Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism by Alvin Plantinga Page B

science, therefore, are in conflict, which does not bode well for religion.
    But is all this really true?
II THE OLD PICTURE
     
    Bultmann and his friends are evidently thinking in terms of classical science: Newtonian mechanics and the later physics of electricity and magnetism. (Gilkey mentions eighteenth-century science and philosophy.) This is the physics of Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, and the physics of electricity and magnetism represented by Maxwell’s equations. This is the physics of the great conservation laws, the conservation of momentum, for example (which follows from Newton’s third law) and most essentially and most generally, the conservation of energy, especially as developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. 17
    And of course Newtonian mechanics and classical science have been enormously influential. As Alexander Pope put it in his famous epitaph for Newton,
Nature and nature’s law lay hidden in night;
God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.
     
    But classical science, just by itself, is nowhere nearly sufficient for anti-interventionism or hands-off theology. What’s really at issue, rather, is a
Weltanschauung
, a sort of world picture suggested by classical science, endorsed by many influential eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures, and still accepted by these theologians. Or rather, there are least two importantly different pictures here.
A. The Newtonian Picture
     
    First, there is the Newtonian picture properly so-called. This picture represents the world (or at any rate the material universe) as a vastmachine evolving or operating according to fixed laws: the laws of classical physics. These laws can be thought of as reflecting the very natures of the things God has created, so that (for example) it is part of the very nature of material particles and objects composed of them to attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Alternatively, we can think of matter as more tractable, and take the laws to be God’s decrees as to how it shall in fact behave. In either case, we consider the universe as a whole—the material universe, anyway—as a collection including material particles and the things made of them, evolving according to the laws of classical mechanics. Theologically, the idea is that the world is a great divine mechanical artifact that runs according to the fixed laws of classical science, the laws prescribed for it by God. 18 The world is mechanical in that the laws of physics are sufficient to describe its behavior; no additional laws—of chemistry or biology, for example—are needed, and if there are such laws, they are reducible (in a sense that never became very clear) to the laws of physics. On this picture, classical physics is in that respect complete. It is worth noting, of course, that it is no part of classical science as such to claim that physics
is
in this sense complete; this is a pious hope, or a philosophical add-on, or both, even if one that is at least rather naturally suggested by the success of physics.
    But the Newtonian picture is nowhere nearly sufficient for hands-off theology. First, Newton himself (one hopes) accepted the Newtonian picture, but he didn’t accept hands-off theology. He believed that God providentially guides the world. He also believed that God regularly adjusts the orbits of the planets; according to his calculations, their orbits would otherwise spiral off into chaos. Moreimportant, however: according to Newton and classical mechanics, natural laws describe how the world works
when, or provided that the world is a closed (isolated) system, subject to no outside causal influence
. 19 In classical physics, the great conservation laws deduced from Newton’s laws are stated for
closed
or
isolated
systems. Thus Sears and Zemanski’s standard text
University Physics
: “This is the
principle