The Earth is the Lord’s and the Fullness Thereof:
Creation ex nihilo and the ‘Rules’ for Theological Engagement with the Sciences
On Getting the Question Right
There are signs on the horizon that the times they are a changin’ and that Christian theologians and philosophers have begun to reverse their centuries long retreat from the advances of modern science and its claims to exclusive authority over the meaning of reason and the truth of nature. Even the Templeton Foundation, which for decades promoted what Larry Chapp once called a “false irenicism” between theology and science, a kind of a priori concordism that inevitably subordinated the former to the latter, has recently thrown its weight behind more intellectually daring projects.[i] These are hopeful developments for the Church and for the cause of truth, irrespective of the time it takes for them to reach parishioners in the pews or the unwelcome and uncomprehending reception they are likely to meet within the totalizing frame of a scientific culture, defined, in the words of the Australian historian Stephen Gaukroger, by “the gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones.”[ii]
Several intellectual factors have converged to create this opportunity. From Thomas Kuhn to Paul Feyerabend to Hans Jonas, from Amos Funkenstein to Gaukroger to Peter Harrison, succeeding generations of philosophers and historians of science have exploded the “Whig” mythology of a “pure” science, uncontaminated by metaphysical and theological judgment, that attains to pristine objectivity by a linear, cumulative increase in knowledge. Of course, none of this denies the obvious success of modern science in achieving its goals, but it does call into question the extent to which this success should simply be equated with truth and whether science should enjoy exclusive authority over the meaning (or meaninglessness) of nature. While these are now axiomatic assumptions within our scientistic culture, they are in fact philosophical points that once had to be argued for and that required a radical “paradigm shift” or gestalt switch to become effective. It is now apparent that the scientific revolution which commenced in the seventeenth century and has not ended is premised on a more fundamental metaphysical revolution, a radical re-conception of being, nature, knowledge, and even truth itself that mediates our apprehension of natural phenomena, determines the questions we ask of them, and defines in advance which features of their self-presentation in our experience shall count as evidentiary.
It is equally clear that this revolution presupposes and perpetuates a corresponding theologia naturalis—an often-unarticulated notion of what God must be like, irrespective of whether he exists, if nature is really like this—even if that theology takes the negative form of atheism.[iii] Contrary to our “whiggish” prejudices, atheism is not the default position of a metaphysically neutral reason pulling itself up by its own intellectual bootstraps; nor is it an accident that it flourishes on what was once Christian soil. Atheism is a uniquely Christian phenomenon and a privative one, parasitic upon some conception of the God in which it disbelieves. The theological and metaphysical defects in the theologia naturalis of modern science, defects which many well-meaning theologians have tacitly assumed in attempting to engage with the sciences on the terms of their own authority, are a principal reason why the so-called dialogue between theology and science rarely attains to an authentic engagement with the questions of God and creation.
Cognizant of this intellectual landscape and its necessities, a number of philosophers and theologians, especially thinkers associated with the Radical Orthodoxy and Communio schools, have begun to recover theology’s lost confidence and to recognize that theological judgment extends to everything, since no facet of reality can fall outside of creation. They have thus begun to call into question the very notion of “religion” as some special, circumscribed sphere separated from an essentially secular reality evacuated of divine presence. This promises a much more fruitful encounter. [iv]
To these intellectual catalysts we may also add more recent social and cultural factors, though their eventual effect upon thought is still unclear. One is the rapid and comprehensive triumph of the sexual revolution, the human (or posthuman) face of the scientific and technological revolution. The advent of what the reigning Assistant Secretary of Health called the “complex and nuanced field” of transgender medicine, when added to an inglorious history that already includes phrenology, eugenics, and genetic reductionism, at least raises of the question of whether, in addition and to its inevitable metaphysical and theological prejudices, ideological corruption is a feature and not a bug of modern science.[v] The triumph of the digital revolution has launched the mutual surveillance of all against all. Almighty Google, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, is nearer to me than I am to myself.
This immense new power has brought new forms of political agency without political responsibility, the action of everyone in general and no one in particular, that call into question whether the human political future will be human or political in any recognizable sense.[vi] The call to “let science rule us,” which is at least as old as the philosophy of John Dewey, acquired new political force during the pandemic, accelerating the fusion of the digital, sexual and biotechnical revolutions.[vii] Together they seem to be hastening our descent into a post political form of rule that I have called biotechnocracy and others are calling the “biomedical security state.” All of this provokes the question of whether the scientific culture of our New Atlantis, where “all cognitive values are assimilated to scientific ones,” is really so benign after all.
The necessity of metaphysical and theological judgment simultaneously complexifies and clarifies what sort of question the “science and theology” question really is. While I myself have learned a great deal from the standard historical and “sociology of knowledge” approaches to this question and would not wish to discount these forms of inquiry, the nature of this question, or rather the nature of the fundamental question at issue between theology and science as forms of knowledge or historical practices, is not principally historical, methodological or sociological. None of these forms of knowledge can pass from the factual to the true without surreptitiously becoming a kind of total metaphysics, that is, without ceasing to be themselves and becoming philosophy.
So prioritizing these methods of approach, without a corresponding philosophical self-awareness of the aforementioned necessities and the nature of one’s own cognitive act, is likely to conceal as much as it reveals. Above all, it will conceal its tendency to make empiricists—and therefore unwitting atheists—of us all, abstracting both thought and its object from their constitutive relation to God and from the totality of conditions characterizing their actual existence in order to construct an indifferent ‘empirical’ sphere, before adding these constitutive relations back in as hypothetical, second order phenomena. In brief, the “science and theology” question is not first a historical or sociological question because every attempt to post the question will tacitly presuppose an answer to the more basic questions about the nature of being (and the being of nature) in relation to God and the sort of God to which nature is hypothetically related. Beneath this question, in other words, are the still more primitive questions: Who is God? What is the world? These are the fundamental questions at issue between theology and science.
For the remainder of this essay, therefore, I will attempt to sketch an answer to these questions, to think through creation in its philosophical or metaphysical meaning—by no means its only meaning—to suggest how it might govern theological thinking about modern science and even why it is the rationally superior alternative to modern science. This latter point obviously requires some advance clarification. This assertion of superiority does not assume a necessary and eternal opposition between theology and science, though the metaphysical judgments inherent in the self-understanding of science often place it in contingent opposition to a coherent and orthodox theology.
Nor does the rational superiority of theology consist in its providing better explanation of the dynamics of the natural systems and processes that are the subjects of the various sciences. I reject the “a priori discordism” of Christianity’s atheistic and scientistic despisers as much as the “a priori concordism” of the so-called “Templeton paradigm,” and the attempts to “fuse” the theology of creation with scientific theories such as evolution or Big Bang cosmology. In my view, all such efforts are premised upon a category mistake that misconstrues the doctrines of God and creation in advance. One could only imagine that theology and science are mutually exclusive forms of explanation by assuming that divine and natural agency are mutually exclusive forms of causality, that is, if God and the world are juxtaposed as two entities within an order of being that comprehends them both, and it is precisely this—we shall see momentarily—that the doctrine of creation denies.
Methodologically speaking, this means that the ancient Christological principle—distinguish in order to unify—is applicable by analogy to the relationship between theology and science. By distinguishing more radically between science, theology, and metaphysics, metaphysics and theology can be brought more interiorly to bear upon the sciences, engaging and critically judging them not qua biology, chemistry, or physics—that is, not as mechanical and experimental analyses of the world’s physical dynamisms—but qua the metaphysics and theology they inevitably assume and become when they fail to comprehend their own ontological and theological premises or the nature of their own cognitive act.
But this then alters both what it means to say that creation is rationally superior to the sciences and what a positive, fruitful engagement between theology and science would look like. The theology of creation does not offer a better account of “how the world works.” It is not in this that its rational superiority consists. Its rational superiority consists in the fact that the Christian account of “what the world is” is more fully adequate to the world in its self-presentation and to the way that we cannot help experiencing it, phenomena whose explanation is precluded in advance the operative ontology within modern science. It is superior because it rescues reason itself from the reductive functionalism of scientific rationality and more adequately grasps the nature of scientific cognition as the legitimate abstraction from the totality of being that it in fact is. Theology can therefore “save the appearances” for the sciences, accommodating within itself the genuine gains of scientific analysis while simultaneously accommodating ineliminable aspects of being and experience excluded from scientific analysis by its ontology, thus “saving” the sciences from themselves from the reductionist fantasies entailed in their ontology.
To ask the sciences to “admit” creation, then, is not to ask them to become theology or apologetics, as if it were the job of biology or physics to “prove” the fact of creation or of God’s existence. Rather it is to ask them to attend more carefully to the metaphysical exigencies of their own activity and to see in the world what is actually there qua biology, physics, chemistry, and so on, that is, according to the different formal aspects that distinguish the sciences from each other.
What the World Is
The biblical doctrine of creation that took philosophical shape against the backdrop of Plato’s Timaeus, various strands of Neoplatonism, and the ambient Gnosticism in late antiquity did not emerge from free-standing cosmological speculation. It was not intended as kind proto-scientistic explanation for the origin of the world. The doctrine of creation developed in its ontological form as a function of the doctrine of God, whose clarification was necessitated by the confession of Christ as Lord. It served above all to articulate and protect the transcendent otherness of God from the world by liberating the concept of God from any coeval determining principle—God has no opposite—thus preventing the idolatrous reduction of God to an entity within a still more comprehensive order than the divine being itself.
This infinite difference between God and the world came to be expressed through a number of largely negative formulations that would become axiomatic over the course of subsequent centuries: God is neither extended, nor finite; he is not a composite of act and potency or essence and existence; he is not measurable, divisible or localizable by time or space. He is rather like “a circle,” in the image of Alain de Lille, “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”[viii] God is therefore neither a being, as if being were a genus and God and the world were two instances of it; nor is he himself the being of the world. Relation to the world does not define what it means to be God; hence the scholastics would say that God has only a rational rather than a real relation to the world, while the world has a real relation to God.
God is all—God plus the world is not “more” than God alone—and yet, somehow there not only exists something else that is not God, but something that is good and indeed an image of God in its very “not-Godness:” a mystery that can only be resolved in the doctrine of the Trinity and what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls a “philosophy of freedom and love.”[ix] And yet, all these negations are but the reverse side of an affirmation of God’s super-eminence, that God alone is he whose very essence it is to exist, that God alone, is perfect actuality, lacking and therefore needing, nothing.
It is precisely by virtue of God’s radical transcendence of the world that he can be radically immanent within the world, more interior to me than I am to myself, as St. Augustine says, present to all things “innermostly,” in the words of Aquinas as the giver of their being.[x] Far from negating the proper autonomy of natural agents and processes as many Darwinians have imagined, the innermost presence of God to all things establishes the condition of possibility for their autonomy. Because being “is more intimate to anything than those things by which being is specified,” says St. Thomas, “God operates immediately”—without mediation—in all things,” his power being “like an intermediary that joins the power of any secondary cause with its effect.”[xi] Thus he will add in the Summa Contra Gentiles that “the same effect is not attributed to a natural cause and to divine power in such a way that it is partly done by God, and partly done by the natural agent; rather it is wholly done by both, according to a different way, just as the same effect is wholly attributed to the instrument and also wholly to the principal agent.”[xii]
This has important of implications for the meaning of creation, both from God’s side and from ours. St. Thomas will refer to these as the active and passive senses of creation. These implications clarify the meaning of the doctrine and act of creation and will transform the meaning of the question at issue between Christian theology and modern science.
Let us first consider the meaning of creation from God’s side, what Aquinas calls creation in its active sense. Because God is already the super-abundant fullness of being and act, because he lacks nothing and does not need the world in order to be God, God need not ‘do’ anything other than be in order to cause the world. Hence Aquinas will say in the Summa that God does not act for an end in creating; in other words, creation does not change God by actualizing some unrealized potency in him. All the action, as it were, appears on the side of the world.
So what then of the world, what Aquinas calls creation in the passive sense? Thomas denies that creation falls under the categories of action, passion, motion or change, because, following Aristotle, he recognizes that all of categories designate a movement from something to something. In other words, all of these movements and modifications presuppose being and occur within being. Creation, in the strict sense, is distinct from all other forms of causality—the work of nature and art for example—because these also presuppose being. Hence Aquinas will reserve creation for God alone. Yet the whole point of God’s absoluteness as perfect act is that his free creative act presupposes nothing but his own self-communicating goodness, because as fullness of goodness as such, God can neither be lacking nor added to. The difficulty in thinking the nihil without subtly making it something, and thus of thinking creation ex nihilo without reducing it to some kind of manufacture—is a corollary to the difficulty in thinking God alone.
Because creation realizes no unrealized potency in God, Aquinas will say in his Commentary on the Sentences that creation in its active sense is a certain ‘letting be’ of the world, while in its passive sense it denotes a certain interior reception of being through which the world is given to itself. The absurdity of imagining creation as a “process” or as a kind of “causal joint” between God and the world should be obvious, for prior to creation there is nothing for such a mechanism to act upon. Creation in the active sense is simply God himself with a certain rational relation to the creature, while creation in the passive sense is simply the world itself with a certain real relation to God. Creation is not something done to the world, an event within being. Rather creation simply is the world, the event of being, in its constitutive relation to God.
This means that creation does not just designate the origin or motive for the world, nor even the just first in a series of moments somewhere in Planck Time 10-32 of s second before the Big Bang, but the ontological structure of the world visible in all things at every moment. “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”[xiii] To recognize that creation is not an event within being—as Augustine recognized that it is not an event within and measured by time—is to recognize that a certain supra-historical dimension, a ‘vertical’ order of being irreducible to the ‘horizontal’ sequence of historical causes and effects, is a constitutive aspect of this structure.[xiv] This is built-in transcendence is reflected in the indivisible ontological identity that each thing possesses for the duration of its existence as that thing despite its perpetually changing matter, what the tradition of Christian Aristotelianism called substantial form or essence, as well as that mysterious act of existing that is simultaneously proper to each thing and common to all things, binding them into one meta-physical order, which the tradition identified with existence (esse/existentia). It is important to see, moreover, that this entire structure has a novel, ex nihilo quality, by virtue of which each created effect, the subject of its “own” interior and incommunicable act of being, is existentially irreducible to its causes and irreplaceable by any other creature in the universe. A child is not an “emanation” of his parents, but an irreducibly new being, his birth marking the advent of a new world where once there was nothing. Even a materially identical derivative, like a clone, could not be its source.
To “see” creation, then, is not to discover some fact about the world, some process in the world working in concert or competition with natural processes that could be experimentally isolated, verified or disproved by the natural sciences. Rather it is to see the world itself more deeply and comprehensively. This is the work of a lifetime, perhaps many lifetimes, and obviously more than I can hope to achieve in what remains of this essay. Nevertheless, I hope to have seen enough of creation to lay out some “rules” by which to proceed, though “rule” is probably a misleading way to describe what are really more like formal principles of thought. Science is not a univocal term, nor its practice a monolithic activity. My earlier criticisms notwithstanding, scholars like Alan Padgett and Mikael Stenmark have shown something of the various levels at which theology and scientific inquiry “interact” in the course of different theoretical and practical applications.[xv] There can be no set of a priori “rules” to determine the precise outcome of a specific and concrete encounter between theology and any particular scientific endeavor in advance of its occurrence. Even so, I hope that some general guideposts my prevent Christian philosophers and theologians from getting lost in the meeting.
“Rules” of Theological Engagement
The first rule, already discussed, bears repeating. Conceptions of God and nature are correlative; every conception of nature will harbor within itself a tacit conception of God, irrespective of whether he is believed to exist. Metaphysical and theological judgments are therefore not optional. This follows theologically from the fact that there is no “outside” of creation and that relation to God is therefore recapitulated in all other relations including thought. It follows philosophically from the fact that differentiating nature from God is itself a theological act dependent upon tacit assumptions about the kind of God from whom nature is distinct. And what is true theologically and philosophically has borne itself out historically, as transformations in the interpretation of nature have been predicated upon or entailed corresponding transformations to the meaning of God, being, reason and truth.
The second rule follows from the first. Metaphysical and theological engagements with the sciences should be metaphysical and theological, critically engaging the metaphysical and theological judgments presupposed and perpetuated by science. Because theology and science do not belong to the same order of theory, nor God and the world to the same order of being and causality, theology does not have an a priori stake in affirming or denying any particular scientific theory. The truth of creation does not rise or fall with such theories, however inviting (or threatening), say, Big Bang cosmology or evolution by random variation and natural selection may seem to be. One cannot pass from the experimental and mechanical analysis of material phenomena to any ultimate judgments without passing over into metaphysics and theology, which of course the sciences cannot help doing. But since such judgments are not simply the conclusion but the presupposition of scientific inquiry, the interest of theology and philosophy lies more in the question of how these judgments mediate the interpretation of the evidence and indeed determine in advance what features of reality are to count as “empirical” and “evidentiary” in the first place.
To say that theological criticisms are not scientific criticisms is not to say that they do not have scientific import. Because theology and science are correlative, defects in the underlying metaphysics and theology will inevitably result in a reductive treatment of natural phenomena, even when rendered in ostensibly anti-reductionist forms such as emergence theory, complex systems theory, or epigenetic holism. This situation cannot be remedied without readmitting in some form the ontological principles that denote the indivisible unity, interiority, intrinsic intelligibility, and finalities of things, in other words, without a renewed metaphysical understanding of the nature of entity or substance.
The third principle is a corollary of the first two. We have seen that creation as the ontological structure of the world entails a distinction between a “vertical” order of being and a “horizontal” order of history. Ontologically, this means that “what a thing is” cannot be reduced to “how it works” or the antecedent causes that produced it, and of course as a matter of logic, these are distinct kinds of questions. The problem is that modern science science, commenced historically in opposition to Aristotle, is predicated upon the negation of the ontological principles (essence and existence) corresponding to questions in the what-is form. Aquinas notes that “the name intellect arises from the intellect’s ability to know the most profound elements of a thing; for to understand (intelligere) means to read what is inside a thing (intus legere). Sense and imagination know only external accidents, but the intellect alone penetrates to the interior and to the essence of a thing.”[xvi]
When there is no longer an essence to read into, the meaning of intelligence and truth changes, leaving us with a form of reason, Henry Veatch once observed, that cannot say or think what anything is.[xvii] Reason becomes essentially and exclusively pragmatic and functional, so that the “truth” of our theories is precisely identical to our success in manipulating, predicting and controlling natural phenomena—a conception of knowledge which corresponds to ‘nature’ reduced to a plastic mechanism or system. The capacity to engage the sciences from within an ontology of creation, then, is inseparable from the recovery of a more comprehensive conception of reason and an ontological, rather than merely functional, conception of truth.
Fourth, if the infinite God is immediately and interiorly present to all creatures as the giver of their being, this means that each creature is in a certain sense “bottomless,” possessed of an “intensively infinity” that is always “more” in principle than any knowledge we can have of it. As God is truly known partly in the negative mode of not-knowing, so too must true knowledge of the creature include a certain not-knowing that is more than mere ignorance or the current limit to the inexorable progress of science, but the measure of the permanent excess of being to thought. Since all creatures are by virtue of their participation in divine being, a certain via negativa is applicable by analogy to the knowledge of both God and the world, it is the form that knowledge must take if it is to be adequate to its object. Once again, this negative way is but the reverse side of the positive affirmation that the creature is a subject of incommunicable being who cannot be exhausted by our knowledge or exhaustively controlled—implying a notion of truth greater than functional utility and a form of knowledge whose primitive form is contemplation and adoration, not domination. By contrast, the pragmatic conflation of truth and control, whatever its stunning success, ultimately falsifies its objects in advance.
Fifth, what we have called the ontological structure of creation, far from being merely a fideistic assertion or a hypothesis, describes the actual world from which and within which science actually commences: a single order of reality (being) that has already taken up residence in us in manifold ways prior to our awareness of it and that necessarily presents itself to our experience as a meaningful whole, at once simultaneous and successive (intellectus and ratio), comprised of meaningful wholes. The real world from which science begins is the world of things being what they are, doing what they do, in virtue of what they are. This means, first, that the unity and ontological identity conferred on things by creation cannot be expunged without eliminating the intelligibility presupposed in any functional whole-parts relationship and intrinsic to experience as such.
Since this is impossible, it means, secondly, that the exiled principle of unity and intelligibility will always be smuggled back in in another guise—biological information, for example—to do the work of the banished “Platonic” remainder. This is what Plato and Aristotle meant in calling the first principle of being un-hypothetical. It is what anyone understands in understanding anything at all so that the very attempt to deny it affirms it, and those who think they disbelieve it simply display their want of self-knowledge. In brief, if creation is true, if there is an order of being distinct from the order of history, then we ourselves belong to that order and its exigencies—not to some illusory Archimedean point outside of it—and will take recourse to its necessary ontological principles even in our attempts to deny them. The true nature of scientific cognition is thus revealed to be a form of abstraction that imposes upon and isolates certain functional features of being from the totality of conditions that characterize the world in its actual existence, determining which of those conditions will count as evidentiary on that basis. But the totality of conditions does not cease to be real or operative in actuality simply because it is allowed to recede into the background of our attention.
Deeper philosophical self-awareness of this truth on the part of science would preserve the functional legitimacy of experimental reason without the reductionism that inevitably accompanies it. It prevents us from conflating distinctions in thought or separations imposed by experimental practice with real divisions in being. It would thereby prevent us from regarding the parts of reality isolated through experimental abstractions as more ontologically basic than the wholes from which they were abstracted or from imagining that the real world and the things in it were merely the sum of those abstracted elements, which always leaves form and finality, the qualitative and the meaningful, the interior and the quintessentially human, as an epiphenomenal remainder.
Finally, to recognize that the reality of creation implies a more comprehensive, dare we say contemplative form of reason, is to acknowledge the problem of incommensurability, the fact that between the two conceptions of reason there is no neutral, mutually agreed upon criterion by which their respective truth claims can be adjudicated. Modern science is not merely a new method for achieving the same goal as premodern science. Francis Bacon understood this, which is why he advanced a new goal—power, the actualization of “technological” possibilities—as the true goal of knowledge and the criterion by which its “truth” would be judged. The successful resolution of the “theology and science” question depends upon the rediscovery of a still higher goal that is the ground of theology’s rational superiority to every particular science that would seek to become queen. The only true criterion for determining the adequacy of our knowledge to the world is the world itself, a world that includes the meaning through which we apprehend it, which is the condition of possibility for science. The criterion is thus provided by an old German proverb relayed by the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, which I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing. Whoever sees the most wins.[xviii]
Michael Hanby is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science at Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Washington, DC.
[i] See, e.g., Peter Harrison and John Milbank (eds.), After Science and Religion: Fresh Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
[ii] Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1220-1685, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1.
[iii] For a fairly notorious example of a scientific ‘policing’ of theology that assumes a deficient and unacknowledged theological basis, see Stephen Jay Gould, Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999).
[iv] My own book is a modest contribution to this effort. See Michael Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[v] For an example of a biologist who comes near to this conclusion, see Richard C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991).
[vi] For two hypothetical explorations of this future, see Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019); Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017).
[vii] John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1999), 61-93.
[viii] In Bonaventure, Itin., V.8.
[ix] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 143.
[x] Augustine, Conf., III.6.11; Aquinas, ST, I, 8.1, resp.
[xi] Aquinas, In Sent., II.1, 1,4.
[xii] Aquinas, SCG, III.70.8.
[xiii] Romans 1:20.
[xiv] Augustine, Conf. XI.13.
[xv] Mikail Stenmark, How to Relate Science and Religion: A Multidimensional Model (Grant Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004); Alan Padgett, Science and the Study of God: A Mutuality Model for Theology and Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
[xvi] Aquinas, De Ver., I.XII.
[xvii] Henry B. Veatch, Two Logics: The Conflict Between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 26-41.
[xviii] Balthasar, Epilogue (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 15.
The Earth is the Lord’s and the Fullness Thereof:
Creation ex nihilo and the ‘Rules’ for Theological Engagement with the Sciences
On Getting the Question Right
There are signs on the horizon that the times they are a changin’ and that Christian theologians and philosophers have begun to reverse their centuries long retreat from the advances of modern science and its claims to exclusive authority over the meaning of reason and the truth of nature. Even the Templeton Foundation, which for decades promoted what Larry Chapp once called a “false irenicism” between theology and science, a kind of a priori concordism that inevitably subordinated the former to the latter, has recently thrown its weight behind more intellectually daring projects.[i] These are hopeful developments for the Church and for the cause of truth, irrespective of the time it takes for them to reach parishioners in the pews or the unwelcome and uncomprehending reception they are likely to meet within the totalizing frame of a scientific culture, defined, in the words of the Australian historian Stephen Gaukroger, by “the gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones.”[ii]
Several intellectual factors have converged to create this opportunity. From Thomas Kuhn to Paul Feyerabend to Hans Jonas, from Amos Funkenstein to Gaukroger to Peter Harrison, succeeding generations of philosophers and historians of science have exploded the “Whig” mythology of a “pure” science, uncontaminated by metaphysical and theological judgment, that attains to pristine objectivity by a linear, cumulative increase in knowledge. Of course, none of this denies the obvious success of modern science in achieving its goals, but it does call into question the extent to which this success should simply be equated with truth and whether science should enjoy exclusive authority over the meaning (or meaninglessness) of nature. While these are now axiomatic assumptions within our scientistic culture, they are in fact philosophical points that once had to be argued for and that required a radical “paradigm shift” or gestalt switch to become effective. It is now apparent that the scientific revolution which commenced in the seventeenth century and has not ended is premised on a more fundamental metaphysical revolution, a radical re-conception of being, nature, knowledge, and even truth itself that mediates our apprehension of natural phenomena, determines the questions we ask of them, and defines in advance which features of their self-presentation in our experience shall count as evidentiary.
It is equally clear that this revolution presupposes and perpetuates a corresponding theologia naturalis—an often-unarticulated notion of what God must be like, irrespective of whether he exists, if nature is really like this—even if that theology takes the negative form of atheism.[iii] Contrary to our “whiggish” prejudices, atheism is not the default position of a metaphysically neutral reason pulling itself up by its own intellectual bootstraps; nor is it an accident that it flourishes on what was once Christian soil. Atheism is a uniquely Christian phenomenon and a privative one, parasitic upon some conception of the God in which it disbelieves. The theological and metaphysical defects in the theologia naturalis of modern science, defects which many well-meaning theologians have tacitly assumed in attempting to engage with the sciences on the terms of their own authority, are a principal reason why the so-called dialogue between theology and science rarely attains to an authentic engagement with the questions of God and creation.
Cognizant of this intellectual landscape and its necessities, a number of philosophers and theologians, especially thinkers associated with the Radical Orthodoxy and Communio schools, have begun to recover theology’s lost confidence and to recognize that theological judgment extends to everything, since no facet of reality can fall outside of creation. They have thus begun to call into question the very notion of “religion” as some special, circumscribed sphere separated from an essentially secular reality evacuated of divine presence. This promises a much more fruitful encounter. [iv]
To these intellectual catalysts we may also add more recent social and cultural factors, though their eventual effect upon thought is still unclear. One is the rapid and comprehensive triumph of the sexual revolution, the human (or posthuman) face of the scientific and technological revolution. The advent of what the reigning Assistant Secretary of Health called the “complex and nuanced field” of transgender medicine, when added to an inglorious history that already includes phrenology, eugenics, and genetic reductionism, at least raises of the question of whether, in addition and to its inevitable metaphysical and theological prejudices, ideological corruption is a feature and not a bug of modern science.[v] The triumph of the digital revolution has launched the mutual surveillance of all against all. Almighty Google, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, is nearer to me than I am to myself.
This immense new power has brought new forms of political agency without political responsibility, the action of everyone in general and no one in particular, that call into question whether the human political future will be human or political in any recognizable sense.[vi] The call to “let science rule us,” which is at least as old as the philosophy of John Dewey, acquired new political force during the pandemic, accelerating the fusion of the digital, sexual and biotechnical revolutions.[vii] Together they seem to be hastening our descent into a post political form of rule that I have called biotechnocracy and others are calling the “biomedical security state.” All of this provokes the question of whether the scientific culture of our New Atlantis, where “all cognitive values are assimilated to scientific ones,” is really so benign after all.
The necessity of metaphysical and theological judgment simultaneously complexifies and clarifies what sort of question the “science and theology” question really is. While I myself have learned a great deal from the standard historical and “sociology of knowledge” approaches to this question and would not wish to discount these forms of inquiry, the nature of this question, or rather the nature of the fundamental question at issue between theology and science as forms of knowledge or historical practices, is not principally historical, methodological or sociological. None of these forms of knowledge can pass from the factual to the true without surreptitiously becoming a kind of total metaphysics, that is, without ceasing to be themselves and becoming philosophy.
So prioritizing these methods of approach, without a corresponding philosophical self-awareness of the aforementioned necessities and the nature of one’s own cognitive act, is likely to conceal as much as it reveals. Above all, it will conceal its tendency to make empiricists—and therefore unwitting atheists—of us all, abstracting both thought and its object from their constitutive relation to God and from the totality of conditions characterizing their actual existence in order to construct an indifferent ‘empirical’ sphere, before adding these constitutive relations back in as hypothetical, second order phenomena. In brief, the “science and theology” question is not first a historical or sociological question because every attempt to post the question will tacitly presuppose an answer to the more basic questions about the nature of being (and the being of nature) in relation to God and the sort of God to which nature is hypothetically related. Beneath this question, in other words, are the still more primitive questions: Who is God? What is the world? These are the fundamental questions at issue between theology and science.
For the remainder of this essay, therefore, I will attempt to sketch an answer to these questions, to think through creation in its philosophical or metaphysical meaning—by no means its only meaning—to suggest how it might govern theological thinking about modern science and even why it is the rationally superior alternative to modern science. This latter point obviously requires some advance clarification. This assertion of superiority does not assume a necessary and eternal opposition between theology and science, though the metaphysical judgments inherent in the self-understanding of science often place it in contingent opposition to a coherent and orthodox theology.
Nor does the rational superiority of theology consist in its providing better explanation of the dynamics of the natural systems and processes that are the subjects of the various sciences. I reject the “a priori discordism” of Christianity’s atheistic and scientistic despisers as much as the “a priori concordism” of the so-called “Templeton paradigm,” and the attempts to “fuse” the theology of creation with scientific theories such as evolution or Big Bang cosmology. In my view, all such efforts are premised upon a category mistake that misconstrues the doctrines of God and creation in advance. One could only imagine that theology and science are mutually exclusive forms of explanation by assuming that divine and natural agency are mutually exclusive forms of causality, that is, if God and the world are juxtaposed as two entities within an order of being that comprehends them both, and it is precisely this—we shall see momentarily—that the doctrine of creation denies.
Methodologically speaking, this means that the ancient Christological principle—distinguish in order to unify—is applicable by analogy to the relationship between theology and science. By distinguishing more radically between science, theology, and metaphysics, metaphysics and theology can be brought more interiorly to bear upon the sciences, engaging and critically judging them not qua biology, chemistry, or physics—that is, not as mechanical and experimental analyses of the world’s physical dynamisms—but qua the metaphysics and theology they inevitably assume and become when they fail to comprehend their own ontological and theological premises or the nature of their own cognitive act.
But this then alters both what it means to say that creation is rationally superior to the sciences and what a positive, fruitful engagement between theology and science would look like. The theology of creation does not offer a better account of “how the world works.” It is not in this that its rational superiority consists. Its rational superiority consists in the fact that the Christian account of “what the world is” is more fully adequate to the world in its self-presentation and to the way that we cannot help experiencing it, phenomena whose explanation is precluded in advance the operative ontology within modern science. It is superior because it rescues reason itself from the reductive functionalism of scientific rationality and more adequately grasps the nature of scientific cognition as the legitimate abstraction from the totality of being that it in fact is. Theology can therefore “save the appearances” for the sciences, accommodating within itself the genuine gains of scientific analysis while simultaneously accommodating ineliminable aspects of being and experience excluded from scientific analysis by its ontology, thus “saving” the sciences from themselves from the reductionist fantasies entailed in their ontology.
To ask the sciences to “admit” creation, then, is not to ask them to become theology or apologetics, as if it were the job of biology or physics to “prove” the fact of creation or of God’s existence. Rather it is to ask them to attend more carefully to the metaphysical exigencies of their own activity and to see in the world what is actually there qua biology, physics, chemistry, and so on, that is, according to the different formal aspects that distinguish the sciences from each other.
What the World Is
The biblical doctrine of creation that took philosophical shape against the backdrop of Plato’s Timaeus, various strands of Neoplatonism, and the ambient Gnosticism in late antiquity did not emerge from free-standing cosmological speculation. It was not intended as kind proto-scientistic explanation for the origin of the world. The doctrine of creation developed in its ontological form as a function of the doctrine of God, whose clarification was necessitated by the confession of Christ as Lord. It served above all to articulate and protect the transcendent otherness of God from the world by liberating the concept of God from any coeval determining principle—God has no opposite—thus preventing the idolatrous reduction of God to an entity within a still more comprehensive order than the divine being itself.
This infinite difference between God and the world came to be expressed through a number of largely negative formulations that would become axiomatic over the course of subsequent centuries: God is neither extended, nor finite; he is not a composite of act and potency or essence and existence; he is not measurable, divisible or localizable by time or space. He is rather like “a circle,” in the image of Alain de Lille, “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”[viii] God is therefore neither a being, as if being were a genus and God and the world were two instances of it; nor is he himself the being of the world. Relation to the world does not define what it means to be God; hence the scholastics would say that God has only a rational rather than a real relation to the world, while the world has a real relation to God.
God is all—God plus the world is not “more” than God alone—and yet, somehow there not only exists something else that is not God, but something that is good and indeed an image of God in its very “not-Godness:” a mystery that can only be resolved in the doctrine of the Trinity and what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls a “philosophy of freedom and love.”[ix] And yet, all these negations are but the reverse side of an affirmation of God’s super-eminence, that God alone is he whose very essence it is to exist, that God alone, is perfect actuality, lacking and therefore needing, nothing.
It is precisely by virtue of God’s radical transcendence of the world that he can be radically immanent within the world, more interior to me than I am to myself, as St. Augustine says, present to all things “innermostly,” in the words of Aquinas as the giver of their being.[x] Far from negating the proper autonomy of natural agents and processes as many Darwinians have imagined, the innermost presence of God to all things establishes the condition of possibility for their autonomy. Because being “is more intimate to anything than those things by which being is specified,” says St. Thomas, “God operates immediately”—without mediation—in all things,” his power being “like an intermediary that joins the power of any secondary cause with its effect.”[xi] Thus he will add in the Summa Contra Gentiles that “the same effect is not attributed to a natural cause and to divine power in such a way that it is partly done by God, and partly done by the natural agent; rather it is wholly done by both, according to a different way, just as the same effect is wholly attributed to the instrument and also wholly to the principal agent.”[xii]
This has important of implications for the meaning of creation, both from God’s side and from ours. St. Thomas will refer to these as the active and passive senses of creation. These implications clarify the meaning of the doctrine and act of creation and will transform the meaning of the question at issue between Christian theology and modern science.
Let us first consider the meaning of creation from God’s side, what Aquinas calls creation in its active sense. Because God is already the super-abundant fullness of being and act, because he lacks nothing and does not need the world in order to be God, God need not ‘do’ anything other than be in order to cause the world. Hence Aquinas will say in the Summa that God does not act for an end in creating; in other words, creation does not change God by actualizing some unrealized potency in him. All the action, as it were, appears on the side of the world.
So what then of the world, what Aquinas calls creation in the passive sense? Thomas denies that creation falls under the categories of action, passion, motion or change, because, following Aristotle, he recognizes that all of categories designate a movement from something to something. In other words, all of these movements and modifications presuppose being and occur within being. Creation, in the strict sense, is distinct from all other forms of causality—the work of nature and art for example—because these also presuppose being. Hence Aquinas will reserve creation for God alone. Yet the whole point of God’s absoluteness as perfect act is that his free creative act presupposes nothing but his own self-communicating goodness, because as fullness of goodness as such, God can neither be lacking nor added to. The difficulty in thinking the nihil without subtly making it something, and thus of thinking creation ex nihilo without reducing it to some kind of manufacture—is a corollary to the difficulty in thinking God alone.
Because creation realizes no unrealized potency in God, Aquinas will say in his Commentary on the Sentences that creation in its active sense is a certain ‘letting be’ of the world, while in its passive sense it denotes a certain interior reception of being through which the world is given to itself. The absurdity of imagining creation as a “process” or as a kind of “causal joint” between God and the world should be obvious, for prior to creation there is nothing for such a mechanism to act upon. Creation in the active sense is simply God himself with a certain rational relation to the creature, while creation in the passive sense is simply the world itself with a certain real relation to God. Creation is not something done to the world, an event within being. Rather creation simply is the world, the event of being, in its constitutive relation to God.
This means that creation does not just designate the origin or motive for the world, nor even the just first in a series of moments somewhere in Planck Time 10-32 of s second before the Big Bang, but the ontological structure of the world visible in all things at every moment. “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”[xiii] To recognize that creation is not an event within being—as Augustine recognized that it is not an event within and measured by time—is to recognize that a certain supra-historical dimension, a ‘vertical’ order of being irreducible to the ‘horizontal’ sequence of historical causes and effects, is a constitutive aspect of this structure.[xiv] This is built-in transcendence is reflected in the indivisible ontological identity that each thing possesses for the duration of its existence as that thing despite its perpetually changing matter, what the tradition of Christian Aristotelianism called substantial form or essence, as well as that mysterious act of existing that is simultaneously proper to each thing and common to all things, binding them into one meta-physical order, which the tradition identified with existence (esse/existentia). It is important to see, moreover, that this entire structure has a novel, ex nihilo quality, by virtue of which each created effect, the subject of its “own” interior and incommunicable act of being, is existentially irreducible to its causes and irreplaceable by any other creature in the universe. A child is not an “emanation” of his parents, but an irreducibly new being, his birth marking the advent of a new world where once there was nothing. Even a materially identical derivative, like a clone, could not be its source.
To “see” creation, then, is not to discover some fact about the world, some process in the world working in concert or competition with natural processes that could be experimentally isolated, verified or disproved by the natural sciences. Rather it is to see the world itself more deeply and comprehensively. This is the work of a lifetime, perhaps many lifetimes, and obviously more than I can hope to achieve in what remains of this essay. Nevertheless, I hope to have seen enough of creation to lay out some “rules” by which to proceed, though “rule” is probably a misleading way to describe what are really more like formal principles of thought. Science is not a univocal term, nor its practice a monolithic activity. My earlier criticisms notwithstanding, scholars like Alan Padgett and Mikael Stenmark have shown something of the various levels at which theology and scientific inquiry “interact” in the course of different theoretical and practical applications.[xv] There can be no set of a priori “rules” to determine the precise outcome of a specific and concrete encounter between theology and any particular scientific endeavor in advance of its occurrence. Even so, I hope that some general guideposts my prevent Christian philosophers and theologians from getting lost in the meeting.
“Rules” of Theological Engagement
The first rule, already discussed, bears repeating. Conceptions of God and nature are correlative; every conception of nature will harbor within itself a tacit conception of God, irrespective of whether he is believed to exist. Metaphysical and theological judgments are therefore not optional. This follows theologically from the fact that there is no “outside” of creation and that relation to God is therefore recapitulated in all other relations including thought. It follows philosophically from the fact that differentiating nature from God is itself a theological act dependent upon tacit assumptions about the kind of God from whom nature is distinct. And what is true theologically and philosophically has borne itself out historically, as transformations in the interpretation of nature have been predicated upon or entailed corresponding transformations to the meaning of God, being, reason and truth.
The second rule follows from the first. Metaphysical and theological engagements with the sciences should be metaphysical and theological, critically engaging the metaphysical and theological judgments presupposed and perpetuated by science. Because theology and science do not belong to the same order of theory, nor God and the world to the same order of being and causality, theology does not have an a priori stake in affirming or denying any particular scientific theory. The truth of creation does not rise or fall with such theories, however inviting (or threatening), say, Big Bang cosmology or evolution by random variation and natural selection may seem to be. One cannot pass from the experimental and mechanical analysis of material phenomena to any ultimate judgments without passing over into metaphysics and theology, which of course the sciences cannot help doing. But since such judgments are not simply the conclusion but the presupposition of scientific inquiry, the interest of theology and philosophy lies more in the question of how these judgments mediate the interpretation of the evidence and indeed determine in advance what features of reality are to count as “empirical” and “evidentiary” in the first place.
To say that theological criticisms are not scientific criticisms is not to say that they do not have scientific import. Because theology and science are correlative, defects in the underlying metaphysics and theology will inevitably result in a reductive treatment of natural phenomena, even when rendered in ostensibly anti-reductionist forms such as emergence theory, complex systems theory, or epigenetic holism. This situation cannot be remedied without readmitting in some form the ontological principles that denote the indivisible unity, interiority, intrinsic intelligibility, and finalities of things, in other words, without a renewed metaphysical understanding of the nature of entity or substance.
The third principle is a corollary of the first two. We have seen that creation as the ontological structure of the world entails a distinction between a “vertical” order of being and a “horizontal” order of history. Ontologically, this means that “what a thing is” cannot be reduced to “how it works” or the antecedent causes that produced it, and of course as a matter of logic, these are distinct kinds of questions. The problem is that modern science science, commenced historically in opposition to Aristotle, is predicated upon the negation of the ontological principles (essence and existence) corresponding to questions in the what-is form. Aquinas notes that “the name intellect arises from the intellect’s ability to know the most profound elements of a thing; for to understand (intelligere) means to read what is inside a thing (intus legere). Sense and imagination know only external accidents, but the intellect alone penetrates to the interior and to the essence of a thing.”[xvi]
When there is no longer an essence to read into, the meaning of intelligence and truth changes, leaving us with a form of reason, Henry Veatch once observed, that cannot say or think what anything is.[xvii] Reason becomes essentially and exclusively pragmatic and functional, so that the “truth” of our theories is precisely identical to our success in manipulating, predicting and controlling natural phenomena—a conception of knowledge which corresponds to ‘nature’ reduced to a plastic mechanism or system. The capacity to engage the sciences from within an ontology of creation, then, is inseparable from the recovery of a more comprehensive conception of reason and an ontological, rather than merely functional, conception of truth.
Fourth, if the infinite God is immediately and interiorly present to all creatures as the giver of their being, this means that each creature is in a certain sense “bottomless,” possessed of an “intensively infinity” that is always “more” in principle than any knowledge we can have of it. As God is truly known partly in the negative mode of not-knowing, so too must true knowledge of the creature include a certain not-knowing that is more than mere ignorance or the current limit to the inexorable progress of science, but the measure of the permanent excess of being to thought. Since all creatures are by virtue of their participation in divine being, a certain via negativa is applicable by analogy to the knowledge of both God and the world, it is the form that knowledge must take if it is to be adequate to its object. Once again, this negative way is but the reverse side of the positive affirmation that the creature is a subject of incommunicable being who cannot be exhausted by our knowledge or exhaustively controlled—implying a notion of truth greater than functional utility and a form of knowledge whose primitive form is contemplation and adoration, not domination. By contrast, the pragmatic conflation of truth and control, whatever its stunning success, ultimately falsifies its objects in advance.
Fifth, what we have called the ontological structure of creation, far from being merely a fideistic assertion or a hypothesis, describes the actual world from which and within which science actually commences: a single order of reality (being) that has already taken up residence in us in manifold ways prior to our awareness of it and that necessarily presents itself to our experience as a meaningful whole, at once simultaneous and successive (intellectus and ratio), comprised of meaningful wholes. The real world from which science begins is the world of things being what they are, doing what they do, in virtue of what they are. This means, first, that the unity and ontological identity conferred on things by creation cannot be expunged without eliminating the intelligibility presupposed in any functional whole-parts relationship and intrinsic to experience as such.
Since this is impossible, it means, secondly, that the exiled principle of unity and intelligibility will always be smuggled back in in another guise—biological information, for example—to do the work of the banished “Platonic” remainder. This is what Plato and Aristotle meant in calling the first principle of being un-hypothetical. It is what anyone understands in understanding anything at all so that the very attempt to deny it affirms it, and those who think they disbelieve it simply display their want of self-knowledge. In brief, if creation is true, if there is an order of being distinct from the order of history, then we ourselves belong to that order and its exigencies—not to some illusory Archimedean point outside of it—and will take recourse to its necessary ontological principles even in our attempts to deny them. The true nature of scientific cognition is thus revealed to be a form of abstraction that imposes upon and isolates certain functional features of being from the totality of conditions that characterize the world in its actual existence, determining which of those conditions will count as evidentiary on that basis. But the totality of conditions does not cease to be real or operative in actuality simply because it is allowed to recede into the background of our attention.
Deeper philosophical self-awareness of this truth on the part of science would preserve the functional legitimacy of experimental reason without the reductionism that inevitably accompanies it. It prevents us from conflating distinctions in thought or separations imposed by experimental practice with real divisions in being. It would thereby prevent us from regarding the parts of reality isolated through experimental abstractions as more ontologically basic than the wholes from which they were abstracted or from imagining that the real world and the things in it were merely the sum of those abstracted elements, which always leaves form and finality, the qualitative and the meaningful, the interior and the quintessentially human, as an epiphenomenal remainder.
Finally, to recognize that the reality of creation implies a more comprehensive, dare we say contemplative form of reason, is to acknowledge the problem of incommensurability, the fact that between the two conceptions of reason there is no neutral, mutually agreed upon criterion by which their respective truth claims can be adjudicated. Modern science is not merely a new method for achieving the same goal as premodern science. Francis Bacon understood this, which is why he advanced a new goal—power, the actualization of “technological” possibilities—as the true goal of knowledge and the criterion by which its “truth” would be judged. The successful resolution of the “theology and science” question depends upon the rediscovery of a still higher goal that is the ground of theology’s rational superiority to every particular science that would seek to become queen. The only true criterion for determining the adequacy of our knowledge to the world is the world itself, a world that includes the meaning through which we apprehend it, which is the condition of possibility for science. The criterion is thus provided by an old German proverb relayed by the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, which I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing. Whoever sees the most wins.[xviii]
Michael Hanby is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science at Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Washington, DC.
[i] See, e.g., Peter Harrison and John Milbank (eds.), After Science and Religion: Fresh Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
[ii] Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1220-1685, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1.
[iii] For a fairly notorious example of a scientific ‘policing’ of theology that assumes a deficient and unacknowledged theological basis, see Stephen Jay Gould, Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999).
[iv] My own book is a modest contribution to this effort. See Michael Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[v] For an example of a biologist who comes near to this conclusion, see Richard C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991).
[vi] For two hypothetical explorations of this future, see Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019); Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017).
[vii] John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1999), 61-93.
[viii] In Bonaventure, Itin., V.8.
[ix] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 143.
[x] Augustine, Conf., III.6.11; Aquinas, ST, I, 8.1, resp.
[xi] Aquinas, In Sent., II.1, 1,4.
[xii] Aquinas, SCG, III.70.8.
[xiii] Romans 1:20.
[xiv] Augustine, Conf. XI.13.
[xv] Mikail Stenmark, How to Relate Science and Religion: A Multidimensional Model (Grant Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004); Alan Padgett, Science and the Study of God: A Mutuality Model for Theology and Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
[xvi] Aquinas, De Ver., I.XII.
[xvii] Henry B. Veatch, Two Logics: The Conflict Between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 26-41.
[xviii] Balthasar, Epilogue (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 15.
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