The case for god by Karen Armstrong

Author:Karen Armstrong [Karen Armstrong]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 9780307272928
Published: 2009-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

What we know about the external world, we know in exactly the same way as God knows it; we could have the same “clear” and “distinct” ideas as God himself.

Once Descartes was confident that the material world existed, he could proceed with the second part of his project: the creation of a single scientific method that could bring a world that was spinning out of control under the rule of reason. In his desire to master reality, Descartes could not accept the idea that the cosmos had come into being by accident. His cosmos was an intricate, well-oiled machine, set in motion and sustained by an all-powerful God. Like Mersenne, Descartes revived ancient Greek atomism, but with the crucial addition of an overseeing Creator. At the moment of creation, God had imposed his mathematical laws upon the atoms, so that when an atom collided with another, this was not a matter of chance but achieved by divinely implanted principles.22 Once everything had been set in motion, no further divine action was necessary, and God was able to retire from the world and allow it to run itself.

In a time of frightening political turbulence, a universe that ran as regularly as clockwork seemed profoundly attractive. Descartes, a devout Catholic all his life, had experienced his “method” as a Godgiven revelation and in gratitude—extraordinary as this may seem— vowed to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto. Yet Descartes’ philosophy was profoundly irreligious: his God, a clear idea in his mind, was well on the way to becoming an idol, and his meditation on the thinking self did not result in kenosis but in the triumphant assertion of the ego. There was no awe in Descartes’ theology: indeed, he believed that it was the task of science to dispel wonder. In the future people should look, for example, at the clouds, “in such a way that we will no longer have occasion to wonder at anything that can be seen of them, or anything that descends from them.”23

When he dedicated his Meditations on First Philosophy to “The Most Illustrious Dean and Doctors of the Sacred Faculty of Theology in Paris,” Descartes made an astonishing claim: “I have always considered that the two questions respecting God and the soul were the chief of those that ought to be demonstrated by philosophical [i.e., “scientific”] rather than theological argument.”24 In the clear expectation that they would agree with him, Descartes calmly informed the most distinguished body of theologians in Europe that they were not competent to discuss God. Mathematics and physics would do the job more effectively.25 And the theologians were all too happy to agree. It was a fateful move. Henceforth, theology would increasingly be translated into a “philosophical” or “scientific” idiom that was alien to it.

• • •

Even those who could see flaws in Descartes’ Universal Mathematics were excited by the idea of a mechanical universe, ruled at all times and in all places by the same unequivocal laws.26 Increasingly, the mechanical universe would be seen as a model for society.

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