IV. Integration
2. Theology of Nature
The philosopher John Leslie defends the Anthropic Principle as a design argument. But he points out that an alternative explanation would be the assumption of many worlds (either in successive cycles of an oscillating universe or in separate domains existing simultaneously); These worlds might differ from each other, and we just happen to be in one that has the right variables for the emergence of life.48 Moreover, some of these apparently arbitrary conditions may be necessitated by a more basic unified theory, on which physicists are currently working. We will examine these alternatives in chapter 5.
The bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore, claims that there are many instances of design in the universe, including the Anthropic Principle and the directionality of evolution. Some of his other examples, such as James Lovelock’s "Gaia Hypothesis" and Rupert Sheldrake’s "morphogenetic fields," are much more controversial and have little support in the scientific community. Montefiore does not claim that these arguments prove the existence of God, but only that the latter is more probable than other explanations.49
Debates continue about the validity of each of these arguments, to which we will return in later chapters. But even if the arguments are accepted, they would not lead to the personal, active God of the Bible, as Hume pointed out, but only to an intelligent designer remote from the world. Moreover, few if any persons have actually acquired their
religious beliefs by such arguments. Natural theology can show that the existence of God is a plausible hypothesis, but this kind of reasoning is far removed from the actual life of a religious community.
abandoned in the future.
Our understanding of the general characteristics of nature will affect our models of God’s relation to nature. Nature is today understood to be a dynamic evolutionary process with a long history of emergent novelty, characterized throughout by chance and law. The natural order is
ecological, interdependent, and multileveled. These characteristics will modify our representation of the relation of both God and humanity to nonhuman nature. This will, in turn, affect our attitudes toward nature and will have practical implications for environmental ethics. The problem of evil will also be viewed differently in an evolutionary rather than a static world.
For Arthur Peacocke, the starting point of theological reflection is past and present religious experience, together with a continuous interpretive tradition. Religious beliefs are tested by community consensus and by criteria of coherence, comprehensiveness, and fruitfulness. But
Peacocke is willing to reformulate traditional beliefs in response to current science. He discusses at length how chance and law work together in cosmology, quantum physics, nonequilibrium
thermodynamics, and biological evolution. He describes the emergence of distinctive forms of activity at higher levels of complexity in the multilayered hierarchy of organic life and mind. Peacocke gives chance a positive role in the exploration and expression of potentialities at all levels. God creates through the whole process of law and chance, not by intervening in gaps in the process. "The natural causal creative nexus of events is itself God’s creative action."50 God creates "in and through"
the processes of the natural world that science unveils.
As we will see in chapter 6, Peacocke provides some rich images for talking about God’s action in a world of chance and law. He speaks of chance as God’s radar sweeping through the range of possibilities and evoking the diverse potentialities of natural systems. In other images, artistic creativity is used as an analogy in which purposefulness and open-endedness are continuously present. Peacocke identifies his position as panentheism (not pantheism). God is in the world, but the world is also in God, in the sense that God is more than the world. In some passages, Peacocke suggests the analogy of the world as God’s body, and God as the world’s, mind or soul. I am sympathetic with Peacocke’s position at most points. He gives us vivid images for talking about God’s relation to a natural order whose characteristics science has disclosed. But I believe that in addition to images that provide a
suggestive link between scientific and religious reflection, we need philosophical categories to help us unify scientific and theological assertions in a more systematic way.
The writings of the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin are another example of a theology of nature. Some interpreters take The Phenomenon of Man to be a form of natural theology, an argument from evolution to the existence of God. I have suggested that it can more appropriately be viewed as a synthesis of scientific ideas with religious ideas derived from Christian tradition and experience. Teilhard’s other writings make clear how deeply he was molded by his religious heritage and his own spirituality. But his concept of God was modified by
evolutionary ideas, even if it was not derived from an analysis of evolution. Teilhard speaks of continuing creation and a God immanent in an incomplete world. His vision of the final convergence to an
"Omega Point" is both a speculative extrapolation of evolutionary directionality and a distinctive interpretation of Christian eschatology.51 In any theology of nature there are theological issues that require
clarification. Is some reformulation of the classical idea of God’s omnipotence called for? Theologians have wrestled for centuries with the problem of reconciling omnipotence and omniscience with human freedom and the existence of evil and suffering. But a new problem is raised by the role of chance in diverse fields of science. Do we defend the traditional idea of divine sovereignty and hold that within what appears to the scientist to be chance all events are really providentially controlled by God? Or do both human freedom and chance in nature represent a self-limitation on God’s foreknowledge and power, required by the creation of this sort of world?
How do we represent God’s action in the world? The traditional distinction of primary and secondary causes preserves the integrity of the secondary causal chains that science studies. God does not interfere but acts through secondary causes, which at their own level provide a complete explanation of all events. This tends toward deism if God has planned all things from the beginning so they would unfold by their own structures (deterministic and probabilistic) to achieve the goals
intended. Is the biblical picture of the particularity of divine action then replaced by the uniformity of divine concurrence with natural causes?
Should we then speak only of God’s one action, the whole of cosmic history? These are some of the questions that a theology of nature must answer. We will return to them in part 3.