As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, it was the rise of this "nature is a machine" view that contributed to modern, Western disenchantment. Facts, in and of themselves, don't produce disenchantment. In fact, many of the discoveries of science can fill us with wonder and awe. So the empirical findings of science aren't the problem. The problem, since Isaac Newton, is with a particular way of imagining the world, the rise of a mechanistic imagination.
This mechanistic imagination also seeps into our theological thinking. As I recently argued in my series on petitionary prayer, our questions about if prayer "works" are being framed in a very Newtonian way. I described this as the "Magic Domino Theory" of prayer, where we imagine the world as a chain of cause and effect, like a line of dominos, and wonder if God will "insert" a cause/domino in the chain. This same mechanistic imagination, as I also described in my series on hard and soft magical systems, also bedevils our conversations about theodicy and providence.
[Interlude. Of course, quantum mechanics overthrew Newtonian mechanics. Much to the chagrin of Albert Einstein who famously said, "God does not play dice with the universe." The point being, while quantum mechanics is the reigning scientific consensus, we, like Einstein, still tend to think about the cosmos as functioning in a Newtonian, cause/effect manner. That said, I've lately been wondering about how the many-worlds, multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics would relate to petitionary prayer, miracles and providence. That is to say, in a Newtonian world a miracle would have to be an interruption of or insertion into a single, serial chain of cause/effect. God would be "violating" the mechanistic laws of Newtonian mechanics. Such a violation would, conceivably, be "visible" as a "gap" or "suspension" of the "laws" of nature. But in a quantum multiverse God could simply select among an infinite set of possible worlds and in doing so would not violate any of the laws of physics and would be empirically undetectable to science. Miracles in the multiverse would be, from a scientific perspective, "invisible.")
In short, I'm with Sergius Bulgakov in believing that imagining God's relation to the world as causal is one of the worst habits of the Western Christian imagination. Following Bulgakov, God is not the cause of the world. Rather, God is the Creator of the world. And by that we mean a relation of continuous ontological dependence, and not some distant Clockmaker. Phrased differently. God is His own relation to the world. God is not a magic domino in the machine you imagine the world to be.
Retuning back to Lloyd Gerson's description of Platonism. Beyond antimaterialism, Platonism espouses antimechanism. As Gerson writes, "Antimechanism is the view that the only sort of explanations available in principle to a materialist are inadequate for explaining the natural order." More: "One way to understand antimechanism is as the denial of one version of what we have come to call 'the causal closure principle,' that is, the principle that physical or material causes are necessary and sufficient for all events in the physical world."
As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, antimechanism characterizes the sacramental ontology of the Christian imagination. The natural world rests upon a spiritual ground. Creation is suffused with the presence and glory of God. As Paul preached in Athens, in God we live, move, and have our being. All nature has a sacramental aspect, materiality pointing toward spiritual reality.
