Originally posted by twhitehead
That's up to you. You could also try reading the next sentence.
[b]The scientists to which Lewis referred absolutely did this very thing.
Shall we simply take your word for it? Care to present evidence for your claim?
Nothing like today.
Not even close.
Not so. There are actually far more scientific advances/discoveries made each year ...[text shortened]... article in question required less energy, it would not suddenly mean that the field was broader.[/b]
quoting:
Freaky: The scientists to which Lewis referred absolutely did this very thing (expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.)
TW: Shall we simply take your word for it? Care to present evidence for your claim?
The following mentions some influential scientists and mathematicians who attributed the laws of physical nature to God.
Excerpt:
"What are laws of nature? For the Middle Ages, natural laws had been universal moral rules established by God. The injunction against murder, recognized by all cultures, was a typical example of a natural law. The concept of a physical law of nature was completely absent. That came only as Christian thinkers extended God’s legislative power to the natural world. As philosopher and scientist René
Descartes (1596-1650) expressed it, “God alone is the author of all the motions in the world.”
For its time, this was a radical claim. Following Aristotle, medieval scientists had imputed immanent tendencies to physical entities, saying for example that objects went into motion because they were seeking their own natural resting place. Nature had thus enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy.
In the new science, however, natural objects had no inherent properties, and it was God who directly controlled their interactions. In much the same way that the Deity had instituted moral rules, he was now seen to have enacted laws that governed the natural world.
“Nature,” observed Robert
Boyle, “is nothing else but God acting according to certain laws he himself fix’d.”
The fact that God was the author of these laws meant that they shared something of his nature. Descartes, for example, argued that because of their source, natural laws must be eternal and unchanging. He went on to justify his law of the conservation of motion by appealing to God’s immutability. Nature was constant because God was immutable.
This provided a crucial foundation for experimental science. In the words of Newton’s predecessor in the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, Isaac
Barrow, experimentalists “do not suspect that Nature is inconstant, and the great Author of the universe unlike himself.” Only because they assume that God’s decrees are unchanging do they expect the consistent results of a number of experiments to hold true ever after.
The Mathematics of Nature
The idea of eternal and immutable laws of nature, vital to modern science, found a close ally in mathematics. A distinguishing feature of science, as many hapless students have discovered to their regret, is its mathematical character. But this had not always been so. This change, too, emerged from theology.
To medieval thinkers, the marriage of mathematics and natural science would have been an illicit and barren union. Following Aristotle, they held mathematics to be a product of the human mind. For this reason mathematics was not thought to provide true descriptions of reality: useful descriptions—yes—but not true descriptions.
Astronomers, regarded as practitioners of a mathematical science, were thus thought to trade in useful fictions. Their models were capable of predicting the positions of heavenly bodies but were not thought to provide a true physical account of the cosmos.
This very issue led to Galileo’s fateful encounter with the Inquisition. He insisted that the sun-centered system of Copernicus was more than a useful mathematical device—it was an accurate physical description. Galileo’s novelty, then, lay in his championing not of a new astronomical model, but of a new model of astronomy.
Mathematics could provide a true account of the universe only if it were more than a human construction.
Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton made the bold assertion that mathematical relations were real only because they were convinced that mathematical truths were the products not of human minds, but of the divine mind. It was God who had invented mathematics and who had imposed mathematical laws on the universe. Like Scripture, the “book of nature” had also been written by God, and, as
Galileo insisted, this book was “written in the language of mathematics.”
Descartes cited the inter-testamental book, Wisdom of Solomon, to support his contention that God was a mathematician, “Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight” (11:20). Newton subsequently described the cosmos in terms of an “infinite and omnipresent spirit” in which matter was moved by “mathematical laws.”
Crediting God as the author of mathematics was thus a crucial step in asserting the reality of mathematical relations, and this enabled the subsequent application of mathematics to the field of physics."
https://www.christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/god-of-math/
The source is Christian but the claims about these scientists and mathematicians are reasonable.
Science Kills God; God Gets Even
05 Oct '14 22:50
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