A Miracle Creed by Jeffrey K. McDonough;

Author:Jeffrey K. McDonough;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

This passage, of course, recalls topics already discussed in Chapter 1. It is worth emphasizing here, however, that Leibniz’s two realms doctrine not only provides him with an elegant story about an explanatory parallelism holding between minds and bodies, as well as between bodies understood as being governed by efficient laws of nature and teleological optimality principles, it also lays the foundation for a story about the compatibility of efficient causal explanations within the order of nature and teleological explanations in terms of God’s ends. Setting aside for the moment the kind of immanent lawful teleology discussed in Chapter 1, we can—according to Leibniz—understand the behavior of a ray of light both in terms of the efficient causes determining its behavior and in terms of God’s providential end of optimizing nature. The ray of light must pass through some point B because it is constrained to do so by prior efficient causes. But it must also pass through point B because its doing so is part of God’s providential end of producing his effects by the easiest and most determinate ways. In suggesting how efficient causation within the order of nature and divine providential ends might smoothly dovetail, Leibniz’s optimization approach to optics may once again be seen as paving the way for his embrace of Providence.

Finally, as a third theme, sounded throughout his mature works, Leibniz insists over and over that a proper defense of divine teleology should seek to show how consideration of God’s ends might be positively conducive to making important discoveries in natural philosophy. Although he sometimes mentions in passing cases of well-functioning organisms in connection with this theme, his principal example in support of the utility of providential reasoning for making discoveries in the natural sciences simply are his optimal form derivations of the laws of reflection and refraction. Thus, in a characteristic passage from the Discourse on Metaphysics, he writes:

[T]he way of final causes is easier, but is nevertheless frequently of use in discovering important and useful truths, truths that would take a long time to find by the other, more physical route. Anatomy provides important examples of this; and Snell, the first formulator of the rules of refraction, would have been a long time finding them, if he had tried first to find out how light is formed. But evidently he followed the method which the ancients used for catoptrics, which is in fact that of final causes. For by looking for the easiest way to get a ray from one given point to another by reflection . . . they discovered the equality of the angle of incidence and of reflection. . . . M. Snell, as I believe, and after him . . . M. Fermat, have more ingeniously applied this to refraction. Since rays in the same media observe the same ratio of sines as that between the resistances of the media, this turns out to be the easiest, or at least the most determinate route to get from a given point in one medium to a given point in another.

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