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(Talk at the American Church, Paris)

I

The practice of natural theology has traditionally been an effort to prove or demonstrate the existence of God by arguing from observed phenomena in nature on the basis of universal rational principles. It has been conducted separately from theological discussion of the God of revelation, the God revealed through the incarnation to be triune: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The perception that there is order within nature has always led to a felt need to explain this order. The classical Christian response shows the influence of the Greek notion of a universal logos, or cosmic order, and of Aristotelian cosmology, combined with Paul’s insight in Romans 1:20 that God’s power and nature have been understood and seen through the visible creation. Up until the twentieth century, this Christian response has been the rationalistic one of inference from nature to a first cause, on the assumption that God’s existence is universally perceptible and philosophically demonstrable.

Let me describe briefly two quite different examples of this traditional approach to natural theology. In the thirteenth century, which saw the rise of scholasticism and an intense stress on reason, Thomas Aquinas set out his Five Ways, or Proofs, of God’s existence, which involve tracing back to a First Principle the existence of motion, causality, contingency, degree of value—implying an ultimate perfection—and design or purpose. The basic argument for all Five Ways is that an infinite regress in any of these instances is rationally incoherent, and that in every case a First Cause, an Absolute Source, must be predicated. The existence of motion, for example, implies a Prime Mover; or, what exists might not have existed, so a Necessary Being must be predicated beyond the reach of contingency; or, directionality—what appears to be purposefulness—is to be observed in nature, in organic growth and in human action, so an Original Designer must be inferred or deducted; or, at the ethical level, the existence of natural law and the human conscience which constrains us and yet which is clearly not the result of our own will or reason, points to a metaphysical source beyond ourselves. This kind of approach to the question of the existence of God, while strong philosophically and persuasive to a believer, is vulnerable to the criticism (in my view weak, but the determined unbeliever can make anything count as an objection) that it involves what critics call flat assertion on the basis of ignorance, and that the inference in each case to a personal primary being called God is arbitrary.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing within the mechanistic cosmological framework of Newtonian thought as it had developed in the eighteenth century, William Paley saw the universe, and this world in particular, as a watch—that is, as a mechanism—from which he logically inferred a Watchmaker. He lived in the period of early industrialism and saw the apologetic potential of a mechanistic analogy to demonstrate the necessary existence of God. Paley adduced many other natural features to support his basic argument that contrivances in nature are inexplicable without reference to a Designer, but his mechanistic approach, in keeping with the tenor of his age, was vulnerable to the same criticism as Aquinas’s arguments; moreover, with respect to the specific watch analogy, the atheist philosopher David Hume pointed out that the world could just as well be compared with a plant or some living organism for which a strict design argument was philosophically untenable. This last criticism became even more forceful later in the century when Darwin observed that an appearance of design arises naturally in the course of evolution.

In the twentieth century, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth objected strongly to the independent aspect of traditional natural theology, by which he meant the development of arguments for the existence and nature of God separately from the biblical revelation of God the Trinity. Not only could natural theology, so conceived, not give knowledge of the Trinitarian God, but it split discussion of the knowledge of God into two parts—the first concerned with the one God that reason was supposed to be able to demonstrate, and the other concerned with the triune God revealed through Jesus Christ. Barth perceived that this was theologically and methodologically unacceptable. It was not that Barth ruled out the possibility of seeing traces of the Creator God within nature, or that he saw no place for rational structure in our knowledge of God, but he insisted that such a structure must be coordinated with revelation if it was not to be misleading abstraction.

The approach to natural theology—to the question of how a Christian is to consider the relation of nature to God—depends on one’s point of view, on what one sees. The modern world is very conscious of perspective, of point of view. It is evident that the fact that all human beings are rational does not mean we all see nature—the world out there—in the same way. Cultural context and religious experience fundamentally influence what and how we see. A converted Christian person will see evidence of God in nature, because he or she believes God is the Creator. A nonbeliever is not likely to see the same thing in the same way, obviously. This insight, common today, means that although the traditional approach to natural theology has been useful in its time, it is no longer really serviceable.

The main point to be made in this regard is that knowledge of the true God revealed in Scripture and supremely in Jesus Christ cannot be read off nature. One can sense—as Paul insists in the text from Romans that I mentioned a moment ago—God’s reality in the power and order of nature, yes, but one cannot, by virtue of human reason, infer or deduce the Trinity from natural phenomena. In recent years, a new approach to natural theology has been emerging which takes its starting point from within the Trinitarian framework. Its aim is not to prove or even argue for the existence or nature of God, but to give evidence of the explanatory power of the specific Christian vision of reality based on revelation, with respect both to scientific discoveries and to everyday experience.

II

I want to look now at how the apostle Paul talked about nature when addressing a crowd of curious Greek intellectuals in Athens. The account is in Acts 17:22–34. Paul recognizes that the people are religious and worship a variety of objects. In his wanderings in the city he had seen an altar inscribed “To an unknown god,” and he declares to his listeners that he will proclaim to them who God is. He does not proceed by using rationalistic arguments, as one might have expected in a Greek context. He refers immediately to the Creator of “the world and everything in it,” and goes on to call this God Lord and to declare that God had given mortals life and breath and had set out times and spatial boundaries for nations so that humans would search for him and perhaps find him. The Greeks had no concept of such a personal Creator of all things—the Platonic notion of a demiurge was as close as they had come to such an idea—but a vague sort of pantheistic sense of a divine presence was clearly in the air, and it was to this religious intuition among his listeners that the apostle was appealing.

To support this approach he quotes two Greek poets, Epimenides and the Stoic, Aratus, to the effect that in God “we live and move and have our being . . . for we too are his offspring” (v. 28). He then makes his decisive move, which is to declare that this God, of whose existence the Greeks have an intuition but no knowledge, calls people to repent—that is, basically, to change their way of seeing reality, which will change the way they act—because he—this God—has fixed a day when he will judge mankind, and this judgment will be carried out by a man whom God has appointed and whom, as an assurance of this, he has raised from the dead.

What is interesting for our purposes here is that Paul, in making his case for the true identity of the deity whom the Greeks call “the unknown god,” puts his emphasis on the creation of the world by this God and on God’s act to raise from the dead, in historical space/time, a man whom he has designated to be judge of the world. Paul does not speak explicitly here of this man as God—of the incarnation—but he does stress the resurrection. He does not use the rationalist tools of argument commonly used by the Greek philosophers when trying to take account of the religious impulse or to transcend it.

The God whom the Greeks have an intuition of, but who is very different from their ideas about him, is the Creator of nature and an actor in history. He is not to be identified with nature, but, as its Author, he is intimately associated with it. He is a personal deity who has dominion over the beginning and end of all things, over the destiny of mankind, over life and death. To speak truly of God, to identify the true God, one must speak of concrete nature, of the material world: God is the one who creates and orders nature and who acts within it to judge and redeem. His self-revelation happens in and through the material creation. Whether one accepts this argument or not—some Greeks did, some did not—it is evident that Paul’s vision provides a kind of coherence to the material world and to man’s destiny within it that neither the Greeks’ religiosity nor their philosophizing could provide. It is my contention that Paul’s vision, in its full-fledged Trinitarian shape, provides us too, living in the context of modern science, with a way of seeing all aspects of reality that gives them coherence and intelligibility.

III

Let me now approach this Trinitarian question from an anthropological angle. A philosophical stance adopted by the majority of the scientific community is what is called critical realism. It holds, in agreement with common sense, that there is an objective, external world out there separate from us, the observers, but also that we, as knowers, are subjectively involved in that world by virtue of our interpretation and appropriation of it; at the level of quantum phenomena, moreover, it is the case, the physicists tell us, that we actually influence that world out there by our experimental observation of it. Cognitive neuroscience of perception is showing that we exist in relation to the natural world, that our mental representations of it shape the way we see and understand it, and vice versa—in a word, that we are participants in nature, interactive with it; we do not create reality as such, but we do act creatively upon it—we are certainly not simply passive recipients of sensory data.

For our purposes, what I want to do here is to suggest the theological ground in Scripture for this relationality of mankind to nature, a relationality that philosophers at least since Kant have recognized and that neuroscience is confirming in our day. We are not so-called objective observers. Yes, our self-consciousness—unique in nature—gives us distance from the material world, but it does not separate us intrinsically from that world, in the manner of Cartesian dualism. The strict subject-object schema is transcended by the reality that we are integrated constitutionally into this material world that is God’s handiwork. By referring to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, we can gain the theological perspective that undergirds this reality.

Genesis 1 reveals that God is the Creator of all reality, the one who establishes order out of chaos, who brings light, energy, and all other creatures into being, where before was only darkness and void. Then verses 26–28 tell us that God has created mankind—man and woman—in his image, and that, as God’s representatives on earth, we are to multiply and have dominion over the world, that is, to rule it wisely and tend it as we might a garden, not by exploiting it ruthlessly for profit but by cultivating it joyfully in the interest of sociability, culture, and human welfare.

Genesis 2 goes on to develop the vocational dimension of humankind by speaking of Adam’s naming of the other creatures. Naming, which requires both authority and rationality, is accomplished through our linguistic gift and our tool-making capacity, which give rise to technology, science, and the various arts—in a word, to culture. By these means, we are enabled to carry out our vocation of exercising dominion.

From this double revelation of our being created in the image of God and of our having a cultural vocation, we may understand that men and women are ontologically—that is, in their very being—in relation to God and also to the created world. This insight provides a basic perspective on the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation in its anthropological dimension, that is, as it relates to mankind. We are indefeasibly bound to both God and nature, and we are responsible to both. The insight illuminates the discoveries I just mentioned in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and we shall see shortly its explanatory power in regard to many human capacities and activities.

A proper anthropology that fits within a Trinitarian framework for natural theology requires us to go on and look at Genesis 3, which describes the seduction and corruption of mankind by Satan’s wily appeal to human pride. This rebellion against the Creator leads not to a dissolution of our bond with God but to its inversion: it becomes a negative bond, rooted in fear instead of love, giving rise to unbelief, idolatry, competition with God, and finally atheism, expressed consummately in mankind’s defiant ambition to delete God altogether by means of science/technology—I use a computer term here deliberately—and to make a new creation—our own—replacing the kingdom of God with the kingdom of man, as the satanic snake in Eden intimated we could do. Our bond with God being distorted, our bond with our fellow humans and with the rest of nature must necessarily be distorted too. Our God-given tool-making power is perverted to the end of self-aggrandizement and so becomes an ambivalent force as the human race uses it creatively on the one hand to make culture, thus reflecting God’s creative power, and on the other hand deploys it to do evil by dominating and exploiting and destroying. Every period of human history gives evidence of both uses.

IV

Let me now return to the Trinitarian question as such, before listing areas of human experience that become more intelligible by being seen from within a Christian framework.

In the Genesis 1 narrative God is present and active in three expressions: first, God’s Wind, the Spirit, sweeps over the face of the waters and the formless void; second, God imagines his creation and speaks into the void; third, by God’s Word, creatures come into being, beginning with light, which is the energy that makes all other material reality possible. In the course of the Old Testament Scriptures that follow the Genesis text, there are countless explicit references to the Spirit and to the word of God interacting with human beings and the material world. A summary statement of this is to be found in Psalm 33:6–9, which says: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth. He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle; he put the deeps in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.”

It is in the New Testament that the three forms-in-one of God’s life and power, active in Hebrew history but not experienced yet as distinct divine persons, materially penetrate the creation by the incarnation of God’s Son: God acts by his Spirit to speak his Word into flesh in the form of a man, who is the Messiah of the Jews and the full manifestation of God’s grace. Within the framework of the Hebrew Scriptures, this incarnation of the Word of God is, of course, a pure miracle and quite unforeseen as such, as will be his bodily resurrection in the middle of space/time history after his crucifixion. But in fact both these events may be seen to be rooted in God’s Triune act of creation and in his ongoing interaction with the natural world as recorded in the Old Testament narratives. The church recognizes here both continuity and discontinuity with the prior revelation of God in the Old Testament period; it sees in Christ a fulfillment of the inner meaning of that revelation, which is God’s determination to save the creation that he has lovingly made and that mankind has so grievously distorted.

It is by the Logos of God—God’s ordering Word—that the creation comes into being; and it is by that same Logos, the Word incarnate, that this creation, fallen into disorder through satanic and human rebellion, is redeemed. God is love, and he is omnipotent with respect to the achievement of what he wills to achieve, which means that his plan to share life with creatures, most notably with the creature made in his image, cannot be ultimately thwarted. Creation and incarnation—both the work of the Triune God—are inseparable as they are understood together within God’s primordial intention. As the creation is an expression of divine love—the love between the divine Persons that has them choosing to go out from themselves, from the self-contained Godhead, toward a created other—so the incarnation is similarly an expression of divine love, as the incarnate Word chooses to go out from the security of the divine realm and to subject himself to the miserable human condition even unto death, for the sake of redeeming men and women from their sin and renewing the whole of nature.

Seeing nature through this double lens of creation and incarnation provides a way to understand both the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, within the natural world we know. The creation is good, but has been spoiled and is under grave threat through the disobedience of the fallen angels and of mankind; the incarnation brings to fruition God’s economy of salvation, his redeeming response to the disobedience.

Hope in the return of Christ in glory, a hope based on his promise and of which the gift of his Spirit provides us with a pledge, broadens still farther the conviction that God’s eternal plan will be triumphantly consummated. There is somewhere in the human breast an inherent hope that life has meaning despite suffering and loss, and that death and dissolution are not the finality of being. Something in us—even in the modern age of skepticism and materialism—refuses to believe what I call the nihilistic gospel. Even those who resist God spin some kind of story that gives meaning to their lives, though that meaning and the hope it signifies will be necessarily reduced. Where does this ineradicable hope come from? I believe it is rooted first of all in the revelation that we are made in God’s image; and secondly, in the incarnation of the Son of God, whereby Christ, the very image of God made man, has overcome on our behalf the forces that push toward despair—the devil, sin, and death—and so has opened a vision of eternal life. Certainly this ever-resurgent hope in the human heart is better explained by reference to the Trinitarian God than by the evolutionary mechanisms of mutation and natural selection understood in a materialistic way that excludes God from the process.

V

Let me try now, in my concluding section, to show the relevance of these remarks to various aspects of our lives, and especially to some recent advances in our scientific understanding of the material world. A Trinitarian natural theology enables us to see the world in a particular way, and my thesis is that this way of seeing throws a great deal of light on our experience and knowledge of reality. Limits of time and competence mean that my discussion can be only summary, but my hope is that it will provide you with food for further reflection.

A central issue in the philosophy of science is the explicability of the world. How is it that we human beings can actually read to a considerable extent the book of nature? This ability is in no way to be taken for granted. It requires explanation. Natural theology must seek a fundamental connection between experience and understanding, between perception and cognition.

The language by which scientists penetrate the secrets of the cosmos is mathematics. Cosmologists and physicists continue to be amazed by the effectiveness of mathematics to uncover the laws that govern the operations of the material universe. This purely abstract capacity of the human mind—a mind that has emerged from within nature itself—is able to elucidate to a considerable extent the way physical reality functions, in its macro- and micro-dimensions. Some scientists hold a Platonic view of the mathematical equations that correspond to objective reality: they believe that these are discoveries of preexisting mathematical structures, timelessly present in an ideal realm. Other scientists prefer to believe that they are human constructions that happen to correspond to cosmological reality. In either case, the correspondence is there: epistemology corresponds to ontology, what we can know corresponds to what is. How can this be? And how can we explain the remarkable fact that this mathematical ability has not come into existence to give our race greater survival value? It goes way beyond any basic survival requirements and clearly is not the product of a natural selection process, in the Darwinian sense. Its presence, apparently gratuitous, seems to point to a purpose that far outstrips the question of survival and fitness.

To such questions, the sketch I have given of the Triune God who creates and redeems should help us to provide an answer that has considerable explanatory power. What we know from our experience, and what scientists assume and then demonstrate in their labors, is that nature is ordered. It operates according to laws. Behavior is by and large predictable and dependable. Even what we may wish to call the strangeness of quantum or chaos theory is not beyond the reach of order, even if the nature of that order falls outside the ordinary connotations of that word and concept.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is instructive in this regard. It refers to the impossibility of measuring at once the momentum and the position of an electron on account of the fact that the act of measurement of one of these disturbs things sufficiently so as to make uncertain, indeed impossible, the measurement of the other. Heisenberg went on from this discovery to believe that this uncertainty was not a matter of human ignorance but of ontological indeterminacy in quantum systems themselves. This notion has since received experimental confirmation. We are left with a picture of the universe being indeterministic at its most basic level. But this does not mean that the universe is irrational or chaotic. Paul Davies points out that even if at the basic level of micro-reality intrinsic chance is operative,

the relative probabilities of the different possible states are still determined . . . This statistical lawfulness implies that, on a macroscopic scale where quantum effects are usually not noticeable, nature seems to conform to deterministic laws.1

Epistemological uncertainty reflects the ontological uncertainty that is built into the universe. John Polkinghorne maintains that chance, in the quantum sphere as well as in the sphere of evolution, is evidence not of disorder but of freedom—the freedom given by the Creator to the natural order to create itself, developing as a process within the framework of the Creator’s overall purpose. Chaos theory can be instanced as another theory pointing in this direction. This theory, as I understand it, refers to immensely sensitive physical systems which are unpredictable in behavior because they cannot be insulated from even the tiniest events in the environment, and by “environment” one doesn’t mean just the immediate planetary or even galactic locality but the entire universe.

Polkinghorne, in his Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity, gives the example of air and weather systems.2 The recently posited theory of nonlocality shows that particles that have interacted at some point remain mysteriously linked even if physically separated by vast distances. Some tiny, even microscopic, event can affect an entire physical system such as the weather, in a manner that is altogether unpredictable. But chaos theory goes on to show that the range of possible behaviors is contained within certain bounds and that the randomness itself is contained within a patterned structure. Polkinghorne likes to call the pattern-forming propensity within nature “active information,” and he suggests that the spontaneous generation of order emerging from indeterminate randomness points to a holistic level of reality deeper even than the concepts of energy and matter and not reducible to them.3 He thinks that this concept of “information” will be a main focus of research for the rest of this century.

Where does all this order come from? How can we best explain the regularities and patterns within nature, which we call laws, and which, to a real extent, we can discover and elucidate by mathematics? How is it that even what we call chance occurrences at the quantum level are not manifestations of chaotic randomness but are events within a larger, apparently ordered framework? It would seem that there are only two explanations on offer today: the first is the existence of multiple parallel universes, perhaps infinite in number, of which ours, by chance, happened to turn out this way; the second is that an all-powerful creative mind—God—created the universe in just this way. The first possibility, without any basis in observation or experiment, seems, to many scientists, believers in God or not, to be a completely unscientific flight on mathematical wings into metaphysical fantasy in order to escape the second possibility—the one that points to God—which provides a far simpler and indeed much more probable metaphysical explanation of the order we find in the universe.

The biblical texts in the Old and New Testaments that I alluded to earlier, which speak of the Creator God and his creation, provide a plausible underpinning for the second hypothesis. The Triune God, who imagines, speaks, and breathes out the cosmos, is an inconceivably powerful, personal, rational mind, and the cosmos he created by his Word, the Logos, is therefore orderly and rational; man, because he is created in the image of this personal, rational God—of this Logos—and because he is given moreover the mandate to exercise dominion over the creation and is therefore designed to be able to know it, possesses in consequence the rational capacity, through mathematics, to do, among other things, what we call science, that is, to fruitfully investigate God’s handiwork that we call nature and to discover its inner workings and laws.

The same explanatory strategy applies to the much-discussed Anthropic Principle, which refers to the nearly unbelievable fine-tuning of the initial cosmological conditions that would permit carbon-based life to eventually emerge. The universe, we now know—and this is a very recent discovery—has not always existed; the laws of this universe are contingent; the causal order we find is not a matter of logical necessity. This means that we cannot know this causal order by a priori rational deduction, as Aristotle believed; we must observe it. We can only know it through a posteriori empirical investigation.4 It is this truth, revealed through sacred Scripture, that led Christian thinkers to the experimental method, which laid the basis for modern science. On the other hand, the convergence and intrinsic strength of certain fundamental constants (e.g., the four cosmic forces: gravity, the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force), and the incredibly specific numerical values of these constants with respect to electrical charge, density, and velocity that shaped the evolution of the universe starting an instant after the Big Bang, had to be, and were, of such precision that some astrophysicists can speak of the virtual inevitability not only of the formation of stars and of the heavier atomic elements necessary to carbon-based life, but also, subsequently, of the emergence of simple organisms followed by their increasing complexity all the way up the ladder to the human brain and the astonishing phenomena of self-consciousness and rationality.

The convergence of so many apparent coincidences among the primordial variables, all of them a priori independent of each other, demands an explanation other than chance. The presence of such precision had nothing to do with natural selection, obviously. The laws of nature that underlie the possibility of biological evolution were in place from the beginning of the universe, long before the mechanisms of biological evolution came into play; and it is becoming clear that they are still operative in the processes of biological development, though exactly how has yet to be discerned. But in themselves these basic laws, whose very existence to begin with remains an unfathomable mystery, cannot explain the emergence of life and the increasing information needed for the development of that life.

One of the many currents of thought in the ongoing debate in the scientific community about the mechanisms of evolution corresponds strikingly with the notion of directionality implicit in the Anthropic Principle. According to the biochemist and geneticist Michael Denton, there exist archetypal forms underlying proteins, similar to the structure underlying snow crystals.5 This leads Denton to think that the evolutionary process is guided fundamentally by laws of nature—hence by the constants present since the Big Bang—and not just by chance mutation, adaptation, and natural selection. According to this understanding, the unity of a biological type would arise not just from a common ancestor and the laws of heredity but, beyond that, from rational criteria—for instance, all the legs of different terrestrial vertebrates obey a common principle. Such common morphologies, it is suggested, possess an internal logic and are not merely the result of blind processes following the rule of trial and error. This insight, strengthened by the fact that many organic forms are governed by mathematical laws (mathematical laws do not develop by chance!), provides, to my mind, a noteworthy parallel with the notion mentioned earlier that explanatory mathematical equations are actually discoveries of archetypal structures, ideas in the Platonic sense that exist beyond space and time and yet govern cosmological reality.

Notions like these lend plausibility to an associated contention, shared by a growing number of paleontologists, zoologists, and biologists, that the neo-Darwinian gradualist mechanisms used to describe microevolution are inadequate to account for macroevolution, i.e., the passage—sometimes occurring quite rapidly by a kind of leap—from one class or order to another. Large-scale shifts from one biological genre to another—macromutations such as that from reptiles to mammals—cannot, it is held by scientists such as Roberto Fundi, Jean Dorst, and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, be the result of pure chance, but must arise by virtue of preexistent archetypes, comprehensive organizational schemas that are somehow potentially present and are triggered under opportune environmental conditions.6 Denton observes moreover that many conditions such as the structure of the carbon atom, the nature of water as the liquid best adapted to carbon, the suitability for life of the light spectrum emanating from the sun, point, when gathered cumulatively, to a teleological orientation of the evolutionary process. As with the Anthropic Principle in relation to the initial conditions of the cosmos, the features of our planet would appear to be optimally adapted to the emergence of life. Teleology, directionality, intentionality—all these are in evidence here, and they point logically to an infinitely powerful mind that created and ordered all things.

The order of the universe, and the special order peculiar to Earth, display a stunning particularity which manages to hold in a kind of equilibrium the rigidity of regimented structures and patterns such as crystals, with the random unpredictability of quantum activity. Law and chance operating together are required for the universe we know to have evolved the way it has done. There is constraint and there is openness; there is structure and there is freedom; there is stability and there is dynamism; there is necessity, in the sense of law, and there is contingency. But all these balancing features that structure reality are not inherently necessary to that reality; they are contingent; things could have been different. These features are imposed upon the universe by the free will of the Creator. Their order and rationality are not necessary in themselves, but are reflections of the rational nature of the God who willed them into being. And this order is intelligible to human beings because we are made in the image of that God. But, of course, our rational powers are limited; we are finite creatures, we cannot fathom everything. In what way, for instance, the astounding progressive complexification of life, involving evolutionary process and emergence, was contained potentially in the unimaginable release of energy at the Big Bang and in the initial cosmological conditions and forces that quickly channeled that energy, remains a mystery.

Such order, and the interconnectivity of all aspects of the universe, as illustrated again by the recently discovered phenomenon of nonlocality mentioned earlier—a phenomenon that seems to escape the constraints of cosmological law as presently understood—does appear to point in the direction of deliberate design by an omnipotent and infinite mind. It is the Triune God—three co-inherent, intimately related, divine Persons in one Godhead, as revealed in the incarnation and the Son’s relation to the Father in the Spirit—that best accounts for such relationality, such interconnectivity, in the universe. Once again, a Creator, understood within a Christian Trinitarian natural theology, is the most plausible explanation available.

A natural theology so conceived can account for many other things as well, including, as I suggested earlier, the existence of evil, falsehood, and ugliness. These negative realities—linked with Satan and the perversity of men and women—are perceived and experienced against the backdrop of their opposites, i.e., goodness, truth, and beauty, which have their source in God. The economy of salvation, moving from the creation of morally free creatures made in God’s image, through the fall, to incarnation, and finally to Christ’s promised return and eschatological consummation, is the interpretive framework that makes the most sense of the order and splendor as well as the moral ambivalence of the natural world, including human nature as we experience it. The moral, rational, and aesthetic dimensions of reality that find consummate expression in human persons are mysteriously rooted in the physical creation we have been considering, in the order it displays and the unfolding complexity of its material structures.

Let me conclude with a brief comment on beauty. Beauty is inherent in all aspects of reality. It irradiates the universe. It is the aesthetic dimension of cosmological order, yet intimately related to the rational and moral dimensions as well. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical equation, or of a person who acts in self-sacrificing generosity; and we Christians speak of the beauty of Jesus, who manifests to us inexpressible love. Why is the natural world so beautiful? Why is mankind able to perceive and create beauty? Once again, as with our ability to read the book of the universe, here we find ourselves with the ability to appreciate its beauty. The universe is rationally and aesthetically intelligible to us. We are gifted to understand it and to be moved by its splendor. Perhaps we can call beauty the radiance of cosmic order, the radiance of truth, which itself may be understood as the manifestation of goodness, of the good, which is God. Why do the creatures that emerge through the processes of natural law, information, mutation, and natural selection turn out to be, each in a way quite beyond description, so beautiful? What always strikes me is that even the strangest biological creatures, like the ones discovered in the depths of the ocean, are oddly beautiful, though by some aesthetic criteria one might find them ugly. In themselves they are wondrous, amazing, stunning, and somehow the sheer wondrousness of them makes them beautiful.

It is all mysterious. And that is our final word: mystery. We are surrounded by mystery. And yet that mystery is not alien to us, nor utterly impenetrable. Even for the atheist, the cosmos is intelligible and beautiful. In a profound way, mankind is at home in the universe. And if by divine mercy we have come to know Jesus Christ, and to be in communion with our heavenly Father through the gift of the indwelling Spirit of God, we are filled with gratitude as we behold the natural world and see it as it truly is, God’s splendidly ordered creation, groaning, yes, on account of man’s rebellion, yet radiant still with beauty, and destined, when Christ returns, to be liberated from decay and restored to its full glory.7 Considering all these things, we can confidently affirm that the gift to us of knowledge of the true God—of the Holy Trinity—has explanatory power beyond any competing worldview to make ultimate sense of all that we perceive and experience.

1. Davies, Mind of God, 31.

2. Polkinghorne, Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity, 82–87.

3. Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, 82–85.

4. Pearcey and Thaxton, Soul of Science, 30–34.

5. Staune, Notre Existence a-t-elle un Sens?, 242–66.

6. Staune, Notre Existence a-t-elle un Sens?, 256–60.

7. See Romans 8:18–25.