La domanda senza risposta. Alcune riflessioni su scienza, ateismo e la nozione di Dio by Hans Jonas

Author:Hans Jonas [Jonas, Hans]
Language: ita
Format: epub
Tags: filosofia
ISBN: 88-7018-415-3
Publisher: il melangolo
Published: 2001-03-14T23:00:00+00:00

THE UNANSWERED QUESTION

SOME THOUGHTS ON SCIENCE, ATHEISM, AND THE NOTION OF GOD

If I convince myself and others that the question is indeed an unanswered question, 1 shall have succeeded in doing what I have set out to do.

When the famous French mathematician and physicist Laplace, having dedicated his celestial mechanics to Napoleon I, and being received by Napoleon in gracious audience and Napoleon, quite an educated man, had looked into this very scholarly mathematical work, a kind of completion of Newtons work, Napoleon asked or remarked on the fact that he had missed in the system of the world, of the universe, in a work on celestial mechanics, any reference to God. Whereupon, Laplace gave the famous answer: Your majesty, I have no need of such a hypothesis.

Now this neatly sums up the situation created by the success of the scientific analysis of the material universe. Insofar as God is a hypothesis, and serves the function that a hypothesis is meant to serve, that hypothesis has become redundant. Now, in what sense is God a hypothesis? Surely anyone with the least knowledge of what religion is about is aware that the idea of God is not exhausted by the service of the notion of God as a hypothesis. On the other hand, it is undeniable that in the history of the great creeds, in their very search, the hypothetical function of the idea of God is not negligible. The function which the hypothesis of God had to perform was twofold. One, to account for the existence of the universe, the doctrine of creation. Without such an account of its cause, of the primary cause of its coming to be, the universe would not make sense, that is, the riddle of its existence is answered by the idea of creation. Secondly, the working of things in the universe, even the day to day working of the extraordinary and significant events in the concatenation of things, also require an author who could be credited with governing the world according to some purpose or intent at least so that what seems to be meaningful, significant is thereby explained.

Thus, God considered in an explanatory role, and this is only one, though not an unimportant aspect, it was God the creator and God the Lord of nature. The particular role in his relation to man is something which is not completely answered by these two aspects, that I summed up as affirming the hypothesis of God. All the proofs of the existence of the God, the traditional ones, actually are somehow connected with this hypothesisfunction of the notion of God.

In these arguments an appeal is not made to faith, but to reason, and one can insist on a rational explanation, and it is a rational aspect in the conception of God, cosmological in two senses: as creator and as governor, perpetually in control. Not only the first instigator, but also perpetual controller. In this sense God was indispensable. And Laplace said: In these functions he is dispensable.

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