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Kant (on force): *
In 1744 Kant started writing on natural philosophy, considering the properties of force; in 1747 he completed the Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces, his first known text, first publication & first book published in German (1749) a technical tract.
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Kant argued that force & motion are unrelated; force is not so much about motion more about being. Living forces are best described as the dynamic source for nature, an “active force” or a vis activa. Everything begins with force, it is even prior to extension. Nature’s units are active forces whose actions construct & sustain the fabric of nature. Force acts by radiating showing that is source is its interior. With action comes location, with location space, with space the universe. Force is the first cause. Forces acts on the exterior, when the fields of multiple sources meet they act on each other. External modifications of radiation affect its internal makeup. Force is an active pulse & activity describes; collisions with another field has constitutive effects on the original activity. Dynamic expansion & interaction through location makes space; reciprocal action creates structure. Force-points stretch, grip & take hold, the mutually modifying engagements constitute their connections. Consequences: force & space constitutes reality.
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Kant’s thesis is radical. The dynamic ontology of chapter 1 contradicts Genesis. Force, not God, creates everything, Nature included. Force can be modelled mathematically, & can be jointly determined by 2 quantities; “God” is merely a placeholder for the cause of force itself.
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force (Catholic, Protestant and Atheistic notions): *
Newtonian mechanism accounts for physical motion in terms of deterministic laws; if every moment in history had been completely determined by physical laws acting upon what came before it, how does God act in the world? How can we reconcile human freedom? Newtonian mechanism also reinforced reductionism: behaviour is explained solely in terms of the behaviour of its parts.
the atheists: Scientists, who fully embraced the Newtonian mechanism with its determinism & reductionism, looked for explanations solely in terms of efficient causes. They denied the need for God, Creation, or divine purpose & inferred a meaningless, purposeless world.
19th-century Protestant liberals eliminated from their theory of divine action all objectively special acts & miracles, speaking only of God's one great uniform act: Creation. Aside from this God does not act at particular moments in history. Many Protestant thinkers abandoned the physical world, retreating into the "inner" world of the human spirit. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) first advanced this, removing religion from knowledge, relocating it in feelings. Late 19th century Ritschl (1822–1889) wrote, "theology has to do, not with natural objects, but with states and movements of man's spiritual life." In this manner Protestants protected human freedom from physical determinism by severing human existence from its physical foundation. Compatible with this were the deists who promoted a God who creates and then desists, letting man & Nature run the show.
Catholic theology (& fundamentalist Christians) advocated an approach called interventionism. This allows God to break the laws of nature when acting in a specific event (such as a miracle, or in a Biblical context, the parting of the Waves for Moses or the Resurrection). God is able to create gaps in an otherwise deterministic world to make "room" for particular divine acts. Newton himself was an interventionist, claiming that the planets' orbits were inherently unstable and thus in need of occasional divine adjustment. This divine activity, outside the ken of scientific explanation, gives us a God of the gaps. The theory relies on scientific ignorance & retreats whenever science fills an explanatory gap.
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