Brooke Week 3: Mechanical Enlightenment

“The theme of Chapter IV is the mechanization of the natural world – that seventeenth century development which has often been seen as a decisive advance on organic models of the cosmos.”(p. 13)

“One of the many ironies in our story is that a model for the universe, which in the seventeenth century was used to affirm God’s sovereignty, was used by the deists of the eighteenth century in their attacks on established religion” (p. 13)

“Isaac Newton saw in the very laws he discovered a proof, not of an absentee clockmaker, but of God’s continued presence in the world” (p. 118)

“The basic postulate of the mechanical philosophies was that nature operates according to mechanical principles, the regularity of which can be expressed in the form of natural laws, ideally formulated in mathematical terms” (p. 119)

“This ability to create two worlds, to relate the real world to an idealized mathematical model, was one of the techniques that made modern science possible” (p. 121)

“For Bacon, as for Boyle and Newton after him, it was simply inconceivable that, from chance distribution and collision of atoms, a wolrd of such order could have been produced - and order that the progress of science was confirming rather than destroying” (p. 125)

“An event could be deemed a miracle if it was not explicable in terms of physical laws.” (p. 127)

“He was not bound by any kind of logical necessity, nor by the laws of nature, for they were simply expressions of the way He normally chose to act.” (p. 134)

“Newton’s conviction that “God was everywhere from eternity” had implications for how space and time were to be conceived. They, too, had become absolute rather than relative contructs. For DesCartes there had been no space without matter; for Newton there was no space without God.” (p. 137)

"It was often said that the test of a good Cartesian was whether he would kick his dog." (p. 141)



“Chapter V takes us into the eighteenth century and into that period of the “Enlightenment” when the sciences were hailed as instruments of progress and when institutionalized religion, especially in Catholic countries, was vilified for its superstition and priestcraft.” (p. 13)

“It was often not the natural philosophers themselves, but thinkers with a social or political ax to grind, who transformed the sciences into a secularizing force.” (p. 13)

“If scientific knowledge derived from reflection on ideas that arose ultimately from sense experience, it was tempting to generalize and say that no other mode of knowing was possible” (p. 154)

“An antipathy to voluntarist theologies is evident in Leibniz’s remark that a secure foundation for law is to be found not so much in the divine will as in His intellect, not so much in His power as in His wisdom.” (p. 161)

“Miracles, Leibniz insisted, were to supply the needs of grace not to remedy second rate clockwork.” (p. 162)

“Priestley makes a fascinating study because he personified a set of values that allowed the integration of scientific and industrial progress into a process theology, which promised the eventual triumph of rational Christianity. Progress in science was to be “the means under God of extirpating all error and prejudice, and of putting and end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion as well as science.”” (p. 180)

“That the Christian religion could be given a rational defense became one of Hume’s principal targets. He did not deny that the universe must have a cause. The question was whether anything could be known about it.” (p. 182)

“The gist of it was that no testimony was sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony was such that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact that it purported to establish. Defining a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature, Hume insisted that there must be a strong antecedent probability against its having occurred. Human testimony, however, was know to be capricious and corruptible” (p. 184)

"He (Wesley) stressed, as before, that his aim was not to account for things, only to describe them." (p. 191)

"The lesson that Wesley's many readers would have absorbed was that a science of nature, not bedeviled by arrogant theorizing, could offer rational support for Christian piety - revealing, as it appeared to do, a marvelous organization and adaptation within the created order." (p. 191)

Brooke Week 4 : Natural Theology and The Science of History

So we complete our time in Brooke who takes us from Pre-history to Modernity. We are now able to agree with Solomon that "there is no new thing under the Sun" but as applied to Science and Faith. We started this section by discussing how a theistic person would view a lightening rod as a challenge to God's sovereignty and complete it with the largely duelist view of a modern, complementary worldview where the developments of Science do not impact issues of faith.

In this week, we start with how the modern worldview provides a completely different historical narrative from the Universe to the mundane. To show how this works we start with a couple of simple questions:

1) If a strict Baconian looks at the following photo as the only evidence for humanity what would that scientist be able to say?

1) If a Cartesian looks at the following photo as the only evidence for humanity what would that scientist be able to say?

We discovered of course that Baconians have a very limited ability to see the obvious. If we then extend this principle to the Universe and the message written for us in the stars then what do we see? Well, this is the Universe as we see it.

If we allow a Cartesian analysis of what we see then we can categorize the stars according to size and history.

Leading us to conclude that if our Sun behaves in any way like the stars in the Universe that are the same size then this is not only the history of our Sun but its future as well. What is amazing in this is that if this model is correct then to form a golf atom in a wedding band the atom would have to have been fused in the heart of one star. That star would have to explode and turn to dust then return to the heart of a second star which then uses it as fuel to form the gold atom and then that star explodes to dust that eventually got collected up into the ball of space debris that formed our Earth. At least two stars. Makes you wonder.

Another thing that makes you wonder is that our view of the Universe is based on what we can see. The fact is that stars closer to us block the view of stars that are farther away. So one year the Hubble Space Telescope was trained on a tiny spot of night sky that was apparently dark. What they discovered was that the tiny black spot was a window past the local stars to the farther stars and this famous photo was collected. It is important to note that the image did not see stars but galaxies of millions, billions, trillions of stars ... all in a window the size of a grain of sand in the night sky.



A cartoonist saw this discovery in this way ...

From My Pictures

And so we see how modern science tells us a history of the universe and the Earth and our job as scientists and theists is to not only understand this information but to develop a worldview that integrates it.

And so we consider how people just like us tried to do this as the world changed under their feet 100 years ago at the beginning of the Modern Era ...

Chapter 6: The Fortunes and Functions of Natural Theology
“The object of the chapter is to uncover some of the reasons why this integration of science and religion proved so viable, despite the existence of trenchant critiques. We shall also consider the extent to which a commitment to natural theology affected the scientific enterprise and the extent to which advances in science affected the plausibility of arguments from design. ” (p. 15)

“The idea that divine wisdom could be discerned in nature was attractive in different ways, both to Christian apologists and to deists. Christians found the argument useful in their dialogues with unbelief. It seemed to offer independent proof of a God who they believed had also revealed Himself in the person of Christ. On the other hand, Deists also had reasons for promoting the design argument. The more that could be known of God through rational inference the less perhaps it was necessary to refer to revelation at all” (p. 193)

“For Calvin, any knowledge of God inferred from nature would be distorted, the defective product of a dimmed and fallen intellect. The image could only be rectified by reading nature through the spectacles of Scripture” (p. 195)

“Natural theology flourished in England not because of a peculiar English mentality but because there were social and political circumstances that gave the English Enlightenment a distinctive character” (p. 200)

“… according to Kant, was that no matter how much wise artistry might be displayed in the world, it could never demonstrate the moral wisdom that had to be predicated of God” (p. 205)

“On one level, natural theology was not so much destroyed by science as eased out of scientific culture by a growing irrelevance.” (p. 219)

“Whewell continued to argue that the best explanation for the mind’s capacity to discover scientific truth was that it had been designed for the purpose. As priest and preacher, however he stressed that the way back to God was not through rational considerations. For one thing, that would leave God out of the conversion process; for another it would take insufficient account of the fact that design arguments were really only compelling to those that already believed.” (p. 224)

Chapter 7: Visions of the Past: Religious Belief and the Historical Sciences
“The assumptions made in reconstructing the past were often highly controversial even among naturalists themselves. We shall therefore stress the competition between rival scenarios, in which the political and religious preferences sometimes constituted a hidden agenda. Although there were countless attempts to harmonize these disturbing vistas with biblical texts, they were eventually abandoned – at least among academic theologians – as the methods of historical research were brought to bear on questions of biblical authorship” (p. 14)

“With the emergence of more sophisticated historical scholarship, particularly in Germany, it had already become clear to many Christian intellectuals that adherence to the literal inerrancy of Scripture was no way to present the credentials of Christianity to the modern world.” (p. 231)

“The science of history had created a watershed. One set of presuppositions took one toward a more human, but historically elusive Christ. The other – more traditional – allowed the retention of the Christ of faith, but at the cost of severing ones ties with what Strauss called “our modern world”” (p. 270)

Brooke Week 2: Revolution and Reformation

We looked at Chapters 2 and 3 of Brooke last week and focused on the near co-incident hinges of history called the Scientific Revolution and The Reformation. There were a few notable quotes:

"In Chapter II we address a specific historical problem: The interpretation of those shifts in the understanding of nature that, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, added up to what traditionally been called the Scientific Revolution." (p. 12)

"While it is true that investigations into nature were often subordinate to religious concerns in the late medieval period, it would be mis-leading to imply that they were bound together in am indissoluble complex until they were prized apart in the seventeenth century" (p. 12)

"It is even possible to argue that the scientific revolution saw an unprecedented fusion of science with theology, resulting in more secular forms of piety" (p. 53)

"A reverence for antiquity, though an appropriate stance for theology, was inappropriate for natural philosophy where reason and the senses held sway" (p. 56)

"Strictly speaking, it was impossible to effect a fusion of Christianity with Aristotle - as Aquinas was well aware. In selecting those facets of Aristotle's teaching that he considered illuminating, he was guided by the demands of his faith" (p. 60)

"The problem is, however, that real history rarely conforms to later stereotypes." (p. 64)

"Protestant critics, looking for a religion denuded of magic, would enlist the Bible on their side" (p. 71)

"The search for signs of God in nature had often been based on the assumption that the two books had been written in essentially the same language." (p. 77)

"They imply an earlier fusion, when it is more accurate to speak of subordination. And they imply divorce when what was achieved in the seventeenth century was a differentiation often conducted on theological grounds" (p. 81)

"In Chapter III we raise the question whether parallels can be drawn between the the reform of learning through experimental science and the reform of religion that occurred through the Protestant Reformation" (p. 12)

"While there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that certain Protestant societies were more tolerant toward new scientific learning, the difficulties that arise in testing such generalizations can be formidable." (p. 12)

"If Protestantism was more conducive that Catholicism to the expansion of science, one would expect this to manifest itself in a greater receptivity toward new and controversial ideas" (p. 83)

"True wisdom recognised the limitations of knowledge" (p. 87)

"Calvin's theology, no less than Luther's, illustrates that same capacity within Christianity for self-criticism and renewal" (p. 95)

"Whereas academic philosophers with a vested interest in preserving the Aristotelian world-picture were united against Galileo, there was no such unanimity among his clerical contacts, some of whom gave constructive advice." (p. 101)

"Put another way, puritan values helped to create an audience receptive to programs for the improvement of man's estate." (p. 111)

"The idea of a correlation between a latitudinarian and a scientific mentality can be appealing. They could be bound together by the belief, found in Bacon, that religious controversies were an impediment to science. There could be a suspicion of dogma, whether religious or scientific." (p. 115)

Tulips in My Stained Glass Window

In last weeks lecture we got to talking about tulips. I don't know how students that have taken religious studies courses from Calvinists would miss this. Many churches have tulips or stylized tulips in their stained glass windows




Why would they have tulip motifs in their stained glass windows? Well the people at The Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics offers us the following:

"This system of theology was reaffirmed by the Synod of Dordt in 1619 as the doctrine of salvation contained in the Holy Scriptures. The system was at that time formulated into "five points" in answer to the unscriptural five points submitted by the Arminians to the Church of Holland in 1610. "

The five points are:

Total Depravity
Unconditional Election
Limited Atonement
Irrisistible Grace
Perseverance of the Saints

So the tulips in your church's stained glass windows are there as a mnemonic to remind you that once upon a time your church was Calvinist (or it still is). 'Nough said.