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The Book of Nature
It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the intellectual shift that occurred in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The central issue concerned the method for knowing the truth, whether in the physical sciences, philosophy, or theology. In prior centuries, the truth was regarded as something revealed by the authority of tradition (all the way back to Aristotleâs teachings about the workings of nature) or the teachings of the church. The truth was found in what was taught to be true by those in positions of authority to know the truth. If a farmerâs crops failed, for example, he or she might go to the local priest to learn how the hand of God was behind the farmerâs misfortune.
All that changed with the advent of the scientific method. Now the success or failure of crops was explained by discovered knowledge about the workings of nature. This was a radical, monumental shift in thinking. Nearly everything thought to be true, because of the received wisdom of past centuries, was now challenged. It was not so much the content of taken-for-granted knowledge that was at issue; the issue concerned the method by which this knowledge was derived. The new paradigm could be summarized as follows: We find ourselves in a world that is governed by laws, and these laws can be discovered through rational investigation and trial-and-error experiment.
This new approach was applied to knowledge about God. The existence of the Judeo-Christian God, or of a Creator Deity, was widely accepted throughout Europe. The issue concerned the nature and will of this God. How could that be known? The church had its own answer to that question, according to which scripture and tradition were regarded as the sources of knowledge about God. These were now rejected as being unscientificânot necessarily wrong, but based on an untenable method of discovery. The correct method, it was now believed, was to look at the created world, the world of nature, for insight into the nature and will of the creator. This was because Godâs nature was manifested in the world He created. This was the key point.
Isaac Newton is a good example. In 1687 he announced to the world that he had happened upon a law of God, a law put in nature by God to make the universe an orderly, lawful place. This was the universal law of gravitation, a law that Newton believed revealed the lawful orderliness of Godâs nature. Think about this for a moment. Newton discovered that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This fascinating law is in nature, but how did it get there? It would be farfetched to think it occurred by accident. He believed it came from God. In a sense, he was doing theology when he was doing his science. Nowadays, we would say he was doing ânatural theologyâ; but even in his day, this concept was sometimes used to describe his work.
It was not only Newton who believed the creator God was revealed in His creation. Other giants of the scientific revolution shared the same belief, including Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler. It gradually became a widespread belief among other scientists (or ânatural philosophers,â as they were called) and among the intellectual class at the time. Throughout European culture, the dominance of the church, whose teachings about God were based on Scripture, gave way to the new approach to learning about Godânamely, through a scientific exploration of the book of nature.
If we jump forward to the beginning of the twentieth century we find Albert Einstein with similar beliefs. When asked whether he believed in God, he wrote: âMy religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little we can comprehend about the knowable world. That deep emotional conviction in the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.â In response to a student who asked about his religious faith, he said:
Thanks to Einstein and the burgeoning fields of particle physics and astrophysics, we now know much more about the book of nature than in the era when Newton made his discoveries. Since the time of Aristotle, it was believed that atoms were the fundamental building blocks of matter. But the last fifty years brought in the burgeoning field of particle physics and the discovery that atoms were composed of much smaller particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) and that protons and neutrons were composed of still smaller bits of matter (quarks and leptons). In addition, particle physics identified the fundamental forces at work in the microscopic world.
In physics, the laws and principles of this world are called quantum mechanics. âQuantaâ refer to the indivisible units of matter or energy that make up the quantum world. Because these units behave and interact in a fluid, dynamic manner, the term âquantum dynamicsâ would be more appropriate. There is nothing âmechanicalâ going on in this realm. Nonetheless, I will stick with the term âquantum mechanicsâ in the following discussion.
As I mentioned in the Introduction, the theology of the book you are now reading belongs to the field of natural theology. Its basic premise is that the book of nature, which we now see as vastly more intricate and rich than we ever knew, is a source of revelation about the Creator Deity. To elaborate on this point, I should say a word about the two principles that inform my method.
The principle of emanation. I believe the fundamental building blocks and forces in the natural worl...