A Philosophy of the Christian Religion by Murphy Nancey;

Author:Murphy, Nancey;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2018-07-02T13:43:17+00:00

3.3 Worldview changes

Lovejoy writes that the great chain of being was discussed more in the eighteenth century than at any other time in history32—it was no longer an “endemic assumption . . . which if made explicit would amount to a large and important and perhaps highly debatable proposition in logic or metaphysics.”33 In the eighteenth century, the new empirical-scientific mindset was already clashing with this metaphysical assumption, and it is interesting that the sources he quotes who still held to it were predominantly literary figures. For example, it was a major theme in Essays on Man (1733–4) by Alexander Pope (1688–1744), who even repeats Augustine’s assumption that a break in the chain of being would create cosmic disorder.34

Loss of this concept of a break in the chain of command from God to the nat­ural world, attributed to angelic and human disobedience, and then combined with such a dramatic focal point (Lisbon) for recognition of the “prevalence of misery in the world,”35 caused the existential problem of evil to bare its teeth in a new way: what can account for a universe designed to produce such massive suffering?36 Especially important is that it defeated the Augustinian answer to the problem of animal suffering.

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