approach to natural theology has been useful in its time, it is no longer really serviceable.
The main point to be made in this regard is that knowledge of the true God revealed in Scripture and supremely in Jesus Christ cannot be read off nature. One can sense—as Paul insists in the text from Romans that I mentioned a moment ago—God’s reality in the power and order of nature, yes, but one cannot, by virtue of human reason, infer or deduce the Trinity from natural phenomena. In recent years, a new approach to natural theology has been emerging which takes its starting point from within the Trinitarian framework. Its aim is not to prove or even argue for the existence or nature of God, but to give evidence of the explanatory power of the specific Christian vision of reality based on revelation, with respect both to scientific discoveries and to everyday experience.
II
I want to look now at how the apostle Paul talked about nature when addressing a crowd of curious Greek intellectuals in Athens. The account is in Acts 17:22–34. Paul recognizes that the people are religious and worship a variety of objects. In his wanderings in the city he had seen an altar inscribed “To an unknown god,” and he declares to his listeners that he will proclaim to them who God is. He does not proceed by using rationalistic arguments, as one might have expected in a Greek context. He refers immediately to the Creator of “the world and everything in it,” and goes on to call this God Lord and to declare that God had given mortals life and breath and had set out times and spatial boundaries for nations so that humans would search for him and perhaps find him. The Greeks had no concept of such a personal Creator of all things—the Platonic notion of a demiurge was as close as they had come to such an idea—but a vague sort of pantheistic sense of a divine presence was clearly in the air, and it was to this religious intuition among his listeners that the apostle was appealing.
To support this approach he quotes two Greek poets, Epimenides and the Stoic, Aratus, to the effect that in God “we live and move and have our being . . . for we too are his offspring” (v. 28). He then makes his decisive move, which is to declare that this God, of whose existence the Greeks have an intuition but no knowledge, calls people to repent—that is, basically, to change their way of seeing reality, which will change the way they act—because he—this God—has fixed a day when he will judge mankind, and this judgment will be carried out by a man whom God has appointed and whom, as an assurance of this, he has raised from the dead.
What is interesting for our purposes here is that Paul, in making his case for the true identity of the deity whom the Greeks call “the unknown god,” puts his emphasis on the creation of the world by this God and on God’s act to raise from the dead, in historical space/time, a man whom he has designated to be judge of the world. Paul does not speak explicitly here of this man as God—of the incarnation—but he does stress the resurrection. He does not use the rationalist tools of argument commonly used by the Greek philosophers when trying to take account of the religious impulse or to transcend it.
The God whom the Greeks have an intuition of, but who is very different from their ideas about him, is the Creator of nature and an actor in history. He is not to be identified with nature, but, as its Author, he is intimately associated with it. He is a personal deity who has dominion over the beginning and end of all things, over the destiny of mankind, over life and death. To speak truly of God, to identify the true God, one must speak of concrete nature, of the material world: God is the one who creates and orders nature and who acts within it to judge and redeem. His self-revelation happens in and through the material creation. Whether one accepts this argument or not—some Greeks did, some did not—it is evident that Paul’s vision provides a kind of coherence to the material world and to man’s destiny within it that neither the Greeks’ religiosity nor their philosophizing could provide. It is my contention that Paul’s vision, in its full-fledged Trinitarian shape, provides us too, living in the context of modern science, with a way of seeing all aspects of reality that gives them coherence and intelligibility.
III
Let me now approach this Trinitarian question from an anthropological angle. A philosophical stance adopted by the majority of the scientific community is what is called critical realism. It holds, in agreement with common sense, that there is an objective, external world out there separate from us, the observers, but also that we, as knowers, are subjectively involved in that world by virtue of our interpretation and appropriation of it; at the level of quantum phenomena, moreover, it is the case, the physicists tell us, that we actually influence that world out there by our experimental observation of it. Cognitive neuroscience of perception is showing that we exist in relation to the natural world, that our mental representations of it shape the way we see and understand it, and vice versa—in a word, that we are participants in nature, interactive with it; we do not create reality as such, but we do act creatively upon it—we are certainly not simply passive recipients of sensory data.
For our purposes, what I want to do here is to suggest the theological ground in Scripture for this relationality of mankind to nature, a relationality that philosophers at least since Kant have recognized and that neuroscience is confirming in our day. We are not so-called objective observers. Yes, our self-consciousness—unique in nature—gives us distance from the material world, but it does not separate us intrinsically from that world, in the manner of Cartesian dualism. The strict subject-object schema is transcended by the reality that we are integrated constitutionally into this material world that is God’s handiwork. By referring to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, we can gain the theological perspective that undergirds this reality.
Genesis 1 reveals that God is the Creator of all reality, the one who establishes order out of chaos, who brings light, energy, and all other creatures into being, where before was only darkness and void. Then verses 26–28 tell us that God has created mankind—man and woman—in his image, and that, as God’s representatives on earth, we are to multiply and have dominion over the world, that is, to rule it wisely and tend it as we might a garden, not by exploiting it ruthlessly for profit but by cultivating it joyfully in the interest of sociability, culture, and human welfare.
Genesis 2 goes on to develop the vocational dimension of humankind by speaking of Adam’s naming of the other creatures. Naming, which requires both authority and rationality, is accomplished through our linguistic gift and our tool-making capacity, which give rise to technology, science, and the various arts—in a word, to culture. By these means, we are enabled to carry out our vocation of exercising dominion.
From this double revelation of our being created in the image of God and of our having a cultural vocation, we may understand that men and women are ontologically—that is, in their very being—in relation to God and also to the created world. This insight provides a basic perspective on the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation in its anthropological dimension, that is, as it relates to mankind. We are indefeasibly bound to both God and nature, and we are responsible to both. The insight illuminates the discoveries I just mentioned in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and we shall see shortly its explanatory power in regard to many human capacities and activities.
A proper anthropology that fits within a Trinitarian framework for natural theology requires us to go on and look at Genesis 3, which describes the seduction and corruption of mankind by Satan’s wily appeal to human pride. This rebellion against the Creator leads not to a dissolution of our bond with God but to its inversion: it becomes a negative bond, rooted in fear instead of love, giving rise to unbelief, idolatry, competition with God, and finally atheism, expressed consummately in mankind’s defiant ambition to delete God altogether by means of science/technology—I use a computer term here deliberately—and to make a new creation—our own—replacing the kingdom of God with the kingdom of man, as the satanic snake in Eden intimated we could do. Our bond with God being distorted, our bond with our fellow humans and with the rest of nature must necessarily be distorted too. Our God-given tool-making power is perverted to the end of self-aggrandizement and so becomes an ambivalent force as the human race uses it creatively on the one hand to make culture, thus reflecting God’s creative
