RTGH Part 2: The 3 Metaphors that Made Science and Their Theistic Origins

Return of the God Hypothesis is a book written by Stephen C. Meyer in which he presents scientific discoveries that have "revived" the idea of a creator and designer of the universe and biological systems. In this article series, I will do a study of each chapter, discussing what is presented and its spiritual significance. The first chapter begins the discussion of if modern science had Judaeo-Christian origins, where Stephen Meyer offered hard evidence that the very first natural philosophers (that is what they were called before scientists) founded their respected fields under the conviction that the natural world was ordered and law-governed because it was created and sustained by an intelligent God. We also discussed how the revival of the doctrine of creation enabled these philosophers to change their thinking from the old Aristotelian virtue naming to the rigorous systematic study of mechanical causes behind natural phenomena. (All references taken from the Book)

In his process of reading the founders of modern science, Stephen ran into three metaphors used to encapsulate the design and order within nature. These three are a Book, a Clock, and a Law-Governed Realm. These three metaphors cleared the path further for these early scientists into the advancement of the scientific revolution.

The Book of Nature

Early Christians started referring to nature as a sort of "book", one that was akin to the Bible in its respect to reveal the attributes of God, namely His eternal power and wisdom. As early as the 3rd century, Christian monastic Anthony the Abbot (AD 251 - AD 365) described the natural world like a book that was on hand to study if he wanted to "read God's Word". Basil the Great (AD 330 - AD 379) said, “We were made in the image and likeness of our creator, endowed with intellect and reason, so that our nature was complete and we could know God. In this way, continuously contemplating the beauty of creatures, through them as if they were letters and words, we could read God’s wisdom…” (Basil of Caesarea, Homilia de Gratiarum Actione, 2, PG 31, 221C-224A).

Stephen says that texts like Psalm 19 and Romans 1 support this idea. Psalm 19 says that the "Heavens declare the glory of God's power, and Romans 1 says, "Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” During the Middle Ages and the Reformation, the reiteration of the doctrine of creation brought a new light to passages such as these. John Ray, in his 17th-century two-volume study The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, references these two passages, as well as Robert Boyle (most known for his Boyle's Law that describes the behaviour of gases under pressure), who also referred to nature as a "book". He likened the study of the natural world to an institution of the Sabbath. In other words, God had created the Sabbath to give men time to rest from work, but also to provide leisure time to think about and observe natural phenomena. Boyle saw his study of nature as an act of worship; that's a big deal!

This Metaphor was Good for:

1. The metaphor of nature as a "book" that could reveal the nature of God provided the theological motivation for scientific study. Their God's glorious works motivated them to study.

2. This view reinforced the conviction of the intelligibility of nature by implying that God could reveal himself through it, and that He had created the human mind to "share in His thoughts".

3. It also implied the reliability and regularity of natural phenomena for scientific study because it affirmed that nature offered some authoritative revelation about God, and His sustaining power of said systems.

Since the information revealed in scripture and the attributes revealed in nature originate from the same source, there was also no reason to think that both fields would converge or contradict each other strictly, but rather be complementary. That's why Boyle never viewed the evidence he found as something that strayed him away from belief in God, and hence why his study was an act of worship to him, similar to the study of scripture.

The Clock of Nature

Moving on to the Scientific Revolution, many natural philosophers also referred to nature as a mechanical clock. This implied the contingency and intelligibility of nature because a designer can make a clock in many different ways to achieve the same operation (contingency); and the designer is a rational agent that entails the discernability of the mechanisms they create (intelligibility). Robert Boyle said this about nature, “'Tis like a rare clock… where all things are so skillfully contriv’d that the engine being once set a moving, all things proceed according to the Artificers first design” (Boyle, "A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature", cited in Davis, "The Faith of a Great Scientist.”). Many philosophers under this metaphor started calling themselves Mechanical Philosophers, those who rejected the previous Aristotelian virtue-naming game that never got down to the causes of phenomena.

They insisted on looking for physical mechanisms behind effects in place of simply naming the regularities in nature. Boyles did this in his study on the interactions between corpuscles of air (what particles of air were called before their discovery) to explain their spring-like behaviour under pressure in closed systems. In this, he developed his infamous Boyle's Law, which describes the relationships between gas, pressure, volume, and temperature. Boyles discouraged calling upon the direct hand of God to account for natural phenomena because he thought such appeals missed the mark on understanding natural causality. In his quote from above, Boyle explained that the metaphor implies that God doesn't need to constantly act our natural causes to keep the universe working. He argued that the natural world and living systems that semed to be designed did not need to have God's interventuon or the interposition of "the artificer... but perform their functions upon particular occasions, by virtue of the general and primitive contrivance of the whole engine” (Boyle, "A Free Enquiry, 448).

Just like how, once a mechanic has an engine put together, does not need to perform the gas transfer from the tank to the engine; the insertion of the correct amount of gas and air into the cylinders, and every single ignition in the cylinders by himself because the way the engine is assembled accounts for the ignition by itself by various natural laws and apparatuses put together in a specific way for a specific purpose. In an essay titled Final Causes, Boyle says this, “The more clearly and particularly we discern… the more we discern the admirable wisdom of the omniscient author of all things; of whom it is truly said by a prophet [Isaiah], that He is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working” ("Final Causes," 150-51). The metaphor implied that the interaction between material parts or mechanisms could explain the regular workings of nature, as well as that naming things effects did not yield an understanding of how things work (for a detailed explanation of what I'm talking about here, read Part 1).

William Paley's Watch Analogy (AD 1743 - 1805)

William Paley (Natural Philosopher and Apologist) used an analogy for his readers. Imagine coming across a watch on the shore of a beach one morning. There is nobody around, no watch stores, or watch makers. Any rational observer would never conclude that natural forces randomly constructed and washed the watch on the beach; they would conclude that a mind had designed it at some point, and through some unknown circumstances was lost and/or placed there. As he put it, “Every Indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature.”  Boyle also created a similar quote (Boyle, Royal Society, Boyle Papers, vol. S fol. 105, cited in Davis, "The Faith of a Great Scientist” 99).

The Laws of Nature

During the Scientific Revolution, many also called nature a law-governed realm and thus sought after what they called the laws of nature. This means that they expected to find regularity in nature, for if there is no God behind creation, then there is absolutely no reason to expect order if all is random. The clock metaphor compared God to a clockmaker whose watch worked in regularity, the book implied intelligibility and contingency, the laws also implied that, but more specifically, the repeated regularity of the systems in the form of "laws". Laws that set "boundaries" on what can be physically done (Psalm 74:17, 104:9; Job 38:11; Colossians 1:16; etc.). For example, Boyle's Law was derived from the observation of the mechanical interaction between corpuscles of air and the properties God had given them, the regularity resulted from the God given design of the mechanisms and laws governing the extent of these properties.

The Monotheistic Worldview

Many early scientists attributed natural regularity to God's original design of the systems and His constant supervision of them. There were laws of nature only because there had been a supernatural law giver. University of California-Berkeley Chemist IMelvin CalvinI notes that the Israelite Monotheistic worldview offered a reason to expect a single intelligible order behind natural phenomena. You see, polytheists and pantheists believe in the existence of many spirits or gods that each interact with each other and nature in their own ways; I.e., they had no reason whatsoever to think natural phenomena would occur in uniformity and order. Thus, the Israelites believed, “the universe is governed by a single God, and is not the product of the whims of many gods, each governing his own province according to his own laws” (Calvin, Chemical Evolution, 258).

In The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law, Edgar Zilsel argues that the first people to recognize nature as externally governed were the Hebrew people. He cites multiple passages from Job, Proverbs, and Psalms that imply God had issued laws that set boundaries on the range of possible behaviours of natural mechanisms (Romans 1:19-25, 8:19-22; Genesis 3:17-19; Psalm 19:1, 102:11, 104:24 & 28-30; Hebrews 1:10-12). The bible uses the word "Chok," which means Law or decree, and is always used to describe God's laws for man, but also for the laws that set boundaries on nature.

The Hebrew word "Chok," which means Law or Decree

Passages such as Job 38:8-11 and Jeremiah 5:22 use this word to describe God setting limits on the behaviour of water. Zilsel argues that these passages, with the idea of a single creator, "decidedly contributed to the formation of the modern concept of the law of Nature.” He also notes that Greks and Romans almost never used the term "laws" of nature, and even in the period of the Sophists (4th century BC), the two terms meant opposites (Zilsel, "The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law, 249-53. For an amplifying discussion and extended quotations, see Chapter 2, n. d, at www.returnofthegodhypothesis.com/extendedresearchnotes.). Plato used the term "law", but only to contrast the relationship of sick and healthy people (a sick person is in worse condition than a healthy one), and did not apply it to nature. He sought to identify immaterial forms that necessarily existed, while Aristotle tried for the four causes or virtues, but neither of them hit the mark of what is, in modern science, known as the "laws of nature".

Epicurean Philosophers (a philosophy of do what makes you happy and minimizes your suffering) didn't think of nature as a realm governed by laws because they thought the gods had no care for the physical world at all. Roman Stoics didn't have a concept of law, but instead a self-existent logical principle of order called the logos, from which all moral principles derived, but not natural regularity. Many Christian Neoplatonists and Aristotlians did use the term, but only to refer to moral intuition and not the regularities of natural mechanics. Only in the 16th century, when Western Christianity began to rely more on the Bible as a source of authority did the term "laws of nature" become what we know today in the early writings of great minds such as Bacon, Descartes, Kepler, Christiaan Huygens, Richard Hooker, Boyle, and Newton.

The Concept of Natural Law was Good for:

1. The natural philosophers were no longer under the influence of the idea that they could deduce how nature ought to work; they began to realise that they needed to develop a systematic method of investigation and rigorous study.

2. The metaphor implied "reliable divine oversight," as Stephen says, which encouraged the use of mathematics to describe natural regularities. The use of mathematics enabled the prediction and control of nature, which led to the technological advancements soon to come.

   
   

Did They Invoke God?

Despite the history being accessible to New Atheists, they still insist that Newton and early natural philosophers were aiming at ridding science of God. In this section, Stephen offers hard evidence that these early scientists were heavily under the conviction and motivation of a divine legislator.

Action at a Distance and Constant Spirit Action

Natural philosophers committed to the view of contingency saw the regularities of nature as the expression of God's constant supervision of the universe. Stephen mentions that although Newton is held a giant in his field, at the time he developed his theory, his contemporaries met him with stern suspicion. According to the Mechanical philosophers, all natural regularities were produced by an underlying mechanism; thus, explanations of nature needed to invoke parts that interact. For example, before Newton, René Descartes and Christiaan Huygens proposed a theory of traction where they proposed swirling vortices made of a substance called Ether that pushed heavenly bodies around the sun. Yet Newton's theory had no material or parts, it proposed that two bodies with mass invoke a mysterious action from a distance that establishes attraction of the masses without them making physical contact.

Newton believed that tidal actions were caused by the gravitational attraction of the moon and Earth, even though they made no attraction. He proposed that all material bodies exert force on other bodies in direct proportion to their mass and inversely proportionate to the square of the distance between them.

Equation for Newton's Law of Gravitation. Where F equals the Gravitational Constant (G) multiplied by the product of the masses of the bodies (m1m2) divided by the square root of the distance between them (r2)

Stephen points out that the (r2) is extremely significant because it implies that the force of gravity was transmitted through space; in other words, there was no material, mechanical cause of the gravitation. Newton's theory upset a lot of mechanical philosophers of the time, especially Gottfried Leibniz, who claimed that Newton was invoking the same virtue naming of the previous era. “What produces that tendency to fall? If we don't know, have we really identified the cause of gravity? Or have we just treated the name of the effect in question as its own cause?” Leibniz thought that this would lead to an infinite regress, and there had to be an explanation for the cause of gravity that was purely physical.

Despite Lebniz's attacks, Newton defended himself by showing that he could mathematically describe and predict the movements of falling bodies and cosmic bodies with unmatched precision. He also said that his extensive use of math was an advancement from the previous time, where philosophers imagined a mechanical cause for phenomena. “Indeed, mechanical models like the vortices theory of gravitation or the spring model of air pressure tended to claim applicability to only a specific process. Newton found this less intellectually satisfying than discovering laws that applied to all matter and the grand mathematical synthesis that he had advanced in the Principia” (Return of the God Hypothesis, Pg 44). Newton still may have invoked the hand in a letter to Bishop Richard Bentley in 1692, where he implied that a constant acting agent may cause gravity.

Newton added, “Whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left open to the consideration of my reader.” (Newton, February 25, 1692/3, 189.R.4.47. W.). In the letter, answering the Bishop's question about gravity's mysterious action, Newton did affirm the belief that matter could not act upon other matter with no material contact. It clearly shows Newton regarded the cause of gravity as “constant spirit action,” as Stephen's Cambridge supervisors called it. Newton and his followers clearly believed that the laws of nature reflected the power of a designer who created and established these laws aswell as sustaining their existence fundamentally.

The Importance of Design Arguments

The founders of modern science did not just assume the universe was created; they also argued for their assumption via the discoveries they were making about nature. Johannes Kepler saw intelligent design in the mathmatical precision of planetary motions and the three laws he founded that describe the movements of said bodies  (Kepler, Mysterium Cosmograpbicum, 93-103; Harmonies of the World, 170, 240; Gingerich, "Kepler and the Laws of Nature," 17-23.). Robert Boyle insisted that the regularity of the natural law and biological systems revealed "a most intelligent and designing agent" (Boyle, Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle, 172). Carl Linnaeus argues for design within the classification groups that all living things fall into, as historian of science James Larson has said, "Rational inquiry must inevitably, in Linné's opinion, lead, not to skepticism or disbelief, but to the acknowledgement of and respect for an omniscient and omnipotent creator" (Reason and Experience, 151).

Newton not only viewed gravitational action as a manifestation of God's power, but he also made some powerful arguments based on the design of other discoveries. In Newton's work Opticks, his major treatise on light, he argued that the properties of light and the design of the eye were so matched with each other that it suggested foresight of a creator. In the epilogue to the Principia, Newton argues that the stability of the planetary system is not only due to the regularity in the law of gravity, but also to the initial positioning of the planets and comets concerning the sun by God. Many histories of science, Stephen says, pose Isaac Newton as someone who proposed a purely mechanical universe that was eternal and self-organizing, that left no place for God. This view fundamentally misrepresents Isaac Newton, he rejected the idea that gravity could be explained by a purely mechanical cause. He also believed the law of nature expressed God's ordering power of matter through the constant action of his spirit.

Isaac Newton saw evidence of intelligent design in the complex anatomical structures in biological systems as well as the regularities in nature. So why did a shift happen, and how did we get from Boyle and Kepler to Richard Dawkins? Stephen Meyer tackles that in the next chapter of Return of the God Hypothesis. Amen.