Brooke John Hedley,2014-Science-and-Religion-Some-Historical-Perspectives

“That doctrine, it is said, refers to the ultimate dependence of everything that exists on a Creator. It need not entail the separate creation of every species.”

“Popular generalizations about that relationship, whether couched in terms of war or peace, simply do not stand up to serious investigation. There is no such thing as the relationship between science and religion. It is what different individuals and communities have made of it in a plethora of different contexts.”

“Newton himself remarked that it was part of the business of natural philosophy to discuss such questions as the attributes of God and His relationship to the physical world.”

“Natural philosophers of the seventeenth century would present their work as the search for order in a universe regulated by an intelligent Creator. [...] Laws were the result of legislation by an intelligent deity. [...] Newton would declare that the regulation of the solar system presupposed the ‘counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.’”

“If the human mind had been created in such a way that it was matched to the intelligibility of nature, then the possibility of secure scientific knowledge could be affirmed. [...] A proven capacity to discover the laws of nature and to express them mathematically was taken by [...] William Whewell, as evidence of an affinity between the human and the divine mind.”

“Noting that the lens and pupil of the eye were ‘so finely shaped and fitted for vision that no artist can mend them,’ Newton asked whether blind chance could have known sufficient of light and its refraction to have effected the design.”

“Past precedents indicate that conflict will assuredly arise, if statements about God are used to fill the gaps in scientific explanation.”

“The point is not that science undermined the design argument - certainly not in the eighteenth century. Quite the contrary. It was rather that religious apologists were asking too much of it. A religious burden was placed on the sciences, which they were eventually unable to carry.” Fiszki źródłowe do rozprawy doktorskiej

“William Paley’s Natural theology [...] claimed that there was proof of the unity of God. It came from the ‘uniformity of plan observable in the universe.’ [...] But Paley’s argument was more ambitious than this. It aimed to establish a God with personality.”

“The fact that natural theology could be used both to attack and defend Christianity may be confusing, but that very ambivalence also helps to account for its resilience. Without additional clarification, it is not always clear [...] whether proponents of design were arguing a Christian or deistic thesis.”

“Indeed, Aquinas had warned against the anthropomorphic reasoning that simply conferred human attributes onto God. He had even excluded animate objects from his teleological proof on the grounds that it was the unconscious cooperation of inanimate things, in achieving particular ends, that spoke more clearly of God’s existence.”

“Thus, the most the argument could show was that the world has an architect, working on preexisting material. That was as far as the analogy with human manufacture could go. To establish the contingency of matter, the role of God as Creator, or the existence of a necessary Being, required a different form of argument.”

“That laws of nature were to be regarded as if they had been prescribed by a lawgiver was not sufficient to establish that they had. Only if no other explanation for the appearance of design could be found would the inference to a divine designer be secure. But one could not know that all other possibilities had been exhausted.”

“The supreme deficiency of physico-theology, according to Kant, was that no matter how much wise artistry might be displayed in the world, it could never demonstrate the moral wisdom that had to be predicated of God. To postulate a Being who was holy, good, and just, one had to transcend the anthropomorphism of the design argument.”

“To treat the traditional ‘proofs’ of God’s existence as if they were exclusively proofs (and, as such, necessarily failures) is to miss other roles they played [...]. They could function, nondemonstratively, in a clarification of what it would be for God to be God.”

“Thomas Chalmers [...] willingly conceded that the design argument, as a proof, was not compelling. But one thing it did was raise questions about the origin and purpose of creation - questions that infidels ought to be asking, and to which the only satisfying answers were to be found in the Gospel.”

“It did not matter to Powell if the development of the solar system, or even of organic systems, could be explained by natural laws. The fact that those laws had conspired to produce such a world as this was sufficient testimony to divine wisdom and foresight. [...] Whewell had many times said that laws of nature, and the effects resulting from their combination, provided as fitting a testimony to divine activity as the appeal to divine intervention.”

“Theoretical constructs, appearing in different branches of science, have been shown to be interdependent, and also underdetermined by the data they purport to explain. [...] This does not, of course, entitle religious concepts to intrude into scientific conceptualization. But the realization that theories are underdetermined by their supporting data explains [...] that aesthetic and religious beliefs have played a selective role in the past.”

“By ‘chance’ variations, Darwin did not mean occurrences that were uncaused. He sometimes used the word merely to cover his ignorance of the cause. At other times he meant by ‘chance’ the intersection of otherwise independent causal chains. The crux of the matter [...] was that variations [...] could not be said to be a response to the adaptational needs of the organism. In that respect the process seemed to lack direction.”

“He wanted to show that it was perfectly possible for a good Catholic to be an evolutionist. He claimed to have found in the scholastic philosopher Suarez [...] a precedent for admitting the possibility of creation through secondary causes.”

“So long, however, as Darwinian evolution could be construed as a unified process in which potential was actualized in higher organic forms, the inference, he suggested, had to be to a single designer.”

“In America, the defender of liberal religious values has the burden of differentiating his own position from that growing body of creationists whose attacks on the theory of evolution constitute a threat not merely to the orientation of research but to the cognitive content of academic science.”