(May 31, 2016 at 5:27 pm)Constable Dorfl Wrote: This whole supernatural thing is bullshit anyway. Prior to 1859 no serious theologian would hace considered god to be outside nature, because they reckoned him the embodiment and regulator of it. ...
Didn't deism begin to develop in the early 1700's?
Quote:But with natural selection, Darwin kicked away that support, by showing a mechanism for one of the major areas in science that had no need for a god. The clever theologians now realised that even if Darwin was wrong, the sheer fact that a plausible and workable theory could be thought up which removed god altogether in biology was enough to destroy any pretension to god being a natural being. Thus the idea of removing him from nature, giving him an undetectable effect on reality and all that malarkey was born.
I think you are ignoring an important philosophical/theological development which took place in the 14th century and eventually led to the intellectual crises of the 16th century: The rise of nominalism/voluntarism and its implications for divine agency in the world. This set the stage for deism (which is the modern default understanding of god... how many arguments are centered around how god "started" it all?) to displace participatory being. Once that is set up, it's much easier to view reality without the "need" for god.