Throughout his Discourse on Method, Descartes repeatedly focuses his attention on the traditional Christian notion of a creator God. All the same, Descartes forwards a rather non-traditional approach to the idea of natural law. As he notes in section 45 of Part II,
It is indeed more probable that God has made [the world] from the beginning such as it was to be […], so that although he had not given it, at the beginning, any other form than chaos, provided that having established the laws of nature he lent to it his assent to act as it customarily does, we can believe, without doing any injury to the miracle of creation, that […] all the things that are purely material could have rendered themselves in time such as we see them at present.
Essentially, Descartes is arguing that because God ordered the laws of nature in such a way as to develop and maintain themselves, one can promote a more scientific, dare I say, pre-evolutionary approach to the creation story wherein God sets the earth in motion, hurrying its natural processes, and, in turn, lets the earth develop as it naturally would if separated from Him, but still within the realm of His perfect will and ordinance.
But herein rests my question: Did God create the natural laws or did he merely set them to work in the natural world?
I take up this question as I think of the language used to quantify God’s nature according to Descartes’ Christian perspective. Essentially, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent. He was, is, and ever shall be. In short, God is all things good. He is a creator, but He was not created. By His nature, He cannot be anything other than the embodiment of the perfect things that, as Descartes would argue, give us proof that such a God exists. God does not, then, define perfection because He created it, He defines perfection because He is made up of it. Thus, since qualities like perfection, goodness, and truth were not created, they simply are as a result of the fact that God, whose nature encompasses them, is.
From this notion my question arises, what do we do with the natural laws? Did God out of his perfect and unlimited power create the rules of motion, sound, light, etc. or did He out of his perfect understanding set them to work in the world the only way in which they could? Are the laws of nature, like God himself, of a substance having always been?
I am honestly unsure of how Descartes would answer, and I am equally unsure of whether or not he would think this question merits an answer. All the same, it seems to me that if God is, in fact, perfection and not simply the author thereof, so also would the products of his nature be perfection. But then again, what about the problem of humanity?
P.S. My apologies to PC users for the earlier font confusion.
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I think that it is worth reflecting what we mean by natural laws, and their perfection.
ReplyDeleteAs far as natural laws are concerned, it seems to me that they express the ways in which matter must behave; they enumerate patterns of necessity in the natural world- and they are perfect in that these patterns are numerically expressed in concise formulas, and infallibly applicable.
The important point is that within a mathamtical construction of reality, certain necessities follow, just as a triangle's angles MUST add up to 180 degrees. In matter, it is a different situation, because one is not dealing with numbers but objects. Because of the categorical separation between matter and mathematics, there must be some quality inherent within matter that compels it to act in the ways that it does, which are expressably mathamatically. Thus nature is an orchestration of inevitable movements, and 'natural laws' are merely the illustration of the patterns that matter adheres to.
Then the question becomes, if God created the world, did he have a choice in endowing matter with the intrinsic properties that it has? If God didn't create the world, why does matter have these specific properties? In either case, how are these properties coupled with matter, in nature?
All this is assuming that matter indeed does act some consistent fashion, and is not chaotic.
Hope that makes sense.
Other important questions (or ways of asking similar ones) may be:
ReplyDeleteAre the functions of matter perfect? If so, must they be of the same nature of other perfections such as that which is God and therefore have always been?
Mr. Haney has presented a theological interest that philosophy may be better prepared to take seriously. Intriguing post.