5. AMistake About Creation Results in aMistake About God.
5. A mistake about creation results in a mistake about God.5
It is difficult to come across any statement that more deeply celebrates the vocation of the scientist’s search for truth than this one from Thomas Aquinas: That “a mistake about creation results in a mistake about God.”
All the mistakes we make about nature steer us away from our understanding of Divinity. Consider the mistake that says homosexuality is “contrary to nature” (which it may be for heterosexuals but not for homosexuals, who constitute roughly 8 percent of any human population). Furthermore we have counted 464 other species that sport homosexual populations. Or the mistake that the difference between races is anything but a superficial difference. Or the mistake that we live on a flat earth, or on an earth around which the sun turns, or that stars are eternal; or that species have always been here, or that the earth is 6500 years old, or that God punishes us through disease, or that men are active and women are passive, or that men are born to rule, or that there has always been patriarchy, and so on. Yes, “a mistake about creation results in a mistake about God.”
Aquinas’s observation underscores the value and necessity of our searching for truth. “Only the truth will make you free,” and only the truth will result in fewer mistakes about God. Of which humans can cling to very many indeed.
Among other examples, one can point to the mistake that God is homophobic, or misogynist, or racist, or in love with empires and empire-building, or an old white man in the sky or restricted to the sky “out there” at all, or on the side of the powerful, or a punitive father, or a judge and ethereal peeping tom who cares exclusively about our sex lives, or a thruster into hell and eternal damnation and hellfire, or sadistic, or made in the image of man, or out to get us, or believer in original sin, or angry all the time, or a shame dispenser, or a bestower of guilt, or one who hates us. In fact, Aquinas insists: “God cannot hate anything.” (119)
Humans regularly project onto Divinity our own unexamined shadows, and this renders Divinity often very scary indeed.
But let us flip this saying around. If a mistake about creation results in a mistake about God, isn’t it true also that an insight about creation might result in an insight about God? For example, that absorbing the truths of evolution gives us an insight into the way Divinity operates, with patience and with lots of coming and going, living and dying, resurrecting and spreading seeds of new life. Species come and go, stars come and go and resurrect, galaxies and supernovas come and go and resurrect. Creativity and birthing are at the heart of the habits of the universe—indeed the cosmos exhibits habits that we call the paschal mystery of life, death, and resurrection. We find these played out with stars, galaxies, and supernovas. Or the truth that relationship lies at the heart of things. And that things are not just things but relationships. That emptiness is a big part of an atom and of a galaxy. That darkness and mystery such as Dark Energy and Dark Matter play significant roles in the universe. And do our psyches also reflect a psychic version of dark energy and dark matter, of shadow and potential for evil?
Other truths inform us that all things have a shadow, the human species very much included and that good habits are necessary to lessen the shadow’s influence on us. Truths that interdependence is everywhere and where there is interdependence compassion is possible because compassion is the working out of our interdependence. Truths that art and symbol and metaphor and myth and ritual are part of all human tribes because we all seek to praise and share and remember our deep experiences of both joy and sorrow that touch our hearts and call forth our common humanity and common dreams and needed healing. That the body is an amazing gift and deserves to be cared for and understood and wondered at (see chapter 11). That plants and animals, soil and forests, oceans, rivers and fishes all have their stories to tell as well as their beauty to share.
But the painful truths of nature also need revealing. For example, climate change is happening and the implications of this for the future of the human race and so many other species. Glaciers are melting, and seas are rising, droughts and firestorms are multiplying, and floods are increasing, storms and hurricanes are becoming more frequent and devastating (and, consequently, migrations will increase), the acidity of the oceans is increasing, and species are disappearing at an alarming rate, from insects to polar bears, from tigers to trees, from plants to fishes. Science warns us—as an ancient prophet—of the bad news as well as the good. All this offers insight about the divine and what it asks of us today.
Aquinas’s observation about truth and our understanding of God elevates the scientific vocation, since scientists are in pursuit of the truths behind and within nature. He almost baptizes scientists as priests or “midwives of grace” (my definition of the priestly archetype). After all, scientists explore the grace of truth-finding, truth discovery, truth-telling, and truth-sharing even when it may be an inconvenient truth or an uncomfortable one.9 We are made aware of our current climate emergency—and, hopefully, some solutions to it—by scientific observation and truth-telling.
Aquinas insists that our knowledge of God is relative to our knowledge about creation and nature—including human nature. Nor is this just armchair speculation from him. After all, he devoted his whole life to bringing science into religion in spite of fierce opposition. He devoted himself to synthesizing his religious beliefs with Aristotle, whose “discovery” and translations by Islamic scholars were the newest intellectual revolution of the times in Europe. But Aristotle arrived with three strikes against him:
1. He was a scientist—fundamentalists in Aquinas’s day (like those in our own) were not interested in science, since they felt all truth was contained within the Bible.
2. He was a “pagan.”
3. He came by way of Islam.
Aquinas also brought the new methodology of Islamic scholasticism into Christian places of learning. Scholasticism was a revolution in itself because it threw out the traditional monastic teaching by way of citing old, dead patriarchs and substituted it with asking questions and seeking objective answers. Scholasticism therefore was a prelude to modern science. Aquinas himself, then, was a prelude to modern science in many ways.
For all these reasons, Aquinas was very controversial in his day. Stories are told that the French king had to call out his troops at times to surround the convent where Aquinas lived because local priests had so encouraged their parishioners to attack him at home—all because he dared to bring a pagan scientist into the faith. Courage, then, was part of Aquinas’s love of truth and his commitment to science.
“Love of God presupposes knowledge of God,” declares Aquinas (181). Thus science is a door that leads us to love God more fully. Knowledge matters—and, therefore, science matters.
Sheer Joy is God’s
and this demands
companionship.