Given the extraordinary achievements seen in the scientific revolution and the huge cultural and technological advantages that those advances conferred on the Western world, it is surprising that so little has been written about it by those concerned with economic development. Major writers who have claimed either the parity or superiority of China to the West economically prior to the eighteenth century have been almost entirely silent about the European scientific revolution, its long history, and its significance.

If we credit Herbert Butterfield's claim set out in the introduction to this study, then it is clear, as the last chapter has shown, that there was a great transformation of thought regarding our understanding of the forces governing the natural world. That mental transformation uniquely unfolded in the West during the last phases of the scientific revolution. This means that Max Weber's question about “what combination of circumstances” were responsible for the great ascendance of the West must include those of the revolutionary new scientific point of view that infused the whole gamut of seventeenth-century natural scientific inquiry, not just astronomy. Put differently, the question of why the West can only be answered by bringing together the great conceptual transformation of the scientific revolution and the effects of the Protestant Reformation that had been noted by Weber. That path of cultural synthesis must consider the facilitating effects of religion along with the emergence of the new print media, the crystallization of a public sphere, and the rising rates of literacy. Indeed, as a sociological factor, the unparalleled rising rates of literacy in Europe were a major contributor to the great ascendance and divergence that set Europe off socially and economically from other parts of the world. Furthermore, the rise of literacy in Europe must be traced back at least to the early sixteenth century, when there was no parallel development in China, Asia broadly, or the Muslim world. At the same time, those developments have to be read against the long developmental background from the late Middle Ages.

As astronomy went through its revolutionary transformation from the time of Copernicus to Newton, the ground shifted from mathematical modeling to deep probings of the structures of the universe. We have seen already that seventeenth-century European natural philosophers had stumbled onto the mysterious forces of magnetism and electricity. Solving the problem of the orbits of the planets was not just a mathematical problem based on observational parameters for the seven planets. Sooner or later, astronomers would be released from the confines of geometry to the soaring world of philosophers of the universe such as Galileo wished to be. That meant grasping the forces of nature, both large and small.

Philosophers of the Universe

This was to be the new age of cosmology. Inevitably, it required working toward a unified science of terrestrial and celestial physics. Kepler was the first of these new philosophers of the universe to propose a new astronomy based on physical causes, something missing from Copernicus's great work. Yet, even he did not envision a unified terrestrial and celestial physics, as Newton did. He had a grand vision for the shape of astronomy based on physical causes, but just what that meant in Kepler's time, nobody could say. He laid out that vision in an insight from 1605 that was not published until the appearance of his New Astronomy of 1609:

To propose a machinelike universe animated by a single force was audacious. Galileo was a committed Copernican, and his extraordinary visual exploration of the heavens using the telescope yielded the discovery of the cratered surface of the moon, the satellites of Jupiter, and the phases of Venus, all of which supported the Copernican hypothesis as he saw it. Yet, he did not have a grander vision of celestial physics beyond the success of the Copernican system.

The ideas about magnetism and electricity that began to be widely discussed by natural philosophers at the outset of the seventeenth century take us deep into the mysteries of the fundamental forces of nature. Even at the end of the twentieth century, this part of modern physics had many unanswered questions, including just how to think about the four basic forces of nature: strong, weak, gravitational, and electromagnetic. Today, perhaps electric and magnetic forces seem the simplest to comprehend, but in 1600, no one had even imagined the existence of “electricity.” William Gilbert stumbled onto it while divining the nature of magnetism. Only that innovation paved the way for the continuous study of electric forces throughout the seventeenth century. In the meantime, astronomy was about to be transformed from mere mathematical model-building to philosophical speculation about just what holds our universe together. But before we can approach that great intellectual struggle, we need to consider the discovery of the more subtle forces that bind our world, and that began to be glimpsed in the early seventeenth century.

Holding the World Together

The question of what holds the planets in their orbits was abruptly brought into focus in the late sixteenth century. In 1577, a comet appeared in Europe, seen by many observers, but especially Tycho Brahe. He was then the most accomplished European astronomer. He noticed that the path of the comet was such that it would have crashed through the crystalline spheres that were supposed to hold the planets and fixed stars in their orbits. If this comet on a path through a crystalline sphere did not cause a crash, then those spheres vanished. If the crystalline heavenly spheres were gone from the universe and therefore could not explain why the planets and fixed stars continued in their daily and yearly paths, then cosmological thinkers had to ask themselves if there is not some intrinsic force in nature that attracts objects to each other. This was the deeper background to Kepler's thinking in 1605.

Up to modernity, the majority of Christian thinkers presupposed the world of creation to be composed of two parts: the material and the spiritual, existing alongside one another as independent yet interacting realms. In the traditional exegesis of Genesis 1, for example, the creation of light in Genesis 1:3 (“Let there be light”) was interpreted as a spiritual light for spiritual beings in a spiritual world (kosmos noētos), preceding the creation of the corporeal light of the sun in the empirical world (kosmos aisthētikos) in Genesis 1:14.

This two-stock universe lost its plausibility with the advent of classical physics in the seventeenth century, when nature came to be seen as a seamless unity. The scientific intuition of the oneness of the universe, however, was initially combined with a narrow interpretation of the nature of the material. As Isaac Newton (1642–1727) argued in his Opticks, matter is basically atomic: “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles”. According to Newton, these particles, formed in the beginning by God and held together by the mechanical laws of nature, serve the divine purpose of the universe while at the same time being embraced by God, who is ubiquitously at work ordering, shaping, and reshaping the universe. For Newton, mechanism and theism were two sides of the same coin. How else to explain the orderliness of the otherwise arraying particles?

The use of informational terms is widespread in molecular and developmental biology. The usage dates back to Weismann. In both protein synthesis and in later development, genes are symbols, in that there is no necessary connection between their form (sequence) and their effects. The sequence of a gene has been determined by past natural selection, because of the effects it produces. In biology, the use of informational terms implies intentionality, in that both the form of the signal, and the response to it, have evolved by selection. Where an engineer sees design, a biologist sees natural selection.

Scientists who speculate on philosophical questions usually agree that classical materialism – the view that reality consists of nothing but small massy particles bumping into one another in an absolute and unique space–time – is intellectually dead. Accounts of the universe now regularly involve notions such as that of manifold space–times, quantum realities that exist at a more ultimate level than, and are very different from, massy particles in one specific space, and informational codes that contain instructions for building complex integrated structures displaying new sorts of emergent property.

What this suggests is that the nature of the reality investigated by physics and biology is much more complex and mysterious than some Newtonian materialists thought (though of course Newton himself was as far from being a materialist as one can get). In particular, the role of information in any account of our universe has come to take on a new importance.

Most contributors to this volume distinguish three main types of information – Shannon information, “shaping” information, and semantic information.

Shannon information is a matter of how to input the maximum amount of information into a closed physical system. It is concerned, it might be said, with quantity rather than quality, in that it totally ignores questions of the significance or function of the information that a physical system might contain. This is a technical matter for information technologists, and I shall not consider it further.

A host of surveys indicate that what Christians, and indeed other religious believers, today affirm as ‘real’ fails to generate any conviction among many of those who seek spiritual insight and who continue regretfully as wistful agnostics in relation to the formulations of traditional religions – notably Christianity in Europe, and in intellectual circles in the USA. Many factors contribute to this state of affairs, but one of these, I would suggest, is that the traditional language in which much Christian theology, certainly in its Western form, has been and is cast is so saturated with terms that have a supernatural reference and colour that a culture accustomed to think in naturalistic terms, conditioned by the power and prestige of the natural sciences, finds it increasingly difficult to attribute any plausibility to it. Be that as it may, there is clearly a pressing need to describe the realities that Christian belief wishes to articulate in terms that can make sense to that culture without reducing its content to insignificance.

Correspondingly, there is also a perennial pressure, even among those not given to any form of traditional religiosity, to integrate the understandings of the natural world afforded by the sciences with very real, ‘spiritual’ experiences, which include interactions with other people and awareness of the transcendent.

Both of these pressures in contemporary life accentuate the need to find ways of integrating ‘talk about God’ – that is, theology – with the world view engendered and warranted by the natural sciences.

The most important single issue in the conversation of theology with science is whether and how God acts in or influences the world. Here I shall ask whether the notion of information can help theologians address this question. It is well known that traditional philosophies and theologies intuited a universal “informational” principle running through all things. Their sense that “Mind,” “Wisdom,” or “Logos” inhabits and globally patterns the universe has been repeated in widely different ways time and again: in ancient Greek philosophy, the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Scriptures, Philo, early Christianity, Stoicism, Hegel, Whitehead, and others. But can the intuition that the universe is the bearer of an overarching meaning – of an informational principle actively present to the entire cosmic process – have any plausibility whatsoever in the age of science?

These days, after all, one must hesitate before connecting the Logos of theology immediately to patterns in nature. The life process as seen through the eyes of evolutionary biologists, to cite the main reason for such reluctance, scarcely seems to be the embodiment of any universal divine principle of meaning or wisdom. Contrary to the picture of cosmic order expressed in much religious thought, evolution involves seemingly endless experimentation with different “forms,” most of which are eventually discarded and replaced by those only accidentally suited to the demands of natural selection.