This article from the Onion cracked me up. Nick sent it to me over a year ago, but I didn’t get around to posting about it.
I like this quote:
Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."
I’m not sure if the quote from Newton is correct, but if it is, he certainly would have been alluding to a higher power. Newton, and many people who took up his ideas, believed that gravity was evidence of God’s providence. One particularly famous example of this view is the Boyle Lectures given by Richard Bentley in 1692; so famous, in fact, that several historians of science see this as the beginning of an intimate connection between Anglican theology, hierarchical views on social order and Newtonian natural philosophy.*
Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.
Physics based on the Bible? This is not as bizarre as it sounds. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there were people who attempted to construct explanations of natural events based on literal readings of Scripture. Thomas Burnet, for example, developed a “Sacred Theory of the Earth” which used Descartes’ philosophy to explain Noah’s flood and the final destruction of the world. William Whiston worked out a similar account using Newtonianism instead of Cartesianism. John Hutchinson, who thought that Newtonianism would lead to atheism, wrote a book called “Moses’ Principia” – an entire system of natural philosophy based on the Genesis account of creation.*
This all sounds like nonsense to us today, with our firm beliefs about the proper roles of religion and science, but things were not so clear-cut back then. I particularly like Robert Boyle’s thoughts on the topic. He suggested that studying the natural world is a type of philosophical worship of God. He described the natural philosopher (or a scientist today, perhaps) as a priest of nature, explaining the book of God’s works to his fellow Christians.
Similarly, I think some scientists today would view their work as understanding God’s creation better – for God’s glory, not for chasing God out of the universe. But I think the most important thing about this historical stuff is that is shows that the relationship between science and religion has not always been about conflict, no matter what some scholars and airport novelists might want us to believe.
*Note: I think all this is correct, but I’m speaking very generally and not constructing a well-researched and referenced argument!
2 comments:
I must say, I agree with this "Intelligent Falling" theory.
Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down...
Absolutely! The so-called "law of gravity" doesn't explain anything - it is merely descriptive.
Anyway, there was a discussion on Alistair.adversaria not that long ago on this sort of thing - see here. James Jordan was cited:
Jordan suggests that, instead of thinking in terms of an impersonal ‘force of gravity’, we think of ‘gravity-angels’ who move objects according to the ‘laws of gravity’ that God has established.
Hmm. It was a satire, you know.
The 'law of gravity' is descriptive, but also predictive, and that's why it's useful.
This angel idea is intriguing. It does offer an interesting perspective on theodicy, but whether God is acting in nature or angels are, science will still be the same. The job of science is to provide natural explanations for events. A scientific naturalist such as Dawkins might argue that this is all there is, but a Christian scientist can view science as an attempt to understand how God created the world and continues to act in it.
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