Natural Science and Theology

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Jeffrey Thayne

I have been working on a project that delineates the theological roots of the natural sciences. The modern sciences believe that the world is composed entirely of inert matter, and that everything we observe can be accounted for by matter interacting according to strict mathematical laws. This philosophy can be described as materialism and the mechanical philosophy of nature. Materialists deny the existence of any kind of being that cannot be explained by an account of the interactions of matter in motion, and thus deny the existence of God or His relevance in studying the natural world.

Many believe that this is because the scientific method has led us to these conclusions; however, it seems clear now that this philosophy has its roots in Deism, the belief that although God was the original creator of the universe, the First Mover, since that time He has not interacted with the world. According to Deists, all processes of the natural world have occurred autonomously and independent of God since the moment of creation. Deists habitually deny the possibility or relevance of divine interaction in the world, including miracles. Thus, David Griffin may be right when he says, “If there ever is to be a harmony between science and religion, the attachment of the scientific community to the mechanistic worldview will have to be transcended.”

Here is an excerpt from the project:

Many of the assumptions of materialism and mechanism are originally theologically motivated. Griffin (2000) explains, “Whereas we had previously assumed that the mechanistic view of nature was adopted primarily for rational-empirical reason, we have now learned that it was adopted primarily for sociological and theological reasons” (p. 133). For example, Epicurus, an early Greek materialist, believed that the chief cause of human disturbance was a belief in an interventionist God and in the afterlife. Materialism, he said, rid human beings of this disturbance; he said: “If our suspicions about heavenly phenomena and about death did not trouble us at all and were never anything to us, … then we would have no need of natural science” (Wiker, 2002, p. 33). He claimed that the world is composed exclusively of matter, and that all order in the world can be accounted for in terms of the random interactions of uncreated matter. If the material universe was eternal and non-contingent, and had at least some powers of self-organization (random processes), there was “no need of invoking a god as the designer of the complex dance of the stars and planets; a purely material account [would] be sufficient” (Wiker, 2002, p. 46).

Also, Griffin explains that the mechanical philosophy of nature was championed by some philosophers precisely because they could use it as an argument for the necessity of a metaphysical God; Griffin quotes Boyle, a leader in the move towards the mechanistic worldview; he said, “Boyle rejected, furthermore, the view, common to spiritualists and Aristotelians, that creatures have ‘internal principles of motion,’ saying that these ‘vulgar’ views make nature ‘almost divine’” (2000, p. 115). In order to preserve what Griffin called “false metaphysical compliments” towards God, many of these philosophers dichotomized the physical from the divine more fully than ever before. Whatever properties God possessed, such as the capacity for independent action or self-motion, was precisely what matter lacked. Thus, in reaction to movements positing magical or “occult” powers to the physical world, scholars and philosophers searched for a way to preserve God’s exclusive organizational power. In this climate, Griffin explains, the “idea of matter as inert could seem a godsend” (2000, p. 119). Griffin explains that from this point of view,

creatures do not need the power to move themselves, because an external, omnipotent agent can do everything directly. We must distinguish clearly between matter, on the one hand, and the laws of motion, on the other, realizing that the latter exist only as imposed by God. … In short, the world’s order contains no inherent rationality to be discovered; it is completely imposed by the arbitrary fiat of God. … Only this view, Boyle held, respects the absolute difference between the Creator and the created and reflects the perfect transcendence, freedom, and power of the former. (p. 115)

The intellectual projects of those who were trying to exclude God in their philosophy and those who were trying to preserve his metaphysical transcendence converged into a philosophy known as Deism. The Epicurean worldview was revived during the modern era and influenced the views of many Deists (including Thomas Jefferson, who had read Epicurus in the original language; Wiker 2002, p. 207). While Deists believed that God was the original motivator, all processes since the creation happen autonomously, and could therefore be studied without reference to divine intervention. As Wiker explains, “In Deism, then, the living Logos was replaced by the laws of motion as that which defined the order of existence” (2002, p. 205). The arbitrary fiat of God described by Boyle became the inherent order of the natural world that, while imposed originally by God in the act of creation, is autonomous and independent of God’s influence. Wiker (2002) explains:

Deism therefore became the religion of the new view of nature; that is, it was the religion that a closed system of nature would allow. As with Epicurus, the Divine was both distant and impotent to interfere with nature. The characteristic animosity of Deism toward Christianity … was rooted in the Epicurean animosity to an interfering, miracle-performing deity. Simply put, Deism was the form religion had to take in a Newtonian cosmos; and one sign that God did not ultimately belong in the system was the all too easy slide of Deism in the eighteenth century into materialist atheism in the nineteenth. (p. 205)

Thus, we see that the materialistic and mechanistic philosophy of nature led to deism, which is marked by a distaste for contemporary divine intervention in the physical world. C. S. Lewis (1947) explains, “What the Naturalist believes is that the ultimate Fact, the thing you can’t go behind, is a vast process in space and time which is going on of its own accord” (p. 8), independent of divine or human action. Brent Slife continues this thought: “The world is thought to occur as if its operation happens autonomously, as a result of its own independent processes. … natural laws and principles autonomously govern the many processes and events of the world—not God” (“Should We…”, p. 6). It is clear that mechanistic philosophies are not theologically unbiased; they have their origins deep in various threads of religious thought.

It is clear that the natural sciences have evolved over the ages in response to theological questions and concerns. I am not saying that the natural sciences are a religion; only that they present a particular theological worldview. Daniel Dennett (1995), for example, disputes the view that science is philosophically and theologically unbiased when he says:

Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on without examination. (p. 21)

We see in the mechanistic conception of science an example of the insights from Gadamer that Richard Williams summarizes:

Methods do not establish truth. Rather, presuppositions about truth—and the nature of the world—influence, and, therefore, end up instantiated in methods. Thus at some level and to some degree, any methods will reflect back to those who employ them something of the presumed nature of truth and the world that influenced their creation and deployment. (Williams, “A Modest Proposal…”, p. 3)

Many philosophers have demonstrated the the idea of science as a self-correcting enterprise, free from theological, ideological, and philosophical assumptions is historically and presently inaccurate. Any method we use in science will be affected by pre-empirical metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the world around us. As honest scientists, we must recognize and acknowledge this, and be fully aware and cognizant of the assumptions we bring to our research. We must also recognize the possibility of alternative assumptions. As Griffin explains,

If we find that the reigning orthodoxy within the scientific community is destructive, and if we find that this worldview has resulted largely from the influence of the Christian theology of an earlier century, then it is especially incumbent upon the theological community today to challenge this worldview. … What is clear now … is that if there ever is to be a harmony between science and religion, the attachment of the scientific community to the mechanistic worldview will have to be transcended” (pp. 110–132).

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