Nature and Nature's God

Long story short: I've been overwhelmed with work the last several weeks and so apologize yet again for the appalling lack of beardful bloggage. All this apologizing is doing wonders for my humilty, though. I'm getting humbler and humbler, and am now probably more humble than most people I know.

I offer, then, this mediatation on our experience of God in nature, and how I think that may be different from natural science. This is lifted from an ongoing thread at the Christian Pipe Smokers forum;

 

Nature moves one toward belief in God and is reasonably used to support belief in God, but seen narrowly as a strictly scientific question, it lacks the kind of certainty that science seeks. The finite things of the world can not adequately prove the existence of an infinite God, as if you could write it down in an equation... "X+YxZ = God"

Philosophically, one can work out that an unmoved mover must exist, but that is more like pure reason, not a matter of testable scientific hypotheses, because there is no scientific proof even that reason means anything. Science is again, too small to address such questions. Science is contingent on reason and on the relaibility of our sense experiences.

Of course, the tragedy of the modern age is that science has been divorced from the kind of philosophical/metaphysical grounding that would make it really fruitful for the happiness and betterment of mankind. We "progress" scientifically, but are no better for it, and no happier.
I think that when St. Paul said "...since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." it's pretty unlikely he was thinking about science . The presence and glory of God are manifest in nature, even for those (perhaps especially for those) with little or no scientific understanding of what they are seeing.

I look at the universe and see it less as a mechanism and much more as a work of art. Science can tell us nothing about the meaning of the Pieta , or of Beethoven's Ode to Joy , or whether The Lord of the Rings movies do justice to the books. These are human experiences that are simply opaque to science.

I think the experience of the presence of God in nature is of this kind of character, and is beyond the (comparatively) narrow, dull certainties of a laboratory or supercomputer.

Discoveries of natural science can certainly multiply these opportunities to see God in nature (look at the photos from the Hubble telescope, or from electron microscopes), but I don't believe a scientist has any advantage in that regard over an aborigine watching the sun set.

Comments

[Michael Baruzzini]

David B. Hart has an article at 'First Things' today which gets at your point, I think:

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/10/hellipof-hills-brooks-standing-lakes-and-groveshellip

It is one thing to precisely describe nature, as science aspires to do. There is a certain beauty in that, for sure. Indeed, there is even a very real beauty in pure mathematical equations. But then there is also the reality of experiencing nature at the human scale. It's laws and workings are a mystery, and point to something more.

I've always found it intriguing that atheists both rely on and deny this deep beauty of the natural world. Read Sagan, for example. They continually invoke the wonder and beauty of the material world as inspiration, and then go on to intellectually deny the very existence of such non-material things. At least their ability to be moved is a source of hope for them, I hold. It is the chink in their armor through which God may finally get through.