Religious explanations of gravity invoking the direct intervention of God span several hundred years, including some of Isaac Newton's own writings as well as occasionalism in Islam.
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Occasionalism is a theory about causation which says that created substances (matter and natural forces) cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God himself.
Such a religious view was advocated by the 11th century Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali in his work The Incoherence of the Philosophers. He famously stated that when cotton comes into contact with fire, the cotton is not burned by the fire, but directly burned by God or God through his angels:
...our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively;’ this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God.
The occasionalism of Al-Ghazali is an important concept in Islamic theology today, particularly in the Asharite (Traditionalist) school of Muslim theology.
In a letter to the Reverend Dr. Richard Bentley in 1692, Isaac Newton wrote: "To your second query I answer that the motions which the planets now have could not spring from any natural cause alone but were impressed by an intelligent agent." This statement is referenced by Intelligent Design advocate Stephen C. Meyer in The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design,[1] who refers to this statement as "Newton's famous postulation of special divine intervention to stabilize the orbital motion in the solar system" in developing his argument of the methodological equivalence of naturalistic and non-naturalistic (i.e. supernatural) theories.
In 1925, Rev. William Asbury Williams, D.D. wrote, in a book titled The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved:[2]
The power of attraction, which we may call a property of matter, is really the power of God. The effects are the results of power and intelligence..... Gravitation requires the computation of countless millions of the most complex and difficult problems, every instant, by the divine mind.... These innumerable calculations prove that God is everywhere. We are continually in the immediate awesome presence of an Infinite God.
Charles Darwin clearly opted for the opposite point of view. In 1842, Darwin wrote his "pencil sketch" of his theory[3] in which he set evidence of common descent against the doctrine of separate creation and asked:
What would the Astronomer say to the doctrine that the planets moved (not) according to the law of gravitation, but from the Creator having willed each separate planet to move in its particular orbit?[4]