Still more of my Creed Book

Here beginneth the third part:

Now, you might think, because of Aristotle’s Prime Mover and his interest in natural science, that the key to inventing science was, therefore, monotheism or something like it. Not exactly.

Islam is as intensely monotheistic as you can get but wound up persecuting those who might have founded an Islamic scientific tradition. Why? Because the winners in the Islamic philosophical struggle insisted that creatures had no delegated powers at all and that God acts upon all creation absolutely directly. To deny this, it was thought, was an act of impiety, robbing Allah of glory and giving it to creatures.  So, it was insisted, the paper is not blackened by the flame consuming it. Rather, Allah blackens the paper, and the flame just happens to be there at the same time.

[O]ur opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively;’ this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God.”[1]

It is a subtle distinction but it spelled the difference between science being stillborn, not born, in the Islamic world.  For if you believe that God acts directly and not through secondary causes called “creatures”, there is no point in trying to trace the connections between creatures, which is what science is all about.  Science is nothing other than the measurement and manipulation of the connections between the properties of time, space, matter, and energy.

So something more than mere belief in one God who made and ordered all things was vital to the rise of science. You also had to believe—as medieval Catholic Christians did and as Islam did not—that though God was the primary cause of all things, there was also such a thing as secondary causes.  To give an analogy, Michaelangelo is the primary cause of the statue of David, but his chisel is a secondary cause.  Likewise, God is the primary cause of you.  But your parents, grandparents, and a whole chain of secondary causes leading back to the Big Bang are also real secondary causes.

Because medieval Catholic Christians believed that and believed God had placed us in the world to know him through the things he had made, they were able to invent natural science as a sort of byproduct of their faith.

It is because of this conviction that God has invested nature with a certain inherent lawfulness enabling it to organize and elaborate itself that the Catholic tradition in general and St. Thomas in particular have no big issue with what will eventually become known as “evolutionary theory”.  Similarly, St. Augustine, a thousand years before Thomas, will take it for granted that God has invested in nature properties that unroll over time (the Latin for “unroll” is “evolvere”). In his commentary on Genesis, Augustine writes:

It is therefore, causally that Scripture has said that earth brought forth the crops and trees, in the sense that it received the power of bringing them forth. In the earth from the beginning, in what I might call the roots of time, God created what was to be in times to come. [Emph. added][2]

And so St. Thomas, a thousand years after Augustine, will likewise take it for granted, not that God keeps tinkering with the universe to miraculously design a new species of cow or platypus now and then by direct divine intervention, but that the universe has invested in it by God from the beginning the power to organize itself and unroll new forms and properties over time:

Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves, by which those things move towards a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the ship.[3]

Of course, St. Thomas isn’t privy to a lot of the knowledge we have accumulated since his day, but what’s striking is that he gets the main thing right: that God has invested in creation from the start the power to unroll itself.  So he writes:

Nothing entirely new was afterwards made by God, but all things subsequently made had in a sense been made before in the work of the six days. …. Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning.[4]

Forget the wrong science about “putrefaction”. Medievals, unable to see the eggs laid in rotting meat by insects, guessed that the process of rotting was what created the maggots.  It was a reasonable but wrong guess owing to the lack of microscopes. Thomas simply took the word of the scientists for granted to illustrate his point as an ordinary person today might take the word of “consensus science” for granted about climate change, plate tectonics, or relativity without knowing much about those disciplines beyond something he saw on the Discovery Channel. The main point is this: Thomas believes, just like a modern evolutionist, that new species (should any turn up) would be brought forth by purely natural powers. In his day the best guess of science was that stars and the elements causing putrefaction were the natural agents of change.  These days it is cosmic rays or “environmental agents” causing a mutation in a genome. But the point is, Thomas grasped that new species arose from natural causes, not because of a violation or suspension of natural causes.

In short, the real Argument from Design is not that God hits the first cueball at the Big Bang and then goes off to nap for a few billion years until he needs to step in, tweak the machine, and make DNA, or tyrannosaurs, or a new species of whale appear via a miraculous zap.  It is that God has invested all of creation with the power to unroll the potential hidden in it from the Beginning and that he is present and sustaining creation in every atom and at every nanosecond as it does so.  It is indeed his design, and it is a design far more elegant than that of a garage tinkerer perpetually having to fix nature with endless miraculous interventions to create new species of beetles.
[1] al-Ghazali, “The Incoherence of Philosophy” in The Longman Standard History of Medieval Philosophy by Garrett Thomson and Daniel Kolak (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 229
[2] St. Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis V.4.xi

[3] St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics II.8, lecture 14, no. 268

[4] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.73.i, ad. 3 et resp. 3