The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by Burtt E. A.;

The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by Burtt E. A.;

Author:Burtt, E. A.; [Burtt, E. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1890314
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-11T16:00:00+00:00


H. God’s Relation to the Mechanical World

Boyle’s deeply religious character has been patent enough from many of the quotations already cited. It is time, however, to fix our attention on this side of his philosophy more directly, and to note its ultimate relations, in his own mind, to experimental science. His religious activities were multifarious; among other things he contributed heavily toward the support of missionaries in far corners of the globe, and carried on quite a correspondence with some of them, including John Eliot of New England fame. He founded the famous series of Boyle lectures, in which he hoped that answers would be offered to the new objections and difficulties in the way of accepting the Christian religion, arising from the developments of the time in science and philosophy. Dr. Bentley, an important correspondent of Newton, became the first lecturer on the Boyle foundation. We learn from Birch’s Life of Boyle, that “he had so profound a veneration for the Deity that the very name of God was never mentioned by him without a pause and a visible stop in his discourse; in which Sir Peter Pett, who knew him for almost forty years, affirms that he was so exact, that he did not remember to have observed him once to fail in it.”319 Experimental science was to Boyle, as to Bacon, itself a religious task. “. . . So much admirable workmanship as God hath displayed in the universe, was never meant for eyes that wilfully close themselves, and affront it with the not judging it worthy the speculating. Beasts inhabit and enjoy the world; man, if he will do more, must study and spiritualize it.” 320 He was eager that others might undertake the work of science in the worshipful spirit of religion, praying, for example, in his will that the Royal Society might refer all their attainments to the glory of God.

What, to Boyle, were the fundamental facts of experience that clearly point to the existence of God? Two types of fact he offers most profusely in this connexion, the fact of human reason and intelligence, and the fact of order, beauty, and adaptation in the universe at large. “I make great doubt, whether there be not some phenomena in nature, which the atomists cannot satisfactorily explain by any figuration, motion, or connexion of material particles whatsoever: for some faculties and operations of the reasonable soul in man are of so peculiar and transcendent a kind, that as I have not yet found them solidly explicated by corporeal principles, so I expect not to see them in haste made out by such.” 321 Just what kind of a God this fact implies, and what his relations with the intelligible world of nature must be in detail, Boyle as we shall see, answers in terms of traditional doctrine rather than by an attempt to secure a fresh insight into the problem. As regards his second, more distinctively teleological argument, compare the following statement, selected from many



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