Maarten Hoenen in his fifth lecture ‘Voraussetzung und Vorurteil‘ has mentioned that Collingwood once compared monotheism with polytheism in respect to influencing science. According to Collingwood, the modern reductionism (Theory of Everything) is similar to monotheism where everything should be explained through God.
From Robin George Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics
God Exists as Metaphysical Proposition
Chapter XVIII “The Proposition ‘God Exists’”
p. 185. “In the last chapter but one I had occasion to comment on the way in which a ‘logical positivist’, wishing to recommend the doctrine that ‘metaphysical propositions’ not being verifiable by appeal to observed fact are pseudo-propositions and meaningless, quoted as examples propositions about God, such as the proposition ‘God exists’. To him the proposition ‘God exists’ would seem to mean that there is a being more or less like human beings in respect of his mental powers and dispositions, but having the mental powers of a human being greatly, perhaps infinitely, magnified”.
p. 186. “I have no fear of being contradicted when I say that the meaning I suppose to be attached by this author to the proposition ‘God exists’ is a meaning Christian theologians have never attached to it, and does not even remotely resemble the meaning which with some approach to unanimity they have expounded at considerable length.”
p. 187. “If the proposition that God exists is a metaphysical proposition it must be understood as carrying with it the metaphysical rubric; and as so understood what it asserts is that as a matter of historical fact a certain absolute presupposition, to be hereafter defined, is or has been made by natural science (the reader will bear in mind my limitation of the field) at a certain phase of its history. It further implies that owing to the presence of this presupposition that phase in the history of natural science has or had a unique character of its own, serving to the historical student as evidence that the presupposition is or was made. The question therefore arises: What difference does it make to the conduct of research in natural science whether scientists do or not do not presuppose the existence of God?”
Then Collingwood shows that the metaphysical proposition ‘God Exists’ has played the crucial role in the foundations of classical physics.
It is interesting to note that people do not like when one touches their absolute presuppositions.
p. 31 “If you are importunate enough to ask ‘But how do you know that everything that happens has a cause?’ he will probably blow up right in your face, because you have put your finger on one of his absolute presuppositions, and people are apt to be ticklish in their absolute presuppositions.”
p. 44 “This is what in the preceding chapter I called being ‘ticklish in one’s absolute presuppositions’; and the reader will see that this ticklishness is a sign of intellectual health combined with a low degree of analytical skill. A man who is ticklish in that way is a man who knows, ‘instinctively’ as they say, that absolute presuppositions do not need justification. In my own experience I have found that when natural scientists express hatred of ‘metaphysics’ they are usually expressing this dislike of having their absolute presuppositions touched.”