Ultimate Explanations of the Universe (18 page)

The concept of creation has a religious origin. Hence it is not surprising that it was developed and elaborated within the sphere of theological and metaphysical reflection. At any rate that intellectual environment was characteristic of the whole of the Middle Ages. But with the approach of the Modern period and the emergence of questions which would eventually give rise to the empirical sciences, the creation issue could not remain insensitive to these transformations. Although the idea of creation had become thoroughly theological and metaphysical, it obviously pertained to the world as well, and at a certain stage even served as a sort of bridgehead connecting the issues in theology and metaphysics with the gradually maturing issues in the natural sciences. Movement across this bridgehead went in both directions. Some of the theological debates left their imprint on the natural sciences, and conversely – the new style of thinking and the new methods developed by the nascent sciences generated questions addressed to the concept of creation, questions which would have been unimaginable earlier. An example of the impact of theology on science comes in a set of issues connected with the problem of divine omnipotence. What can God, and what can’t He do? Is He limited by any kind of “nature of things?” Can He create something that would be self-contradictory? Or putting it more generally: is He constrained by the principles of logic? Which logic? And so on. Any constraints on divine omnipotence will of course have an impact on the created world. If there is anything that God cannot do, then that thing cannot occur in the created world. Can we then draw any conclusions concerning the world on the basis of limitations to divine omnipotence?

But the path of reasoning could also be taken in the opposite direction. Rapid progress in the new sciences started when they learned to apply mathematics to the examination of the world. This prompted the idea that the world had a “mathematical plan.” So did the Creator think mathematically? Since from the composition of a work we may draw conclusions regarding its author’s intention, we are in the midst of questions leading directly to the concept of God.

In their concept of God the Greek and Roman philosophers often attained the very peak of philosophical reflection. As Amos Funkenstein writes,
¹
the clash between the Judaeo-Christian and the Pagan theology did not concern the number of gods (serious thinkers treated the popular, folk brand of polytheism at best as a metaphor), but rather the nature of divinity. The Greek concept of the Divine had something about it reminiscent of Einstein’s cosmic religion. For the Greeks God was a sort of cosmic principle responsible for the unchanging order of the world. The notion that God could intervene in the history of mankind or change the order of the world was unacceptable to a sophisticated Greek thinker. It is worthwhile citing the example of Galen, who ridiculed Moses for thinking that God could do anything, “even should He wish to make a bull or a horse out of ashes” if He wanted to. Galen himself believed that certain things were impossible by nature and that God did not even attempt such things at all but that He chose the best out of the possibilities of becoming.
²

The theology of the Fathers of the Church was obliged to react to such an attitude. And it did – significantly, by endorsing it in part. Origen made a distinction between what God could do in principle (
per potentiam
), and what He actually did on a rational basis (
ex iustitia
). With time this distinction assumed the form of the classical differentiation between absolute divine omnipotence (
potentia absoluta
) and
potentia ordinata
– “ordered” power. The distinction is well illustrated in the debate between Peter Damian and Anselm of Canterbury. Peter had criticised Aristotle for the opinion that God could not change the already accomplished past
post factum
. According to Peter Damian He could, for instance make Rome never founded. Anselm immediately spotted the danger of a terrible paradox in this. If God could create self-contradictory things, He could also annihilate Himself and His omnipotence. Therefore we should assume that divine omnipotence is limited at least by the principle of non-contradiction. On the other hand, God observed the order He Himself had created, since this was His will as determined in His wisdom.

St. Thomas Aquinas made an even sharper distinction between absolute and ordered omnipotence. Absolute omnipotence pertained to everything that was not self-contradictory, and Thomas meant “self-contradiction” in the sense of formal logic; by applying a logical interpretation he stressed that any thing that accomplished such a self-contradiction would not be a thing but a non-thing, and therefore could never be created. Ordered omnipotence applied not only to the order of our world, but also to the order of other possible worlds. God chose to create this world, and not some other of the possible worlds; that was His free choice. In this sense the world was contingent – it could have been different from what it is.
³

Of course definitions do not resolve all the problems. Duns Scotus observed that the distinction between what was possible absolutely and possible by ordination was not sharp enough, since ascribing something to God that was disordered (and that is what the distinction implied) seemed inadmissible. When we get down to specific applications the distinction becomes even fuzzier. For example, St. Thomas was of the opinion that particular beings in all possible worlds (admissible thanks to ordered omnipotence) were connected with each other by a variety of relations, and that a drastic change in any one being in such a world could lead to a logical contradiction, and therefore would be beyond the range of divine omnipotence. William Ockham disagreed with this. In his opinion every individual, as regards both its existence and its nature, was completely dependent on the will of God. The contingency of Duns Scotus’ world was much more radical than that of St. Thomas’s world.

The last-mentioned debate is characteristic as a testimonial to a growing voluntaristic attitude, that is a gradual expansion of the area left to the free decision of God, which emerged and increased the nearer the debaters were to the Modern period.

The peak of this trend came with the views propounded by Descartes, who said that even the axioms of mathematics depended on the will of God. If God wanted to, He could annul all the multiplication tables. This is an astounding claim, since Descartes was a resolute rationalist who believed that the whole of physics could be derived from “first principles,” and considered the analytical geometry he had devised not only as a paragon of rationality, but also as a kind of ontology of the world. If the essential property of matter was its extension, as he held, then the most fundamental science of all that was material had to be geometry. Historians of philosophy and science have been racking their brains trying to figure out how to reconcile Descartes’ rationalism with his radical view on the omnipotence of God.
⁴

In the seventeenth century the old debates on divine omnipotence found an entirely new field of application. Today we tend to think that the designers of the new science, with Galileo and Newton in their vanguard, repudiated the past and launched an entirely new style of thinking. They did indeed initiate a New Learning, but nobody is capable of abolishing his past (except in extreme cases of amnesia). Even these greatest names in science were firmly rooted in tradition, and what made them great was the fact that they did not reiterate the truths as taught to them, but were able to extract new, exciting meanings from them. Yes, they did take a rationalist outlook on the world, but they envisaged God as the guarantee of the world’s rationality.

In the preceding period, going right back to Aristotle, attempts to learn about the world were made by the “categorial classification of beings.” The classification of the sciences was to reflect the fundamental ontological categories,
⁵
and the aim of the individual sciences was to “resolve” the principal classification or to make it more detailed within the area of study proper for that particular discipline. These classifications were so natural that any change within them disturbed the world order. In this conceptual context discussions on what God could and could not do on the grounds of His ordered omnipotence seemed fully warranted.

The tension between the world’s contingency, associated with the strategy of collecting information on the world by observation and experimentation, and the inevitability in the fact that the laws of nature are mathematical is clearly visible in the opinions of Kepler. On the one hand there was his Pythagorean belief in the world’s geometrical perfection, in which the sphere and circle expressed the supreme level of symmetry; and on the other – his assiduous observation of the positions of Mars, which led to the conclusion that the orbit of the Red Planet was not a circle but an ellipse. After much intellectual struggle Kepler found a solution: things mathematical were causes of things physical, since at the beginning of time God adopted a simple but abstract plan of things mathematical to serve as the prototypes of materially designed magnitudes.
⁹

Kepler’s suggestion to salvage the forfeited circular symmetry by means of the symmetry of the five Platonic solids inscribed in and described on appropriately chosen circles soon lost its currency, but within a short time the idea that God was a “mathematical designer” spread and became the prevalent notion. What was still needed was to find out what that design was like. The essential core of the answer to this question, in force for the next few centuries, was supplied by Isaac Newton.