The third of 4 posts for chapter 6 of Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love

The Interplay of law and chance:

How do we explain random occurrences? What Darwin called ‘variations’ are called genetic mutations today – examples of chance events in the succession of generations.

Peacocke writes, “It is in the interplay of chance and law which is in fact creative within time, for it is the combination of the two which allows new forms to emerge and evolve.” (Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age)

• Law refers to the orderly suite of natural forces that govern how the universe works. These principles (arrived at by observing the regularities in the world) hold true in all ordinary circumstances. Certain constants, processes, relationships emerged as the universe developed over time. These ‘laws of nature’ are descriptive rather than prescriptive – descriptions read from regularities in the universe. Einstein: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility”.

• Chance refers to the crossing of two independent causal chains that intersect for no known reason that can be figured out in advance. The interruption may be destructive or it may open the possibility that something new might emerge from within these systems. Either way, things do not go on as before.

• Together: Changes in genetic material bring about changes in the structures of organisms, which in turn make possible new behaviors and relationships. These mutations are inherently unpredictable at the molecular level at which they occur, and are random with respect to the needs of the organism (some are beneficial, many are harmful). Uncertainly also awaits in the particular environmental niche where the mutated organism has to interact. Far from creating a confused jumble, however, these random events operate within a milieu which constrains and delimits their possible outcomes. Without such constraints small changes would dissipate in chaos. With such selection in place, random changes are accommodated in ways that allow regular trends to take root and develop.

• If all were law, the natural world would ossify.

• If all were chance, nature would dissolve in chaos.

• But chance operating within a law-like framework introduces novelty within a pattern that contains and directs it. Rather than being an enemy of law, chance is the very means by which nature becomes continuously creative.

Chance challenges us precisely because it is so unpredictable:

There are important philosophers and scientists who are so struck by this uncertainty that they have elevated the play of chance to a metaphysical principle. Consequently, any idea that the universe has an overall direction or purpose must be false, along with the belief that there is a Creator God engaged with the process. (Monod, Dennet, Dawkins…To learn more about these authors and their theories, go to Johnson’s Select Bibliography, which begins in Beasts on p. 306)

In response, other thinkers call attention to the fact that chance is not the only dynamism at work in evolution. Peacocke opens a way ahead with a striking idea: why not see chance as a tool that allows matter to explore the full range of its possibilities? Chance mutations are the way the stuff of the universe gets investigated, its potential unpacked, so that it moves in the direction of living richness and complexity.

• To digress to the human species for a moment, it is a given among philosophers of science that the emergence of human nature is based on the existence of a natural infrastructure of this kind.

• There is a deep compatibility between the creative (though not conscious) ways that physical, chemical, and biological systems operate through the interplay of law and chance on the one hand, and the human experience of consciousness and freedom on the other.

• At the very least, the freedom of natural systems to explore and discover themselves within a context of law-like regularity is one of the natural conditions for the possibility of the emergence of free and conscious human beings as part of the evolving universe.

What sense can theology make of this dynamic?

Propensities given to creation by the Creator in the beginning are gradually actualized by the operation of chance working within law-like regularities over deep time.

• If law stands for the constants of the world, for its steady physical properties and regular processes, then this regularity can be regarded as a feature with which God has endowed the world.

• If chance stands for the unpredictable interruption of this regularity by other natural forces, then this capacity for surprise can also be taken as a God-given feature of the world.

• The interaction of chance and law becomes a creative means, over time, for testing out, tweaking, and finally evolving every new structure and organism of which the physical cosmos is capable. (It is, as Peacocke astutely observes, what one might expect if God created the world to be a participant in developing its own richness.)

• Theology has traditionally allied God with lawful regularity. “This is still a fine idea,” Johnson writes, “the deep regularities of the world in their own finite way reflect the faithfulness of the living God, reliable and solid as a rock. It has been more difficult for chance to find a home in the theological imagination….”

• But the occurrence of chance reflects God’s infinite creativity. Johnson sees God’s infinite creativity as the endless source of fresh possibilities, and concludes, “Divine creativity is much more closely allied to the outbreak of novelty than our older order-oriented theology every imagined. In the emergent evolutionary universe, we should not be surprised to find the Creator Spirit hovering very close to turbulence. (Beasts, p. 173)

Unscripted adventure:

The interplay of law and chance over deep time underscores the fact that the history of evolution is amazingly unscripted.   A favored imaginative game among scholars is to rewind the tape of life’s evolution back to the beginning, and let it roll again. Would the community of life look as it does now?  No.  Looking back, an intelligible story of life’s emergence can be constructed, which is what Darwin did. But looking forward, there is no telling what might happen.   A better analogy might be a wild ride through time whose outcome defies prediction. The laws of physics and chemistry are reliable, but “nothing in them demands that Earth be created, let alone with elephants”. (Rolston, Three Big Bangs)

The second of 4 posts for chapter 6 of Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love

The wisdom of philosophy

In their dialogue with science, almost all contemporary theologians accept the theory of evolution. But they differ over how to view the relationship between God and the created beings of the evolutionary world, asking,

How can we affirm our faith in God without compromising the integrity of what science has discovered?

The following theories indicate ways to think about ‘God-and-created-world’ that will set the stage for discussing one more option (the classical notion of primary and secondary causality, related to the dynamic of participation in being.)

• Single action theory sees God as the agent whose intention is carried out in the overall development of the cosmos, rather than in its particulars. (Kaufman, Ogden, Wiles….To learn more about these authors and their theories, go to Johnson’s Select Bibliography, which begins in Beasts on p. 306)

• The top-down causality theory sees God acting by feeding a flow of information into the system of the world-as-a-whole, influencing its operation the way a patterned whole influences its parts. This position finds an affinity with the gospel of John’s concept of the logos, the divine Word. (Peacocke)

• Causal joint theory sees God inserting divine influence at significant hinge points in open systems, to actualize one of the many possibilities present. (Murphy, Russell, Ellis, Polkinghorne)

• The organic model sees the world as the body of God, envisioning the Spirit of God acting universally and particularly in the world, the way our personal selves act in and through our own bodies. (McFague, Jantzen)

• The kenotic position sees God voluntarily self-limiting divine power in order to participate vulnerably in the life of the world, making room for its freedom. (Hicks, Ward, Fiddes, Haught)

• Process thought sees God as a creative participant in the cosmic community who acts in all events by influence or persuasion. God lures the world in a desired direction toward new possibilities of a richer life together. (Hartshorne, Cobb, Barbour, Griffin)

While markedly different from each other, these various positions have much in common:

All share a profound respect for the freedom of the natural world to evolve consistently with its internal laws, as discovered by contemporary science.

All reject a ‘God of the gaps’ brought in to explain what science has not yet figured out.

All propose models in which the creating God (as known in in the Christian tradition) might be understood to act in the natural world (as known by evolutionary science).

In different ways all seek to make intelligible the idea that the creating God – as ground, sustaining power, and goal of the evolving world – acts by empowering the process from within.

Neo-Thomism

The old theology of primary-secondary causality (as argued by Aquinas and often termed neo-Thomism today) emerged from a static worldview rather than an evolutionary worldview.  It might seem that this would eliminate it from consideration by contemporary theologians – but actually the basic principle remains the same:

The creative activity of God is accomplished in and through the free working of secondary causes.

Johnson acknowledges that language limitations frustrate what she is trying to say:

‘Primary’ and ‘secondary’ causes are not two different types of causes, but operate on  completely different levels – one is the wellspring of Being itself, and the other participates in the power to act (as things that are burning participate in the power of fire).

When Aquinas seeks to explain how God’s creative purpose is achieved over the course of time, he sees no threat to God in allowing creatures the fullest measure of freedom according to their own nature. It is characteristic of God’s all-giving love to raise up creatures who participate in divine being, to such a degree that they are also creative and sustaining in their own right.

In terms of evolution, this does not mean that God’s divine action supplies something that is missing from a creaturely act (or secretly replaces it so that creatures are only a sham cause). Nor does it mean that divine and finite agents are fully complementary, each contributing distinct elements to the one outcome. It means that the living God acts by divine power in and through the acts of finite agents. (Here the wonderful Latin word concursus – meaning flowing or running together -expresses this idea of divine power working in and through finite agents.)

Aquinas says that the processes of the world seem to accomplish their purpose on their own – and without any interference from God. However, this very self-direction already has an imprint from God; it is genuinely part of their own nature, and at the same time it also expresses God’s purpose. Since all good is a participation in divine goodness, the universe as a whole tends toward the ultimate good, which is God.

Johnson tries to draw all these threads together to give us a view of evolution’s autonomous workings while still affirming the Creator Spirit’s innermost presence and action. As the immanent ground of all, God’s intention comes to fruition by means of purposes acted out in grounded creatures.And why?

“The great-hearted God imparts to creatures the dignity of causing.”
(Beasts, p. 166)

Johnson writes that it is so easy to forget this – slipping God into the web of interactions as though the divine were simply a bigger and better secondary cause. But the philosophical distinction between ultimate and proximate causality helps us hold firm to the mystery of the greatness of God and the integrity of creatures.

For Johnson, this is a technical way of interpreting how mature Love acts.

Critics of neo-Thomism

In the dialogue between contemporary positions on divine action, neo-Thomism is criticized on several fronts:

Barbour notes that neo-Thomism has difficulty in moving away from divine determinism to allow for genuinely random acts to occur. (However, Johnson adds, if chance be given the status of a secondary cause, this problem disappears – see Johnson’s assessment, below.)

Peacocke notes that neo-Thomism sometimes uses the artisan/instrument analogy to explain how God, (the primary cause) works through secondary causes in the world. The problem is that this completely overlooks the independent operation of natural causes in the world. The Creator does not relate to the world the way a carpenter uses her hammer; rather, the Spirit of God sets the world up in the fullness of its own powers, which are grounded in the gift of being created.

Polkinghorne (and other critics) note that neo-Thomism merely asserts that God acts through natural causes without giving any idea of the mechanism by which God’s purposes are accomplished. The primary-secondary causality actually offers nothing to illuminate how God acts in the world. Polkinghorne argues that thanks to the indeterminism of reality at many levels, God’s direct intervention in any instance does not transgress the laws of nature.  Natural systems themselves are ‘gappy’ and open enough to receive outside influence without being violated.

(This position, it seems to Johnson, commits a double fallacy. One the one hand, inserting hidden divine action into an open system compromises the natural order. In principle this is no different from the classical idea of divine intervention in a rigidly law-controlled world, except that the intervention is now hidden. On the other hand, the position errs by making God into a bigger and better secondary cause. To the contrary, as Schillebeeckx says, “Belief in God the creator is never an explanation, nor is it meant to be.” Belief in the Creator God delineates the ultimate meaning of the universe, not an explanation of how things work.)

Johnson’s own assessment of neo-Thomism

Johnson holds that neo-Thomism withstands criticism when linked to two overarching concepts: the Creator God as the absolute Living One, pure wellspring of being; and the associated concept of creaturely participation.  Scholars who work with the neo-Thomist position consistently register how it lets the world be the world and evolve in its own way. For instance,

Herbert McCabe: “Aquinas, of course, had no notion of the evolution of species” – but seeing this process as a typical manifestation of the wisdom of the Creator – “he would I am sure have been delighted by the sheer simplicity and beauty of the idea.” (McCabe, On Aquinas)

Denis Edwards: “Aquinas long ago clarified that God’s way of acting in the world is not opposed to the whole network of cause and effect in nature. God’s work is achieved in and through creaturely cause and effect. It is not in competition with it. Aquinas never knew Darwin’s theory of evolution, but he would have had no difficulty in understanding it as the way that God creates.” (Edwards, The God of Evolution)

Johnson concludes: This overview of the current philosophical discussion can help us make room for both evolution and faith. Two agencies of infinitely qualitatively different magnitudes are present in the same worldly action: the autonomous creature which acts, and the divine agency which founds, sustains, and empowers it.   These are not two actions doing essentially the same thing, acting in a parallel way, each contributing to part of the effect:

Brought to life by divine generosity, creatures are genuine centers of activity that operate with their own causal efficacy, interrelated and dependent on each other as well as on God – while the ineffable, transcendent Mystery dwelling within the evolving world continuously creates through the world’s own autonomous processes, letting it be and self-spending in an outpouring of love. (Beasts, p. 168-169)

The first of 4 posts for chapter 6 of Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love

The Paradigm of the Lover

If the natural world’s current design is the result of a long history that can be explained by natural laws, how are we to understand the presence and the activity of the Giver of life?

How can this evolving world be understood as God’s good creation?

Prior to knowledge of evolution, the idea of the Creator went hand-in-glove with the model of God as a monarch ruling over his realm. Reflecting the worldview of their day, many  biblical and classic theological texts expressed the world’s relation to God through the metaphor of God as Creator/King.

The old metaphor becomes difficult when the theory of evolution makes clear that the world’s gorgeous design has not been executed by direct divine agency (so to speak, ‘from above’) but is the result of innumerable, infinitesimal adaptations of creatures to their environment (‘from below’).

The old metaphor becomes even more difficult when we realize that the variations on which natural selection works occur randomly. The absence of direct design, the presence of genuine chance, the enormity of suffering and extinction, and the ambling character of life’s emergence over billions of years are hard to reconcile with a simple monarchical idea of the Creator at work.

Building from a theology of the presence of the Creator Spirit (as discussed in chapter 5), the view proposed here holds that God’s creative activity brings into being a universe endowed with the innate capacity to evolve by the operation of its own natural powers, making it a free partner in its own creation.

This position differs from deism; the difference lies in the presence of the indwelling Spirit of God, who continuously empowers and accompanies the evolving world.

This differs also from monarchical theism, where the Creator directly dictates or micro-manages the natural world’s every significant move. Far from compelling the world to develop according to a prescribed plan, the Spirit continually calls it forth to a fresh and unexpected future.

To be imaginative for a moment, it is as if at the Big Bang the Spirit gave the natural world a push, saying, “Go, have an adventure, see what you can become. And I will be with you every step of the way.” (p. 156)

What do we mean when we say, ‘God is love’?

The ancient Christian affirmation – ‘God is Love’ – testifies to the experience of God’s love in the history of Israel, made manifest in Jesus Christ, and in the ongoing gifts of the Spirit in the world, even to our own day.

To develop a theology of God’s action in the world, this history functions as an illuminating starting point and ongoing bedrock for reflection.  For all Christian theology, the gospel is good news. The love of God is a saving, healing, restoring power that benefits human beings:

• Irenaeus (2nd century) – “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”

• Bernard of Clairvaux (12th century) – The Creator’s love enhances human autonomy: “What was begun by grace alone, is completed by grace and free choice together…”

• Karl Rahner (20th century) – Radical dependence on God and the genuine freedom of the creature increase to the same degree. The deep union of Jesus’ human nature with divine nature did not make him a robot but constituted him a genuine human being, with the integrity of his own freedom. Rahner reasons that the same dynamic holds true for all human beings.

And now, what about evolution?

Take these insights about God’s loving grace, that run through Christian theology from the 2nd to the 12th to the 20th century, and now extend them to the origin of species:

Christians believe that Jesus’ love, shown in his life, suffering and death, was characteristic of God’s way: compassionate self-giving love for the liberation of others. If this is true of God, we can expect to see God’s power not as controlling but as cruciform love – love that empowers others. Couldn’t it be that since the Spirit’s approach to human beings powerfully invites but never coerces, the best way to understand God’s action in the evolution of the natural world is by analogy with how divine initiative relates to human freedom?

Since gracious divine action reveals the character of God, then the holy Mystery who creates, redeems, and sanctifies the world brims over with the most profound respect for creatures. Divine love unfailingly manifests itself not as coercive ‘power-over’ but as ‘power-with’ that energizes others.

Compassionate, cruciform love brings flourishing to all creatures.  Among humans, a mature loving relationship builds up the strength of personal autonomy in those loved, whether they be on an equal footing, like spouses or friends, or at different stages of life like parents and children, students and teachers. Rather than suppressing the gifts of the other, love brings about their flourishing. In our fractured world love is never perfect, always mixed with other forces. On balance, however, its effect is so life-giving because its unifying bond brings about profound growth toward genuine autonomy.

The last chapter concluded that far from being distant from the divine, the world is the dwelling place of God. This chapter charts a path from the activity of the Spirit, Who is love, to the understanding that the evolving world, operating without compulsion according to its own dynamics, works freely with the incomprehensible God in bringing forth the fullness of its own creation.

Recall how biological evolution occurs over billions of years: life moves in the direction of complexity.

While unpredictable in advance, the sequence of life’s development can be reasonably understood in retrospect as the working out of innate propensities, with which the universe is gifted from the beginning.

This whole process is empowered by the Creator, Whose love freely gifts the natural world with creative agency.

Carol McPhee re-introduces us to Prayer, by Jorie Graham:

•  In Chapter 6 Johnson will make Aquinas’ concept of primary and secondary causation the hinge that connects her dialogue between the Nicene Creed and The Origin of Species.

After considering several theologies showing God as ’empowering the process’ of the continuing evolution of creation from within, Johnson presents Aquinas’ causation concept as more clearly enabling us to perceive both God’s transcendence and the basic integrity of God’s created entities.

• Aquinas’ thought is a fundamental part of Johnson’s theology. Chapter 5 in Ask the Beasts repeats much of what she said about Aquinas’ concept of God in her 1993 book She Who Is. By reinterpreting Aquinas she follows other theologians, like Karl Rahner, who find that with the medieval culture set aside, there is a basic truth to be found in his writings.

For example, Johnson overlooks the static universe that some have derived from Thomistic thought in her emphasis on the active meaning of esse, on God’s essential relationality and gift of love to creation, and on the concept of participation.

• So what does Aquinas say about causation?

The world is essentially unnecessary. To explain the world, there must be a cause not caused by a preceding one, a Being who causes all other causes, a primary cause. Primary cause is therefore in a class all its own, unique. Nothing caused the primary cause. It’s the beginning of everything and is not dependent on any other cause. At one point Aquinas argues that God is the ‘exemplary cause’ of all things, meaning that in God are all the essences or forms or possibilities of all creation.

Secondary causes are all created entities and are altogether in different class from primary cause. They’ve been set in motion or brought into being by the primary cause. Each has its own integrity, its own essence – a cow is a cow, an oak tree an oak tree, a human a human – its own causative effects, and each participates with the primary cause in the ability to act and to be in themselves causes. Though they are ever dependent on the primary cause for their own being, they act freely.

Johnson skips over some of Aquinas’ other thoughts on causation, the potentiality within each form, for example, or the idea of final cause. But she incorporates them in her discussion of the imbedded natural inclination that sends creatures toward a ‘natural good.’ Altogether, they posit a universe evolving as its created entities freely act and change as they continuously participate in the being of God.

(1)  In the last session we read Prayer, by Jorie Graham, as a metaphor illustrating this concept. In Prayer Jorie Graham tells us she’s watching minnows, each moving as a tiny muscle to make of the whole group a ‘visual current.’ But this visual current is itself propelled by a real current of water, ‘mostly invisible.’ Johnson, explaining Aquinas’s concept of God, tells us that each creature is dependent on the Creator, that the Creator (the primary cause) is its source and principle of being and though each creature is an agent in itself (a secondary cause) it cannot affect the Creator.

Just so, in the poem the visual current, the school of minnows, acts according to its own nature, yet cannot ‘freight or sway by/ minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls.’ The motion of the creator current ‘forces change–/this is freedom’.

Prayer *
by Jorie Graham

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change—
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

* Prayer (‘minnows’) was written as a turn-of-the-millennium poem for the New York Times Op-Ed page, and was originally dated 12.31.00

(2)  Lorienne Schwenk brought Life is Juicy, by Leonard Bernstein:

Life is Juicy *
by Leonard Bernstein

Life begins in the waters-
Not the deep, but the borders of land:
The stagnants that nourish the sterile earth
Like a juicy gland.
Life is the seed of the marriage
of liquid and solid events.
In the coves, in the swamps, in mysterious pools,
Our heartaches commence.
Life is the pulp and the slime,
The marshmallow bellies of frogs,
Their thyroided eyes, their eggjellies caught
On the rotting logs.
Life is the algae, the roe;
The army of maggoty breeds
Devouring the corpse of a very old perch
Adrift in the weeds.
Life is the plasm, the cells,
The fat symbiotics in pairs;
The ankledeep fungoids which darkly provide
The crawfish with lairs.
Life is the scaly and scummy,
The poisonous green without breath;
The marinal maze whose only solution
Is ultimate death.
For Death is the crisp and the clean,
The fine oxidation, the rust,
The spermless, the painless, the classic, the lean,
The dry, dry dust.

Life is Juicy was written in a cottage on the mucky shore of Lake Mah-kee-nak, Stockbridge, MA, 2 July 1947

(3)  A poem many of us learned in childhood, with words and images that point to the sacred within and around the world we live in: 

God’s Grandeur *
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

*  To hear this magnificent poem read aloud,
go to http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173660

The Icebergs
by Frederic Edwin Church, 1861
click on the picture to enlarge it to full screen

Bob Pelfrey writes,

Frederick Edwin Church’s painting The Icebergs (above) illustrates several points about the intimate – almost structural – relationship between art and science (and in terms of the still widely held ‘natural theology’ approach in theology) at the time of Darwin’s publication of Origin.

Briefly, scientists of the time not only depended on artists – as they had since Leonardo’s time – for illustrations of any kind of visual phenomena; scientists often were artists themselves, especially in fields related to biology and geology. Until Darwin’s time, only hand-drawn images of any kind had existed.

As noted in our discussion this morning, Church was highly regarded and appreciated by geologists as a ‘scientific’ colleague. In the next two generations, photography would (first slowly, then with incredible speed) change this… to the point that today virtually all scientific ‘images’ are in some form of digital/photographic format.

Art, in this sense, is now marginal to science as such. Not so in Darwin’s time.

And….

Bob also writes re: Darwin’s ‘transgressiveness’:

The Icebergs also shows the deep public expectation (including many scientists, as Elizabeth Johnson points out) that the more ‘scientific’ a painting of Nature was, the more it should reflect God’s implicit Truth (order/design), Goodness (morality/meaning) and Beauty (sublimity).

This is the area where Darwin, with absolutely no malice, was ‘transgressive’ to the world-picture of his day.  Instead of ‘God’ explaining order/meaning/sublimity…’chance’ and ‘natural selection’ were sufficient causes.  This was a very distressing and dis-crediting jolt to the traditional paradigm, a paradigm that goes back in the Christian tradition to the book of Genesis.

‘Transgressiveness, however, is not necessarily a negative term.  If the affront, shall we say, is ‘processed’ (as in American racists who ‘saw the light’ and changed their attitudes due to Martin Luther King’s work and preaching), ‘transgressiveness’ can alter one’s worldview, morality, mindset, etc. in a positive and even transformative way.

Which is what Elizabeth Johnson is trying to do with “Darwin” vis a vis Christianity.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

In our time we struggle to reconcile the relationship between science and religion; in the middle ages the conflict was between theology and philosophy. While many medieval thinkers concluded that the two types of knowledge were in direct opposition to each other, the master theologian Thomas Aquinas asserted that “both kinds of knowledge ultimately come from God” – and are thus not only compatible, but can work in collaboration.

Aquinas reasoned that

• God is not a ‘being’ or even a ‘Being’; God simply is.

• The infinitely transcendent God is also present in and to this material world.

• Through God’s infinite, life-giving love, all creatures participate in the life of God.

This is where Aquinas’ Latin can help us:

• Ens (a noun) means entity, something that has existence. If we think of God as ens, we limit God to a particular something, a being; but God is not one Being among many beings.

• Esse (a verb) means to be. When we think of God as Esse, we image God as Verb: God is to-be. (The infinitive form emphasizes God’s infinite divine aliveness – in time as well as space.)

• Participatus (the Latin root of participate) means to have a share in a larger whole, or to possess something of the nature of a person, thing, or quality. Aquinas wrote, “All beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation.”

For Aquinas, God is everywhere and is in all things:

• “God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works… as to ignite is the proper effect of fire.”

• “God fills every place; not, indeed, like a body, for a body excludes the co-presence of another body. When God is in a place, others are not thereby excluded from it.” The divine presence spills over beyond the interior of creatures, filling everything; hence, while “God is in all things…it can also be said that all things are in God.”

God as Trinity

• The first Christians experienced God as Father/Creator, Jesus/Redeemer, and indwelling Holy Spirit.

• Reasoning from these varied experiences of God, Christian theologians as early as the 3rd century were imaging God as Trinity – that is, as a community of three ‘persons’ united in love.

• In the 13th century Aquinas saw the trinitarian God, whose very character is Love, as the active wellspring of all life.

• Aquinas taught that the life and love of God is communicated to the world not just through its original creation, but through God’s ongoing invitation to participate in divine community.

Panentheism

• Contemporary theology calls this model of the God-world relationship panentheism, from the Greek pan (all), en (in) and theos (God): all-in-God.

• Panentheism sees the created world as indwelt by God’s Spirit while also encompassed by divine presence; that is, the God who dwells within the world also transcends it at every point.

• Within the world, the creating Spirit is present to all creatures, bringing them into existence; and all creatures, in their daily being and doing, continuously participate in the life of the One who is sheer, exuberant aliveness. (Already in the first century, St. Paul was thinking of this mutual indwelling when he said that in God “we live and move and have our being” Acts 17:28.)

• Observing the marvelous diversity of creatures in the world, Aquinas concluded that their very differences express the divine goodness: “For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided.” Contemporary theologian Denis Edwards (author of The God of Evolution: A Trinitarian Theology) follows Aquinas when he notes that “no one creature, not even the human, can image God by itself. Only the diversity of life – huge soaring trees, the community of ants, the flashing colors of the parrot, the beauty of a wildflower along with the human – can give expression to the radical diversity and otherness of the triune God.”

• Thus Aquinas’ idea of participation is still a major influence on contemporary Christian thinking: the natural world exists because it participates in the Esse of God: the whole world exists due to a continuous act of love on the part of the Creator Spirit – indwelling the creation, sustaining its life, and cherishing its ‘entangled bank’.

The world as God’s dwelling place

• Seeing the world of beasts, birds, plants, and fish with the eyes of faith leads us to conclude that the natural world is not merely ‘natural’ (that is, of lesser spiritual significance than the ‘supernatural’). Rather, the natural world bears the mark of the sacred, because it is imbued with a spiritual presence. In its own way, the whole cosmos is a sacrament and a revelation.

• The insight that plant and animal species exist by participation in the life-giving power of God allows nature’s sacramental character to emerge.

• Christian sacramental theology has always pointed to simple material things – bread, wine, water – which, graced by the Spirit of God, can be bearers of divine grace.

• Such ordinary things are able to communicate divine grace because the whole physical world itself – not just things (enses) used in worship – is permeated with the presence (Esse) of God.

We have reached the middle of Elizabeth Johnson’s Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (chapter 5, ‘The Dwelling Place of God’). Johnson begins by asking us:

What would ‘a Christian theology of evolution’ look like?

To describe how a Creator works with – and within – this universe, Johnson turns first to the Dominican priest and theologian, Herbert McCabe.  Born in 1926, McCabe studied chemistry and philosophy before he was ordained a Dominican priest; from then on he studied, taught and wrote about the works of Thomas Aquinas until his death in 2001.

McCabe gives us a helpful image of a Creator who “makes all things and keeps them in existence from moment to moment, not like a sculptor who makes a statue and leaves it alone, but… like a singer who keeps her song in existence at all times.” (God, Christ, and Us, p. 103)

Johnson reminds us that classic theology spoke of creation in three senses:

• Original creation – In the beginning, the God of life creates the universe, and all its life forms. All living species receive life as a gift from their Creator, and exist in utter reliance on that gift. Without this gift of life, all things would sink back into nothingness.

• Continuing creation – As the universe moves through time, the ever-creating God continues to sustains all things. Since the ever-creating God is present always and everywhere, the world of life is itself the dwelling place of God.

• New creation – Source of endless possibilities, the ever-creating God will continue to draw the world into an unimaginable future. Christians view this future through the lens of Christ’s promise: in the end, the Creation will not be abandoned, but transformed into new communion with God.

The world as the dwelling place of God:

The dominant image of God in our culture is still the all-powerful, distant super-being who started the world, rules it from on high, and occasionally intervenes in the world’s life.

This image of God will not be helpful to us as we work to build a Christian theology which is in dialogue with modern science.

To develop an image of a God who works in an evolving world, we must come to see God as immanent as well as transcendent; we must image a God who not only embraces the world but dwells within it, sustaining it in every moment of its being and becoming.

This would be a God who, in Herbert McCabe’s words, “makes all things and keeps them in existence from moment to moment, not like a sculptor who makes a statue and leaves it alone, but… like a singer who keeps her song in existence at all times.”