The development of mathematical physics and the disciplines based on it have, especially since the end of the eighteenth century, tended to undermine the whole enterprise of natural theology by calling into question the need for metaphysical principles in a complete account for the universe and by generating specific results which seem to call into question the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe. The response on the part of natural theologians has been to seek ways around cosmology rather than confronting the problems raised by mathematical physics. This paper will argue that these alternative strategies
In the light of these conclusions, any credible strategy for demonstrating the existence of God must pass through cosmology and show that the universe is ultimately meaningful in the sense of being ordered to a first principle which is infinite, necessary, perfect, and thus divine.
There can be little doubt that the development of mathematical physics and the disciplines based on it have, especially since the end of the eighteenth century, tended progressively to undermine the whole enterprise of natural theology. Beginning with Laplace's claim that God is an hypothesis of which he had no need (Laplace 1819/1951, 1799-1825), up through the development of Darwinian evolutionary theory (1859/1970) and the discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which resulted in bleak predictions of impending cosmic heat death (von Helmholtz 1854/1961), and continuing in the present period with quantum cosmologies which undermine the principle of causality (Hartle and Hawking 1983, Halliwell 1991, Linde 1994, Bucher, Goldhaber, and Turok 1995, Bucher and Spergel 1999) and inflationary big bang theories which leave little room to hope in the long term survival of life and intelligence in the universe (Davies 1994), the tendency of mathematical physics has been to render most historical forms of the cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God increasingly less credible. This mobilization of mathematical physics against natural theology we call the "cosmological critique."
Believers have responded to this situation in two principal ways. The dominant tendency has been to abandon natural theology altogether in favor of what amounts to fideism –the notion that we can attain to knowledge of God only by means of faith or some other nonrational means. A much smaller group, centered mostly but not exclusively within the Catholic Church, which condemned fideism at the First Vatican Council (Vatican I. Dei Filius II, Canon 2:1; John Paul II 1998: 53), has attempted to find other ways to demonstrate the existence of God, including the "purely metaphysical" forms of the cosmological argument favored by Gilsonian or "historical" Thomists (Gilson 1936, von Steenberghen 1980 Tweeten 1996), the transcendental arguments put forward by Rahner (1958, 1976) and the Transcendental Thomists, and also, in somewhat different form, by Hartshorne and his followers (Gamwell 1990), or intuitionist or illuminationist arguments which lead back towards the ontological proof (Seifert 1981).
This paper will argue that these alternative strategies are seriously flawed. First, none of these strategies actually succeed in proving the existence of God. Second, even if one or more of these strategies did succeed in proving the existence of God, the God proven would be either so irrelevant to human life and the life of the universe generally as to be religiously meaningless, or else the object of a cult so other-worldly as to be vulnerable to critiques of the sort advanced by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. While these critiques could not, following as they would on a proof of the existence of God, undermine claims regarding the truth value of religion, they would still retain considerable force as indictments of religion as an obstacle to human development.
In the light of these conclusions, any credible strategy for demonstrating the existence of God, and thus for combating the nihilism, despair, and injustice of our time, must pass through cosmology –it must confront and answer the cosmological critique of metaphysics, and show that the universe is ultimately meaningful in the sense of being ordered to a first principle which is infinite, necessary, perfect, and thus divine.
The Aristotelian approach to God grew out of and completed a complex scientific argument which showed that everything in the universe is ordered to a final cause which draws them into being by means of teleological attraction (Aristotle. Metaphysics 12.7). The crisis of Aristotelian physics, a result of its failure to supply a unified theory of motion (Mansueto unpublished), and the shift from teleological explanation to mathematical formalization in physics did not lead to an immediate crisis for natural theology. On the contrary, most mathematical physicists, Newton (Newton 1700) among them, took for granted the fact that the wonderful order which they were describing had a divine author in terms of whom alone its beauty and harmony could be adequately explained (Paley 1802/1986). Already, however, the growing prominence of mathematical methods in physics led to a subtle shift in emphasis which laid the foundations for the crisis. Within the Aristotelian tradition science was by nature explanatory and deductive. The aim of science, in other words, was to rise to a principle in terms of which the phenomena under investigation could be shown to be rationally necessary consequences. This meant that physics necessarily terminated in metaphysics, which alone could supply a principle from which finite and contingent phenomena could be deduced. Mathematical physics, on the other hand, merely describes phenomena, leaving their essential nature and underlying causes obscure (Mansueto unpublished). This tended from the very beginning to promote the idea that the new "science" was achieving more than it actually was. The generalization of Newtonian mechanics into a universal dynamic theory in which the position and velocity of every particle could be accounted for in terms of that of every other particle made it possible, at least in principle, to "account for" everything in the universe without reference to any immaterial or metaphysical principles (Laplace 1799-1825). Thus Laplace's claim that God is an hypothesis of which we have no need. The gradual development of the nebular hypothesis (Kant 1755/1968), of historical geology, and of evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century (Darwin 1859/1970), and the advent of mathematical cosmology (Friedman 1922), which claim to describe the whole history of the universe in terms of a set of relatively simple equations, have only contributed to this impression. Some –though by no means all—contemporary theories of self-organization point in the same direction (Hayek 1988).
The more serious challenge to natural theology has come from physical results which either paint a picture of the universe which makes the existence of God seem profoundly unlikely, or which seem to undermine principles which we need in order to prove the existence of God. Of particular importance in the first regard are results concerning the long-term destiny of the universe. The discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the middle of the last century, which holds that any closed system of particles (which is the way in which the universe was then conceived) tends towards increasing disorder or, in an alternative formulation, tends to dissipate its energy so that it is no longer available to do work, was taken to imply that the universe, far from evolving towards ever higher degrees of organization, was in fact headed toward an inevitable heat death (Helmholtz 1854/1961, Engels 1880/1940). Contemporary cosmology now rejects this prediction, because matter and energy dissipate at different rates, making the existence of thermodynamic gradients and thus available energy a permanent feature of the physical universe (Roos 1994: 77). At the same time, the standard cosmology has equally somber implications for the long-term future of the universe: either continued expansion and cooling, making life and intelligence more difficult if not actually impossible, or else a contraction which will annihilate all complex organization (Davies 1994). Attempts by physicists such as Frank Tipler to argue for the continued development of life and intelligence into infinity under a standard cosmology, while quite creative, ultimately lack credibility (Tipler 1994). And it seems unlikely that an infinite, necessary, and perfect God would create a universe which gives rise to life and intelligence only to allow it later to be destroyed.
Difficulties of this sort notwithstanding, a number of thinkers have persisted in seeing the standard cosmology as not only compatible with, but even as suggestive of, a divine creator. This view is particularly common among thinkers with an Augustinian bent, such as Stanley Jaki (Jaki 1988), and in no way violates the general-relativistic principles which form the foundation of the standard cosmology. This approach, however, is called into question by recent developments in quantum cosmology which envision entire universes coming to being through random fluctuations in an underlying quantum field (Hartle and Hawking 1983, Halliwell 1991, Linde 1994, Bucher and Turok 1995, Bucher and Spergel 1999). This approach renders not only teleological but even mechanical causality problematic. In addition, if the nature and limits of causal explanation are unclear even at the physical level, it is difficult to see how they can be legitimately extended into the metaphysical realm.
In the light of these difficulties, the overwhelming tendency among believers has been to abandon the enterprise of natural theology entirely. Even within Catholic contexts, the tendency since at least the middle of the century has been to simply take for granted that the "god-proofs" have been invalidated and that religion is first and foremost a matter of the appetites, with "belief" following only on affective experience or an act of the will. There have, however, been attempts to salvage natural theology in a way which, however, evades rather than confronts the difficulties created by natural theology. Generally speaking these attempts fall into three categories. First, some thinkers within the phenomenological trend (Seifert 1981), as well as a much smaller number of objective idealists, have claimed what amounts to a direct intuition of the divine. In the case of thinkers working within the phenomenological tradition this generally means that God is one of, indeed the highest, of the essences which becomes accessible in the wake of the phenomenological reduction. In the case of objective idealists, the claim is generally on behalf of a specifically religious intuition which is difficult to distinguish from faith. Generally speaking both strategies form part of a larger Augustinian philosophical and theological problematic, and resonate with Augustine's claim that the fact that we have an idea like that of God can be explained only in terms of the existence of God because neither a finite mind nor any other finite system would be incapable of generating such an idea on its own.
Attempts within the Thomistic tradition to save natural theology have run along very different grounds. Transcendental Thomists such as Rahner have argued that, Kant to the contrary, the idea of God is not simply a transcendental ideal by actually a synthetic a priori. Rahner's starting point, like Kant's, is the internal structure of human consciousness. But the structure of consciousness, he insists, tells us something about the object of consciousness, much as the structure of a keyhole points to both the existence and the nature of keys (Rahner 1976/1978). Every existential judgement we make, Rahner argues, presupposes implicitly the notion of esse as such, or God, of whom we thus have what he calls a nonthematic preapprehension (Rahner 1957/1968). It should be noted that in his later work Rahner seemed more inclined to regard this argument as a demonstration of our natural openness to God than as an authentic proof, regarding the value of which he was profoundly suspicious (Rahner 1976/1978).
"Historical Thomists" of the Gilsonian school have been more anxious than their Transcendental counterparts to uphold at least something of the validity of Thomas' own strategy for proving the existence of God. At the same time, they have tended to side with Augustinian critics in arguing that the Aristotelian proof from motion --Thomas' first way-- does not really demonstrate the existence of the Christian God, but only of a pagan final cause (Gilson 1936, von Steenberghen 1980, Tweeten 1996). Here the agenda is theological rather than scientific. For Gilson it is the discovery of the concept of Being as such which constitutes the greatest achievement of Thomas, an achievement which is intimately bound up for him with the doctrine of Creation ex nihilo (Gilson 1952). The first proof, it is argued, does not rise to a Creator God, who is the Being of all things, but only to a teleological attractor who, among other things, may be dependent on the heavens for its perfection and who might even make the universe necessary and eternal, something which they believe contradicts revealed wisdom. This has led some historical Thomists to become profoundly skeptical about the adequacy of all of the Thomistic proofs (von Steenberghen 1980). Others (Owens 1980) reread Thomas' proof in the light of his "existential metaphysics," or understand motion exclusively in terms of movement from potency to act, without any reference to cosmological presuppositions (Tweeten 1996). In either case the main thrust of the argument is the same. The fact that there is a universe at all depends on Being as such in which all contingent beings enjoy a created share. We need know nothing in particular about the universe in order to arrive at this conclusion.
The response to the cosmological (mathematical-physical) critique of natural theology has been mistaken in two ways. First, arguments for the existence of God which evade cosmological consideration turn out inevitably to be radically inadequate and fail in their aims. This is true, however, in very different ways of neo-Augustinian intuitionism (or illuminism) and transcendental Thomism on the one hand and of the Gilsonian "purely metaphysical" version of the cosmological argument on the other hand. Augustinian and transcendental Thomist arguments fail purely and simply. Specifically, they are entirely vulnerable to psychoanalytic and sociological critiques such as those advanced by Feuerbach (1841/1957), Marx (1943/1978, 1844/1978, 1867/1977), Nietzsche (1889/1968), Freud (1927/1928, 1930), and others which advance alternative explanations for religious consciousness, at least some of which are probably more economical than the neo-Augustinian or transcendental accounts. Even if one were to grant a bit more to the transcendental argument in particular, namely that the idea of God (understood as the Thomistic esse) is in fact a condition of any possible knowledge, this does not necessarily imply that God in fact exists --one might also conclude that there is no real knowledge, an option which has become increasingly popular with the development of postmodernist and deconstructionist ideologies during the last quarter of the twentieth century (Derrida 1976/1968, Lyotard 1979/1984). Perhaps more to the point, the neo-Augustinian and transcendental Thomist approaches are pastorally vacuous, unable to answer the main forms of doubt in the modern world --i.e. the suspicion that the universe is not, after all, ultimately meaningful and that religion is merely a sort of wishful thinking.
The problem with the Gilsonian approach is very different. In itself, the metaphysical form of the cosmological argument is valid, even if the scruples about paganism which motivate it are not. The difficulty is that the whole enterprise of metaphysics must first be validated and its basic concepts established before this argument can be made. And metaphysics arises out of cosmology --or of physics in the Aristotelian sense, understood as a complete explanatory theory of the universe. It is the need to complete the physical explanation of the universe in a principle which itself requires no further explanation, precisely because it is self-caused, that brings the whole enterprise of metaphysics into being in the first place. And the concepts used by metaphysics in establishing and analyzing this principle --causality among them-- are carried over from physics. If physics cannot validate the concept of causality then it is not clear how it can legitimately be carried over into the metaphysical realm. Looked at from a pastoral standpoint, it might be said that while the Aristotelian strategy could easily appeal to someone who did not initially believe in God, and who was conducting an open-ended investigation aimed at understanding the universe, the purely metaphysical approach of the Gilsonian school will make sense only to someone who already believes and is thus of limited pastoral value.
Second, attempts to rise to the idea of God in a way which evades rather than passing through cosmology, even if they could succeed in proving the existence of God, are inevitably religiously unsatisfying. People seek God, at least at first, in order to ground whatever meaning they have discovered in their lives --to situate the whole business of knowing and loving and creating in a context which suggests that the realities of suffering and death notwithstanding, what we are and what we do has some ultimate meaning. And our knowing and loving and creating are, furthermore, situated within the context of a definite physical, biological, and social context which must be shown to point, however obliquely and indirectly, toward an End in which what we do in our lives is conserved and validated. It is only on the basis of this first religious impulse that we can grow, by means of the "dark night" towards a higher spirituality which in which God is known and loved for God's own sake, and in which we eventually come to know ourselves in and love ourselves for the sake of God rather than knowing God as the condition of our own self-realization (Garrigou-Lagrange 1938). In by-passing cosmology the neo-Augustinian and transcendental Thomist approaches by-pass the question of the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and thus of our own lives and render the question of God's existence religiously meaningless.
One might, of course, object, that what is at issue here is simply a different understanding of what religion is about --that it is very emphatically not about a "search for meaning" nor is it an answer to any striving which is properly human, but rather something which "shakes us and turns us" away from our properly human, creaturely concerns towards a God who is radically other. And this is, indeed, the trend of most twentieth century theology, Protestant and Catholic (Tillich 1967, Rahner 1976/1978). If we rise to knowledge of God in some way other than by abstraction and inference from the data of the senses concerning the world we live in, then love of God is also in radical discontinuity with the love of nature, of other human beings, and of the human civilizational project. The result is the otherworldliness characteristic of the larger Augustinian tradition. The difficulty, once again, is that this is, precisely, the sort of religion which is vulnerable to the critiques of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. One might, of course, simply reject such critiques as signs of worldly pride, but this is mere assertion --no really satisfactory argument for a rationally knowable principle which might ground a critique of pride has been put forward.
The task, then, is quite clear. Those who are anxious to combat the nihilism and despair of the present period, and the injustice which that nihilism and despair legitimates, must confront directly the challenges to religion posed by mathematical physics and its subaltern disciplines. As it happens, there are growing reasons to believe that such a confrontation might actually be won. On the one hand, the internal contradictions of mathematical physics have grown increasingly obvious (Lerner 1991, Mansueto unpublished). Relativity and quantum mechanics turn out to be irreconcilable, the first depending on continuous and the latter on discrete formalisms. Dynamics generally (including both relativity and quantum mechanics) describe the universe in time-reversible terms; thermodynamics describes irreversible processes of organization and disintegration. And there appears to be a tension, if not a contradiction, between thermodynamic descriptions of irreversible change, which ultimately tend towards higher entropy, and evolutionary theory, which points towards the development of ever higher degrees of organization. On the other hand, a number of recent developments, including the discovery of cosmological fine tuning, the development of theories of complexity and self-organization, and the emergence of post-Darwinian evolutionary theories which stress the role of symbiosis and self-organization, all point towards a picture of the universe which is much more friendly to physical, as opposed to purely metaphysical, forms of the cosmological argument, as well as to arguments from cosmic teleology (Harris 1991, 1992). What will be required to address this problem, however, is not merely a dialogue between religion and science mediated by philosophy, but rather the development of a new scientific paradigm which transcends the limits and internal contradictions of mathematical physics, and returns to the historic task of science --the explanation, as opposed to the mere formal description of the universe-- and which thus concludes, as did the older Aristotelian physics, in a principle infinite, necessary, and perfect, the incredible Beauty, Truth, and Goodness of which draw all things into Being and from which they derive their share in the transcendental Integrity which guarantees them a participation in Eternity.
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