An Introduction to Divine Action: Isaac Newton’s God
Newton would have subscribed to the
following six ways in which God was active:
- the creation of matter and setting it in motion in accordance
with certain prescribed laws;
- the formation of the present world system;
- its continued operation;
- its occasional reformation;
- occasional spiritual intrusions in human affairs through the
agency of natural phenomena (e.g., comets and epidemics);
- miracles.
It is especially
interesting to note that Newton himself did not hold the mechanical view of the
universe to which his system led.Rather he thought of God directly mediating the force of gravity. Yet within a
hundred years of the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687 there were many who would have denied that any of
these six aspects of divine action were operative. It was accepted that
physical forces could act at a distance without mediation, divine or other.
Hume had attacked the reasonableness of believing in miracle (see the question
of miracle). Laplace had posited the complete determinism of a world governed
by Newtonian physics. And the
simplicity and elegance of Darwin’s
evolutionary scheme did
away with the notion that individual living creatures need be the direct
products of divine design.
Email
link | Feedback | Contributed by: Dr.
Christopher Southgate
Source: God, Humanity and the
Cosmos (T&T Clark, 1999)
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