AJ Roberts's Theology of Nature

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It is rare for me to be certain about what God wants me to do. There is no foolproof way, as God isn’t an answer machine nor a scientific object that we can study. But there are ways that I try to be a little more certain. I pray to God every day and hope that He reminds me to change my course if I’m going astray. I compare my convictions with Scripture, as God’s Word cannot contradict each itself. I share my spiritual life with other believers and ask for their opinion.

For now, the conviction has gradually formed in my mind that God wants me to finish my PhD in physics as best as I can. God wants me to appreciate His glory and majesty in the experiments that I do. I have chronicled part of how I got there here. I don’t know if afterwards, God wants me to continue in academia, industry, or go to an entirely different field. Having faith in God and living one’s life according to His will is a continual journey. It’s never finished, and I certainly don’t have all the answers.

I certainly agree that God’s ways are sometimes unknown, inscrutable, and even frustrating. Why doesn’t God just get rid of all evil and suffering straight away? Why doesn’t God grant my prayers right now? Why doesn’t God reveal himself and remove all doubt from me? The Bible tackles this problem head on, in the book of Job. And yet even Job doesn’t get a rationally satisfying answer about why he, a righteous man, has been allowed to suffer so terribly and unfairly. He does, however, realize that God’s purposes are way too unfathomable for him to justifiably raise this complaint.

This is not a comforting answer. But despite all the suffering and frustration with the world, I think there is something interesting about how God has allowed us to wrestle with that question itself. Instead of making everything agreeable and pleasant, he’s given us a choice: to keep wrestling with these difficult questions, as Job did, or to turn away from him instead.

This is why I think faith is fundamentally about our personal response to God: do we want to go on the journey, or not? That choice determines the rest of our outlook on life - everything afterwards is just rationalization. And for me I still feel drawn to God even as I encounter questions, frustrations, and doubts. I don’t know why. You can try to explain it with my background, my desires, my thoughts - but there have been plenty of people in a similar situation who have chosen otherwise. So it just is.

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How do you know that you are not just talking to yourself?

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As I said, there is no foolproof way, Patrick. I do not know for sure. There can always be other explanations. But I choose to believe. I tried to explain that in my previous post. Did you even read the whole of it? I did not write that lightly.

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I read to the whole thing and it is an honest representation of your beliefs. Your beliefs seem to serve you well. And they bring purpose and meaning to your life. Nothing wrong with that.

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But with all the suffering in the world and all the divisiveness caused by all the competing and contradictory faiths and beliefs, don’t you think the fundamental problem is the large number of competing and contradictory beliefs? Obviously they all can’t be right. But they all can be wrong.

Can your beliefs be wrong?

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Divisiveness comes from many sources. Fear of the unknown. Greed. Tribalism. Past experiences. Or simple unfortunate circumstance. Contradictory religious beliefs are just one factor. There have been so many wars fought between people of the same religion.

Yes. I’m pretty sure that some of my current beliefs (in any topic) are wrong…I just don’t know which ones.

But an important point, as you said, Patrick, is that my beliefs are very useful and beneficial for me. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I will not feel as if I have lost anything. If there is nothing after we die, then I will not even be around to regret the fact that I chose to believe in God instead of not. My life right now has become better by believing in God, by having meaning, purpose, and a sense of encounter with the Creator. If atheism is true, then whether I’m religious or not doesn’t really matter. (Of course, if I’m religious in a way that harms myself or others that would be undesirable. But we agreed that’s not the case for my faith.)

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I hope your right. Live long and Prosper.

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22 posts were split to a new topic: An Atheist’s Natural Theology

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Now here’s a crucial thing! Being able to think beyond the idea of scientific objectivity is indeed important.

Josh points out that we are part of nature, and there’s a strong old theological stream that says that mankind is the way that nature becomes aware of God… and that its at least as much because man is personal as because he is rational (in fact in the old days the two meant much the same).

Secondly, God is personal, and the creature made in his image, as his viceroy over nature, is personal. So it is entriely plausible that God has imbued nature with personal meaning, to be acquired other than by reason. To see it another way, it makes no sense to talk about objective knowledge of the personal love of God, since love is always a view from soewhere, and never an objective view from nowhere.

Which isn’t to say that there is no “publically available” knowledge of God in nature (though as I think we all agree, that is strictly limited) - @AJRoberts point was about what can be truly learned of God beyond that, in a deeper way. One might add that she, I and any others who have such subjective knowledge can happily share it around - and it becomes public amongst those who know God, if not those who don’t.

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This seems to be an important fact often forgotten, no? We tend to see “Nature” as that thing “out there”, but we are part of nature too. We have natures, and we know our nature is shared. In fact, human nature is public knowledge, even though it is personally experienced. This is the point of thinking about “other minds.” It is a private experience that is publicly known.

This seems to be an important case, @jongarvey, as you work out your theology of nature.

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I’m on it, Josh, all being well on Monday for starters.

Note that it’s Descartes’ theology of nature that separated us from nature in common thought in the first place. By teaching of our minds as “res cogitans” and everything else as “res extensa” he created the illusion that objectivity was possible, because our minds could be divorced from the world, perhaps by that chimera “pure reason”.

Quantum theory does for that illusion, but the writing was on the wall as soon as the “mind-body problem” started to look intractable. And on that there is another good book by Tom Nagel that I’ve yet to read, The View from Nowhere.

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I’m not demanding scientific objectivity. Rather, I’m asking how would you be able to discuss and verify revelations of God from nature. This is common in all subjects of inquiry. For example, when studying Scripture, we interpret it with justification from grammar, context, genre, and history. Of course, one can also just say that “the text means X to me” or “the text makes me feel God’s love” without justification, and they won’t necessarily be wrong, but their statement wouldn’t be authoritative.

We know that God loves us not just from personal experience but also from the Bible. For example, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:7-8, NIV). Does this mean that one can fully understand the love of God by reading Scripture? Of course not. As you described, there is an indescribable, personal experiential part of it that cannot be communicated in mere words. But it does mean that one can at least corroborate the love of God with propositions known through reason and analysis. (Again, not necessarily scientific reasoning, just reasoning in general.) One can point to acts of God described in Scripture, as well as direct statements about the love of God, to give an external, objective grounding on whether our personal experience is veridical. Christianity is not a religion which rests upon purely personal feelings.

If what @AJRoberts was describing was really subjective, indescribable knowledge about God acquired through scientific discovery, then I wonder how theologically significant her statement really is. One could be a Cartesian/Baconian TE of the type that you criticize a lot and still say that they encounter God through their scientific work. In fact, I suspect that a lot of deistic/anti-natural theology TEs would prefer just that: a knowledge of God which is based on personal response, not publicly available nor describable using words and propositions.

What would the sharing look like? What words would you use to share it, since you said that it is indescribable?

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I don’t think I said any such insights were “indescribable” as I chack my posts. I said “non-propositional” - that is, the doctrine of the Trinity would not come from nature (except by some poetic metaphor), but a sense of God’s love, or justice, or sternness might. And those are shareable - I believe most people from the arts world who are believers would take that for granted.

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Hints, or more, of NT Wright. And I like your usage of “post-scientific” age. Man, I get so fed up with people (none here) whose hubris makes claims like “post-genomic” age. We are so not out of genomic infancy yet.

Looking forward to reading Aquinas’s Five Ways and the two articles you linked to above.

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This claim of God’s visibility (if you will) in the providential ordering and law-like governance of the universe is the basic revelation we receive from nature (with or without scientific inquiry, as Joshua points out.) These provide the basis for scientific inquiry and some certainty of what one can usually expect in reality. That, along with further consideration and observation of nature and ourselves, leads us to speculate that God (the one behind it all) wants us to seek, discover and know things about nature, ourselves, and the Creator. But the revelation of God in nature is not just these things. If it were it could leave us in a very deistic place with nothing more than faint hints of and no closer to encountering a personal God with good intent.

I think the fine-tuning of life and biology far surpasses the fine-tuning of the cosmos and fundamental physics. In living things, the complexity and interdependent layers of mechanisms and processes are every bit as and far more rich than Mozart’s greatest symphony. Even the simplest cell exceeds his greatest symphony by orders of magnitude.

No one who understands the musical score (all its symbolism and information) and the mechanics of crafting the various musical instruments needed to play the score, let alone the proper execution of the score by all the different instruments (even excluding the complexity of the musicians) can ignore that each and every supportive and functional component displays the glory of Mozart. Not just the score itself or the rules of time, amplitude, harmony and dissonance.

We know a lot and stand on the shoulders of giants in science and philosophy. But we are so ignorant of what is involved in getting a fully differentiated sperm and a fully differentiated egg to form a diploid zygote that goes ‘backward’ or regresses in information to a pluripotent stage, that then goes forward to form through progressive divisions into a full grown adult – a being with over 200 hundred differentiated cell types, properly ordered and functioning… (or at least functioning good enough to join the dialogue at Peaceful Science).

Every new discovery does not stand alone; it stands in context of finely balanced metabolic pathways, in finely balanced cellular and organ specific environments, in organisms dependent upon finely-tuned, symbiotic internal microbiomes and external ecological systems on a rare earth, just so fit to sustain life.

This is exactly the kind of thing I mean when I say we all need to be natural theologians, recognizing and telling this version of nature accessed through scientific discoveries – while not losing sight of the testimony of nature itself, on that stroll or hike.

And as to your specific question about the Higgs Boson… this might be helpful: http://www.reasons.org/explore/publications/nrtb-e-zine/read/nrtb-e-zine/2014/01/01/higgs-boson-may-illuminate-dark-energy

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Yes, @dga471, what @jongarvey said too!

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@jongarvey I just finished your Hump article on Consistent theistic epistemology… and well, excellent! Thank you!

I especially like these bits: (You would have been a great addition to the Dabar dialogue and content!)

“Indeed, according to Catholic doctrine each new member of Adam’s old race is in part a new creation, the eternal soul being directly created by God, rather than by natural generation. But leaving aside specifically Roman teaching, a proper understanding of the relationship between mankind’s creation “in the image of God” and the second Person of the Trinity, “the Image of God” , shows that there is a discontinuity between mankind and the rest of creation that was brought about by divine action in real time.”

“The upshot is that the very difference between Christian Theism and Deism is measured by the shortness of some of the causal chains in creation, in which God claims to be intimately involved rather than distant and aloof.”

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Indeed - though I’d come to the same conclusions before getting into Wright to any degree.

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One need read no further than Job 10 to find a natural theology that doesn’t seem to depend upon other special revelation --but does not yet completely benefit from it, either:
“ I loathe my own life; I will give full vent to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.“I will say to God, ‘ Do not condemn me; Let me know why You contend with me.‘Is it right for You indeed to oppress, To reject the labor of Your hands, And to look favorably on the schemes of the wicked?‘Have You eyes of flesh? Or do You see as a man sees?‘Are Your days as the days of a mortal, Or Your years as man’s years,That You should seek for my guilt And search after my sin?‘According to Your knowledge I am indeed not guilty, Yet there is no deliverance from Your hand.‘ Your hands fashioned and made me altogether, And would You destroy me?‘Remember now, that You have made me as clay; And would You turn me into dust again?‘Did You not pour me out like milk And curdle me like cheese;Clothe me with skin and flesh, And knit me together with bones and sinews?‘You have granted me life and lovingkindness; And Your care has preserved my spirit.‘Yet these things You have concealed in Your heart; I know that this is within You:If I sin, then You would take note of me, And would not acquit me of my guilt.‘If I am wicked, woe to me! And if I am righteous, I dare not lift up my head. I am sated with disgrace and conscious of my misery.‘Should my head be lifted up, You would hunt me like a lion; And again You would show Your power against me.‘You renew Your witnesses against me And increase Your anger toward me; Hardship after hardship is with me.‘ Why then have You brought me out of the womb? Would that I had died and no eye had seen me!‘I should have been as though I had not been, Carried from womb to tomb.’“Would He not let my few days alone? Withdraw from me that I may have a little cheerBefore I go— and I shall not return— To the land of darkness and deep shadow,The land of utter gloom as darkness itself, Of deep shadow without order, And which shines as the darkness.” - Job 10:1-22 NASB
While needing a bit of spiritual come-uppance yet, which he will get before the story concludes, Job has here laid the questioning basis for the mystery which was only fully answered in Jesus Himself.
I hope others will contribute specific instances of natural theology in the Scriptures, or even of those who’ve come to faith on the basis of natural theology laying the groundwork for a new appreciation for the Scriptures themselves, and the mystery and answer they reveal.

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Dear @AJRoberts,
Thank you for engaging with me. Based on your explanation, I think we are not that far apart as I initially thought. If I’m understanding you correctly, “providential ordering and law-like governance” for you refers only to the starting point for science. Thus I would also disagree if someone says that this starting point is all you can say about God and science. I affirm that every discovery in science also makes us learn something about God, in the sense that the order and structures we encounter through doing science have reflect the majestic beauty of God. The discovery of the Higgs boson vindicates the Standard Model of particle physics - and the fact that we are able to create such a theory that fits so well to nature (even if it still has glaring flaws) gives us a glimpse of the workings of God’s creativity and genius when he created the universe. The RTB article about Higgs and dark energy that you mentioned seems to agree with my views - it does not talk about God explicitly, but refers to the “the beauty and elegance of this universe as well as the remarkable fact that humans are here to try to understand its mysteries.”

However, where I suspect we could differ is the question of which class of scientific discoveries reflect God’s glory. I am somewhat sympathetic to fine-tuning arguments in physics - such as those advanced by Luke Barnes and Robin Collins, referring to how the relative strengths of forces in the universe seem to be so finely tuned so as to allow a universe filled with stars and planets and life. There is no experimentally verified explanation for why this is the case - no deeper principle that makes it so. Thus this is potentially an explicit argument for the existence of God. Let us call this Strong Fine Tuning (SFT). Intelligent Design type arguments, if they are right, would fall into this category as well.

But besides Strong Fine Tuning, there is “regular” science such as that in particle physics. In these areas, we can understand large parts of the science using a set of equations derived from some fundamental principles. There is no major scientific puzzle as is the case with Strong Fine Tuning. As I opined in the first paragraph, I still think that regular science displays the glory of God, possibly even revealing multiple facets of God’s character including love, goodness, beauty, and his will for us. There is also the amazing fact that God has created us mentally capable enough to glimpse these wonderful truths of regular science! Yet I would call this a less explicit argument for God - we can call it Weak Fine Tuning (WFT), because I think one can have epistemological access to these revelations only if one already believes in God and is willing to interpret scientific discoveries within that worldview. It is in this sense that I agree with you that we can encounter God through every scientific discovery. But I see WFT as more of an extension of the basic providence and law-like governance of God that is necessary to do science in the first place. WFT (i.e., the success of science) is a vindication that those basic assumptions are true.

What I’m curious is whether the examples of fine tuning in biology - the “finely balanced metabolic pathways” that you refer to - are closer to Strong or Weak Fine Tuning. I am a bit confused because while your examples seem to refer to a lot of “regular science”, they also refer to gaps and ignorance in our understanding. (I am also very ignorant in biology, so I don’t know if your examples are open problems or past scientific successes.) If some deeper principle is found that gives a fuller explanation of why these metabolic pathways are finely balanced, does that change the nature of what is divinely revealed in them?

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