and spiritual matters are quite separate and have regarded them as contradictory, with no connection between them. However, with the ever-growing impact of science on our lives, religion and spirituality have a greater role to play in reminding us of our humanity and our responsibilities.
One of the dangers of science and technology is that, because of the sheer power they harness, we may disturb the natural balance of the world. On the other hand, one of the wonderful things about science and technology is that they bring such immediate satisfaction. Still, there is a risk that when we rely too much on the external achievements of science, we pay less attention to the need for corresponding inner growth. Confusion already abounds about how best we are to conduct ourselves in life. In the past, religion and ethics were closely intertwined. Now, many people, believing that science has disproved religion, make the further assumption that morality itself has been discredited.
We need to strike a balance. I believe that in the foreseeable future religion, historically the source of many of our societies’ values, will remain influential. However, the essential qualities we need are compassion and forgiveness. These are the qualities that form the basis of human survival. But it is compassion rather than religion that is important to us. Religion involves compassion, but compassion does not necessarily involve religion.
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Natural Theology, Deism, and Early Modern Science
Peter Harrison
One of the most far-reaching consequences of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was a crisis of authority that pervaded the whole of Western Christendom. The aftermath of the Reformation saw the development of an unprecedented diversity of religious beliefs and practices in Europe, along with destabilizing wars of religion and the vigorous persecution of religious minorities. In this context the need for a criterion of religious truth became particularly acute. During the medieval period, tradition, scripture, reason, and experience had all been acceptable sources of religious authority, although they were mediated by the magisterium of the Catholic Church. Following the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, serious challenges were issued to each of these long-established sources of authority. These challenges were underscored by new developments in the natural sciences. Copernican ideas and the revival of ancient atomism called into question long-standing scientific beliefs and prompted a reevaluation of the medieval understanding of the relationship between science and theology.
Reason and Revelation
Integral to early modern debates about the relative merits of the various sources of religious authority was the fundamental issue of the relationship between reason and revelation. Some thought that reason was the only impartial way to adjudicate between the mutually exclusive claims of various confessional groupings and to heal the deep-seated rifts that had shattered the religious unity of Europe. In its more extreme manifestations, the appeal to reason characterized that disparate group of individuals known as deists. But the appeal to reason raised significant questions about how truths of reason, including philosophical and scientific truths, could be related to truths of revelation—the latter usually being associated with the content of scriptures or, less commonly, truths known through personal religious experience.
An influential answer to this question had already been provided by Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274). Aquinas suggested that human reason, unaided by divine revelation, is capable of arriving at certain truths about God, such as his existence and his governance of the world. Only through divine revelation, however, could human beings become acquainted with such specifically Christian truths as the incarnation, the triune nature of God, and Christ’s atonement for human sin. Those things that could be known about God through reason alone were the province of what became known as “natural theology,” while truths divulged by divine revelation belonged to “revealed theology” (although Aquinas did not himself employ this terminology). Examples of the former were Aquinas’s celebrated “five ways”—five rational arguments for the existence of God—which include proofs based on the causal order of the world (the cosmological argument) and on the apparent design of the world (the teleological argument). In articulating these arguments, Aquinas drew on the science of Aristotle, in keeping with his view that pagan philosophy could make valid contributions to the enterprise of natural theology.
A third kind of argument, the ontological argument, first articulated by Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109), proposed that God existed because the idea of God existed. Aquinas rejected this kind of argument, in part because it was based on purely logical considerations and did not draw on observations of the natural world. Here again, Aquinas was relying on the Aristotelian view that genuine knowledge begins with the senses. Anselm’s ontological argument proved acceptable to other medieval philosophers such as Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308), however, and it is usually accorded a place within the scope of natural theology.
For Aquinas, natural theology provided a rational foundation on which the superstructure of revealed theology could rest. Revealed truths, appropriated by faith, complemented natural truths, grasped by reason. Moreover, while the content of revealed theology could not be known through the exercise of reason, it did not follow that truths of revelation had no rational support. Aquinas suggested that the truths of revealed theology were attested to by the authority of the church and, more importantly, received indirect support from miracles and prophecy. Thus readers of the gospels could have confidence in the veracity of Christ’s message because he had performed miracles and had confirmed prophecies made centuries before. The performance of miracles also signified the special status of saints.
The Thomist view of the relationship between natural and revealed theology did not go unchallenged during the Middle Ages. William of Occam (c. 1285–1349), for example, thought that the domains of nature and grace were rather more independent than Aquinas had thought them to be. But for the most part, the complementary nature of these two domains was generally accepted. This Thomist understanding also became the standard view in the early modern period. As philosopher and scientist René Descartes (1596–1650) observed: “some things are believed through faith alone—such as the mystery of the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the like. . . . other questions, while having to do with faith, can also be investigated by natural reason: among the latter, orthodox theologians usually count the questions of the existence of God.”
The notion that the “mysteries” of revealed theology received indirect support through miracles and prophecy was not neglected. Such figures as scientist Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) stressed the importance of these supernatural attestations. According to Boyle, the evidence of miracles is “little less than absolutely necessary to evince . . . that the Christian [religion] does really proceed from God.” Running parallel to the distinction between natural and revealed theology there developed the idea of two kinds of “evidences” for Christian beliefs. “Internal evidences” consisted of rational arguments for God’s existence; “external evidences” were related to arguments based on miracles and fulfilled prophecies.
Natural Theology, Design, and Natural Philosophy
One of the challenges faced by champions of the new science, or “natural philosophy” as it was then known, was to recast natural theology in ways that made it consistent with recent scientific discoveries. The “five ways” of Aquinas had been couched in terms of Aristotle’s science and relied on Aristotelian presuppositions. It was important for the legitimization of non-Aristotelian natural philosophy that it not be seen as undermining theological arguments that relied on Aristotelian premises. But specific doctrines of the new science appeared to conflict with traditional Christian views. Most notoriously, the Copernican hypothesis called into question the central place of human beings in the cosmos and seemed at odds with literal readings of scripture. Equally significant, the newly revived atomic or “corpuscular hypothesis” was traditionally associated with atheism. Advocates of these novel scientific views thus had to make the case for their compatibility with Christianity.
Several strategies were employed. Descartes argued that the whole of philosophy, including natural philosophy, was premised on the existence of God. Some of the arguments of natural theology were thus required to provide a foundation for natural philosophy. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) linked the reformation of natural philosophy to the reformation of religion, suggesting that the new science was a means of partially restoring to humanity a God-given dominion over nature. But far and away the most popular approach, in England in particular, was to argue that new scientific discoveries provided irrefutable evidence of divine design, and in a manner far superior to the older Aristotelian science. The natural sciences, it was claimed, provided an ever-increasing body of evidence that established beyond doubt that the world was the product of God’s wisdom and providential design. Robert Boyle encapsulated this approach in his Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (1664). The more we study the things of nature, he wrote, “the more Footsteps and Impressions we discover of the Perfections of their Creator; and our utmost Science can but give us a juster veneration of his Omniscience.” Isaac Newton (1642–1727) concurred with this judgment, observing in his magnum opus the Principia (1687) that “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.”
So convinced was Robert Boyle of the importance of a partnership between science and natural theology that he made provision in his will for the endowment of an annual series of eight lectures for the purpose of “proving the Christian Religion, against notorious Infidels, viz Atheists, Theists [i.e., Deists], Pagans, Jews and Mahometans.” Appropriately enough, the very first Boyle lecturer, Richard Bentley, employed Newton’s theory of gravitation as his central argument for the existence of God. Bentley also referred to the findings of a long list of scientists, including such leading naturalists as Marcello Malpighi, Francesco Redi, Jan Swammerdam, and Anton van Leeuwenhoek, all of whose work was cited as providing evidence of God’s wisdom in the creation. The precedent thus set, many subsequent Boyle lecturers used the empirical findings of natural history and natural philosophy to arrive at their theological conclusions. For the majority of its chief advocates, then, the new science was a most congenial partner for natural theology.
The increasing involvement of natural philosophers in the sphere of natural theology meant that to some extent those laboring within the sphere of natural science could regard themselves as theologians of a kind. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Robert Boyle, while engaged in quite different branches of science, regarded their activities as fundamentally religious and referred to themselves as “priests of nature.” According to Boyle, the new science was really a kind of “philosophical worship” of God. In a similar vein, Isaac Newton remarked in his Opticks (1730) that natural philosophy, properly pursued, would ultimately lead to the first cause—God. Sentiments such as these have led some historians to suggest that what distinguishes early modern natural philosophy from the naturalistic science that was later to emerge in the nineteenth century is the intrinsically religious orientation of the former.
One consequence of the close connection between natural science and natural theology was a restriction of the scope of natural theology to topics that fell within the domain of science, and natural history in particular. Because of this, the teleological argument for the existence of God, which was based on the observation of design in nature, displaced the more abstract ontological and cosmological arguments, which were not based on the scientific principle of induction. In time, virtually the whole domain of natural theology (what we could know about God through reason) was occupied by a single argument— the argument from design. This argument was incorporated into the explanatory framework of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural history and natural philosophy. Even the powerful criticisms of philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) had little impact on its popularity.
But by the nineteenth century, natural theology had become precariously reduced to the single argument that we can know of God’s existence because of the evidence of design in nature. Thus it was vulnerable when Charles Darwin (1809–1882) provided an alternative scientific explanation of organic adaptation. However, for the duration of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, natural science and natural theology formed such a powerful alliance that it was difficult to see where the boundary between them lay.
Deism and Early Modern Science
It is sometimes assumed that the fruitful union between science and natural theology pushed revealed theology into the background. A common view is that the leading figures of early modern science—Descartes, Boyle, and Newton —promoted a deistic understanding of God’s relation to the cosmos: the great designer, having created this vast clockwork system, simply left it to run, happy in the knowledge that it would be sustained by the inviolable laws of nature. Science, it is argued, brought about a disenchantment of the world, and the idea of an intervening deity—a God who would reveal himself in the midst of mundane reality—simply became untenable.
There is an element of truth in this common view. Descartes introduced the idea of a world governed by divinely imposed laws—a view that was subsequently taken up by Newton and others. If God controlled the operations of nature through an imposition of unchanging laws—and Descartes had suggested that this necessarily followed from the immutability of God—then it was a relatively small step to the claim that nature operated independently, according to its own intrinsic principles. It must be pointed out that most early modern understandings of natural laws, including those of Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, still called for God’s constant activity in order to preserve the cosmos and to sustain its complex motions. Newton seemed to argue at one point that the force of gravity was nothing other than God’s constant efficacious willing, and he vehemently denied that gravity was an intrinsic property of matter. However, there was nothing to stop his successors from adopting a different view. If early modern natural philosophers did not themselves actively promote deism, it might be said that they indirectly contributed to it.
A related issue concerned miracles and their place in a clockwork cosmos. If God had meticulously planned a particular order for the natural world, then any subsequent intervention in that order would imply some deficiency in the original plan. The very notion of a law of nature seems to imply that there are no exceptions. But if there are no exceptions to laws of nature, there can be no miracles, no revelatory interventions into the natural order by God, and no external evidences to support the Christian revelation.
It has been suggested that early modern natural philosophers made a contribution to the disenchantment or desacralization of the world. But the agents they dispelled from nature were the intelligences and immanent tendencies (Aristotle’s “unmoved movers”) of Aristotelian science, and not the Christian God. Indeed, the expulsion from the world of these intrinsic powers made possible the reimposition of God’s direct control of nature, albeit a control mediated for the most part by regular laws. Arguably, a far more significant source of desacralization was the Protestant Reformation, with its “this world” orientation, its iconoclasm, its critical stance toward the sacraments and the cult of saints, and its denial of contemporary miracles. Some historians argue that Protestantism promoted the emergence of modern science by creating space in the material world for naturalistic explanation.
A more significant deficiency in the view that attributes the emergence of deism to modern science relates to a confusion about what deism actually is. The vast majority of seventeenth-century deists were motivated by religious rather than scientific considerations and had only a peripheral interest in such philosophical issues as laws of nature and the divine governance of the world. It is important to observe a distinction between two senses of the term deism —the metaphysical and the historical. In the broader, metaphysical sense, deism refers to the idea of an absentee God. But deism is also used in a narrower sense, to describe a particular tendency of early modern thought that originated in England and became prominent in Enlightenment Europe.
Historical deists had a loosely shared commitment to a simple and minimalist religious creed based on reason. In their view, the putative truths of revealed theology were a perennial source of religious conflict because they lay beyond the bounds of human reason and were thus not amenable to rational adjudication. Religious concord, in their view, could be achieved only if the dispute-engendering claims of revealed theology were set aside. True religion, to paraphrase the prominent English deist John Toland (1670–1722), included nothing that was “contrary to reason,” nor even “above reason.” Many deists contended that the first religion of the human race had been a universal religion of reason, which in all cultures and periods of history had been corrupted by the mysterious additions of priests and politicians.
It might be thought that with their emphasis on the sufficiency of natural theology, deists would draw considerable comfort from the doctrines of natural philosophy. As it turned out, in England at least, the most prominent natural philosophers were vehement opponents of the deists. Robert Boyle thus insisted that the Christian revelation was attested to by miracles and prophecies, and that God could intervene at will in his creation. One of the chief groups against whom the Boyle lectures were to be directed were “theists,” by which Boyle meant deists. Newton believed that the Christian scriptures contained important revelatory truths. As for miracles, he asserted that at some future time, God would intervene in the natural order to correct irregularities in the orbits of planets. This prompted German philosopher G.W. Leibniz (1646–1716) to suggest that Newton’s intervening deity was like an incompetent watchmaker, compelled to make running repairs in his flawed productions.
The controversy between Newton and Leibniz betrays something of the difference between England and the Continent on these issues. The relationship between natural philosophy and deism in France, for example, took a different trajectory than it had in England. Here it is possible to discern a link between metaphysical deism and natural philosophy. Descartes’s insistence on the immutability of God not only guaranteed the constancy of the laws of nature but also made additional divine activity in the world superfluous. By invoking divine immutability, Descartes paradoxically succeeded in liberating natural philosophy from a reliance on theistic explanations. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) complained that Descartes would have liked to dispense with God but needed him to set the world in motion. Even when Descartes ventured into the sphere of natural theology, he invoked the ontological rather than the teleological argument for God’s existence, attesting to his desire to keep the realms of religion and science distinct. The ontological argument is the only traditional proof that does not rely on some claim about the nature of the empirical world.
Descartes apparently recognized that the admission of God as the cause of an otherwise inexplicable phenomenon would compromise the integrity of scientific explanation. Descartes supposed, in his hypothetical account of the cosmos, “that God will never perform any miracle.” This naturalistic stance eventually ceased to be a methodological assumption and became a metaphysical commitment.
In sum, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England witnessed the development of a mostly congenial relationship between science and natural theology. Minimalist deist creeds could draw little support from the sciences, which were usually allied with religious orthodoxy. On the Continent, a different pattern emerged. In eighteenth-century France, a more conservative religious establishment opposed the forces of reason and enlightenment. In France, a rationalist belief in the constancy of nature meshed more neatly with metaphysical deism. The nineteenth century brought major changes to the alliance between science and natural theology that had flourished in England. A once fruitful partnership was subjected to increasing pressures from the growing professionalization of science, the questioning of traditional patterns of belief from within the religious establishment itself, and the challenge to the idea of design presented by the theory of natural selection.
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