ABSTRACT
But can the divine be in any sense immanent in a material universe? The previous chapter contains an assumption that mind is at home in the world, a characteristic of it as natural as energy, life, or gravitation. Many philosophers, however, most notably Descartes, have argued for a radical discontinuity between matter and mind. Even when they were forced by the dualism into the most elaborate gymnastics to account for the mysteries of perception and intentional action-how could a ghostly immaterial mind either experience the world through physical senses or affect it by moving physical limbs, unless, as Bishop Berkeley thought, God arranged a continuous coincidence?—they stuck to their beliefs. For centuries material determinists and apologists for transcendental religion alike have insisted on the essential deadness of the fundamental matter of the universe, its lack of internal spontaneous process, of self-awareness and self-motivation. We know from Richard Westfall’s biography of Newton that the reason natural philosophers of the Enlightenment insisted on the deadness and inert passivity of material nature was in order to concede to God a necessary role in giving it all life and animation, so that the divine would not be a fifth wheel in the world. Rational men, they wished to distance themselves from what they considered the magical practices and superstitions of popular religion, and declare their independence from clerical authority, female wishful thinking, and traditional ritual. Not wanting to see God as immanent in the universe, and preferring to keep him outside it where he could, so to speak, be kept an eye on, they tried to make physicality as incomplete as possible in respect of all the properties attributed to soul, consciousness, reflectiveness, initiative, originality, so that he would still have something important to do.
