Last 2 religion journal - Essay Example

In the former, spiritual experiences are taken to be the result of the processes of matter. In pantheistic theology, both nature and mind (spirit) are considered to be manifestations of some divine principle, which pervades all nature but is ultimately not different from it. The view that nature depends on God can be either theistic or deistic. For me, both of these trends have one thing in common: They assume that nature is ordered and that the human mind is capable of tracing out that order.

One could, therefore, try to unfold on an analytical basis the respective impacts of those various religious ideologies on the scientific enterprise. However, such an approach would, at almost every step, imply historical considerations about science, and all the more so as science has only gradually revealed itself as a strictly quantitative study of things in motion. It may, therefore, seem more logical to specify, from the start, those impacts in their historical context, because pantheism, theism, deism, and materialism represent also a historical sequence (Byrne 54).

This opinion holds true in respect both to the formulation of a major scientific theory and to its subsequent interpretation. Hence, the relation of deism to science is a matter that is essentially different in its status before and after Newtons Principia. Before the appearance of that work, which preceded the robust emergence of deism in the Western world, pantheism and deism could play their respectively inhibitory and creative roles in science (Byrne 59). After the Principia, exact science had a broadly articulated mathematical, or quantitative, structure that safely operated within its own set of methodical canons and retained a very large measure of independence from participating scientists religious or antireligious motivations.

And, as is well known, this distinction led to the deism, which