Faith in Science

Gabriel R. Ricci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138523357
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351520713
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

There is growing academic interest in addressing the relationship of religion and science. There are also very generous funding sources that encourage scientists to demonstrate the reality of purpose in the world. Still, there are organizations offering support to community groups dedicated to discussing religion and science. Contributors explore this development in Faith in Science. The intellectual initiatives analyzed here seem far removed from the deep religious and cultural divisions that dominate the contemporary geopolitical landscape. This emerging industry, however, originates in a cultural debate that set the evolutionary view of Nature against revelation's conception of Nature as the fulfillment of God's creation. The two worldviews are hopelessly mismatched, although scientific creationism purports to have uncovered scriptural evidence that invites another look. Along the way, the imposition of theological themes onto the geological record became a tendency for many naturalists. Peter Medawar's scathing review of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man in 1961 remains as a warning for those who mix Darwinian orthodoxy and theological parlance. The challenge, Medawar would have us believe, is not to abandon the exacting methods and logic of science in favor of a poetic dream of how consciousness is a manifestation of energy. But does this mean that science and religion are only methodologically demarcated? Must we insist on the traditional boundaries instituted by scientific conventions and religious beliefs? From various historical, religious, and scientific vantage points, contributors to this volume, who include Guy Consolmagno, Donald Kraybill, David Ray Griffin, Gerald L. Schroeder, Robert Pollack, Robert Pennock, Carol Wayne Wright, Bill Durbin, Kathleen Duffy, and Anthony Matteo, take up these challenges.

Valuing Nature: Vital Reconstructions
of Anne Conway (1631–1679)

Carol Wayne Wright

“Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion.”¹

Introduction

During the seventeenth century in Western Europe, the nature and direction of developments in science (or natural philosophy) were matters of intense debate and investigation. This was also an era in which women could not attend university and their roles were restricted to that of wife and mother. It is surprising, therefore, to discover that Anne Conway, a seventeenth-century English philosopher, made important contributions to conversations about the nature and constitution of the physical world. In her sole published text, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy,²Conway challenged the basic assumptions of Descartes’ dualism (as well as Hobbes’ atheistic materialism), and advanced her own system as the true, most adequate philosophy of the time. Conway anticipated many of the dangerous implications of the hierarchic dualisms associated with mind/matter and spirit/flesh distinctions. Assuming an anti-Hobbesian stance, she asserted that all substances have some element, or at least potential possession, of thought or mentality. Conway’s vitalistic principles were supported by a religious worldview that placed emphasis on the life of all things, and compelled its adherents to adopt an ethic of care for the inherent worth of everything alive.

Unfortunately, Conway is better known for her lifelong headaches that befuddled the medical authorities of the seventeenth century than for her contributions to natural philosophy.³ In a gesture typical of patriarchal constructions of history, Conway’s vitalistic approach to nature has been virtually erased from Western intellectual history and overshadowed by the tradition of “scientific” views on nature inaugurated by such luminaries as Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes. Moreover, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy is not featured in most contemporary historical studies that trace the long-standing interconnections between religion and science.⁴ The result is that Conway’s distinct perspectives on major seventeenth-century categories concerning the “nature” of nature (substance, motion, and matter) have been ignored by many historians of philosophy and science, and her religious cosmology is practically unknown by contemporary religious scholars.

In this essay, I recover Conway’s ideas concerning nature and contend that they are too important to remain in obscurity.⁵I do so for several reasons. First, Conway’s views increase our awareness of the diversity of intellectual positions regarding the construction of nature during the seventeenth century. The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy shows that at least one woman provided a provocative articulation of natural philosophy and a sustained critique of mechanistic science. This fact helps to dismiss the still popular yet unfounded notion that women were not significant contributors to essential debates concerning natural processes during the early modern period. Second, Conway provides an alternative to the mechanistic worldview popularized by such thinkers as René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes. In so doing, she offers a religious cosmology resonating with ethical force regarding proper relations among all forms of nature. Third, Conway’s cosmological views foreshadow a trajectory of religious naturalism that has challenged the “dominion-over-nature” ideology derived from the modern scientific conception of nature that began with Bacon and escalated horrifically throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Conway’s reflections on the “sentience” of nature prefigure some key assumptions and implications of process cosmologies regarding the radical relationality found among all forms of nature. In addition, Conway’s general outlook is consistent with my own basic conviction, namely, that religious truth is always conditioned by beliefs about (human) nature and destiny—that is, by what we think about ourselves as natural processes in relation to other natural processes surrounding us. Conway’s work thus provides a surprising precedent for new naturalistic impulses in religious studies as some of us call into question the deficient scientific models of nature that have dominated mainstream thought until quite recently. Conway’s vitalism has heuristic value, lending support in crucial ways to various reconstructions of nature in our own “post” age.

This essay is divided into three major sections. In part one, I discuss the historical context for Conway’s system of thought, emphasizing the emergence of the “mechanistic” vision of nature that led to later scientific developments in the West. In part two, I introduce key features of Conway’s religious cosmology that countered the dominant mechanistic one conceived by influential thinkers of her period I specifically focus on Conway’s response to certain aspects of Descartes’ construction of nature. In the final section, I outline the “value” discourse inherent in Conway’s religious naturalism. I also discuss the potentially rich connections between the strain of seventeenth-century cosmological thought I find in Conway and current developments in process naturalism. I conclude by briefly discussing the value of Conway’s thought for contemporary religious naturalists.

The New “Experimental Science” in Seventeenth-Century England

Conway’s reflections on nature emerged during a period when religious, philosophical, and “scientific” ideas were more often than not integrated into epistemological models legitimizing one or another particular investigation of nature. Yet, most historical accounts of science have placed undue emphasis on its methodological observation, experimentation, and inductive reasoning, often failing to show the plurality of “scientific” positions or approaches to natural processes during the early modern period. With the aid of new historical studies of the last forty years, scholars now emphasize the importance of religion to new scientific investigations of nature in seventeenth-century England. The standard view that emerged in the nineteenth century, which saw science advancing and replacing religion rather quickly, no longer holds. Religious ideas not only aided the rise and establishment of English science, or the new “philosophy,” as it was called at that time, but most forms of knowledge were intimately and inseparably linked to, and inspired by, particular forms of religious belief and practice.⁶

Since the translation of Aristotle’s works from Arabic into Latin in the thirteenth century, Aristotelianism had served as the primary conceptual framework for observing the natural world. During the early seventeenth century, some natural philosophers began constructing a new paradigm to replace Aristotelian scientific explanation, which they considered bankrupt in light of the Renaissance revival of ancient philosophies of nature, the Reformation, the skeptical crisis, and the Copernican revolution.⁷ In his 1664 work, Experimental Philosophy, Henry Power (1623-1668) reflects a common view shared by other natural philosophers and physicians, i.e., that God made this world to be studied by humanity. Power favors the “new philosophy” because it helps depict the Christian’s responsibility to God, and the manifestation of the divine plan for the universe. Keeping in mind the homage due to God, Power eagerly embraces a new era in which the old Aristotelian hold on knowledge is passing away.

These are the days that must lay a new Foundation of a more magnificent Philosophy, never to be overthrown, that will Empirically and Sensibily canvass the Phaenomena of Nature, deducing the Causes of things from such Originals in Nature as we observe are producible by Art, and the infallible demonstration of Mechanicsk: and certainly, this is the way, and no other, to build a true and permanent Philosophy....And to speak yet more close to the point, I think it is no Rhetorication to say That all things are Artificial, for Nature it self is nothing else but the Art of God. Then, certainly, to find the various turnings and mysterious process of this divine Art, in the management of this great machine of the World, must needs be the proper Office and onely the Experimental and Mechanical Philosopher.⁸

Although most Aristotelian natural philosophers in the mid-seventeenth century continued to explain the observable facts of nature in terms of the intermixing of the four elements, substantial forms, and final causation, many experimental scientists found these explanations lacking in empirical validity. By insisting that the “scientist” employ methodical observation, experimentation, and inductive reasoning, while rejecting the “antiquities and citations of authors,” Francis Bacon (1561-1626) helped lay the foundation for a new turn to direct perception —to the things themselves—as the basis of all knowledge.⁹ In 1661, Joseph Glanville, echoing a Baconian sentiment, epitomized these new thinkers’ objections to Aristotelianism: it was merely verbal, it did not give a satisfactory account of phenomenon, and it did not lead to discoveries for “the use of common life.”¹⁰By the late seventeenth century, Bacon was heralded as the hero of a new world of discovery and his name symbolized a co-operative empirical philosophy.

At the most abstract level, the new mechanical philosophy imposed a metaphysics that endowed the natural order with only one kind of entity: matter. Mechanists held that all natural phenomena could be explained in terms of simple observations of matter in motion; they also constructed a physics of the universe where the planets were material objects whose motions in space were amenable to mathematical description. To help advance their theories, many mechanists appealed to atomism. Since its revival in the late sixteenth century, the atomist model had become the primary epistemological framework for those observing natural processes. Atomism provided easy, systematic, and reliable explanations for understanding the impact of matter with matter, or the causality determining the movement of gross bodies. As did the ancient atomists, so the new atomists explained phenomena on the basis of the size, shape, and motion of particles of matter. In spite of differences in politics, nationality, or theological convictions, thinkers such as Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637), Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1637), Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), and René Descartes (1596-1650) defended the mechanical philosophy against the Aristotelian metaphysics of matter, form, and privation, and in opposition to the Neo-Platonically inspired animistic philosophies of the Renaissance.¹¹ In their various writings, they included sections describing the ultimate components of the world (matter and motion) and addressed the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities—this was the view that material bodies possess only a few primary qualities and the observed qualities of bodies actually result from the interaction of the primary qualities with our sense organs.¹² In numerous ways, and with varying degrees of emphasis, these thinkers mechanized the natural world and human perception, declaring that qualities are subjective and relative to the human perceiver. Mechanistic science became very influential because it described a homogeneous universe, all the parts of which were governed by the same laws of nature. For many of its adherents, mechanism was compatible with developments in astronomy, the science of motion, and physiology. For example, Descartes considered William Harvey’s proof for the circulation of blood “much easier to conceive” if understood in mechanical terms.¹³

The mechanical worldview emerged during an era when people took for granted the vital interconnections among epistemology, cosmology, morality, and politics. Most thinkers were wary of any particular conception of the world that would desacralize it and lead to all forms of social disorder. As Michael Hunter observes,”... for many, the most important social corollary of intellectual life was the way it informed conduct. It was widely believed that the fabric of society depended on a philosophical and theological consensus, and hence unorthodox viewpoints which seemed to undermine this and to encourage immoral attitudes were regarded with alarm.”¹⁴ With the possible exception of Hobbes and his followers, most mechanical philosophers sought to avoid the materialist atheism that was traditionally associated with Epicurean atomism. Embracing their role as the new cosmological artisans, seventeenth-century mechanists retained God, generally conceived as the source of motion, as an absolute fixture within their systems. Their various treatises contain sections establishing the existence of God, the nature of God’s providential relationship to humanity, and the immortality of the human soul. For most mechanists, the source of motion in the world (God) must lie outside of the natural, material realm. The desire to retain some form of theism in a mechanistic universe led many thinkers to reject the notion of active matter, for any conception of nature as self-moving could possibly lead one to explain the world without necessarily appealing to God or to the supernatural. One could avoid such danger if one conceives matter as naturally inert and a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• A Tech Approach To God And Religion
• On Being An Intellectually Fulfilled Theist
• The Clergyman-Scientist
• Teilhard and Evolution
• Valuing Nature
• Science and Religion
• A Place for Religion in Science?
• Science and the Bible
• Contributors