Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology

by William Whewell

This has been the view of the relation of the Deity to the universe entertained by the most sagacious and comprehensive minds ever since the true object of natural philosophy has been clearly and steadily apprehended. The great writer who was the first to give philosophers a distinct and commanding view of this object, thus expresses himself in his “Confession of Faith:” “I believe—that notwithstanding God hath rested and ceased from creating since the first Sabbath, yet, nevertheless, he doth accomplish and fulfil his divine will in all things, great and small, singular and general, as fully and exactly by providence, as he could by miracle and new creation, though his working be not immediate and direct, but by compass; not violating nature, which is his own law upon the creature.”

And one of our own time, whom we can no longer hesitate to place among the worthiest disciples of the school of Bacon, conveys the same thought in the following passage: “The Divine Author of the universe cannot be supposed to have laid down particular laws, enumerating all individual contingencies, which his materials have understood and obey—this would be to attribute to him the imperfections of human legislation;—but rather, by creating them endued with certain fixed qualities and powers, he has impressed them in their origin with the spirit, not the letter of his law, and made all their subsequent combinations and relations inevitable consequences of this first impression.”[43]

2. This, which thus appears to be the mode of the Deity’s operation in the material world, requires some attention on our part in order to understand it with proper clearness. One reason of this is, that it is a mode of operation altogether different from that in which we are able to make matter fulfil our designs. Man can construct exquisite machines, can call in vast powers, can form extensive combinations, in order to bring about results which he has in view. But in all this he is only taking advantage of laws of nature which already exist; he is applying to his use qualities which matter already possesses. Nor can he by any effort do more. He can establish no new law of nature which is not a result of the existing ones. He can invest matter with no new properties which are not modifications of its present attributes. His greatest advances in skill and power are made when he calls to his aid forces which before existed unemployed, or when he discovers so much of the habits of some of the elements as to be able to bend them to his purpose. He navigates the ocean by the assistance of the winds which he cannot raise or still: and even if we suppose him able to control the course of these, his yet unsubjugated ministers, this could only be done by studying their characters, by learning more thoroughly the laws of air and heat and moisture. He cannot give the minutest portion of the atmosphere new relations, a new course of expansion, new laws of motion. But the Divine operations, on the other hand, include something much higher. They take in the establishment of the laws of the elements, as well as the combination of these laws and the determination of the distribution and quantity of the materials on which they shall produce their effect. We must conceive that the Supreme Power has ordained that air shall be rarefied, and water turned into vapour, by heat; no less than that he has combined air and water so as to sprinkle the earth with showers, and determined the quantity of heat and air and water, so that the showers shall be as beneficial as they are.

We may and must, therefore, in our conceptions of the Divine purpose and agency, go beyond the analogy of human contrivances. We must conceive the Deity, not only as constructing the most refined and vast machinery, with which, as we have already seen, the universe is filled; but we must also imagine him as establishing those properties by which such machinery is possible: as giving to the materials of his structure the qualities by which the material is fitted to its use. There is much to be found, in natural objects, of the same kind of contrivance which is common to these and to human inventions; there are mechanical devices, operations of the atmospheric elements, chemical processes;—many such have been pointed out, many more exist. But besides these cases of the combination of means, which, we seem able to understand without much difficulty, we are led to consider the Divine Being as the author of the laws of chemical, of physical, and of mechanical action, and of such other laws as make matter what it is;—and this is a view which no analogy of human inventions, no knowledge of human powers, at all assists us to embody or understand. Science, therefore, as we have said, while it discloses to us the mode of instrumentality employed by the Deity, convinces us, more effectually than ever, of the impossibility of conceiving God’s actions by assimilating them to our own.

3. The laws of material nature, such as we have described them, operate at all times, and in all places; affect every province of the universe, and involve every relation of its parts. Wherever these laws appear, we have a manifestation of the intelligence by which they were established. But a law supposes an agent, and a power; for it is the mode according to which the agent proceeds, the order according to which the power acts. Without the presence of such an agent, of such a power, conscious of the relations on which the law depends, producing the effects which the law prescribes, the law can have no efficacy, no existence. Hence we infer that the intelligence by which the law is ordained, the power by which it is put in action, must be present at all times and in all places where the effects of the law occur; that thus the knowledge and the agency of the Divine Being pervade every portion of the universe, producing all action and passion, all permanence and change. The laws of nature are the laws which he, in his wisdom, prescribes to his own acts; his universal presence is the necessary condition of any course of events, his universal agency the only origin of any efficient force.

This view of the relation of the universe to God has been entertained by many of the most eminent of those who have combined the consideration of the material world with the contemplation of God himself. It may therefore be of use to illustrate it by a few quotations, and the more so, as we find this idea remarkably dwelt upon in the works of that writer whose religious views must always have a peculiar interest for the cultivators of physical science, the great Newton.

Thus, in the observations on the nature of the Deity with which he closes the “Opticks,” he declares the various portions of the world, organic and inorganic, “can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever living Agent, who being in all places, is more able by his will to move the bodies within his boundless uniform sensorium, and thereby to form and reform the parts of the universe, than we are by our will to move the parts of our own bodies.” And in the Scholium at the end of the “Principia,” he says, “God is one and the same God always and every where. He is omnipresent, not by means of his virtue alone, but also by his substance, for virtue cannot subsist without substance. In him all things are contained, and move, but without mutual passion: God is not acted upon by the motions of bodies; and they suffer no resistance from the omnipresence of God.” And he refers to several passages confirmatory of this view, not only in the Scriptures, but also in writers who hand down to us the opinions of some of the most philosophical thinkers of the pagan world. He does not disdain to quote the poets, and among the rest, the verses of Virgil;

Principio cœlum ac terras camposque liquentes

Lucentemque globum lunæ, Titaniaque astra,

Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus