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References
Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his System of the World, trans Andrew Motte, ed. Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. xxvii.
See M. B. Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science,” Mind 43 (1934), pp. 446–68; J. E. McGuire, “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972), pp. 523–42; Francis Oakley, “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of Laws of Nature,” Church History 30 (1961), pp. 433–5; John Henry, “Henry More versus Robert Boyle,” in Henry More (1614–87): Tercentenary Essays, ed. Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), pp. 55–76; James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990); P. M. Heimann, “Voluntarism and Immanence: Conceptions of Nature in Eighteenth Century Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978), pp. 271–83; Margaret J. Osler, “Fortune, Fate, and Divination: Gassendi’s Voluntarist Theology and the Baptism of Epicureanism,” in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Margaret J. Osler, “The Intellectual Sources of Robert Boyle’s Philosophy of Nature,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion, 1640–1700, ed. Richard Ashcroft, Richard Kroll, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Antoni Malet, “Isaac Barrow on the Mathematization of Nature: Theological Voluntarism and the Rise of Geometrical Optics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997), pp. 265–87.
See, e.g., B. J. T. Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 110; Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy, p. 151; Matt Goldish, Judaism in the Theology of Isaac Newton (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), p. 159; James E. Force, “The God of Abraham and Isaac (Newton),” in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, eds., The Books of Nature and Scripture (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 179–200, esp. p. 183; E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1952), p. 294.
Peter Harrison, “Voluntarism and Early Modern Science,” History of Science 40 (2002), pp. 63–89.
Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy, p. 17. Cf. Henry Guerlac, “Theological Voluntarism and Biological Analogies in Newton’s Physical Thought”, Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983), pp. 219–229 (esp. p. 227).
Brian Leftow, Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 10 vols, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998) 9:633a.
Thomas Aquinas is generally regarded as the prototypal intellectualist: “God produces his effects according to his wisdom. For the will is moved to act from some kind of apprehension and the apprehended good is indeed the object of the will.” Summa contra gentiles II, 24.1–2. Duns Scotus may be taken as an example of voluntarism: “anything other than God is good because God wills it, and not vice versa.” Opus Oxoniense III, 19. For Scotus, nonetheless, some acts are naturally good or bad, inasmuch as they tend to perfect human nature or corrupt it. William of Ockham, the other standard exemplar of voluntarism, has a similarly nuanced moral theory.
MS Bodmer, ch. 1, 4r–5r (my emphasis.) Cf. Irenicum or Ecclesiastical Polyty tending to peace, Keynes MS 3, fol. 5.
Gregory MS 245, fol. 14a, in J. E. McGuire, “Force, Active Principles, and Newton’s Invisible Realm,” p. 190.
Clarke, “Of the Immutability of God,” The Works of Samuel Clarke, D.D., 2 vols (London, 1738), 1:41.
Ibid.
René Descartes, Objections and Replies, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), 2:293.
For the creation of eternal truths see Descartes to Mersenne, 15 April 1630, in Philosophical Writings, 3:23; Objections and Replies, in Philosophical Writings, 2:291.
Margaret Osler has suggested that Descartes was not a voluntarist, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy, pp. 11, and 146–52. However, virtually all Descartes scholars accept this identification. Part of this is a disagreement over definitions. The basic issue is how Descartes’ extreme voluntarism with respect to Goďs willing of eternal truths is to be squared with his apparent intellectualism. See, e.g., Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 179–92. Funkenstein concludes, rightly in my view, that Descartes’ rationalism is anchored not in his ontology, but in his epistemology (p. 186). For discussions of Descartes’ position in relation to the voluntarism and science thesis, see Harrison, “Voluntarism and Early Modern Science,” and Edward B. Davis, “Christianity and Early Modern Science: The Foster Thesis Reconsidered,” in Evangelicals in Historical Perspective, ed. David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 75–95.
There is a vast literature on this issue. For the range of interpretations see Dan Kaufman, “Descartes’s Creation Doctrine and Modality,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 80 (2002), pp. 24–41; Thomas M. Lennon, “The Cartesian Dialectic of Creation,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy 2 vols., D. Garber and M. Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1:331–62; E. M. Curley, “Descartes on the Creation of Eternal Truths,” The Philosophical Review 93 (1984), pp. 569–97; Harry Frankfurt, “Descartes on the Creation of Eternal Truths,” The Philosophical Review 86 (1977), pp. 36–57. In relation to the issue at hand, see the discussion in Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, pp. 179–92.
Thus, e.g., John Henry: “Newton being a voluntarist (who emphasized Goďs arbitrary will and held him to free to make any kind of world he chose) and Leibniz a necessitarian or intellectualist (who held Goďs reason to be his primary attribute) and who believed, therefore, that God was constrained by coeternal rational and moral principles to create only this world—which must be the best of all possible worlds.” John Henry, s.v. “Causation,” in The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia ed. Gary Ferngren (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 35.
Clarke, “The Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion,” Works, 2:698.
Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise of Freewill, in Treatise concerning eternal and immutable morality with A Treatise of Freewill, ed. Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 189.
Ibid., p. 187.
Nicolas Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, ed. Nicholas Jolley and David Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, VI.v (p. 95).
David Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 Ibid., I.v (p. 9). Cf. “the volitions of God relating to the world are not contained in the notion we have of him.” Malebranche, Dialogues, VI.vi (p. 96).
David Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 Ibid., VI.v (p. 95).
See, e.g., G. W. Leibniz, The Principles of Philosophy, or, the Monadology, in Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1989), pp. 220, 227; Principles of Nature and Grace, based on Reason, in Philosophical Essays, p. 210.
Leibniz, New Essays in Human Understanding, II.27, ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 239; The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), p. 39 (Leinbiz’s fourth paper, 19).
Thus J.E. McGuire: “Voluntarist theology ⋯ denies that God must have a sufficient reason for creation.” “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” p. 527.
Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, p. 30 (Dr. Clarke’s Third Reply, 2).
Isaac Newton, Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light, based on the 4th edn (New York: Dover, 1979), pp. 404ff.
Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1a. 25, 6; Quaestiones disputatae de potentia Dei 3.17. Also see Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, pp. 131f., 142, 201.
Indeed, Amos Funkenstein has observed in this connection that “Newton’s insistence on the arbitrarinesscum-perfection of creation resembles rather Aquinas [than Boyle].” Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 193, n. 2. Cf. p. 201.
It should be understood that the term “arbitrary” did not have the same negative connotations in the seventeenth century that it has acquired since. John Leonard writes that “‘Arbitrary’ is an especially treacherous word for the reader of seventeenth-century English, for the sense ‘dependent on the discretion of an arbiter’ was then more common than it has since become.” Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 6. On the contemporary meanings of “arbitrary” see also Harrison, “Voluntarism and Early Modern Science,” p. 74.
Heimann, “Voluntarism and Immanence,” p. 273; Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy, p. 11.
Newton, Opticks, p. 403.
Newton, MS Yahuda 21, fol. 1r.; Memoranda by David Gregory, May 1694, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 7 vols, ed. H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall, and L. Tilling (Cambridge: Published for the Royal Society at the University Press, 1959–77), 3:336. Cf.: “it must be agreed that God, by the sole action of thinking and willing, can prevent a body from penetrating any space defined by Certain limits,” in Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. and tr. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 139. For the association of this view with Newton’s voluntarism, see James E. Force, “Newton’s God of Dominion,” in Force and Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Newton’s Theology, pp. 85ff., and E. B. Davis, “Newton’s Rejection of the Newtonian World View,” Science and Christian Belief 3 (1991), pp. 103–17.
Roger Cotes, “Preface” to Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Clarke, “The Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion,” Works 2:698.
Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1a. 104, 1–3.
Malebranche, Dialogues VII.8, p. 113. Cf. The Search after Truth, trans. and ed. Thomas Lennon and Paul Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 450.
Malebranche, Treatise on Nature and Grace, trans. Patrick Riley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 162.
Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in Philosophical Writings, 1:127. See also Daniel Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 274ff.
Heimann, “Voluntarism and Immanence,” p. 273. Cf. J. E. McGuire on Boyle’s mechanical philosophy: “God’s Will, therefore, is the only causally efficacious agency in nature.” “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” p. 525.
Newton to Bentley, 25 February 1692, in Correspondence, 4:438.
Richard Bentley, Boyle Lectures, Sermon IV, in The Works of Richard Bentley, D.D., 6th edn., 3 vols., ed. Alexander Dyce (London, 1836), 3:74–5. William Whiston suggests something similar, arguing that the “Providence of God in the Natural World is not merely a Conservation of its being, or a Non-annihilation thereof; but a constant, uniform, active influence or Energy in all the Operations done in it.” A New Theory of the Earth (London, 1696), p. 6. Elsewhere in this work, Whiston states that the “Effects of Nature” are nothing but divine power “acting according to fixt and certain Laws” (p. 211).
See, e.g. Alexander Koyré, “Gravity an Essential Property of Matter,” Newtonian Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 149–63; I. B. Cohen, “Newton’s Third Law and Universal Gravitation”, Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987), pp. 571–93. For a summary of these interpretations see John Henry, “‘Pray do not Ascribe that Notion to Me’: God and Newton’s Gravity,” in The Books of Nature and Scripture, ed. Force and Popkin, pp. 123–47. Ernan McMullin frankly concludes that Newton seemed to have no clear and consistent position on this issue. Newton on Matter and Activity (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1978), p. 104.
On the Cartesians and occasionalism see Daniel Garber, “Descartes and occasionalism,” in Causation in early modern philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993), pp. 9–26; Steven Nadler, “Occasionalism and the question of Arnauld’s Cartesianism,” in Descartes and his contemporaries, ed. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 129–44;–Doctrines of explanation in late scholasticism and in the mechanical philosophy,” p. 541, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy, I:513–52; Daniel Garber, “How God causes motion: Descartes, divine substance, and occasionalism”, Journal of philosophy, 84 (1987), pp. 567–80; Andrew Pessin, “Does Continuous Creation Entail Occasionalism? Malebranche (and Descartes),” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (2000), pp. 413–40, and “Descartes’s Nomic Concurrentism: Finite Causation and Divine Concurrence,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003), pp. 25–49.
Desmond Clarke, “Casual Powers and Occasionalism from Descartes to Malebranche”, in Descartes’ natural philosophy, ed. Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John Sutton (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 131–48, esp. p. 145.
Popkin, pp. 123–47 Henry, “God and Newton’s Gravity”, See also Daniel Garber, John Henry, Lynn Joy, and Alan Gabbey, “New Doctrines of Body and its Powers, Place, and Space,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 1:553–623, in which it is concluded that “Newton was not an occasionalist” (1:605).
Newton, Opticks, pp. 404ff.
Robert Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso, in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. T. Birch, 2nd edn. (London, 1772), 5:521. I say that what this difference amounts to is not clear, for if God is atemporal and one takes his original creation and his ongoing preservation of the universe as aspects of a single act then the difference between Newton and Boyle would seem to lie only in a different way of thinking about this simple divine act.
Robert Boyle, Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God, in Works 5:140. Peter Anstey writes: “The point of comparison with Boyle is that for Newton the laws arise from the nature of matter, whereas for Boyle they are expressions of God’s will. For Newton, matter has powers and the laws of nature are manifestations of those powers.” The Philosophy of Robert Boyle (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 175. As in the case of Newton, there has been some discussion of Boyle’s position on these questions. J. E. McGuire has suggested that Boyle is an occasionalist—“with respect to inanimate nature all causal action must originate with God”—although he is reluctant to use this terminology. “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” p. 535, cf. p. 532. See also E. McCann, “Was Boyle an Occasionalist?,” in Philosophy, its History and Historiography, ed. A. J. Holland (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), pp. 229–31; Struan Jacobs, “Laws of Nature, Corpuscles, and Concourse: Non-Occasionalist Tendencies in the Thought of Robert Boyle,” Journal of Philosophical Research 19 (1994), pp. 373–93; T. Shanahan, “God and Nature in the Thought of Robert Boyle,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (1988), pp. 547–69; Anstey, Philosophy of Robert Boyle, pp. 158–86, and “Boyle on Occasionalism: An Unexamined Source,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999), pp. 57–81. Cf. Pessin, “Descartes’s Nomic Concurrentism.”
“Many will follow Descartes in holding that body is by its nature inert, and its motion and activity must come from without; such are the occasionalists of the Cartesian school, as well as philosophers like Henry More, who saw the mechanical philosophy as an argument for the existence of incorporeal substance. On the other side are those, Newton and Leibniz most visibly, but probably also Spinoza, who argued for a world of bodies in themselves active,” John Henry, Lynn Joy, and Alan Gabbey, “New Doctrines of Body and its Powers, Place, and Space,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 1 Garber et al., “New Doctrines of Body”, p. 580. For differences between Henry More, Descartes, and Boyle, see Margarel J. Osler, “Triangulating Divine Will: Henry More, Robert Boyle, and René Descartes on God’s Relationship to the Creation”, in Stoicismo e origenismo nella filosofia platonica del Seicento inglese, ed. Marialiusa Baldi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1996), pp. 75–87.
Dobbs, Janus Faces of Genius, p. 110 (my emphasis). Lisa Sarasohn similarly describes Gassendi’s voluntarism as the view that “the world is absolutely contingent on God’s will”. Gassendi’s Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 15. For a further discussion of this point, see Harrison, “Voluntarism and Early Modern Science”, esp. pp. 67–70.
Luther thus insisted that “all things happen by necessity” because God “forsees, purposes, and does all things by an immutable, eternal, and infallible will.” Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers werke: kritische Gesammtausgabe (Weimar: Böhlaus, 1883-), 123 vols, 18:617, 615.
Clarke, Works, 2:698.
Ibid., 1:40. Compare Matthew Hale’s observation that, “in reality there is nothing in the World Contingent, because every thing that hath bin, is, or shall be, is praedetermined by an Immutable Will of the First Being, that is, by what God ordains.” A Discourse of the Knowledge of God, and of Our Selves (London, 1688), pp. 33ff.
Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1a. 25, 5.
On the distinction and its history see Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, pp. 117–201; Lawrence Moonan, Divine Power: The Medieval Power Distinction up to its Adoption by Albert, Bonaventure, and Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Francis Oakley, “The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Theology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998), pp. 437–61; Oakley, “The Absolute and Ordained Power of God and King in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Philosophy, Science, Politics, and Law,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998), pp. 669–89; William Courntenay, Capacity and Volition: A History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power (Bergamo: P. Labrina, 1990).
For a description of these developments see Eugene Klaaren, Religious Origins of Modern Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1977), esp. pp. 35–8.
Klaaren, Religious Origins of Modern Science, pp. 39–52; Dobbs, Janus Faces of Genius, p. 111; Oakley, “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science,” p. 448; “The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Theology,” p. 452.
Dobbs, Janus Faces of Genius, p. 111. So, too, Newton’s God of Dominion,” p. 85; McGuire., p. 85. “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” p. 526, n.8.
Oakley, “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science,”, Oakley, “The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Theology,” p. 452.
Oakley, “The Absolute and Ordained Power of God and King in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Philosophy, Science, Politics, and Law,” Oakley, “The Absolute Power of God and King”, pp. 677ff. Oakley gives his sources as Dobbs, Janus Faces of Genius, p. 110, and Force, “Newton’s God of Dominion.” For a slightly different reading of how the power distinction operated for Newton, see John Henry, “God and Newton’s Gravity,” in The Books of Nanre and Scripture, ed. Force and Popkin, pp. 123–47. For parallel arguments relating to Boyle and Gassendi, see J. E. McGuire, “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972), p. 526 McGuire, “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” p. 526, and Margaret Osler, “Providence and Divine Will in Gassendi’s Views on Scientific Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983), pp. 549–60.
See, e.g., William J. Courtenay, “Nominalism and Late Medieval Religion,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus with Heiko Oberman (Leiden: Brill, 1974), pp. 37, 42, 43, and Capacity and Volition, pp. 16–20; Eugenio Randi, “Ockham, John XXII and the Absolute Power of God”, Franciscan Studies 46 (1986), pp. 205–16; Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, pp. 130–4. For an alternative view that identifies proponents of an operationalized absolute power see Justin Oakley, Omnipotence and Promise: The Legacy of the Scholastic Distinction of Powers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2002), pp. 9–13.
Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God: Luther Studies (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963), p. 91. See also Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), pp. 282ff.; Richard Desharnais, “The History of the Distinction between Goďs Absolute and Ordained Power and its Influence on Martin Luther,” 1966 PhD Dissertation, Catholic University of America, p. 248.
John Calvin, Sermons on Job, in Corpus Reformatorum 34. 339 ff. Cf. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.xxiii.3, 2 vols, ed. J. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 2:950. On Calvin’s rejection of the power distinction see David Steinmetz, Calvin in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 40–49; Anna Case-Winters, Goďs Power: Traditional Understandings and Contemporary Challenges (Louisville: Westminster, 1990), 42–63; Françcois Wendel, Calvin: Origins and Development of his Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 127ff. Cf. Oakley, “The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Theology,” p. 457. Even the extent to which Calvin and subsequent Calvinists subscribed to voluntarism remains contentious. See, e.g., R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (London: Paternoster, 1997); Paul Helm, Calvin and the Calvinists (London: Banner of Truth, 1998); Norman Fiering. “Will and Intellect in the New England Mind,” William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972), pp. 515–58.
“Therefore, since God assumes to himself the right (unknown to us) to rule the universe, let our law of soberness and moderation be to assent to his supreme authority, that his will may be for us the sole rule of righteousness, and the truly just cause of all things. Not, indeed, that absolute will of which the Sophists babble, by an impious and profane distinction separating his justice from his power—but providence, that determinative principle of all things, from which flows nothing but right, although the reasons have been hidden from us.” Institutes, I.xvii.2 (I:214).
John Bramhall, Castigations of Mr Hobbes (London, 1657), p. 46. Cf. p. 407.
William Perkins, A Golden Chaine, or, The Description of Theology (London, 1621), pp. 17ff. Cf. An Exposition of the Symbole or Creede of the Apostles (London, 1611), p. 37. William Ames also notes that, “the father is and was able to haue [sic] created another world, yea a thousand worlds, but he would not, not will not.” The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1642), p. 24. Cf. p. 459. pp. 85ff., and E. B. Davis, “Newton’s Rejection of the Newtonian World
Dibner MS 1031 B, fol. 4v.
Newton, Opticks, pp. 404f.
William Courtenay also offers this explanation. See “The Dialectic of Divine Omnipotence”, p. 8, in Covenant and Causality within Medieval Thought (London: Variorum, 1984).
Sir Isaac Newton: Theological Manuscripts, ed. H. McLachlan (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1950), pp. 17ff. The criterion of unusualness had been proposed by Augustine and conditionally endorsed by Aquinas. See Augustine, De civitate dei, XXI.8, De utilitate credendi, 16.34, Contra Faustum XXVI.3; Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1a. 105, 7. See also Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), pp. 93–124; Peter Harrison, “Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995), pp. 531–53.
As J. E. McGuire himself has expressed it, for Boyle and others, “physical laws are categories imposed upon nature by the human mind in light of the observed regularities of experience, or of those experimentally produced.” “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” p. 525, cf. p. 536.
For an extended account of this conception of the miraculous see Harrison, “Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature.” For a contrasting interpretation see James E. Force’s contribution to this collection.
Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, p. 35 (Clarke’s Third Reply, 16).
Clarke, Works, 2:697.
Gregory MS 245, fol. 14a (my italics).
The Search after Truth and Elucidations of the Search after Truth, trans. and ed. Thomas Lennon and Paul Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Elucidations X, XV, pp. 614, 666, 667ff.
Descartes, Objections and Replies, in Philosophical Writings, 2:293.
Oakley, “The Absolute Power of God and King”, p. 678
Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3rd edn., 7 vols (Tübingen: Mohr, 1957–65), 6:1490b; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “voluntarism”.
In the mainstream philosophical literature, “voluntarism” means “doxastic voluntarism”—the view that choice plays a significant role in belief. This position is contrasted with evidentialism, according to which belief is determined by evidence. Theological voluntarism in this sense is another term for “fideism”, which stresses the primacy of faith rather than reason. See Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, 15 vols. (Paris: Librairi Letouzey et Ane, 1903–50), Vol. 15, cols. 3313 ff.; The New Catholic Encyclopaedia, 17 vols. (New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1967–79), s.v. “Voluntarism.”; The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 8 vols., ed. P. Edwards (London: Macmillan, 1968), 8:271; The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 845a.
Edward Grant, “The Condemnation of 1277, Goďs Absolute Power, and Physical Thought in the Late Middle Ages,” Viator 10 (1979), pp. 211–44; Planets, Stars, & Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 53ff. Article 34 of the Condemnation, to take a pertinent example, censured the notion that God could not have made a plurality of worlds had he so willed.
Descartes, The World, in Philoiphical Writings, 1:90; Discourse on the Method, in Philosophical Writings, 1:131; Principles of Philosophy, in Philosophical Writings, 1:255. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, pp. 71, 220.
Newton himself contrasted “experimental philosophy” with “hypothetical philosophy,” the latter being said to consist in “imaginary explications of things & imaginary arguments for or against such explications, or against the arguments of Experimentall Philosophers founded on induction. The first sort of Philosophy is followed by me, the latter too much by Cartes, Leibniz, & some others.” Correspondence, 5:398–90. On the rhetorical significance of these categories, see Peter Anstey, “Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy,” in Early Modern Natural Philosophy: Patterns of Change in the Culture of Natural Philosophy in the 17th Century, ed. Peter Anstey and John Schuster, forthcoming.
Rupp, The Righteousness of God, p. 91.
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Harrison, P. (2004). Was Newton a Voluntarist?. In: Force, J.E., Hutton, S. (eds) Newton and Newtonianism. International Archives of the History of Ideas/Archives internationales d’histoire des idées, vol 188. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2238-7_4
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