Discovering and Defining God Through the “Machine” of Nature

Part 1 in a 5-part series on how the 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement known as the ‘Enlightenment’ radically changed Christianity

The early seventeenth century in Western Europe was a troubling time, not unlike the early twentieth century or our own time. Societies were in the throes of economic recession. The world was deeply divided into binary competing factions, influenced by the false certainties of fanaticism, struggling for independence from the old order.

In 1618, this strife erupted into the Thirty Years War, and central Europe became a charnel house where thirty-five percent of the population was annihilated. Institutions and norms observed for so long, including the very form of the universe itself, seemed to have given way to a complex jumble of disjointed pieces. With the fundamentals of reality having so shifted, how could anyone be certain of the truth? How should one then live?

There was concern expressed by some about “atheists,” but the term did not denote anyone denying the existence of God, something generally inconceivable at the time. Leonardus Lessius (1554–1623) was a Flemish Jesuit moral theologian who taught at the University of Leuven, and both applauded and confirmed Galileo’s discoveries (see my post, From Copernicus to Galileo: How Christianity Becomes Intolerant). For Lessius, “atheists” were ancient philosophers like Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius who were heretics not because of their atomism, but because they seemed to hold that the universe had come into being by chance. Lessius argued that the intricate design of the natural world required an intelligent Creator.

French mathematician and Franciscan friar Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), who had also supported Galileo, had no trouble identifying “atheists” in his own time; however (and again), this did not involve anyone denying the existence of God. For Mersenne, these were contemporaries who were skeptical about the ability of human reason to arrive at any final truth or believed that nature operated without any need for supervision. Mersenne developed a Christianized version of atomism that added a supervising Creator to Democritus’ universe.

For more on Galileo, see my post From Copernicus to Galileo: How Christianity Becomes Intolerant.

In combating “atheism,” both Lessius and Mersenne turned not to their own theological tradition but to the philosophies of antiquity. Thomas Aquinas had insisted that we could not learn anything about God from the natural world; now, the complexity natural philosophers were finding persuaded early modern theologians that God must be an Intelligent Designer of the natural world, not in which, but through which God might be discovered. As Karen Armstrong notes in The Case for God, “Denys and Thomas [Aquinas] would not have approved.”[1]

For more on the influence of Denys’ sixth-century writings, see my post, A Spirituality of Silence in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Today.

René Descartes (1596–1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who studied and worked in France and the Netherlands. As a gentleman soldier and student of military engineering early on in the Thirty Years War, his philosophy was marked by the horror of his own time. His goal was to find a truth on which everyone—Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, deists, and “atheists”—could agree so that people of goodwill could live together in peace.

In some ways, Descartes’ method was a rationalized version of Denys’ way of denial. He noticed that when he set aside certainty about what his senses seemed to tell him, he still experienced himself engaged in acts of thinking and doubting, and he became aware, at the very least, of his own existence. He understood himself as something that understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, imagines, and feels.

Why I Write This Blog, and Why Christianity Needs to Evolve

Descartes’ famous maxim, “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) represents a development on traditional Platonic epistemology: “I think, therefore there is that which I think.” Unfortunately, Descartes would describe a self that can only be understood as separate from all other beings, and argue for a dualistic split between mind and body (Gilbert Ryle’s ‘ghost in the machine’); at the same time, Descartes’ observations connecting thought with existence were important in articulating the subjective aspect of individual reality. His observations about the inner self suggest those attributable to the Buddha and reflect Augustine’s focus on the apostle Paul’s “inner person.”

For more on Augustine, see my post Christianity: The Spiritual Realm is Inside Your Consciousness.

For Descartes, the fact that we are aware of our imperfections, or what we lack to be perfect, shows that even as finite beings, we have an innate sense of perfection that must have been placed there by a perfect God. The lifeless material world can tell us nothing about God; only the thinking self can—Descartes was clearly influenced by Augustine and Anselm. But Descartes also conceived of God as a clear and distinct idea in our minds, rather than that which transcends thinking; awareness of God’s existence, and our own, gave confidence that the material world exists, despite the unreliability of our senses.

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Descartes’ cosmos, reflecting Mersenne’s atomism-plus-supervising-Creator, was an intricate, well-oiled machine, set in motion, sustained, and overseen by God through the imposition of divinely implanted unequivocal natural laws upon the atoms; but in Descartes’ case, it was a universe that runs itself, requiring no further divine action. In a time of perpetual war and social turmoil, the idea of a universe running as regularly as clockwork—to say nothing of a society submitting to a government obeying rational laws—was no doubt attractive. But God as a clear idea in the mind is tantamount to idolatry. Meditation that focuses on the thinking self without transcending it does not result in Christlike self-emptying kenosis but in a triumphant assertion of the ego.

There was no awe in Descartes’ theology; the function of natural philosophy (science) was to dispel wonder. Mathematics and physics would ultimately describe God, an endeavor with which theologians of the time were happy to agree. God would not be found in the lifeless, inert material world of nature but through it, in the laws that govern and animate it. A single method of inquiry would lead to wisdom and certainty; the existence of God would become as clear as a geometric theorem. Paul seems to advocate a ‘through-nature’ kind of natural theology in Romans 1:20, though it is unclear from the subsequent passage whether he is holding it up as a way of seeing God or deriding it as a path to idolatry.

The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) also believed that people could use their rational powers to discover God from the evidence given by nature. A proper idea of God would thus solve the problem of the violent religious intolerance that had torn Europe apart. Not unlike the Medieval Scottish friar John Duns Scotus (1265-6–1308), Locke held that combining our mental constructs of God with the notion of infinity could produce a suitable theology. He and Descartes both reflect an empiricist understanding of God and, by extension, of the stories that concern God.

For a discussion of why an empiricist understanding of God is spiritually inadequate, see my post Is Religious Belief About Facts Outside Us, Or Realities Within?

Rather than God being a great mystery connected with the mystery of our being, apprehended through the practice of faith, Enlightenment philosophers posited that God could be proven as a fact—an idea that would finally enter popular consciousness another two centuries on. Next week’s post—the second in this five-part series—includes two contemporary thinkers who did not share the new empiricist understanding of God. It goes on to cover Isaac Newton, one of its greatest champions.

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[1] Armstrong, Karen. The Case for God. New York: Random House, 2009, p. 193.