Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age > Status Update

"For Aquinas the starting point was the idea of divine creation, one of the truths of faith, and from there he proposed that God’s agency was communicated to the creatures by means of an exemplary causality. This retained a degree of distance between Creator and creation. Bacon began with the model of the human artificer and projected the analogy in the other direction. (This analogy was made possible only by abandoning another key tenet of Aristotelianism – a hard distinction between natural and artificial.) What resulted from this was the popular early modern conception of God as a designer and engineer. This anthropomorphic analogy, which turned out to be vulnerable to criticisms later identified by Hume, offered a less direct route to God and a significantly lower theological yield. From it we learn only of God’s power and wisdom, and this by inference."

"With the introduction of a new corpuscular matter theory and the concomitant expulsion of inherent qualities and goal-directed behaviours from natural objects, final causes survived in a kind of vestigial form as divine intentions, purposes, or designs. But how these purposes could be discerned, and what explanatory role they should be accorded in natural philosophy, remained open questions."

"While it might be legitimate to speak of the ends and purposes of human actions, such talk should be excluded from explanations of natural events (e.g., ‘the leaves of trees are for protecting of the fruit’ or ‘the clouds are for watering of the earth’) since these instances of transcendental design divert attention away from the question of the how (how do clouds provide rain?)."

The irony here is in undercutting the "why" to focus on the "how," Bacon undercut the very basis for the "how" in the first place. The earlier practitioners of "science" (anachronistically labeled) pursued both the "how" and the "why" in the natural world because they looked to a personal Designer who does His mighty works for reasons. They expected to find directed, purposeful intercausality when they set out to look for it, and lo and behold, it was there. Science is a unique enterprise in the history of the world. It grew out of Christian soil, upheld uniquely by a Christian worldview that demands both a "how" and a "why" for a satisfying explanation of phenomenon. Soon, efficient causation was lost as well, and what remained were mechanistic "natural laws" that mindlessly functioned only to function.

Now, to be sure, certain scientific advancements occurred due to this transition. Impersonal laws have no agenda and are not grieved by manipulation and exploitation, giving humanity master-esque (Godlike) freedom to do as they will.

"The modern rediscovery of universal consent [the consensus gentium] in the social sciences has mostly inspired efforts to explain religious belief away  – directly contrary to the pre-modern assumption that naturalness constitutes evidence for the truth of the belief.

The prevailing tendency, drawing upon evolutionary psychology, has been towards various forms of evolutionary debunking – religion not as the outcome of any unitary cognitive structure, but as a by-product or ‘false positive’ generated by mental mechanisms designed by natural selection for other adaptive purposes. The trick, of course, is to debunk religious commitment without at the same undermining every product of human cognition (including evolutionary debunking itself)." This has proven a rather difficult needle to thread.