Creation and Inertia: The Scientific Revolution and Discourse on Science-and-Religion
William E. Carroll
Professor
Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford
The understanding of the Scientific Revolution as involving a rejection of Aristotelian science leads many to ignore profound truths about nature and human nature which are found in Aristotelian and Thomistic thought, and, in particular, to ignore or denigrate the value of such thought for the contemporary dialogue between science and religion. Some scholars (e.g., Wolfhart Pannenberg and Hans Blumenberg) have gone so far as to suggest that the principle of inertia, key to the new science of Isaac Newton, is incompatible with the traditional doctrine of creation. Newtonian science, according to such a view, anticipates an understanding of nature as self-sufficient, as not needing an explanation beyond itself. The claim is that just as bodies at rest or in motion need no cause for the continuation of either state, so it became easy to attribute a kind of autonomy or self-sufficiency to all of nature and its processes: only changes had to be explained, not persisting states. By looking again at the crucial developments in the science of the 17th Century, and by challenging misinterpretations of inertia and creation, we can see that to accept the developments of modern science does not require us to abandon traditional notions of creation, nor to reject as no longer valid Aristotelian and Thomistic notions of nature and cause and of the relationship among the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology.