Religion and Science
3. The Mechanical Interpretation of the Universe
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Out of such considerations arose the mechanistic
philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Science appeared to favour a mechanistic
view which saw the whole material world as a vast
machine ... Then came the discovery that living cells
were formed of precisely the same chemical atoms
as non-living matter, and so were presumably
governed by the same natural laws. This led to the
question of why the particular atoms of which our
bodies and brains were formed should be exempt
from the laws of causation. It began to be fiercely
maintained, that life itself must, in the last resort,
prove to be purely mechanical in its nature. The
mind of a Newton, a Bach or a Michaelangelo, it
was said, differed only in complexity from a
printing press; their whole function was to respond
exactly to the stimuli they received from without.
But science today does not adhere to this rigid and
unbalanced principle of causation. The theory of
relativity calls the principle of causation an illusion.
At the end of the nineteenth century it was first
revealed to science that many of the phenomena of
the universe, radiation and gravitation in particular,
defied all attempts at a purely mechanical
