A simple way of describing this would be to say that, whereas in the late seventeenth century God was a distant God, now he is a near God. This shift in the notion of what we have been calling the horizon of expectations has important consequences. If God is an active moral agent and creator of the world, then our relation to him and with other living things must be moral and active. This brings us to a new kind of natural religion. It is not enough to have the bare idea that God exists, nor is it enough to have the idea that God has a special concern for human beings. Human beings have to be engaged in a project that requires knowledge of what is right and good. Human beings do not simply happen upon a truth; they, or rather human communities of agents, have to arrive at a shared idea of a good way to conduct the affairs of life, a good way to conduct human relationships, and a good way to conduct their interactions with the natural world.
## Modern science
A second way in which the understanding of nature alters the picture is the replacement of pagan cosmologies that were based on religious conceptions of how the universe came to be, with new conceptions of how the universe is. The Greek philosophers had a number of competing theories. One involved the natural order being formed out of water, and a second involved an original state of homogeneity before everything was segregated and differentiated by the demiurge. For the Christians this left us with a problem. How are the various ideas of creation compatible with each other? With some imagination, one can see how each of the Greek theories could be made to fit into the biblical story of creation. For example, if matter came to be through spontaneous generation, then one could take Genesis 1 and see it as telling of the creation out of primordial water. And if the world was created from one or two atoms, which we know still exist in what was once the center of the sun, then we can imagine God taking a speck of this primordial substance and, by using a divine instrument, creating the world as we know it. These are just two possible ways to accommodate the biblical story and a pagan conception of nature. These are not the only ways, and some have proposed a great many others. The point is that there are not _a priori_ reasons why all these various stories could not be told of God's creating the world. A Christian conception of God could be compatible with a variety of different ideas of the origin of nature.
The early Christians thought that the pagan explanations were not as useful as the Jewish conception of God as a Creator who did not work according to mechanical laws that could be discovered by human reason. In this view the goal was to find out how God's purposes worked in nature through revealed truths. Aristotle made a distinction between final causes and efficient causes. By a final cause he meant what the thing was designed to be. If God created all living things to make human life possible, then, by an efficient cause, God means why he chose to create a living being in such a way that it would meet these particular ends. This is something that it is useful to know about all living things, not just human beings. In short, the goal was a proper understanding of God as Creator.
But in modern times there has been a sea change. The basic idea of what it means to explain something has been transformed. Instead of explaining an activity or structure in the world in terms of the final cause of a human being, or explaining the existence of some physical object in terms of efficient causality, today scientists explain everything by reference to the laws of nature. Thus nature becomes, not simply the means by which a human being can make sense of his or her life and the universe, but it becomes the explanation of all things. In particular, if we want to explain the existence of some natural object in terms of efficient causality, we are left with nothing but more efficient causality. In the modern view we have no need of final causes, for the efficient causes, so understood, can do the work required.
This is most apparent when it comes to human beings. The modern explanation of the origin of the universe, for example, does not have to be based on an idea of God as Creator. We might say that the world could have come into being by means of some natural law alone. The idea that the world could have come into being by itself is one that is found in some eighteenth-century scientists. They thought that the creation of the universe involved a naturalistic process, and this process was described by laws of nature (see Kant's theory of 'the prime mover'). This is not to say that no one believed in God. Rather, the idea is that such naturalistic theories make it possible to say that God's existence cannot be demonstrated through the use of efficient causality, for an efficient causality cannot explain the existence of God. The modern view of things is summarized in Thomas Henry Huxley's aphorism: 'There is no final cause, no goal of evolution' (quoted in R.G. Collingwood, _The Idea of Nature_ , Oxford University Press, 1946, p. 30).
In the post-Enlightenment view, God is no longer necessary as an efficient cause of any kind, and as a result there can be no explanation of how God gave rise to any natural law. The modernist view (sometimes called the scientific view or the rationalist view) that the universe can be accounted for purely in terms of efficient causality and the laws of nature is exemplified in the following ideas of Thomas Henry Huxley (quoted in Collingwood, _The Idea of Nature_ , pp. 1–3):
There is a law of nature...which holds the mean proportional between all possible kinds of knowledge or truth. Thus, if we know as much as is necessary to bring into action any given portion of our cognitive and practical faculties, we become directly aware that those faculties are working perfectly, as far as our immediate experience goes.
When the intellectual tendencies of the age demand, 'Where did God come from?' the answer can be a logical syllogism. He is a law of nature, in the same sense that gravity, attraction, electricity, etc., are laws of nature.
So the idea that God is a personal being who created the world _out of nothing_ , as the Bible says, is incompatible with modern science. For one reason, it is incompatible with the idea of a natural law. The story of creation out of nothing is told in an allegorical manner, and therefore is neither science nor the laws of nature. It is not something to be demonstrated by empirical science, but rather to be believed on faith. For another reason it is incompatible with naturalism, and thus with modern science.
It was in 1809, at the age of twenty-six, that Thomas Henry Huxley became a professor of medicine at the University of London. His early intellectual life was very much determined by two events. One was a journey to the United States with his uncle, George Huxley, which took him to New York and Cambridge University, and the other was the publication in 1814 of Robert Boyle's _The Rudiments of the Interpretation of Nature_. The impact of these events would shape his ideas about how we should think about nature. What he took from Boyle was the notion that God, the creator of nature, was not a God who was present to the world as something apart, but was a God whose activity was immanent in the world as the source of the laws of nature. But whereas Boyle saw this lawfulness as a divine activity, Huxley saw it as a divine mode of being. The consequence is that God is no longer a personal being but becomes a process. This is a far cry from what Huxley said about God's character and nature in 1834, when he gave his Royal Institution Lectures, and said that God was a 'God of all grace and mercy, a God of love, wisdom, and power', and that the Christian doctrine of God is 'the profoundest system of faith which the human mind has ever conceived' (quoted in Collingwood, _The Idea of Nature_ , p. 38). There is no other being in the world that can say these things.
Now that we have considered the consequences of a new conception of God, we can turn to what the consequences of such a conception are for the doctrine of nature.
The result of this new way of thinking was to drive the notion of nature further away from being an attribute of God. To say that God is the principle of all things in the world and to say that God is the creator of the world are two completely different things. The point is that there is no need to say that God is the creator of the world. God need not be the author of nature. Hence to say that nature is the handmaid of God means something quite different from saying that nature is his offspring. We might say that nature is an attribute of God, but this makes no sense. If God is the creator of nature, then either nature is a creature that God created or it is a brute fact. The idea that nature is a creature is absurd. If nature is the handmaid of God, then nature cannot be the creator of itself, and it would have to be the creation of something else.
When God is seen as the efficient cause of nature, then the world is not like a human being in its autonomy. The idea that God is the efficient cause of nature means that he has to intervene and create nature as he intended it. We might say, therefore, that God acts on nature, and if we conceive of the way
