Approaches to Discerning God in Nature
Approaches to Discerning God in Nature
The doctrine of creation gives theological foundation to the notion of a natural knowledge of God. If God created the world, it is to be expected that God's creation should bear the mark of the divine handiwork. Just as the sculptor's distinctive style might be evident in the sculpture, or a painting might be signed with the artist's name, so the presence of God, it is argued, can be discerned within the creation. But in what part of creation? Where in creation is God to be found?
Three major answers may be discerned within the rich tradition of reflection upon this issue down the centuries: human reason, the ordering of the world, and the beauty of the world.
Human Reason
In his major treatise On the Trinity, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) argued that, if God is to be discerned within the creation, we ought to expect to find God at the height of that creation. The height of God's creation, Augustine argued (appealing to Genesis 1 and 2), is human nature. And, on the basis of the Neoplatonic presuppositions which he inherited from his cultural milieu, Augustine further argued that the height of human nature is the human capacity to reason. Therefore, he concluded, one should expect to find traces of God in human processes of reasoning. Augustine referred to these as “vestiges of the Trinity” (the Latin term vestigium means “a footprint”). On the basis of this argument, Augustine develops what have come to be known as “psychological analogies of the Trinity” (see pp. 312–13).
The Ordering of the World
We have already seen how Thomas Aquinas's arguments for the existence of God base themselves on the perception that there is ordering within nature, which requires to be explained. Equally, the fact that the human mind can discern and investigate this ordering of nature is of considerable significance. There seems to be something about human nature which prompts it to ask questions about the world. And there seems to be something about the world which allows answers to those questions to be given. The noted theoretical physicist and Christian apologist John Polkinghorne comments on this point as follows:
We are so familiar with the fact that we can understand the world that most of the time we take it for granted. It is what makes science possible. Yet it could have been otherwise. The universe might have been a disorderly chaos rather than an orderly cosmos. Or it might have had a rationality which was inaccessible to us. [...] There is a congruence between our minds and the universe, between the rationality experienced within and the rationality observed without.
There is a deep-seated congruence between the rationality present in our minds and the rationality – the orderedness – which we observe as present in the world. Thus, the abstract structures of pure mathematics – a free creation of the human mind – provide important clues to understanding the world. All of this, Polkinghorne argues, is a form of natural theology, preparing the way for the full knowledge of the Christian revelation.
The Beauty of the World
A number of theologians have developed natural theologies based on the sense of beauty that arises from contemplating the world. Perhaps the most powerful exploration of this theme is made by the celebrated American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–58):
The immense magnificence of the visible world in inconceivable vastness, the incomprehensible height of the heavens, etc., is but a type of the infinite magnificence, height and glory of God's world in the spiritual world: the most uncomprehensible expression of His power, wisdom, holiness and love in what is wrought and brought to pass in the world, and the exceeding greatness of the moral and natural good, the light, knowledge, holiness, and happiness which shall be communicated to it, and therefore to that magnificence of the world, height of heaven.
This sense of aesthetic ecstasy pervades Edwards's autobiographical writings, especially his Miscellanies. The perception of beauty that we experience “when we are delighted with flowery meadows and gentle breezes” is, for Edwards, an intimation of the holiness of God, which Scripture clarifies and confirms, placing it upon a reliable theological foundation.
Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88) is an example of a twentieth-century Catholic writer who stresses the theological importance of beauty. However, Balthasar distances himself from any idea of an “aesthetic theology.” His major work, The Glory of the Lord (1961–9), is best seen as a “theological aesthetics” rather than an “aesthetic theology.” The category of “beauty” is, according to Balthasar, to be reclaimed as a description of the revelation of God, rather than some human category which can be applied to God. Balthasar does not develop a philosophical argument from the beauty of nature to the existence of God. Rather, he argues that our experience of nature as beautiful is a consequence of faith, not its cause or condition. We do not approach God through beauty; rather, God approaches us through the beauty of Christ.
These, then, are some of the ways in which Christian theologians have attempted to describe the manner in which God can be known, however fleetingly and inadequately, through nature. Yet it is impossible to talk about “natural theology” without considering the importance of the increasingly influential dialogue now taking place between Christian theology and the natural sciences. So just what is the relationship between Christian theology and the natural sciences?