Re: [asa] Rejoinder 8B from Timaeus - to John Walley and George Murphy

I wish I could turn this now into a lengthy commentary, but I can't. The
hard scholarly work hasn't yet been done to flesh it out, so I'll do the
much less best thing and just make a mostly unsupported point. Not entirely
unsupported or I'd keep quiet, but let's just call it a conjecture rather
than even an hypothesis.

It concerns the reference to the Latin phrase, "etsi deus non daretur," to
which Timaeus took some exception and George Murphy then supported. As
George notes, you can get zillions of hits on google, which suprised me
greatly. I have known for some time that it was used by Hugo Grotius, the
great Dutch legal theorist, in the early 17th century, though precisely
where I'm not sure. It happens that the very first hit I got on google is
Pope Benedict, who mentions Grotius specifically.

Here's my point. Robert Boyle, who can rightly be called an ID advocate --
he wrote a whole treatise on ID, asking "whether and how a naturalist should
consider final causes," to which his answer was a carefully limited yes (ie,
we can discover in science some purposes of some things) -- also quoted
Grotius' phrase "etsi deus non daretur" at least once, though
(embarrassingly) I can't find where he did so. My recollection is that he
did so with some approval. Certainly I can find passages in which he says
that we ought not fly unto God's absolute power in natural philosophy;
rather we should see what God actually did do, not what God could do if he
wanted to. I commented on this (without a reference to Grotius) at an ID
conference several years ago, in a paper I gave called "Mr Johnson meets Mr
Boyle" that remains unpublished (for good reasons; it wasn't a very good
paper overall IMO). Overall, Boyle much admired Grotius' approach to
apologetics and to Christian faith. Grotius was attacked pretty hard by
John Owen, Richard Baxter (a friend of Boyle), and other Puritans, for being
a "Socinian" (a word that, like "atheist," made a good club with which to
beat one's theological opponents at the time), or something equivalent in
their minds. He was of the Arminian theological strain, and Boyle probably
was also (the details of Boyle's theology of redemption remain cloudy to
us). But I believe that Grotius' naturalism also influenced Boyle, who was
nevertheless an ID advocate and a strong supernaturalist. He simply thought
that miracles had no place in natural philosophy.

End of comment. Maybe I'll someday do the hard work and turn this into a
real historical claim.

Ted
 

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Received on Thu Nov 13 09:41:57 2008