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to work for the good of the public, objective research into the external universe beyond
the veil of appearances was to be promoted; while first-person, phenomenological modes
of inquiry into the nature of appearances themselves, as advocated in the organic view of
nature, were to be suppressed.
Finally, the animistic belief in action at a distance and in the occurrence of
miraculous events devoid of preternatural intervention undermined the  argument from
miracles, which was a central pillar of both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant
Church s authority. The mechanical philosophy once again pointed the way to a solution:
all physical influence must be due either to contact by another physical body or to
supernatural intervention. It was in this metaphysical context that Newton was so
concerned about the apparent action at a distance involved in gravitational attraction. His
theological response was that God imposed this appearance of mutual attraction on
matter, in accord with Newton s more general belief that God imposed all natural laws on
the material world. Thus Christian theology and the mechanical philosophy agreed that
action at a distance could not be both natural and miraculous.
More generally, Christian theology found it imperative to draw a strict distinction
between true miracles, those resulting from divine, supernatural intervention, and mere
marvels or extraordinary events. Miracles presupposed a natural order against which they
could be judged miracles and thereby distinguished from mere marvels. In the
seventeenth century, Christian theology and the mechanical philosophy of nature took the
common position that an event could be deemed a miracle if it was not explicable in
terms of natural laws. Science was designated as the proper mode of inquiry to determine
those laws, which made the identification of miracles possible. Thus, the mechanical
philosophy of the seventeenth century which may be regarded as the infant stage of
contemporary scientific materialism was seen as a crucial support for Christian
theology, and many of its principles were largely theological in origin.
The Judeo-Christian concept of imposed laws of nature, which burst into
prominence in seventeenth-century scientific thought, can be traced to the latter part of
the thirteenth century, when a new tradition of Christian theology arose, called the theory
of voluntarist natural law. This theory conceived of law as imposed on the world by the
divine will. This was strongly set forth in the ethical voluntarism of William of Ockham,
who grounded the natural law of morality on the will of God. Natural law, therefore,
became a divine command, which is right and binding merely because God is the
lawgiver.13 According to Ockham, there are no necessary intermediaries between an
infinitely free and omnipotent God and the things that he has created and that are utterly
contingent upon him. So the order of the world can be discovered only by an examination
of phenomena, not by any a priori reasoning other than the careful examination of God s
revealed word. Given his absolute power, God could order the opposites of the acts that
he has in fact forbidden. However, by his ordained power, he has actually established a
moral order, within the framework of which the natural law is absolute and immutable.
Thus, God was thought to have made a pact, or covenant, with his creatures to abide by
the moral laws he had imposed on creation.
The theory of imposed natural law seems to have made its way into Protestant
thought through Martin Luther (1483-1546), who was aware of medieval thinking on this
subject, and Ulrich Zwingli (1484 1531) and John Calvin (1509 1564) also embraced
this notion. Puritan theology, for example, drew a distinction between the ordinary and
extraordinary Providences of God that is strongly reminiscent of the voluntarist theories
of Ockham. Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke, as well as Boyle, Newton, and other members
of the Royal Society, proceeded to adapt the voluntarist theory of moral law to a
comparable view of physical laws operating in nature. Many of these later philosophers
and scientists were well aware of the writings of the medieval voluntarist theologians.
Newton believed that the divinely imposed laws of nature changed from place to place
and from time to time throughout the universe, as if God were experimenting with his
creation in different ways at different times and places. However, shortly after Newton s
time, an increasing number of natural philosophers chose instead to believe that God
imposed his laws on nature in a manner that was the same throughout space and time. In
making this move, they established the principle of universalism.
The new mechanical philosophy asserted that individual entities are the ultimate
constituents of nature and possess no inherent connections with one another. Each exists
in total isolation from the rest, the relations between them are imposed on them from
without, and these imposed patterns of behavior are the laws of nature. In this way the
principle of physical reductionism, yet another of the central pillars of scientific
materialism rooted in Christian theology, was established. According to Robert Boyle,
the laws of motion did not arise from the nature of matter but were imposed on the world
by the will of the Creator. The ordinary course of things can be abrogated, as in the case
of miracles, by the Creator alone (or agents assisted with his absolute or supernatural
power); for God, being omnipotent, can do whatever involves no contradiction. Boyle, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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