The Case for God (36 page)
Authors: Karen Armstrong
Indeed, Newton explained in a later work, the discussion of God was a matter of priority in science:
The main Business of natural Philosophy is to argue from Phaenomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects, till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the Mechanism of the World, but chiefly to resolve these and such like Questions.
47
In a letter to the classicist Richard Bentley (1662–1742), Newton confessed that from the outset he had hoped to provide a scientific proof for God’s existence. “When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme, I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the beleife in a Deity and nothing can rejoyce me more then to find it usefull for that purpose.”
48
When he had considered the mathematical balance of the solar system, he was “forced to ascribe it to ye counsel and contrivance of a voluntary Agent,” who was obviously “very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry.”
49
Gravity could not explain everything. It “may put ye planets into motion but without ye divine powers, it could never put them into such Circulating
motion as they have about ye sun.”
50
Gravity could not account for the superb design of the cosmos. The earth rotated on its axis every day at a speed of about a thousand miles an hour at the equator; if this speed were reduced to a hundred miles per hour, day and night would be ten times as long, the heat of the sun would shrivel vegetation by day, and everything would freeze during the long nights. The motions that Newton had observed were conserved by inertial force, but originally they “must have required a divine power to impress them.”
51
At a stroke, Newton overturned centuries of Christian tradition. Hitherto leading theologians had argued that the creation could tell us nothing about God; indeed, it proved to us that God was unknowable. Thomas Aquinas’s “five ways” had shown that though one could prove that “what all men call God” had brought something out of nothing, it was impossible to know what God was. But Newton had no doubt that his Universal Mechanics could explain all God’s attributes. The Oxford orientalist Edward Pococke (1604–91) had told him that the Latin
deus
was derived from the Arabic
du
(“lord”).
52
In the laws of gravity that held the universe together, Newton saw evidence of this divine “dominion”
(dominatio)
, the overwhelming force that masters and controls the cosmos. It was the fundamental divine attribute: “It is the dominion of a spiritual being that constitutes a God.”
53
But this domineering God was very different from Luria’s self-emptying En Sof or the kenotic God of the Trinity. Having established “Dominion” as the divine quality par excellence, it was possible to infer other attributes. A study of the universe proved that the God who created it must have intelligence, perfection, eternity, infinity, omniscience, and omnipotence: “That is, he continues from age to age, and is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things and he knows what happens and what is able to happen.”
54
God had been reduced to a scientific explanation and given a clearly definable function in the cosmos. God was actually “omnipresent not
virtually
only but
substantially”
in the universe, acting on matter in the same way as the will acts on the body.
55
By 1704, Newton had come to believe that all the animating forces of nature were physical manifestations of this divine presence, though he expressed this conviction only in private to close friends.
56
Not a single natural power worked independently of God. God was immediately present in the laws that
he had devised; gravity was not simply a force of nature but the activity of God himself, he explained to Bentley. Gravity was the “Agent acting constantly according to certain laws that makes bodies move
as though
they attract each other.”
57
Did blind chance know that there was light, and what was its refraction, and fit the eyes of all creatures after the most conscious manner, to make use of it? These, and such like considerations, always have and ever will prevail with mankind, to believe that there is a Being who made all things, and has all things in his power and who is therefore to be feared.
58
God’s existence was now a rational consequence of the world’s intricate design.
Newton was convinced that this “beleife,” a word that he habitually used in its modern sense, had prompted the primordial religion of humanity. While he was working on the
Principia
, he began to write a treatise entitled
The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology
, which argued that Noah had founded a faith based on the rational contemplation of nature. There had been no revealed scriptures, no miracles, and no mysteries.
59
Noah and his sons had worshipped in temples that were replicas of the heliocentric universe and taught them to see nature itself as “the true Temple of ye great God they worshipped.” This primordial faith had been “the true religion till ye nations corrupted it.” Science was the
only
means of arriving at a proper understanding of the sacred: “For there is no way (with out revelation)
*
to come to ye knowledge of a Deity but by ye frame of nature.”
60
Scientific rationalism, therefore, was what Newton called the “fundamental religion.” But it had been corrupted with “Monstrous Legends, false miracles, veneration of reliques, charmes, ye doctrine of Ghosts or Daemons, and their intercession, invocation & worship and other such heathen superstitions.”
61
Newton was particularly incensed by the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, which, he argued, had been foisted on the faithful by Athanasius and other unscrupulous fourth-century theologians.
Thomas Aquinas’s contemplation of the cosmos had revealed the existence of a mystery. But Newton hated mystery, which he equated with sheer irrationality: “‘Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion,” he wrote irritably, “ever to be fond of mysteries & for that reason to like best what they understand least.”
62
It was positively dangerous to describe God as a mystery, because this “conduces to the rejection of his existence. It is of concern to theologians that the conception [of God] be made as easy and as agreeable as possible, so as not to be exposed to cavils and thereby called into question.”
63
For the early modern rationalist, truth could not be obscure, so the God that was Truth must be as rational and plausible as any other fact of life.
Newton’s scientific theology quickly became central to the campaign against “atheism.” During these anxious years, people saw “atheists” everywhere, but they were still using the term to describe anybody they disapproved of, regardless of his or her beliefs; “atheism” thus functioned as an image of deviancy that helped people to place themselves on the shifting moral spectrum of early modernity.
64
In the 1690s, an “atheist” could be recognized by his drunkenness, fornication, or unsound politics. It was not yet possible to sustain unbelief. Certainly people experienced doubts from time to time. John Bunyan (1628–88) described the “storms,” “flouds of Blasphemies,” “confusion and astonishment” that descended on him when he wondered “whether there were in truth a God or no.”
65
But it was wellnigh impossible to maintain such skepticism on a permanent basis, because the conceptual difficulties were insurmountable.
66
The doubter would find no support in the most advanced thought of the time, which insisted that the natural laws brilliantly uncovered by the scientists required a Lawgiver.
67
Until there was a body of cogent reasons, each based on another cluster of scientifically verified truths, outright atheistic denial could only be a personal whim or passing impulse.
But the fear of “atheism” persisted, and when theologians tried to counter the “heresies” of Spinoza or the Levelers, they turned instinctively to the new scientific rationalism. The French priest and philosopher Nicholas de Malebranche (1638–1715) based his anti-atheistic riposte on Descartes. Others followed Newton. The Irish physicist and chemist Robert Boyle (1627–91), founding member of
the Royal Society, was convinced that the intricate motions of the mechanistic universe proved the existence of a divine Engineer. He commissioned a series of lectures designed to counter atheism and superstition by presenting the public with the discoveries of the new science. Christian leaders, such as John Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury (1630–94), were eager to embrace this scientific religion, because they regarded reason as the most reliable path to truth. The Boyle lecturers were all ardent Newtonians, and Newton himself gave his support to the venture.
68
In his Boyle lectures, Richard Bentley argued that the efficient machinery of the cosmos required an all-powerful and wholly benign Designer. Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), who delivered the lectures in 1704, maintained that “almost everything in the World demonstrates to us this great Truth; and affords undeniable Arguments, to prove that the World and all Things therein, are the Effects of an Intelligent and Knowing Cause.”
69
Only mathematics and science could counter the arguments of atheists like Spinoza, so there could only be “One only Method or Continued Thread of Arguing.”
70
Newton’s Universal Mechanics had proved what the scriptures had long maintained: “He is the Great One, above all his works, the awe-inspiring Lord, stupendously great.”
71
Newton had finally refuted those skeptics who believed that “all the Arguments of Nature are on the side of Atheism and Irreligion.”
72
Largely as a result of his Boyle lectures, which made a huge impression, Clarke was hailed as the most important theologian of the day. His God was tangible: “There is no such thing as what men call the course of nature or the power of nature. [It] is nothing else but the will of God producing certain effects in a continued regular, constant and uniform manner.”
73
God had become a mere force of nature. Theology had thrown itself on the mercy of science. At the time this seemed a good idea. After the disaster of the Thirty Years’ War, a rational ideology that could control the dangerous turbulence of early modern religion seemed essential to the survival of civilization. But the new scientific religion was about to make God incredible. In reducing God to a scientific explanation, the scientists and theologians of the seventeenth century were turning God into an idol, a mere human projection. Where Basil, Augustine, and Thomas had insisted that the natural world could tell us nothing about God, Newton,
Bentley, and Clarke argued that nature could tell us everything we needed to know about the divine. God was no longer transcendent, no longer beyond the reach of language and concepts. As Clarke had shown, his will and attributes could be charted, measured, and definitively proven in twelve clear and distinct propositions. People were starting to become dependent upon the new science. But what would happen when a later generation of scientists found another ultimate explanation for the universe?
*
The term “philosophy” was synonymous with “science.”
*
In the manuscript, the words in parentheses have been added as an afterthought above the line.
EnlightenmentF
or many of the educated elite, the eighteenth century was exhilarating. The Thirty Years’ War was now a distant but salutary memory, and people were determined that Europe should never again fall prey to such destructive bigotry. As Locke had argued, scientists had shown that the natural world gave sufficient evidence for a creator, so there was no further need for churches to force their teachings down the throats of their congregants. For the first time in history, men and women would be free to discover the truth for themselves.
1
A fresh generation of scientists seemed to confirm Newton’s faith in the grand design of the universe. The invention of the magnifying lens opened up yet another new world that gave further evidence of divine planning and design. The Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632–73) had for the first time observed bacterial spermatozoa, the fibrils and striping of muscle, and the intricate structure of ivory and hair. These marvels all seemed to point to a supreme Intelligence, which could now be discovered by the extraordinary achievements of unaided human reason.
The new learning spread quickly from Europe to the American colonies, where the prolific author and clergyman Cotton Mather (1663–1728), whose father, Increase (1639–1723), had been a friend of Robert Boyle’s, undertook his own microscopic investigations and was the first to experiment with plant hybridization. He kept up eagerly with European science and, in 1714, was actually admitted to the Royal Society. In 1721, he published
The Christian Philosopher
, the
first book on science available in America for the general reader. Significantly, it was also a work of religious apologetics. Science, Mather insisted, was a “wondrous
Incentive
to
Religion”;
2
the entire universe could be seen as a temple,
“built
and
fitted
by that Almighty Architect.”
3
This “Philosophical” faith, which could be accepted by Christian and Saracen alike, would transcend the murderous doctrinal quarrels of the sects and heal class divisions: