Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

For Isaac Newton (1642–1727), the universe was governed by precise laws which could not only be formulated but mathematically proved to a certainty. These physical laws were not sporadic or local; they were universal and extended everywhere to immense distances, as he wrote in The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, first published in 1687. Newton’s three laws of motion may not apply at the atomic level or under conditions approaching the speed of light, as we now know, but they apply everywhere else. The fall of that famous apple was no less an effect of universal gravitation than the rhythms of the tides or the orbits of the planets.

But to prove the law of gravity, though an unparalleled accomplishment, was not to understand its final cause. Newton wrote, again in The Principia, that I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity. (That as yet demonstrates both Newton’s supreme self-confidence and his rigorous honesty. To this day no one else has deduced those properties either.) In a statement that stands as his scientific signature, he added, et non fingo hypotheses—and I do not feign hypotheses. Even so, this same scorner of the hypothetical would spend much of his career after the amazing two-year period of his greatest discoveries in 1664–66 dabbling obsessively in alchemy, as well as pursuing increasingly fantastic numerological investigations of Scripture.

In one of Aesop’s Fables a stag takes refuge on a cliff to escape his hunters. He feels safe as long as he can survey the landscape below him. But a boatload of hunters coming upriver spot his silhouette against the sky and bring him down from his blind side. The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (1640-1705) resembled that unfortunate stag. He was so fixated on the threat from France and the aggressive designs of Louis XIV that he underestimated a far worse menace from the East. That, combined with his legendary procrastination, almost cost him Vienna and his empire.

In 1683, the Ottoman Turks under Mehmed IV, still smarting from the failure of Suleiman the Magnificent to take Vienna in 1529, began preparing for a new assault on the ultimate prize. Victory, which lay almost within their grasp, would have spelled the end of the Holy Roman Empire. The heartland of Europe would have become yet another unruly Ottoman province.

In the 1970s, when the big-bang model for the origins of the universe at last seemed firmly established, Christian, Jewish, and even some Muslim preachers and exegetes took heart. Hadn’t modern cosmology at long last proved what scripture always claimed? The universe emerged in a single indefinable instant. Creation out of nothing stood confirmed. Genesis had been vindicated.

The troublesome fact that big bang cosmology offers a model of how the cosmos came into being from a dimensionless point of infinite density but says nothing about what—or who—precipitated that primordial explosion (whose effects still determine our world, some 15 billion years later), hardly fazed these eager explicators. But the question nags. How far are we entitled to draw metaphysical inferences from scientific models?

Scientists were once happy to be known as natural philosophers. The title implied not merely that they studied nature but that they thought about it in such a way as to discern its hidden laws. They weren’t concerned only with the how of things but with the why. The beautiful line of Virgil, Happy is he who can recognize the causes of things, epitomized the endeavor. Causation in all its forms, from the collisions of solid bodies on earth to the remote arrangements of the First Cause beyond the empyrean, underlay natural laws. Goethe’s Faust, the mythic prototype of the philosopher-scientist, was driven to despair, as well as near-damnation, by his passion to know what holds the world together in its deepest core. But Faust represents the end of an ancient tradition; for all his knowledge, he’s tormented by the world’s ultimate unknowability. And that bafflement scorches his heart.

It’s almost impossible for us to recapture the pre-Darwinian notion of a species or an individual creature as having issued in its final configuration directly from the hand of its maker. We can’t escape an awareness of the countless mutations and adaptations that every being, including ourselves, has undergone in the long process of evolution. Poets attempt to recover this lost sense of essence. When Rilke writes about a flamingo, he sees it under the aegis of eternity. It would have been interesting and startlingly original had he somehow glimpsed, and been able to convey, the shadowy precursors—all those vanished proto-flamingos—that went to form his transcendental waterfowl, but this would have destroyed the Platonic fiction on which his vision depended.