The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  31. McGrath, Reformation Thought, pp. 73–74.

  32. Ibid., p. 87.

  33. Alastair McGrath, A Life of John Calvin: A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture (Oxford, 1990), p. 90.

  34. Luther, Sermon 25:7, in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (Chicago and London, 1971–89), 4:163.

  35. Luther, Heidelberg Disputation 19–21, ibid., 4:155.

  36. Ibid., 4:154.

  37. Luther, Sermon 15, ibid., 4:166.

  38. Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind, pp. 240–42.

  39. Bossy, Christianity in the West, p. 97.

  40. Euan Cameron, “The Power of the Word: Renaissance and Reformation,” in Cameron, Early Modern Europe, pp. 91–95.

  41. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, 1985), pp. 10–11, 19–20.

  42. Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind, p. 242.

  43. Cameron, “Power of the Word,” pp. 88–89.

  44. John Bossy, “The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe,” Past and Present (May 1970).

  45. A. N. Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 157; Benedict Philip, “The Catholic Response to Protestantism: Church Activity and Popular Piety in Rouen, 1560–1600,” in James Obelkevich, ed., Religion and the People, 800-1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), p. 175.

  46. Cameron, “Power of the Word,” p. 78.

  47. Ibid., pp. 78–80; Robert S. Westman, “The Copernicans and the Churches,” in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1986), pp. 76–80; Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind, pp. 248–253; Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).

  48. Psalms 93:1; 103:4; Ecclesiastes 1:4.

  49. Edward Rosen, trans. and ed., Nicholas Copernicus: On the Revolutions (Warsaw and Cracow, 1978), p. xvi.

  50. Westman, “The Copernicans,” p. 82.

  51. John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis 1.16 in The Commentaries of John Calvin on the Old Testament, 30 vols. (Calvin Translation Society, 1643–48), 1:86.

  52. Calvin, Commentary on Genesis 1:6, ibid. 1:79–80.

  53. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, 1964).

  54. J. L. Heibron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 10.

  55. Michael J. Buckley, “The New Science and the Ancient Faith: Three Settlements at the Dawn of Modernity,” in Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2004), p. 16; Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (New York, 1963), p. 341.

  56. Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind, p. 256; Koestler, Sleepwalkers, pp. 258, 313–16, 394–98.

  57. Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind, pp. 262–63.

  58. Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum: The Secret of the Universe (hereafter MC), trans. A. M. Duncan, intro. and commentary by E. J. Aiton, preface by I. Bernard Cohen (New York, 1981), p. 97.

  59. MC, p. 92.

  60. Kepler, Harmonies of the World 4:1.

  61. Kepler to Hewart von Hohenburg, 9/10 April 1599, in Carole Baumgardt, Johannes Kepler: Life and Letters (New York, 1951), p. 50.

  62. MC, p. 63; see Buckley “The New Science,” p. 13; Westman, “The Copernicans,” pp. 96–97.

  63. Kepler to Michael Mastlin, 3 October 1595, in Koestler, Sleepwalkers, pp. 261–62.

  64. MC, p. 149.

  65. Dedication to Emperor Rudolph II, in Buckley, “The New Science,” p. 15.

  66. John of the Cross, “The Ascent of Mount Carmel,” book I, chap. 13, no. 11, in The Collected Works of John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanagh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, D.C., 1991), p. 150.

  67. William R. Shea, “Galileo and the Church,” in Lindberg and Numbers, God and Nature, p. 117.

  68. Ibid., pp. 276–77; Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind, pp. 263–64; Buckley, “The New Science,” pp. 3–5.

  69. Galileo, Il Saggiatore, para. 48, in Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (London, 1949).

  70. Westman, “The Copernicans,” p. 98.

  71. Buckley, “The New Science,” pp. 8–9.

  72. Galileo, “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” in Maurice A. Finnocchiano, ed. and trans., The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), p. 96.

  73. Ibid., pp. 92–93.

  74. Ibid., pp. 90–91.

  75. Ibid., p. 104.

  76. Shea, “Galileo and the Church,” p. 115.

  77. Ibid., pp. 124–29; Westman, “The Copernicans,” pp. 100–101.

  78. Galileo, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, 20 vols., ed. Antonio Favaro (Florence, 1899–1909), 5:138–39.

  79. Bellarmine to Foscarini, 12 April 1615, ibid., 12:171–72; Shea, “Galileo and the Church,” pp. 120–21.

  80. Galileo, Opere, 5:668–70; Shea, “Galileo and the Church,” p. 122.

  81. Ernan McMullin, “Galileo on Science and Scripture,” in Peter Machamer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (Cambridge, U.K., 1998), p. 285; Buckley, “The New Science,” pp. 9–10.

  82. McMullin, “Galileo on Science and Scripture,” p. 317.

  83. Shea, “Galileo and the Church,” p. 127.

  84. Ibid., pp. 128–30.

  85. Galileo, Opere, 1:489; Shea, “Galileo and the Church,” pp. 130–31.

  86. Yovel, Marrano of Reason, pp. 54–57.

  87. Ibid., p. 53.

  88. Isaac Orobio de Castro, prologue, Epistola invecta contra Prado, ibid., pp. 51–52.

  89. Yovel, Marrano of Reason, pp. 42–51.

  90. Ibid., pp. 57–73.

  EIGHT Scientific Religion

  1. John Donne, An Anatomie of the World, “The First Anniversary,” lines 213–14, in Sir Herbert Grierson, ed., Donne: Poetical Works (Oxford, 1933).

  2. Ibid., lines 212, 251–60.

  3. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York, 1990), pp. 47–55.

  4. Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1987), pp. 40–56; Michael J. Buckley, “A Dialectical Pattern in the Emergence of Atheism,” in Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2004), pp. 30–32.

  5. De providentia numinis et animi immortalitate 1.2.16–19, translated into English as Rawleigh His Ghost, Or, A Feigned Apparition of Syr Walter Rawleigh, to a friend of his, for the translating into English, the Booke of Leonard Lessius (that most learned man) entitled De providentia numinis, et animi immortalitate: written against Atheists, Polititians of these days (hereafter RG), trans. “A. B.” (1631), in vol. 349 of English Recusant Literature, 1558-1640, ed. D. M. Rogers (London, 1977), pp. 325–28.

  6. Donne, “The First Anniversary,” line 213.

  7. RG, pp. 328–29.

  8. P. J. S. Whitmore, The Order of Minims in Seventeenth-Century France (The Hague, 1967), pp. 71–72; Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J., 1971), p. 165.

  9. Buckley, Origins of Modern Atheism, pp. 56–66; Buckley, “A Dialectical Pattern,” pp. 32–33; William B. Ashworth Jr., “Catholicism and Early Modern Science,” in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1986), pp. 138–39.

  10. Robert Lenoble, Mersenne ou la naissance du mechanisme (Paris, 1971), pp. 380–82; Whitmore, The Order of Minims, pp. 144–47.

  11. Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method 2.18. All quotations from Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy are taken from Elizabeth J. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, trans., ed., and
with an introduction by Enrique Chávez-Arvizo, Descartes: Key Philosophical Writings (Ware, U.K., 1997).

  12. Buckley, Origins of Modern Atheism, p. 73.

  13. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 4.32.

  14. Buckley, Origins of Modern Atheism, pp. 85–87.

  15. Descartes, Meditations 2.28.

  16. Descartes, Discourse on Method 3.34.

  17. Descartes, Meditations 5.67.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Descartes, Discourse on Method 3.37.

  20. Ashworth, “Catholicism and Early Modern Science,” p. 139; Jacques Roger, “The Mechanistic Conception of Life,” in Lindberg and Numbers, God and Nature, pp. 281–82.

  21. Descartes, Meditations 6.80.

  22. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York and London, 1991), pp. 26–68.

  23. Descartes, introduction to Les Meteors, in Paul J. Olscamp, ed. and trans., Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Metereology (Indianapolis, 1965), p. 263.

  24. Descartes, dedication to Meditations 1.

  25. Buckley, “A Dialectical Pattern,” p. 33.

  26. Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1986), p. 73.

  27. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, pp. 98–104.

  28. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), p. 314; Locke’s italics.

  29. A. W. S. Baird, “Pascal’s Idea of Nature,” Isis 61 (1970); Ashworth, “Catholicism and Early Modern Science,” pp. 142–44.

  30. Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1966), p. 88.

  31. Ibid., p. 309.

  32. Ibid., pp. 169–70.

  33. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Fate of Theism,” in A. MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York, 1969), p. 12.

  34. Pascal, Pensées, p. 38.

  35. Yirmanyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1989); J. Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism: The History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig (London and New York, 1964), pp. 265–85; R. M. Silverman, Baruch Spinoza: Outcast Jew, Universal Sage (Northwood, U.K., 1995).

  36. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York, 1972), pp. 112, 114, 176, 318–19; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millennarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London, 1957), pp. 303–18.

  37. David J. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1985), p. 69.

  38. Ibid., p. 112.

  39. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, p. 86; Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1974), pp. 82–86.

  40. Margaret C. Jacob, “Christianity and the Newtonian Worldview” in Linberg and Numbers, God and Nature, pp. 239–43.

  41. Isaac Newton, to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1675, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 7 vols., vols. 1–3, ed. by H. W. Turnbull; vol. 4, ed. J. F. Scott; vols. 5–7 ed. A. R. Hill and L. Tilling (Cambridge, U.K., 1959–1977), 7:254–55.

  42. Isaac Newton, preface, Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica. All quotations from the Principia are taken from Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte, revised by Florian Cajori (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962),p. xvii; henceforth referred to as Principia.

  43. Principia, pp. xvii—xviii.

  44. Ibid., p. 543.

  45. Ibid., p. 544.

  46. Ibid., p. 546.

  47. Isaac Newton, Opticks, book 3, query 28, in Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, foreword by Albert Einstein, introduction by Sir Edmund Whittaker and L. Tilling (New York, 1952), p. 369.

  48. Newton to Richard Bentley, 10 December 1691, in Correspondence, 3:233.

  49. Ibid., 3:234, 236.

  50. Newton to Richard Bentley, 17 January 1692, in Correspondence, 3:240.

  51. Newton to Richard Bentley, 11 February 1692, in Correspondence, 3:244.

  52. Buckley, Origins of Modern Atheism, pp. 13–37.

  53. Newton, Principia, p. 546.

  54. Ibid., p. 545.

  55. Ibid., Newton’s italics; A. R. and Marie Boas Hall (Cambridge, U.K., 1962), pp. 138–39; Gary B. Deason, “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature,” in Lindberg and Numbers, God and Nature, pp. 184–85.

  56. Samuel Clarke to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in H. G. Alexander, ed., The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Manchester, U.K., 1956), p. 22; Deason, “Reformation Theology,” p. 185.

  57. Newton to Richard Bentley, 25 February 1693, in Correspondence, 3:253–54; Newton’s italics.

  58. Isaac Newton, “A Short Scheme of the True Religion,” in Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1855), 2:347–48.

  59. Richard S. Westfall, “The Rise of Science and the Decline of Orthodox Christianity: A Study of Kepler, Descartes and Newton,” in Lindberg and Numbers, God and Nature, pp. 230–33.

  60. Isaac Newton, Yehuda MS 41, fol. 7, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem; Westfall, “The Rise of Science,” pp. 232–33. 61. Isaac Newton, MS, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, Los

  61. Angeles; Westfall, “The Rise of Science,” p. 231.

  62. Newton, Correspondence, 3:108.

  63. Isaac Newton, unpublished manuscript, quoted in J. E. McGuire, “Newton on Time, Place and God: An Unpublished Source,” British Journal for the History of Science 11 (1978).

  64. J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and Their History (New York, 1986), pp. 114–21.

  65. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (London, 1966), pp. 33, 38.

  66. Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1982).

  67. Walter J. Ong, SJ, Rhetoric, Romance and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), p. 279; J. E. McGuire, “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972).

  68. Jacob, “Christianity and the Newtonian Worldview,” pp. 243–46.

  69. Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of Christian Revelation, 9th ed. (London, 1738), p. 51.

  70. Ibid., p. 8.

  71. Ecclesiasticus 43:28.

  72. Clarke, Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, p. 126.

  73. Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religions and the Truth and Certainty of Christian Religion, in Richard Watson, ed., A Collection of Theological Tracts (London, 1785), p. 246.

  NINE Enlightenment

  1. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis, 1955).

  2. Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries of Nature, with Religious Improvements, facsimile reproduction with introduction by Josephine K. Piercy (Gainesville, Fla., 1968), p. i; Mather’s italics.

  3. Ibid., pp. 2–3; Mather’s italics.

  4. Ibid., p. 2; Mather’s italics.

  5. Ibid., p. 294.

  6. Robert Briggs, “Embattled Faiths: Religion and Natural Philosophy” in Euan Cameron, ed., Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1999), pp. 197–205.

  7. Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1987), p. 37; James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, 1985), pp. 37–56.

  8. Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1986), pp. 357–60.

  9. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Theodore Bes
terman (London, 1972), p. 357.

  10. Ibid., p. 57.

  11. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1968, 1969), 2:526.

  12. Mather, Christian Philosopher, p. 6; Mather’s italics.

  13. Jonathan Edwards, The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen (New Haven, Conn., 1972), p. 249.

  14. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 22 August 1813, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 2:368.

  15. From “Seven Sermons,” quoted in Turner, Without God, p. 50.

  16. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion (London and Basingstoke, U.K., 1981), pp. 51–54.

  17. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York, 1990), pp. 119–21.

  18. Margaret C. Jacob, “Christianity and the Newtonian Worldview,” in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1986), pp. 249–53.

  19. Commonplace Book I of George Horne, Bishop of Norwich, Cambridge University Library MS SS 8134/b/1; Jacob, “Christianity and the Newtonian Worldview,” p. 252.

  20. Commonplace Book I of George Horne, fol. III; Jacob, “Christianity and the Newtonian Worldview,” p. 252; Christopher Wilde, “Hutchinsonianism, Natural Philosophy and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” History of Science 18 (1980).

  21. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 5: Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture (Since 1700) (Chicago and London, 1989), p. 125.

  22. Ibid., p. 131.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Quoted by Frederick Dreyer, “Faith and Experience in the Thought of John Wesley,” American Historical Review 88 (1983): 13–14.

  25. Pelikan, Christian Tradition, 5:118.

  26. Albert Outler, “Pietism and Christianity,” in Louis Dupré and Don E. Saliers, Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern (London, 1989).

  27. Buckley, Origins of Modern Atheism, pp. 274–75.

  28. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, pp. 121–24, 126–29.

  29. Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford, 1983), pp. 18–29; Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, pp. 202–12, 280–88, 328–32.