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Berkeley's Immaterialism and the Scientific Promise of the Christian Doctrine of Creation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
Extract
In a rather well-known article published half a century ago Michael Foster argued that modern science is rooted in the Christian doctrine of creation. Ancient science, on the other hand, was, according to Foster, the product of Greek metaphysics. The goal of ancient science was the definition of the essence of its object of investigation. The Greeks assumed that the essence of an object was its form and that the form of a thing was intelligible. The task of science, then, was to bring this intelligibility to light.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1987
References
1 Foster, Michael, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modem Natural Science,” in O'Connor, D. and Oakley, F., eds., Creation: The Impact of an Idea (New York: Scribner's, 1969) 48.Google Scholar
2 Ibid., 51–52.
3 Berkeley, , Principles, 46, in Philosophical Writings (ed. Luce, A. A. and Jessop, T. E.; New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1949).Google Scholar All of Berkeley's works cited in this article are from this edition.
4 See Luce, A. A., Berkeley's Immaterialism (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968) 156ff.Google Scholar
5 Berkeley, Principles, 50.
6 Ibid., 107.
7 Berkeley, Analyst, 35.
8 See Ardley, G., Berkeley's Renovation of Philosophy (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968) passim, esp. 120ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 Austin Farrer, “The Physical Theology of Leibniz,” in idem, Reflective Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972) 108. Anyone familiar with Farrer's work will recognize his influence in what I have just written. No one has written more deeply or widely on this subject than Farrer, and there is no substitute for reading his essays in philosophical theology. I have argued elsewhere that his position might justly be called physical Berkeleyanism in that he draws out the implications of the philosophy of immaterialism in terms of modern physical theory. See “The Problem of Miracles and the Paradox of Double Agency,” in Modern Theology 1 (1985) 211–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Berkeley, Principles, 6.
11 Luce, Berkeley's Immaterialism, 71–72.
12 Torrance, Thomas Forsyth, Divine and Contingent Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Ibid., 100.
14 Ibid., 104.
15 Gribbin, John, In Search of Schrodinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality (New York: Bantam Books, 1982) 175.Google Scholar
16 Berkeley, Principles, 34.
17 Ardley, Berkeley's Renovation, 66–67.
18 This matter is discussed at length by Ardley, Berkeley's Renovation, passim.
19 The modern physics of the quantum is often described as counter-intuitive, at odds with nearly everything common sense believes about the natural world. But it is not actually at odds with the common sense to which Berkeley was recalling physics and philosophy. Quantum mechanics is, to be sure, paradoxical with respect to the expectations of classical mechanics, but that is the physics of matter which Berkeley opposed. If the quantum world is not commonly known or commonly experienced, that is not because it is insensible and inexperienceable as matter is, but because its dimensions make that world generally unavailable. At the same time, there is reason to believe that this is the physics that makes possible the world we actually experience as a physics of the “phantom matter” never could.
20 Berkeley, Principles, 147. This passage is at once a comment upon Berkeley's causal proof of God's existence and the conclusion of his account of the nature of perception.
21 Ibid., 109.
22 Imagination is not to be banished from scientific inquiry (as if that were possible); but it must be the servant of such inquiry and not its master. See Luce, Berkeley's Immaterialism, chap. 10.
23 The contrast between these two forms of metaphysics is described in detail in Ardley, Berkeley's Renovation, 64–95. Ardley maintains that Berkeley's intention in his therapeutic analysis was to rid philosophy of metaphysical abstraction, to replace it with a metaphysics rooted in common sense, and in this way to banish the “intellectual nihilism” characteristic of pseudometaphysics. Ardley argues that Berkeley's metaphysics made possible an appreciation of the new physics, “without losing our confidence in the primacy of the world of Plato and Aristotle” (ibid., 6). This is true enough, at least with respect to Plato, whose influence was increasingly prominent in Berkeley's thought as he grew older. But Berkeley's principle concern was to incorporate the new physics into the view of Nature disclosed in the Christian faith, to restore confidence in the understanding of the world which was expressed in the Christian doctrine of creation. His admiration of Plato derived from the fact that he found much in Plato that was of value in the exposition of the Christian understanding of Nature. The book in which Platonic influence is most apparent, Siris, is a chain of reflections beginning with a consideration of the medicinal properties of tarwater and ending with a disquisition on the Trinity. Berkeley's homage to the ancient Greeks is the result of the fact that he reads them as antipathetic to the notion of a self-subsistent corporeal world. He read the ancients through the filter of Neoplatonism, which had very different theological commitments from those of Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras, a reading which is entirely understandable in the eighteenth century, but one that was less critical than it needed to be. In any case, there can be no question that Berkeley's primary concern was to raise human vision to the “near and obvious truth” of the world's dependence upon God.
24 Philosophical Commentaries, 625.