In our post-Newtonian world we've come to imagine our world mechanistically, as a large clockwork deterministically driven by chains of cause and effect. As Lloyd Gerson points out in his discussion of Platonism, this mechanistic view of the cosmos goes hand in hand with a materialistic view of the cosmos. Materialism tends to imply mechanism.
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.
"In our post-Newtonian world we've come to imagine our world mechanistically.... [But] 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 a child of the 1960s and 70s, I joined the wide and deep counter-movement to which I still belong at age 74. Many of our generation walked away from the hierarchical, mechanistic belief systems of our native religions. We are still here.
The so-called New Age, for all of its silliness and deluded self-gratification, was also a turning point in the rediscovery of enchantment.
Many, perhaps most of us, were overwhelmed by the cultural and political backlash that followed.
That backlash still dominates 21st century America with more financial and spiritual violence than ever. Yet it cannot overwhelm the truth.
One of the potential problems with moving away from a mechanistic or causal view of reality and God is that humans then are left even more in the dark. Cause and effect are understandable even if they can oversimplify reality and God. It doesn't really resonate as true to me that a mechanistic view of the world has caused disenchantment (although I am not sure what exactly you mean by this term) but rather a mechanistic view in which man is a "cog" and there is no real purpose or freedom for the individual to bear. When I have fixed something that has gone wrong with my car or improved something mechanically I feel a great sense of accomplishment. I can wrap my mind around a machine and how it works. Perhaps God created a reality wherein we don't actually understand how it works. That seems possible and in line with another step from ptolemy to copernicus to quantumania. And while I revel in the failure of the enlightenment projects desire for control I also feel the sadness in it's desire for understanding.