Renaissance Thought

God moved out of the intellectual center of knowledge as faith was no longer grounded in reason and reason was no longer supervised by faith. The power of the church waned and society found inspiration in the classical world. Interest in this life and the world drove interest in science, which soon uncovered mathematically describable physical regularities. This development shaped the concept of God in a way that further undermined the Aristotelian world view, with its emphasis on such things as divine purpose. Regularities such as those discovered in Kepler's laws of planetary motion and Newton's laws implied a supreme engineer. Early in these developments, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) emphasized God as immanent in the universe as an active principle, a trend in the conception of God that would increase along with the ever more detailed understanding of natural processes to be achieved in the scientific revolution.

The Reformation period saw an emphasis on divine sovereignty over human affairs as a corollary to its emphasis on fallen humanity's inability to achieve a right standing with God. If humans cannot come to God unaided, then it is God who must choose some to be right with him. Since the Reformers affirmed that divine choice cannot be based on merit, love must be the central divine attribute operating in salvation. This view of divine predestination brought new questions, both theological and philosophical, about the relationship between the human and divine wills. The question of how people could be free and responsible if predestination ultimately determines fate was resolved in John Calvin's (1509-64) tradition partly by distinguishing between God's irresistible and resistible will. The latter consists of human choices which God allows (for a higher divine purpose) to run counter to his perfect will. Thus God is entirely sovereign and humans are responsible for their deeds. James Arminius (1560-1609) objected that Calvinism made God responsible for sin, and he proposed instead that God predestined those whom he foresaw would repent.

The Reformers' emphasis on the fallenness of the will led to their distrust in reason as a source of information about the spiritual realm, including God. An unfallen mind would see God everywhere through His creation, but our fallen minds cannot find God. Being therefore hidden, as Martin Luther emphasized (1483-1546), God must reveal Himself in revelation and deed. Humanity must resist the temptation to go beyond what is revealed, especially since God reveals only what we need to know, not all that we wish to know. The Reformers' reluctance to use reason to narrow the gap between the spiritual and physical realms continued the Augustinian tradition (which faintly echoed Plato's two realms), challenging the Scholastics' high view of reason and of Aristotle. That reason has a limited role in the spiritual realm was later emphasized by Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) and Karl Barth (1886-1968).





Enlightenment

Philosophy began splitting from religion as the two moved in opposite directions with regard to reason. Religion was retreating from reason both by emphasizing the divine will over the divine intellect, and in the human realm, by emphasizing faith over reason. Meanwhile, broad elements in the culture turned away from the authority of the church and Aristotle to regard reason as the main source of knowledge. The wisdom of this seemed confirmed in the discoveries of scientists like Newton and Kepler, who had great success using observations to find mathematical regularities in nature. Discoveries were revealing a highly ordered universe, implying a highly reasonable God.

Deism rose as a philosophical form of theism that used reason as its source of knowledge of God. Without revelation to give detail to natural theology, knowledge of God was minimal. Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648) claimed simply that there is one supreme God, who should be worshiped; virtuous living constitutes worship, people should repent, and God rewards good and punishes evil. The emerging Newtonian universe was one of mechanical precision and predictability, with no room for outside causes. Accordingly, there seemed to be little or no room for divine intervention. Deism, then, held that God caused the universe but did not intervene thereafter. Prayer and miracles were deemed unnecessary because of God's superior engineering.

The emphasis on God as a perfect designer entailed that waste and suffering were only apparently pointless. The plan and wisdom of God were seen in the grand scheme of the universe, hence God is known best in generality and abstraction.

In a time of upheaval, Rene Descartes (1596-1650) famously sought to ground all knowledge on a foundation he could not doubt: that he was a thinking being. The success of his approach depended crucially on God's benevolence: because we can be sure that the divine being would not mislead us, we can trust that our clear and distinct ideas are true. God's character thus forms the basis for our certainty that there is indeed a reality corresponding to our ideas. God's omnipotence entails the ability to do even what is logically impossible. Descartes also regarded God as not merely uncaused, but somehow the cause of himself.

John Locke (1632-1704) held a view reminiscent of scholasticism, that revelation reveals about God what cannot be known by reason alone--yet neither does revelation violate reason. He went beyond the scholastics to affirm that what violates reason cannot be accepted as revelation. His motive was to rule out what he called "enthusiasm," which would include supposed private revelations about God held on the sole authority of an individual's intuition that a revelation is true. Reason must judge whether a supposed revelation is true. His view further welded the concept of God to reason.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) agreed with Descartes that clear and distinct ideas indeed reflect reality, but he thought that philosophy must start with God, not the self. This is because God is first in the order of things. God's primacy is also the reason Spinoza rejected Bacon's method of beginning with observation. He abandoned his judaistic roots by affirming that God is the whole of reality, and neither transcendent nor personal.

Aquinas had concluded that God exists on grounds that the universe needs something outside itself as a cause. But Spinoza believed that there can be only one thing--God--because wholes alone are independent and there can be only one whole (or "substance"). There is nothing outside the whole on which the whole can depend. That whole is a network of truths connected by implication. That being the case, everything is either necessary or impossible. Since to be free is to be undetermined by anything outside oneself, God is free because nothing can be outside him; and God alone is free because everything within the whole is the way it is by necessity. There is no need to prove the existence of God beyond the need to prove the existence of the one substance. For Spinoza, God is not an external initiating cause of the world and so is not demonstrable as such. He is nonetheless an immanent and continuing cause of the world. Nor could God be the world's designer or one who imbues it with purpose. That is because wanting to bring something about implies lack, and God can lack nothing. Lacking purposes, God can have no moral goals for humanity. God is the network of all truths, not a personal being who gives revelation. Still, to know God-which is necessarily a matter of reason-is an essential good. As Spinoza said, "the highest virtue of the mind is to understand or to know God" (Ethics, Part 4, prop. 28; trans. Elwes).

Where Spinoza explained reality in terms of a singular substance that is divine, Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) proposed innumerable instances of the same types of substance. These monads as he called them, are centers of psychic energy. They do not act causally on each other but are coordinated in a grand harmony preestablished by God. That so many diverse elements act in harmony is proof for God's existence. Because God operates on a principle of sufficient reason, there must be a reason why he chose to create just this world: it must be the best one possible. While many things are possible individually, even God is limited in what can be brought about together (just as a man can be a father or childless, but not both). Since God alone is perfect, created things have limitations, which is a source of evil. Nevertheless, we find that evil is often a prerequisite for some types of good. God's choice to create this particular world is a matter of his internal moral necessity. He made this world because it has the greatest variety and can, as an act of love, reveal his nature in the greatest possible way.

Leibniz made God the source of causality, George Berkeley (1685-1753) made God the source of perception. He denied the existence of physical substances (because he regarded belief in the physical world as a root of atheism) and claimed that God directly gives us our ideas of the world. The orderliness of our ideas is testimony to the power of God.

David Hume (1711-1776) accepted Berkeley's empiricism, which claimed that our ideas are of particular things and not universal things; but Hume's empiricism led him to skeptical conclusions. He held that our observations about the world do not warrant belief in the God of theism. Design, for example, is manifestly imperfect; furthermore, a good God would not allow evil. If our observations point beyond the world at all it might be to a finite god, or even a number of gods. So the concept of God must be rooted not in reason but in emotion and the will.