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.
Yes, and there are in infinite number of ways of being wrong. But if one seeks whether God may be a distinct person who does love us and chose to communicate to us just what we need, just how we need it, one may have criteria by which to search for validity -- not by philosophy, but by looking for His communication. I supppose even if He engaged in daily skywriting, it wouldn't necessarily draw unwilling hearts into agreement and acceptance, though.
Pardon if this is too much; I just like to cut to the chase. ;-`
Einstein's speech 'My Credo' to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin, autumn 1932, Einstein: A Life in Science, Michael White and John Gribbin, page 262
Cordially,
On another thread we put ourselves through a thought experiment to make this very point in biological terms.
Physicists in the specialty of "information theory and molecular biology" describe the difference as successful communication which is a paraphrase of the technical definition of "information" according to Shannon. The dead skin cell has ceased to communicate, both internally and externally.
Moreover, as betty boop has brought to our attention in this article, such "successful communication" permeates and sustains “all that there is”. As she notes, Newton actually saw this so very long ago:
And those of us who are Christian or Jewish recall what God has said:
This is a variation of Last Thursdayism. God is immanent in all of nature, and any change initiated will change the past along with the present, making the universe appear to obey consistent natural laws.
Don't give me 'cordially'!!!
My assertion is obviously a meta-statement about metaphysical statements, and therefore not to be colored purple!
To reify an epiphany is but to immanentize the eschaton! Beware!
;^)
It violates the principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Even a quantum vacuum is not nothing. Nothing comes from nothing.
Cordially,
If you mean nothing as in "not from pre-existing energy/matter, then I think that statement is not true. Virtual particles (cassini effect) come into existence from "nothing," i.e. not from pre-existing matter/energy.
It violates the principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Well, if you'd like to be scientific, the physical laws/forces of the universe are the cause.
Even a quantum vacuum is not nothing.
The laws of the universe exist everywhere in the universe - even where matter does not, so even where there is no energy or matter, the "rules" are still present.
You're right in that in a quantum vacuum consists of particles and antiparticles that briefly appear and then disappear just as quickly – from nothing (no matter).
thanks for your reply..
Newton's work inspired Kant.
Exactly, Brother A -- which I gather is why Newton insisted that God is "with his creatures" as Creator and Lord of Life, not as some nebulous "world soul." There is transcendent initiative, collaboration, and communication that affects "immanent" living beings, which the pantheist model -- in its haste to make God wholly immanent -- is simply blind to.
The Lord of Life is quintessentially so eternally alive -- and eternally with us -- as to be the foundation of all life, always -- from alpha to omega. There is nothing in the natural world, the world of immanent reality, that even comes close to such universal majesty and power.
I know of no pantheist who would tell you that the world had a beginning, that it was created in the first place. The pantheist world view almost always involves an "eternal universe" model, with the universe waxing and waning over the aeons, seemingly completely under its own autonomous power. Yet absent a beginning, there is really no way to explain this "autonomous power." To say that powers and laws are simply the natural culmination of random chance -- which is the only alternative to a created (i.e., designed) universe I can think of -- is to explain exactly nothing.
For how can an endless series of accidents ever produce one single natural law? If all there is to the evolution of the world is an infinite chain of accidents, then by what defense would any "law" once having emerged protect itself from being wiped out in the next accident?
Thanks for a great post, Brother A!
Hello Diamond! Certainly this is true for us denizens of the natural world.
God, however, is not subject to this restriction. For He created the world "out of nothing."
Of course, He added a whole lot of "value-added" to that nothing.... :^) Thanks so much for writing!
How can you have physical laws/forces where there is no universe, i.e. nothing?
Virtual particles (cassini effect) come into existence from "nothing," i.e. not from pre-existing matter/energy.
Even virtual particles do not literally come into existence spontaneously out of nothing. They are the product, however briefly, of energy fluctuations in the quantum vacuum, and so they show nothing about the causality or acausality of absolute beginnings, of beginnings of the existence of particles, and so do not constitute an exception to the principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Cordially,
God, however, is not subject to this restriction. For He created the world "out of nothing."
Yes, of course, for God is not nothing.
Cordially,
You need to demonstrate this. It is not obvious and some physics theories disagree.
Why can't you? Although it would be moot in practice with nothing for the laws to act upon.
But, imagine this: Assume you create a perfect vacuum in a container. Into this container you then put oxygen, heat and fuel. A fire results.
You did not put the physical laws into the container. The choices we have are that the laws are contained in the atoms – a problematic reiterative problem I think – or that the laws exist everywhere in the universe even where matter doesn't.
I didn't say there wasn't a cause. We can discuss differing definitions and names for that cause. I suggested the laws of the universe. I also like "the creative process of the universe" as general and specific enough.
Honestly, I’m more curious as to the point you are making…
The Greeks already did that. And still those theorists make off with nothing to stuff away in their pockets!
You should always carry thin air in your pocket just in case you need to vanish into something.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.