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Please translate into Arabic: Physics and Metaphysics in the Seventeenth Century
The seventeenth century was a period of such crucial and rapid change in outlook that we may justifiably speak of the birth of modem science in this “century of genius.” Two landmarks in the growth of the new science were Galileo’s Dialogues (1632) and Newton’s Principia (1687). The thought of these two men, whose lives span the century, illuminates the origins of the issues between science and religion which are our concern. It was in the physical sciences that the new intellectual climate first captured the imaginations of men and became the basis for a new world-view. To see the extent of the transition wrought, we will start by outlining briefly certain assumptions of the Middle Ages that were challenged in the seventeenth century. We will look successively at “The Medieval World-Drama,” “Galileo’s ‘Two New Sciences,’ ” and “The Newtonian World-Machine.” Two final sections summarize the positive contributions of religion to the new science and the major points of conflict.
Our objective is to analyze how views of God and man were altered during this century by the changing perspectives concerning God’s relation to nature and mans relation to nature. Interpretations of these relationships were influenced by new ideas about the character of nature, and about ways of knowing nature and ways of knowing God.
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We will accordingly indicate briefly the approaches taken by medieval thought, by Galileo, and then by Newton, to the following topics: (1) methods in science, (2) the character of nature, (3) methods in theology, (4) God and his relation to nature, and (5) man and his relation to nature. We must ask why the new science and its methods had such an impact on religion in this crucial period. From physics men drew both metaphysical and epistemological conclusions that transformed their outlook and remolded their theology. We will find that Newton’s view of God as the cosmic watchmaker was the correlate of his view of the world as a well-designed watch.
These chapters of historical background do not attempt to describe all the complex factors in the growth of modern thought. A few pivotal figures have been selected in order to sketch the origins of contemporary issues. In addition, the arbitrary choice of five topics involves an oversimplified schematism whose only excuse is the need for a brief introduction to problems of science and religion in the twentieth century. The section on the Middle Ages, which is included so that the novelty of seventeenth-century ideas will be apparent, contains only the barest outline. For thorough analyses of these historical developments the reader is referred to the studies listed in the footnotes.
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4 THE MEDIEVAL WORLD-DRAMA
1. Methods in Science: Explanation by Purposes
For what type of explanation of an event should one search? What constitutes an adequate understanding of an occurrence? To what sort of questions about nature is it most important to seek answers? The Middle Ages sought explanations in terms of the true form or intelligible essence of an object and the purpose it fulfilled. The thirteenth-century recovery of Greek science, together with Thomas Aquinas’ magnificent synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy, established in Christendom a distinctive approach to the explanation of nature that dominated Western thought until the seventeenth century.
Why do objects fall? For Aristotle and his followers, motion is explained by the tendency of each thing to seek its own natural resting-place. The “natural place” of fire is up, and that of earth is down. Heavier objects have a stronger tendency downward, so they must fall more rapidly. The end of the motion—in the sense both of “terminus” and of “purpose”—was of more interest than the intervening process. Why does an acorn grow? To become an oak. Why is there rain? To nourish crops. Causality is described by future goals (“final causes”) and innate tendencies (“formal causes”), not just by the effects of past events (“efficient causes”) acting on passive materials (“material causes”). The future goal need not be consciously entertained by an entity (for example, an acorn), but is built into its structure so that by its own nature it achieves the fulfillment of the end appropriate to its kind.
Attention was directed to the final end and not to the detailed process of change from moment to moment. The behavior of each creature follows from its essential nature, defined in terms of its function. If every creature realizes its potentialities, the illuminating questions to be asked concern the uses of things and what they can do. The central feature of all changes, in this view, is the transformation of potentiality into actuality. Logical connections, not simply temporal ones, must be traced. The categories of explanation are essence and potentiality, not mass and force connected by laws in space and time.1
This search for purposes was in part the result of conceiving every object as having a place in a cosmic hierarchy, the creation of a purposeful God. Suppose one asks: why does water boil at one temperature and not some other? The contemporary scientist will perhaps relate this temperature to other facts and laws and theories of molecular structure, but will eventually reach a point when he says: this is simply a brute fact, and it is meaningless to ask why it is thus. But the medieval tradition, going back to Plato and Aristotle, insisted that there must be a reason if the world is not irrational. God’s purposes in creating things, though not always discernible, constitute the ultimate explanation of their behavior.
Because of this assumption of the rationality of the universe, both Greek and medieval science were primarily deductive (starting 5 from general principles and reasoning to particular exemplifications of those principles) rather than inductive (starting from particular observations and generalizing from them). This dominance of deductive logic was closely related to the classical idea, particularly prominent in Plato, that