God the watchmaker

Technology serves as a model for the conceptual frameworks that have always helped man grasp his world. In antiquity, for example, the furnace explained how the body works. For Aristotle and Galen, the heart was the furnace which generated the heat and the lungs the bellows that then distributed it around the body. In the same fashion, as the distinction between science and religion began to come into focus in the 17th century, the model of the then popular technological marvel, the mechanical clock, with its hidden wheels and pulleys, multiple hands, appearing and disappearing bird and human figures, ticking and melodies,  gained prominence and began to function as an explanation for the world and how it worked.  It drew on the discussions of machina mundi that have been conducted since the late Middle Ages, coupled itself to the revival of ancient Epicurean ideas of atomism and created widespread anxiety about the spread and eventual triumph of Atheism - a view of the world without God. Deists, while not ready to abandon the idea of a Creator, made this Creator an essentially absent being, who created the universe and then walked away form it. The world runs itself!

At the same time, the clock model reinforced the necessity of a watchmaker, and made plausible the supposition that behind the regular and apparently independent motion of the clock-hands, there hid an autonomous Being, who intervened and repaired and made the clock run smoothly and, apparently, effortlessly. This fed into the argument between occasionalists and naturalists in the Middle Ages, which farther confused the issues. Numerous thinkers, Mersenne, Gassendi, Robert Boyle (the famous chemist but also a theologian of renown), busied themselves with reconciling this view of Nature with the existence of God, possibility of miracles and denial of determinism (that all human action is predetermined). Boyle, in particular, attempted to use scientific discoveries to support received Truth, setting the stage for much of the apologetic approaches we encounter on this topic today. Boyle''s Lectures, an annual event that was funded by Boyle's inheritance and aimed to combat Atheism (while there were few avowed atheists around at that time, they were suspected and seen everywhere - such were the insecurities of the age). Among arguments used to support religion were discoveries of Newton, himself an intensely religious man, who hinted that gravity was an incorporeal force that proved the existence of the spiritual world. Others became interested in occultism, witchcraft and divination - all to show that behind the mechanical world there stands the world of spirit.

Ultimately, such attempts are unsuccessful, for they are reactive, rather than proactive. One must not infer God out of the gaps in current scientific knowledge. Science marches one, and often fills in the gaps that were previously evoked as evidence of the supernatural. The experience of 17th and 18th century teaches us that we must not stand within science to prove Spirit, but that we must understand each world, the physical, and the spiritual on its own terms and within its own framework. One needs to remember that in practice science is still devoted to the mechanical model as the explanation for the world. But, this model is disintegrating as the computer, not the clock, becomes the regnant technology, and as quantum thinking, chaos theories and Relativity undermine the conviction that everything can be predicted and explained. It is not in the gaps that we might find God but in His rightful space as the power that moves and infuses all things.

Comments

[m]

A small correction. In the 18th and early 19th centuries when "Deism" was popular among intelectuals, "Deism" was understood to mean belief in God, in Creation, in Divine Providence, and even in an Afterlife, all such beliefs coming from reason rather than Divine Relevation. Only relatively recently has the term "Theism" come to mean what was heretofore described as "Deism" and "Deism" changed to meam belief in Creation but not Divine Providence

[m]

A small correction. In the 18th and early 19th centuries when "Deism" was popular among intelectuals, "Deism" was understood to mean belief in God, in Creation, in Divine Providence, and even in an Afterlife, all such beliefs coming from reason rather than Divine Relevation. Only relatively recently has the term "Theism" come to mean what was heretofore described as "Deism" and "Deism" changed to meam belief in Creation but not Divine Providence