Posted on 07/19/2004 11:35:57 AM PDT by betty boop
By Jean F. Drew
As Wolfhart Pannenberg observes in his Toward a Theology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith (1993), the present-day intellectual mind-set assumes that there is no relation or connection between the God of the Christian faith and the understanding of the world in the natural sciences.
Ironically this separation of God from the world is commonly credited to Sir Isaac Newton, the father of classical mechanics, whose ground-breaking work on the laws of motion and thermodynamics seemed to posit a purely mechanistic, deterministic, “clockwork universe” that was not dependent on God either for its creation or its maintenance.
The irony consists in the fact that this was not Newton’s view at all. In fact, the very reverse is the truth of the matter: Newton was a deeply religious man who regarded his scientific efforts as exploits in the discovery of the laws that God uses in the natural world. Moreover, Newton believed that his laws of motion implied the generation of conditions of increasing disorder in the world, such that God would have to intervene periodically to rectify it in order to save it and keep it going:
In his Opticks, Newton emphasized … that the order of nature becomes needful, in the course of time, of a renewal by God because as a result of the inertia of matter its irregularities increase.” [ibid., p. 63]
“Newton confronted with deep distrust the mechanical worldview of Descartes, which derived all change in the world alone from the mechanical mutual effects of the bodies. The Cartesian model of the world, in which the mutual play of mechanical powers was to explain the development from chaos to the ordered cosmos, seemed to him all too self-contained and self-sufficient so that it would not need any divine assistance or would even admit such.” [ibid., p. 60]
Newton rightly recognized that this tendency of the mechanical explanation of nature would inevitably lead to “a world independent from God.” For Newton, such a view would be an utter falsification of natural and divine reality both.
In his own time, Newton’s view that God continuously acts in the world was controversial. Certain leading philosophers, including Kant and Leibnitz, were offended by this view on the grounds that it implied God bungled the original creation. They argued that a perfect Creator cannot have failed to create a perfect creation. And if it’s “perfect,” then there’s no need for God to intervene. (The corollary being: For him to do so would be an acknowledgement or confession of his own imperfection.)
This despite the fact that God in Genesis speaks, not of having made a “perfect” creation, but only a “good” one. The worldview of Leibnitz reflects an early strain of Deism; that of Kant, the Calvinist theological view of God as utterly transcendent majesty.
But Newton didn’t see it either way. For Newton, God was both transcendent and immanent in the world. God created a universe in which he would be “God with his creatures” and Lord of Life forever. The supernatural and the natural had an on-going synergistic relation, and this is what maintained the natural world as a going concern, sustaining it in its evolution toward God’s eschatological goal for man and nature.
In other words, Newton believed God is constantly active in the history of salvation (of souls and world), and evolutionary process is one of his prime tools for accomplishing the divine purpose implicit in the creation event itself.
Yet by what means could God be “present with his creatures?” Newton gave his answer in the Scholium Generale, an addendum to the second edition of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, his chief work on the mathematical principles of the philosophy of nature. The addendum endeavors to clarify the relationship of his doctrines of physics and his religious and philosophical views. Here Newton states that “God constitutes space and time through his eternity and omnipresence: ‘existendo semper et ubique, durationem et spatium constituit.’”
For Newton, God as immensitas constitutes absolute space – infinite and “empty” – and this absolute space is the sensorium Dei The great philosopher and mathematician Leibnitz strenuously objected to this conception, arguing that Newton’s divine sensorium effectively turned God into a “world soul,” and thus led to pantheism. Yet Newton had “explicitly emphasized … that God does not rule the universe as a world soul, but as the Lord of all things.” [ibid.]
What are we to make of this term, sensorium Dei – God’s sensorium? We probably should avoid the conclusion drawn by Leibnitz, who interpreted the term as indicating an organ of perception.
Newton might reply: God being eternally omniscient, he has absolutely no need of an organ of sense perception.
So what, then, did Newton mean by this term? Pannenberg writes that, for Newton, sensorium Dei refers “to the medium of the creation of things: just as the sensorium in our perception creates the pictures of things, God through space creates the things themselves.”
Thus Newton acknowledges a doctrine of creation understood as an on-going process, not just as a single start-up event – let alone a periodically recurring cycle of universal “booms” and “busts” as implied by the “eternal universe” model.
Newton] designates space as the effect of the presence of God with his creatures…. The expression sensorium … even when it is understood as the place of the production of its contents and not as the organ of their reception, cannot itself be a product of the perceiving individual,” whereas with God, space is at once a property and effect of the divine immensitas.
For Newton, the conception of infinite space is implicit in the idea of the omnipresence of God. But, as Pannenberg notes, “it is implicit in it in the way that it has no divisions: infinite space is indeed divisible but not divided, and the conception of division always presupposes space.”
At this point, it might occur to a scientifically-inclined Christian that sensorium Dei could well refer to an infinite, universal creative field, “originally empty” of all content, designed to be the matrix and carrier of all possibilities for our universe, and thus the locus where the “supernatural” [i.e., transcendent] and the “natural” [i.e., immanent] constantly meet.
One thinks of a primary universal vacuum field, whose characteristic associated particle is the photon – light -- which, having zero mass, is the “finest particle” yet known to man (noting that, on the Judeo-Christian view, God preeminently works with Light).
It has been speculated that, if an observer could stand outside of “normal” four-dimensional space-time and take a view from a fifth, “time-like” dimension, the singularity of the “big bang” would appear as a “shock wave” propagating in 4D space-time. If this were true, the shock wave would require a medium of propagation. Perhaps this medium is the universal vacuum field itself, the “ZPF” or zero-point field that extends throughout all of space, giving rise to all possibilities for our universe in every space direction and time dimension – which yet finds its source outside the space-time continuum that human beings commonly experience.
That is to say, the source is “extra-cosmic,” or transcendent. Its creative effect works within the empirical cosmos via the ZPF, which is hypothetically the sensorium Dei of the Immensitas….
Perhaps one day it will be shown that the intimate communication of divine and natural reality is facilitated by the primary universal vacuum field -- the intersection of time and the timeless, the creative source of our universe, the means of its sustenance and renewal over time, the source of the power of the human soul and mind to participate in divine reality, the paradigm of human genius, as well as the source of the continued physical existence of our planet and the universe.
It has been said that Life is the result of “successful communication.” Perhaps the ZPF, as suggested above, is the carrier of information (Logos, the singularity propagating in time); living creatures carry information also – DNA -- information that specifies what they are and how all their “parts” work together in synergy so as to give rise to and sustain their existence. It appears all living creatures have the capability of doing at least some kind of rudimentary information processing. That is, it seems they can “decode” and “read” instructions – perhaps via energy exchanges with the ZPF. When the creature is no longer able to access and process information, successful communication cannot take place, and so the creature dies.
By the way, I do not mean to suggest that information/energy exchanges with the primary universal vacuum field are necessarily consciously experienced events. Probably the reverse is the typical case. Yet we know that the human brain does most of its important work at unconscious levels: the governance of autonomic bodily functions, for instance, is a subconscious process.
Interestingly enough, it was Faraday who first articulated the field concept, and he apparently did so to refute Newton’s sensorium Dei. Apparently he wanted to get rid of the Immensitas altogether, and put Newton’s insight on a purely physical basis.
Yet in the end, it appears Faraday did not so much refute Newton, as lend credence to his basic insight.
A little food for thought....
Interesting. Thanks for the ping.
Not only does the conclusion not follow, the search for a propagation medium has turned up negative in all experiments. The Michelson-Morley being one of the first.
Um, I don't know Jean dear. This is a very short post. I don't want to say I'm disappointed, but... I'll ask Mr. Science if he thinks the article is at an appropriate level for my right-brained mind. (An old college buddy gave me a copy of A Clockwork Orange, but I still haven't read it. Is it like that? ;-)
Would it make any difference to you if I were to say that the medium of propagation need not be physical, "material"?
LOL, unspun! Just a meditation on Newton's theology, and trying to connect the dots between it and quantum field theory. Of course, it's quite speculative! :^)
I have a working scientist friend who has developed quite an interesting model of consciousness, which he sees as facilitated by energy exchanges with the appropriate fields .... That's pretty speculative, too; but I think he makes a good case. Thanks for writing, Brother A!
Moreover, Newton believed that his laws of motion implied the generation of conditions of increasing disorder in the world, such that God would have to intervene periodically to rectify it in order to save it and keep it going:Isaac Newton:
Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.One other quote from Newton (his public position, regardless of his private views):
-- Principia Mathematica (1687) Laws of Motion I
I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.
-- Letter to Robert Hooke (February 5, 1675)
Agreed, PH -- Newton's "official position." Yet it is also a fact that he wrote the Scolium Generale to clarify theological points in his major mathematical work, and put God into his Opticks all the same.
Go figure! :^)
IMO, all metaphysical statements ought to be colored purple in order to be in harmony with their immanence.
I would say that the notion of perfect does as much harm as good to our understanding. "Perfect" as a static state is merely a mental construct. It doesn't exist. Any state of "perfect" only sets the stage for the next stage of "perfect", and so it goes, a moving target receding at the speed of... light? At the speed of thought. Perfect can only be dynamic, it is a continuous process.
Such a mental construct can't have any effect on whether God is or isn't continuously present in his creation. But a dynamic "perfect" is consistent with a God who is present in the here and now. "Perfect" as a moving target doesn't bother me, in my understanding at least, that is what creation looks like, a moving, living, changing, growing thing.
There is a beautiful order to creation, implying to me a well designed formula at the heart of it all, but there is also a kind of beautiful messiness about it, suggesting a creation that responds to damage and overcomes it. Which is to say, a creation that responds to the expected unexpected.
sensorium Dei could well refer to an infinite, universal creative field, “originally empty” of all content, designed to be the matrix and carrier of all possibilities for our universe...
The blank canvas where God will paint his masterpiece, with his perfect formulas, and his little human agents of messiness who fit themselves into any available space, respond to local anomalies and bridge them with their bodies and their lives. With God's help.
Sorry, that's a little on the red side!
Besides, nothing earthly can quite capture the exact shade of perfervid purple necessary for the harmonic convergance of form and substance that our hearts so desire.
;^)
I guess from now on, I suppose, I'll have to write in purple prose. If purple doesn't suit your mood, then I won't be peer reviewed.
Is 'peer review' anything like urinalysis?
That would be a little harsh!
Wow! I'm leaving out whole syllables now!
Note to self: Cut back Coke and coffee consumption.
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