God and Nature

A Theologian and a Scientist Conversing on the Divine Promise of Possibility

Curtis L. Thompson, Joyce M. Cuff

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781441131706
• eBook ISBN: 9781441189141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

The current religion and science dialogue begs for greater clarity on the relation of God to nature. In God and Nature two scholars who embrace contemporary insights from science and religion explore the complexities of this debate. As the narrative unfolds, classical and contemporary thinkers are engaged as discussion partners in articulating a philosophical theology of nature. Conceptual pairs, in which two concepts play off of each other, provide the structure for each of the seven chapters, with usually the first concept being more scientific in character and the second more religious in tone. These pairs of concepts-from chronology and creation to creativity and creator-help to thematize and structure the progressing narrative. Within each chapter the two concepts are first investigated independently, then interdependently, and finally in relation to the divine. At the story's completion nature has emerged as alive with possibility that is as alluring as the actuality it evokes. Envisioned is a divine Creator who works in and through the possibility of creation to lure it into fuller manifestations via creative transformation.

1

Chronology and creation

Wonder and awe are natural attractors of the imagination of human beings. Both science and religion have their roots in this primal experience of the mystery of the creation’s possibility. The pursuit of possibility carried out by our ancestors long ago continues right up to the present, as we too are captivated by the same wonder and awe. In our best moments, when our sensibilities are keenest, we feel the vibrant life of nature seeking new ways and forms to break away from its past. As we probe into nature’s possibility for advancing creatively we experience an expansion of human understanding. However, as we push back the horizon and come to know more and more, we also come to learn more about the unknown. Our education into possibility expands our appreciation for what is, what has been, and what might be. Stirred by wonder and awe, we human beings are not content with less than a comprehensive perspective. We seek an inclusive chronology and an affirmation of the whole cosmos as the creation of an ultimate reality.

Comprehensive chronology

Basic assumptions of affirming chronology

Nature might not be transparent, but it is translucent. Nature presents itself to us and we can read it like an open book. Of course, reading is a process that needs to be learned, and reading the book of nature calls for discipline. Over a century ago American naturalist and essayist John Burroughs (1837–1921), noted: “In studying Nature, the important thing is not so much what we see as how we interpret what we see.”¹ In this chapter “what we see” correlates rather nicely with the notion of chronology and “how we interpret what we see” with that of creation. Reading the book of nature appropriately, according to Burroughs, calls for seeing with one’s reason as well as with one’s perception: “The power to see straight is the rarest of gifts; to see no more and no less than is actually before you; to be able to detach yourself and see the thing as it actually is, uncolored or unmodified by your own sentiments or prepossessions.”² In our study of nature we will stress the danger of dismissing our sentiments altogether because they too give us very important information about nature and must be seen as part of nature itself. Through perception and reason we have access to reading the book of nature.

Teilhard de Chardin contended too that in the verb “to see” lies the whole of life. His only aim in writing The Phenomenon of Man was “to try to see,” so that he could develop a whole view of the unfolding human that was true to our extended experience as human beings.³ True seeing of nature, of course, is not an easy accomplishment. Emerson saw this clearly:

Few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says,— he is my creature, and . . . he shall be glad with me.⁴

The wonder within us over the world before us is like a wild delight running through us, and we attribute this wild delight to nature being alive. The two of us are respectively well into the era of womanhood and manhood, but we have managed to retain the spirit of infancy when it comes to relating to nature.

The basic point, then, is that we are assuming that the universe and its history are knowable and intelligible. Significant secrets of nature’s mystery can be unlocked. This is a key presupposition of all science. Scientific understanding depends upon the fact that the universe is lawful and exhibits regularities, so that its unfolding creative events can be interpreted and explained in terms of the observed relationships and patterns in nature. Many in the scientific community adhere to a reductionistic and atomistic approach to understanding reality. Burroughs himself, for instance, insists that, if we are asking about the exact truth of a given reality in nature, “then there is but one interpretation of nature, and that is the scientific.”⁵ Lest we peg Burroughs as operating with a narrow vision, we recall that he gave us that memorable quote: “The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is ‘look under foot.’ You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.”⁶ So while he urges us to limit our interpretation of nature, so that we are sure not to acknowledge more than is actually before us, he would also agree with us in our concern that we not be so rigorous on the trimming of our focus that we end up experiencing less than is before us. In our probing we are especially sympathetic with the camp of inquiry that is holistic, ever on the search for processes of self-organization that require acknowledging reciprocal relationships, organic wholes, complex networks, and emergent orders. Methodological reductionism, too, we acknowledge as having made wonderful contributions to expanding our knowledge of the universe. But holism, we believe, needs to be given its place as well. The process of unfolding possibility advances by virtue of the drive toward balance exhibited by nonequilibrium systems. Although these events and the realities contributing to them are contingent, a directionality (which is not to say an all-out, comprehensive purpose) can be discerned in the novel expressions of the expanding universe. We are assuming that our claims of chronology are not unrelated to our claims concerning creation. In this sense, the chronology we articulate is more of an enriched version than some would be willing to entertain or digest.

Chronos and kairos

It is worth noting that we as humans have the capacity to move beyond the space and time in which we are situated to generate a cosmic chronology. As creatures who remember the past and anticipate the future, we are able to construct a chronology that reaches back to the very origins of time and space and that extends ahead into a yet undefined future. Our present is richly endowed, then, not only with the present of the present, but also with the past of the present and the future of the present. Chronology builds on our capability for self-transcendence. Embedded within temporality, we humans as finite creatures actualize our humanness in the process of becoming. We have a need to understand our lives. We cannot meet that need without grasping our status in relation to the whole and within the grand cosmic sweep of time. The Greeks helpfully distinguished two notions of time. They used the word “chronos” for quantitative time, that is, the sequencing of events in the inexorable march of time. They used the word “kairos” for qualitative time, that is, to designate those moments that are packed with meaning, pregnant with possibility. No human chronology is utterly void of kairos considerations. We will be making an effort to pay special attention to kairotic moments and events. One such event has been named a “frozen accident.” This is a contingent event resulting in a transformation that marks a new chapter in the chronology. Moments of kairos such as these must be included in a comprehensive chronology. As chronology becomes ever more comprehensive, it takes on characteristics of creation.

Pace, periods, and naming

In identifying the sequence and timing of significant events within a comprehensive chronology, one is confronted with evidence of irregular patterns of unfolding realities. Bursts of creative expression appear to be followed by spans of greater stability and uniformity. Images of the Big Bang and the Cambrian Explosion—the roughly 50-million-year period during which the major groups of animals came into being—can be contrasted with the putatively stable 2.5-billion-year span of exclusively prokaryotic (or most primitive) life on planet earth. Our proclivity for organizing and ordering our world leads us to structure the whole by selecting general features of particular time spans that are frequently separated by kairotic transformations. A comprehensive chronology is dependent upon this periodizing process by which the understanding of the whole is given depth and texture through the combination of focused exploration of the particular periods and the summative conclusions from critical comparison. Here naming is an important part of the process of making sense of life. Language, with all its inherent power and limitations, is used to create the chronology of the universe and to communicate its story. In this sense a comprehensive chronology naturally leads to a creation story.

The age of the universe

A brief word is in order on the age of the universe. Scientists are not in agreement on this, so revisions are offered regularly. Most suggestions over the recent years have ranged from 10 to 15 billion years, with the strongest case being made for between 13 and 14 billion. We mention this to acknowledge that this is a matter on which full closure has not been reached. The debate will continue. Part of the difficulty revolves around the fact that various approaches can be used to determine the universe’s age. One approach is to estimate the age using a cosmological model based on the Hubble constant and the densities of matter and dark energy. According to this model-based estimation the universe’s age is 13.7 billion years. Actual age measurements, rather than estimations, can take place employing other approaches. Radioactive decay can determine how old a given mixture of atoms is and then an estimate can be made of the age of the chemical elements involved. This leads to definite ages of chemical elements since they have solidified into rocks, with the oldest of Earth’s rocks being 3.8 billion years and the oldest meteorites being 4.56 billion years old, which latter number indicates the age of the solar system. Two other approaches involve concentrating on what is called “oldest star clusters” and estimating their age by way of measuring their luminosity or focusing on “the oldest White Dwarfs” (the oldest, coldest, and faintest stars) and estimating the time they have been cooling. For our purposes, we will be simply assuming that the universe is about 14 billion years old.

Comprehending creation

To comprehend is to take in and grasp mentally and understand relatively fully. The creation extends back 14 billion years and includes all that has come into being through the process of becoming under the creative activity of God. One does well to gain a general sense of the scope and grandeur of that glorious commonwealth of creativity’s unfolding. Mystery runs deep enough through this commonwealth that an exhaustive comprehension of it on our part would be ridiculous and presumptuous to expect. Creation’s mystery is real and needs to be celebrated and respected. Equally real, though, is nature’s call for us to come and see what makes her tick. Our appreciation of nature’s mystery ought not lead to silencing her call for us to engage in the serious effort to comprehend creation. Nature is alive because of her creative aspect and we give expression to her liveliness by investing ourselves in comprehending that grand created aspect of nature that we call creation.

Basic assumptions of affirming creation

We are assuming that to affirm the creation is to constitute a world. The philosopher Martin Heidegger has formulated helpful thoughts on what is meant by a world.⁷ A world is a universe of meaning that is grounded in language and that provides the plausibility structure for action. This universe of meaning is experienced as a realm of possibilities. World and creation go hand-in-hand because to regard the universe as created is to see it in relation to its ultimate source. We human beings live in an environment, but we live out of a world. World orients both theoretically and practically. On the one hand, one’s world gives intellectual or ontological orientation by grasping the way things are, by identifying possibility that has been actualized. On the other hand, one’s world gives ethical or existential orientation by intuiting the way things might be, by imagining possibility that might be actualized. Creative individual and communal human projects of thought and praxis transpire in the creation, which is world recognized as gift.

Affirming creation involves the assumption that the creation is knowable and intelligible because reality is ordered in such a way that the basic subject-object divide can be transcended. There is a fundamental coherence or harmony between our personal world of meaning and the public world of commerce in which we operate. This orderliness of the actual creation makes possible our projects. Another basic assumption concerns the distinction between the sacred and the profane. Scholar of religion Mircea Eliade has shed light on this sacred/profane distinction.⁸ Part and parcel of acknowledging a world as meaningful, knowable, orderly, and orienting is acknowledging a cosmos whose ultimate source is the sacred. Manifestation of the sacred in human experience and cultures orders time and space. Special, revelatory events and places serve as vehicles for experiencing the power of the divine. Even the postmodern cynic resonates at one level or another to the truth of this primal vision of the religious experience of humankind. We are assuming, then, that to affirm the creation is to embrace the universe as good, to endorse the reality of freedom as a gift from the sacred, and to acknowledge all interdependent created realities as dependent finally upon the Creator. We again assume in this context that our claims of creation are not unrelated to our claims of chronology. In this sense, the creation we articulate is more tethered to the earthy judgments of science than some would be willing to accept.

Diversity and unity

The scientist readily acknowledges the grand diversity of reality and its importance in the generation and maintenance of the creation. However, engaging the scientist’s attention with greater intensity is the underlying unity of that reality. Sought, therefore, are general principles that render intelligible the countless differences found in nature. In comprehending creation the theologian recognizes the overarching unity of creation and its importance in constituting and sharing a world. However, these days the theologian feels impelled to emphasize the diversity theme. This is because at the socio-cultural level fundamentalist religious forces and global economic forces are at work leveling life by nurturing uniformity and sameness and rejecting difference and individuality. The theologian desires to give diversity its due because of a deep sense that creation’s blessings include contributions to the whole made by individual created realities. Both scientists and theologians have seen the wisdom in understanding individuation and participation as a mutually reinforcing polarity. The more of an individual one is, the more one is able to contribute as a participant in community, and the more fully one participates in community, the more one develops as an individual. The differences of creation need not preclude a deep unity, just as uniting with the other need not rule out maintaining a robust diversity.

Expanding chronology of the expanding creation

Our understanding of the history of the universe has expanded by virtue of the lenses that have been used to view that history. The lens of literalistic biblical history describes a universe that is 6,000 years old. The lens of biological history situates the advent of life at about 2.5 billion years. The lens of geological history resets our time-clock to 4.5 billion years and inserts six major eras. The lens of astrophysical history sets our universal clock at about 14 billion years. While the scope of the chronology has been expanded, so too has the depth of understanding of the created world. Worldviews developed using one set of lenses are often challenged by worldviews developed later. New Earth theology is challenged by Old Earth geology. The geocentric view is challenged by the heliocentric view. The Great Chain of Being is challenged by Darwinian evolution. Newtonian mechanism is challenged by Einsteinian relativism. And in the current Big Bang discussion, the model of an oscillating universe is challenged by that of an expanding universe. Knowledge, not unlike the creation itself, proceeds saltationally, or by jumping from point to point rather than by a steady flow. Assaults on the dominant worldview escalate into serious challenges and finally culminate in the emergence of a successor out of a field of alternatives.

Creation chronicling itself

The universe story unfolds at three levels. There is first the cosmogenesis itself, the birth of the cosmos or sequence of events that has occurred over a period of roughly 14 billion years. The acts of cosmogenesis, secondly, have left their legacy for the future. These events have placed their imprints on the universe, imprints that contain information about the events themselves as well as their timing—the microwave radiation from the Big Bang (the clock of physics), the geological strata of planet earth (the clock of geology), the sequence of bases in DNA (the clock of biology or evolution). Third, the creative cosmogenesis unfolds in such a way that human consciousness develops, which is capable of reflecting on the creation. The human, driven to make sense of the world, notices and interprets the imprints of time and chronicles the story of the universe. We make bold, then, to offer our account of the story that has been reshaped over the millennia into what is now a sophisticated evolutionary epic of the creative dance of the font of possibility flowing continuously into the array of variegated actualities we call the universe.

Creative transformation 1—from the singularity to multiplicity: the birth of energy, space, and time

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1:1

At the outset the universe explodes into being as energy emerges along with space and time itself. Possibilities of non-being are creatively transformed into actuality. This grand explosion is called the Big Bang. Scientists refer to this very beginning of things as “the point of singularity.” The closest we can currently get scient...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Commencements
• 1 Chronology and creation
• 2 Contingency and consilience
• 3 Chaos and connectivity
• 4 Complexity and coinherence
• 5 Cooperation and compassion
• 6 Consciousness and co-creation
• 7 Creativity and Creator
• Conclusions
• Glossary
• Selected bibliography for further reading
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Copyright