So what is the answer? Newton I believe was right; and his opinion was that God compelled the heavenly bodies to obey the Laws which He had prescribed for them. Newton saw that there was no reason for matter to behave consistently, and indeed it doesn’t; in outer space the movement of particles is utterly chaotic, and it is only when large numbers of them are gathered together that they behave as though governed by causal Laws. Expressing it in more modern language, Dr. Broad, the Cambridge philosopher, in his book “Mind and its Place in Nature” written in the 1920s, in discussing a mechanistic view of matter, and what he calls “Emergent Vitalism”, insists at length that a complicated body will always have properties which are different from, and which are entirely unpredictable from, the properties found studying its simpler components. Whatever one calls it, this is an incontrovertible fact, he says, of which one has to take account. Complexity changes the Rules.
Dr. Broad’s colleague Professor Whitehead, in his essay on Immortality, expresses it rather differently. He contrasts the world of Mortality, in which we all live, with the world of Immortality, in which we also all live. Each world, he says, is meaningless without the other; and indeed these two worlds are simply abstractions from the real world all around us; so inevitably and necessarily they inter-relate with each other. The mortal world is the world of activity, creation, of forming relationships and of decay. The immortal world is the world of values, which are eternal; and though he did not say it of good and evil. If you try to live exclusively in the one world or the other, you do so at your peril, because you are attempting to live an unnatural existence. No doubt it is right that a few people should lead a contemplative life, and it is right to remember the highly civilizing influence of the monasteries in the Middle Ages, before they became corrupt. They were societies without aggression, in a very aggressive world. But it is not a life to be recommended to many. However the results of trying to live entirely in the Mortal world are visible all round us; the worship of money, the obsession with Rules and Regulations, the inability to tell the difference between right and wrong, the inability to tell the difference between a victim and an aggressor, are all rapidly turning our beautiful country into a hell on earth, unless somebody does something to stop it. The trivial becomes important, and the important becomes trivial; which is what you would expect if the world of values is ignored.
So my answer is to turn Whitehead’s “Immortal World” into a view of Nature and the Universe created by God, that permeates every nook and cranny of ordinary life; and since the culture in our country is a Christian culture, it means that here it must be a Christian view of Nature and the Universe, if it is to do any good.