Pathways to God

Originally published 2 October 2005

This past Wednes­day [in Sep­tem­ber 2005] I was asked by the direc­tor of the Stone­hill Col­lege Hon­or’s Pro­gram to talk to the stu­dents about intel­li­gent design. The title of my talk was “Why ‘Intel­li­gent Design’ Is Not Sci­ence — and Bad Religion.”

Read­ers of Sci­ence Mus­ings will not need to be told what I had to say about ID not being sci­ence. To us, the answer is so blind­ing­ly obvi­ous that it hard­ly seems nec­es­sary to address the issue. In speak­ing to the top­ic, I spoke for the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of the sci­en­tif­ic community.

As for why ID is bad reli­gion — well, that is a more per­son­al mat­ter, and I spoke only for myself with no desire to con­vert any­one from a dif­fer­ent belief. Although I spoke for myself, what I had to say is part of an hon­or­able and ancient tra­di­tion in all of the world’s reli­gions, includ­ing Chris­tian­i­ty and even Roman Catholi­cism (Stone­hill is a Catholic college).

It went some­thing like this.

If I may gen­er­al­ize, there have tra­di­tion­al­ly been two path­ways to God.

The first path — fol­lowed by the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of believ­ers — looks for God in the excep­tion­al, the mirac­u­lous. The stacked crutch­es at Lour­des. The rais­ing of Lazarus from the dead. Mak­ing the blind see. The vir­gin birth. The res­ur­rec­tion of the body. Answered prayers. Not the nat­ur­al, but the supernatural.

There was a time when every­thing was explained by super­nat­ur­al agen­cies. The sun was dri­ven across the sky each day by the god Helios in his gold­en char­i­ot. Comets were divine por­tents. Plague was a sign of God’s dis­plea­sure. Every spring, tree, moun­tain and stone had its spirit.

Then, in the east­ern Mediter­ranean dur­ing the sev­er­al cen­turies before the Chris­t­ian era a new way of know­ing was invent­ed. Mir­a­cles were ban­ished as expla­na­tions, the anthro­po­mor­phic gods sent pack­ing. Instead, cer­tain curi­ous peo­ple began to look for pat­terns in nat­ur­al events, and to express those pat­terns as pre­dic­tive laws. Sci­ence was invented.

After flour­ish­ing briefly, espe­cial­ly in Alexan­dria, this new way of know­ing was over­whelmed by the human predilec­tion for the super­nat­ur­al, and the great library of Alexan­dria destroyed by reli­gious zealots. But the method did not die. It was revived at the time of the Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tion and became the basis for mod­ern med­i­cine, tech­nol­o­gy, and even, some might argue, through its hand­maid­en the Enlight­en­ment, our polit­i­cal and reli­gious freedoms.

But super­nat­u­ral­ism retains its hold on the human imag­i­na­tion. God’s hand is sought in those things we don’t yet ful­ly under­stand: the Big Bang, the ori­gin of life, the Cam­bri­an Explo­sion, and so on. This the God of the gaps. The God of “intel­li­gent design.”

Well, fine. But gaps have a way of being filled. I would hate to think that my faith in God depend­ed on sci­en­tists nev­er fig­ur­ing out exact­ly how the blood-clot­ting pro­tein cas­cade evolved, or how the fla­gel­lum of a bac­teri­um evolved, to men­tion just two of the so-called “irre­ducibly com­plex” aspects of life offered as evi­dence for intel­li­gent design.

One can eas­i­ly under­stand why the God of the gaps is so pop­u­lar. By look­ing for God in our igno­rance, we can make him in our own image, call him Father, call him per­son, speak to him as friend, claim a per­son­al rela­tion­ship, count on his pro­tec­tive inter­ven­tion in our lives. It is a con­sol­ing thought to think that the cre­ator of the uni­verse — those hun­dreds of bil­lions of galax­ies — has me, yes me, as the apple of his eye.

There is a sec­ond path­way to God that looks to the cre­ation as the pri­ma­ry revelation.

Saint Colum­banus was typ­i­cal of the ear­li­est gen­er­a­tions of Irish Chris­tians when he wrote: “Who shall exam­ine the secret depths of God? Who shall dare to treat of the eter­nal source of the uni­verse? Who shall boast of know­ing the infi­nite God, who fills all and sur­rounds all, who enters into all and pass­es beyond all, who occu­pies all and escapes all?” Those who wish to know God, he says, must first review the nat­ur­al world.

This path­way to God has noth­ing to fear from sci­ence. With the dis­cov­ery of the uni­verse of the galax­ies, the geo­log­ic eons, the won­ders of evo­lu­tion, and the dance of the DNA, our eyes are opened to a majesty and a mys­tery of far greater dimen­sion than the Olympian deities of our ances­tors — and of most believ­ers today.

Colum­banus’s God is the God of mys­tery, the Deus abscon­di­tus of the mys­tics, the hid­den God who is not this and is not that, who evades all names and metaphors, even the pro­nouns “who” and “he,” Rudolph Otto’s mys­teri­um tremen­dum et fasci­nans. It is not a God with whom we can have a per­son­al rela­tion­ship or who attends our per­son­al needs. Rather, it is a God that soaks cre­ation as water soaks a rag. It is a God we see though a glass dark­ly, whom we approach through the val­ley of shad­ow and the dark night of the soul, who always hides just beyond our reach. We don’t dis­cov­er this God though the bible-tump­ing of the tel­e­van­ge­list or infal­li­ble pro­nounce­ments from Rome, but through the works of the great spir­i­tu­al pil­grims—Julian of Nor­wich, John of the Cross, Meis­ter Eck­hart, Georges Bernanos, Sigrid Und­set, Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins, Simone Weil, Pierre Teil­hard de Chardin, Thomas Mer­ton, Flan­nery O’Con­nor, to name just a few from the tra­di­tion I know best.

In his Spir­i­tu­al Exer­cis­es, the Greek author Nikos Kazantza­kis speaks of the pil­grim’s God this way: “We have seen the high­est cir­cle of spi­ral­ing pow­ers. We have named this cir­cle God. We might have giv­en it any oth­er name we wished: Abyss, Mys­tery, Absolute Dark­ness, Absolute Light, Mat­ter, Spir­it, Ulti­mate Hope, Ulti­mate Despair, Silence. But we have named it God because only this name, for pri­mor­dial rea­sons, can stir our hearts pro­found­ly. And this deeply felt emo­tion is indis­pens­able if we are to touch, body with body, the dread essence beyond logic.”

The dread essence beyond log­ic is not dimin­ished by sci­ence. Let me quote once more, this time from the Roman Catholic priest and cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an Thomas Berry: “Today, in the open­ing years of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, we find our­selves in a crit­i­cal moment when the reli­gious tra­di­tions need to awak­en again to the nat­ur­al world as the pri­ma­ry man­i­fes­ta­tion of the divine to human intel­li­gence. The very nature and pur­pose of the human is to expe­ri­ence this inti­mate pres­ence that comes to us through nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na. Such is the pur­pose of hav­ing eyes and ears and feel­ing sen­si­tiv­i­ty, and all our oth­er sens­es. We have no inner spir­i­tu­al devel­op­ment with­out out­er expe­ri­ence. Imme­di­ate­ly, when we see or expe­ri­ence any nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­non, when we see a flower, a but­ter­fly, a tree, when we feel the evening breeze flow over us or wade in a stream of clear water, our nat­ur­al response is imme­di­ate, intu­itive, trans­form­ing, ecsta­t­ic. Every­where we find our­selves invad­ed by the world of the sacred.”