The Rediscovery Of God
Edward Holloway
The rediscovery of God by an ever increasing number of scientists in our day offers an enormous and exciting potential to the Church. This new excitement takes the modern mind to the perception of a cosmos which, in its very mathematical structure alone, is forcing the scientist to admit the existence of God (though as yet of a God who is to the scientist an abstract and impersonal figure). It was to take advantage of this new turn in the affairs of men that the Holy Spirit was at least trying to lead the Church during the Second Vatican Council.
That Council is already twenty years in the past. What are the fair fruits of its hopes and prayers? In the Western world of the older, mature Christendom, at least, the results are nearer to fiasco. The hopes for a new evangelisation have run out of steam. So far, the call for a modernisation of the Church's pastoral life and the framework through which She taught her philosophy and theology, has brought in its stream only the infiltration of that now very old heresy of 'Modernism' which is the reason for the fiasco of the post-conciliar period up to now.
We failed to see the signs of the times twenty and even thirty years ago. The signs were there. The message of the Spirit was given, but men did not have the humility to listen. Now another chance is being offered to seize on this principle of the inter-communion of science with revelation that was at the heart of the 'aggiornamento' which the Church was looking and praying for at the Council.
Beyond Darwin Many scientists today are taking their listeners to the outskirts of a doctrine of creation into meaning and purpose - which is to say an evolution of the universe - which, in man, goes beyond matter even to the manifestation of God. It gives hope of a life which, beginning within the universe, transcends that universe and goes on in meaning and fulfilment into the very bosom of God (John 1: 18). It is therefore a doctrine of creation which gives hope for the individual too within the family of the People of God.
The scientists do not draw out the majesty of that vision, nor the unity of its principle which begins with the poised exactitude of the Big Bang itself. They cannot, they do not have the key. The Church alone has the key, and it is an utter woe for mankind that she has not realised what it is she holds in her hand and has not yet placed it in the lock of human knowledge and opened to mankind a new door to a new perspective.
Professor Bernard Lovell some years ago in his presidential address to the British Association in Guildford Cathedral ( Presidential Address to the British Association 27/8/75 quoting Thomas Carlyle "What is Man? who sees and fashions for himself a universe with starry spaces and long thousands of years … as it were swathed in and inextricably over shrouded; yet it is sky-woven and worthy of a God. Stands he not thereby at the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?" ) did at least insinuate that medieval scholars were not such utter peasants when they made man and his world the centre of the universe. For man indeed is placed at the "centre of immensities", in as much as his being and order alone , (the communion within one creature of both matter and spirit), has been placed at the peak of an ordered system of cosmic evolution. And at that peak - with man - lies the centre of meaning, purpose and fulfilment in the universe.
An Argument from Mathematics? I would dare to say that we can do more than speak of a generalised philosophical argument for the existence of God. There is the argument from simple commonsense, which is presumably the basis of the definition in the First Vatican Council that man can know the existence of God from unaided natural reason alone, and know with it certainty. The argument from more sophisticated philosophy does not introduce any new principle, it only outlines with fuller majesty the content of the first simple apprehension. Both arguments are based on the recognition of dependence for being and for reality upon some other thing. Nothing is its own first cause, nothing its own unaided fulfilment. Nothing is an island in creation.
Creation itself as a harmony of beings that mutually cause, control, fulfil and balance each other, and it all looks for an Absolute outside its own order of total, ontological dependence. But, in following that order of cosmic inter-relatedness - at least in the realm of mathematics and physics - it does seem that we may speak of a proof from mathematics itself in quite a true sense. (For a fuller development of this argument see Catholicism: A New Synthesis p.66)
The modern scientist, tracing back the evolution of the universe to a primal past, has discovered with awe that far from the random movements of vast gas-clouds being a sufficient foundation on which to visualize the evolution of the cosmos, a very precise formulation was necessary to attain, over vast periods of time, the highly ordered, interrelated and interlocked system of life and being within which we live in the universe we know. Some ten years ago Professor Lovell was telling us that the precise frequency of the elements that was needed to evolve a life-bearing universe was determined within, at most, the first three seconds of the primal expansion. Similarly we find Mark Doughty writing in an article in The Tablet
"… the potentiality was there from the start .... modern atomic physics and cosmology are now engaged in establishing that the fundamental conditions that obtained at the very first instant of the Primal Bang, or, - on the newer model, at the moment of initiation of the inflation - were just exactly what they should be to produce this living cosmos by a slow evolution. Not a few, like the professor of theoretical physics at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, are suggesting that "science offers a surer path to God than Religion (cf. Davies: God and the New Physics p. 229). ( Doughty Mark (professor of chemistry at Concordia University, Montreal, 'Beyond Darwin' in The Tablet, 4/2/84):
What causes modern wonder is the realisation, as Professor Davies put it, that if for example the gravitation had been different from what it is by only one trillion, trillion, trillionth, then all stars would been either blue giants or red dwarfs and the universe as we know it would have been impossible (op.cit. p.188) To which one would add that gravitational force is a measure of the amount of matter and energy in the universe, it is probably true to say that the universe is just the right size - at least to a trillion, trillions of a trillionth. to give us life as we know it. There may not be 'spare' atom in the whole universe. The totality is one exactly ordered equation of meaning and function.
Similar statements concerning the universe as an orderly equation of being can be made, or at least divined, without the help of such perfect mathematical precision. For instance, it occurred to me as a youth studying cosmology in Rome, in the despised old days before the Council, that from the relationships of the atoms within the periodic table, and the virtual certainty (even before they had made 'the bomb') that the heavier elements evolved within the interior of hot stars, one could argue that creation must be one continuous mathematical equation. Equations do not suddenly start up within a random universe and then bring in stability everywhere.
It was possible to see the same ordered equation at work in the development of life itself, far beyond the relatively simple sphere of physics. It was possible also to argue, that if creation were one ordered process - ordered by the interplay of one form of being upon another - then almost certainly the evolution of life would be by sudden ordered mutation when the 'precise conditions' of the environment were right. This also is becoming accepted and is the real point of Mark Doughty's title 'Beyond Darwin'. Darwin was right only in his cosmic perspective, totally wrong in the mechanism by which he envisaged the evolution and development of life.
One could consider the evolution of the brain on the basis of the notochord of primitive life all the way to the brain of man. This brain has been built up in a stable manner, over aeons of time, upon the basic laws of primal electric energies in a completely stable way. Moreover, the complexity of that brain has been related to a way of life, becoming ever more complex and versatile, but always ordered with stability to the environment that was developing around. At all times we are in the presence of an 'equational' harmony of being and of mutual control and direction within that 'Equation' by which the developing cosmos is held in stable order. In all fields and in all relationships, from the poising and movements of the galaxies, to the ecologies of life in field, air and ocean, there is a unity of control and direction.
The Unity Law of Control and Direction
This unity of control and direction that harmonizes all things at all stages of evolution and in all relationships of being within the whole universe, we have called: "The Unity-Law of the Universe". This ordered purpose and mutual control of one aspect of being upon another, one form of life upon another - to what is it orientated ? To just one purpose and to one peak.
Teilhard de Chardin makes many a mistake in philosophy and in theology in his own effort to grasp the vision of the cosmos as a unity (most pioneers do) but he is quite right to see the universe and the order of life as a pyramid, broad at the base, rising to one unique and sharp apex in Mankind ! Teilhard was wrong to see the ascent of being in the universe as 'directed chance'. There is, of course, no such thing. He was even more wrong to see the soul in man as one principle of being and order with matter. He just missed the real truth, namely that the movements of energy in the universe in all their 'local' laws are held within one Unity Law of control and direction which works to an overall finality and to a unique purpose at the end of the ages. He just failed to see that the answer to man is not within the material order at all.
The peak of the ascent of being from the primal expansion of energies governed by form, is the brain of man. In the mutation which is man the physical process of evolution reaches the supreme peak of the Unity-Law of control and direction which pervades the universe and works through the universe. The universe cannot give the soul, for the whole order of being that belongs to matter-energy is under the rule of determinism.
However wonderfully versatile it is, the order of purely material life is still programmed, controlled and directed through the interplay of the brain with the environment around it, and within which the brain of any living thing finds the law of its own specific life - its times and its seasons - and responds accordingly, each according to its kind. The answer to the question: 'What is Man?' is much more wonderful and yet so simple in principle, as the things of God always are. In the brain of man, there occurs a mutation for power, energy and 'form' of life which cannot be programmed to the material environment around, because the energy begotten is so totally in excess of the power of that static, deterministic environment to provide a law.
For all that 'nature' around can determine is a life bounded by food, procreation, mating and lair building, holding of territory, evading predators etc. The brain that is to become a constituent of, man' would be a diseased sport within nature, an energy without a 'form' within the universe to which it was directed, and without a life cycle within the environment around to which it could be programmed for its law of life. Because however versatile the animal brain, however much it mimics the 'intelligence' of true man, it is actually always within the order of the programmed and controlled. It is instinctual and repetitive. It cannot do any 'programming' it is made to be programmed, just as much as any computer is.
Man Continuous with Evolution but Special Creation
The miracle of man is that the material mutation which is born within nature to be this new form, with this super power of energy in the brain, is, by its very nature as physical, directed to the order of the spiritual principle, to the soul which is made in the likeness of God and which only God can give. There is no question of God 'deciding' to give this animal a soul. That would be an arbitrary action. Even less possible is the absurd suggestion which I once heard a seminary professor give to us in class, "God could give a cat a soul if He wished". No; God could not.
The two principles of being that make Man - the material body, and the spiritual soul - must be mutually made for each other. The physical 'formula' which is the brain of man was ordered in the beginning as the unique and peak achievement of that' Unity-Law' which framed the universe with exact precision in the moment of the 'Big Bang'. It is the final and utter achievement of that Law of harmonic ascent of being, and in its very physical reality man's body calls for, and is intelligible only in relationship to, that personal 'soul' which God alone can create.
In the act of creating, within the womb, at the moment of 'man', God must give this 'soul' under the very Law of His own wisdom. In this way, 'Man' is at once a product of the evolution of the material creation, and is also a special creation through the soul. There is much more, one suggests, than we usually see in the comment of Christ to Nicodemus: "that which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Holy Spirit, is spirit" (John 3:6.) For the body of man, centred in the brain, is the supreme gift of the flesh and of all material creation. At that peak it becomes related, by necessity of being, to the soul, which only God can give in the act of human creation. This text is of course the first and most recommended in our Baptismal service books. In a much more wonderful way than we can cover in an article, it celebrates the peak of creation-by-development, the finality of the Flesh in its own order, and the finality of God in the order of our sonship and daughterhood of God. It gives the final meaning of all creation and takes 'Man', whether male or female, up into the order of the Divine Being and God's own fulfilment - in the Father, through the Son , in the Holy Spirit who is the love which binds the being of the Father and of the Son.
"In Him We Live, Move, and Are"
The real excitement of the rediscovery of God by men of science begins here. In Man the Unity-Law, which is the working harmony of the universe as a 'going concern' - as an economy or as a progression -now continues in a new dimension. In Man the Unity-Law, which provides the control and direction for man's life, the food and nourishment for man's life, the growth and development in love for man's life, is now in God Himself. It must be so.
This is the wonderful vision and challenge we can and must at once offer to the modern scientist, because what the scientist sees now will become the common stock of 'ordinary perception 'within two generations. Just as, in the same way, the 'scientific' denials of the place and need of God of former years became, in the heart of the common man, the common agnosticism concerning faith and morals and the authority of the Church some generations later.
The scientist may say: 'As a scientist I cannot say anything about that. I am forced to argue to an equation of energy which is always poised in meaning with utter exactitude. I grant that an infinite regress is impossible. I admit a mind that poises and presumably makes matter energy in the poising of its energies under a Unity-Law. I can go no further. The God Iacknowledge is the God of abstract reasoning. This God is real, but impersonal. I know nothing of Him as a person."
Yet this is not true, because the very nature of man is part of reality. It is the peak of reality. Man is not created in an impersonal, neutral condition. In the body he is made by parental love and from birth cries for care and food. In the whole of his person - with the body but through the spirit - he asks "why " and "what for" and looks for wisdom, truth and a lasting and delightful love. He is aware that he is more than an animal of the fields and that the dimensions of his life go out beyond the physical and material to the spiritual, the eternal and the immortal.
How, then, does the Unity-Law within which the universe was framed provide for him and environ him with a law of life and wisdom to which he will respond (and should be eager to respond) ? The answer to this key question is the bond which links together the order of science and of religion in the unity of one wisdom and one economy of God. For this reason the doctrine of the autonomy of science and religion, of reason and of revelation is not acceptable. Religion is the summit of science, because religion is the provision for man who is made under the Unity-Law within which the whole universe is made and poised.
St. Paul gave us the answer so wonderfully at the beginning of the Christian era and the text has been so woefully undervalued, at least in the Latin West among its theologians. Of God he says: "For in Him we live, and move and are, as indeed some of your own writers have said: we are all his offspring". (Acts 17:2S.) There it is. Merely material life is programmed to a law of control and direction that is immanent within nature and within the impact of other material things. When man takes the material, through the soul, into the order of God and spirit, then God becomes man's environmental law.
God provides for man a life-law and wisdom, a truth, a good, a meaning, a final end and the inner nourishment we call "grace" to grow to the plenitude of the likeness of God. Children are not born fully mature, but as babies, although they are in the image of adults. Man is born a spiritual baby, seeking the milk of God, so that outwardly and inwardly, in the public order and in the private communion of the heart, he may grow to the full likeness of God, to the 'perfect man'.
It is really jumping the full evidence and the unrolling of its proof to say it, but we do know in fact that Christ is the full, total, and utterly consistent manifestation of that relationship of God to mankind - the fulness of the Godhead to whose maturity we are born to grow and at once the ultimate meaning of the Unity-Law within which the universe is framed in life, hope, and expectation. "I am come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly" (John10:9-10.)
Science and Faith Not Totally Autonomous
Science has its own proper principles of discovery and, in the evaluation of knowledge in its own sphere, it is autonomous in one sense. Those laws and relationships that arise within the material universe - in physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology - they are valid in their own right and they were so before man ever appeared on the scene. Yet the autonomy of science from religion, of reason from faith, is not so absolute that we can show no organic relationship or dependence between the two, but merely a mutual consistency.
There is more than a communion of orders - namely science and religion - in the being of man. There is, in the fact of man, a communion of reason and faith within a man's one nature. Man's intelligence dominates anything that is less than man, from above. The intelligence of man can know and evaluate the principles of the sciences in their own right, and in its own right (but only because it is Godlike in nature). He does not need religion for this; he does not need faith for this. But in man's own being, both within his own private heart and in the public relationship of humankind by which we form families, communities, nations and eventually one world federation of mankind .... in all of this man does, by very nature, need God as his 'Environer' - his principle of life, meaning, teaching formation and ultimately of all that is expressed in the word "Salvation".
This we say not only from the supernatural order in its technical theological sense, but in the very natural order itself. When Man is created, his being is a communion brought about of the making of the body by nature and the making of the soul by the direct will of God. By very nature, and at the summit of the order of nature, the 'Unity-Law' of creation, within which all things were poised as potential through time and ages, has passed into the Being of God as the determinant of Man.
This has happened by very 'nature' and as part of the creative act of the universe itself. In the presence of God man is like a baby just born. More accurately he is like the tiny fertilized ovum of life itself when just conceived. There is many a period of development and growth in that living relationship to God, within which men as individuals must grow and the communal life of mankind as "Church" must grow.
The scientist cannot hope to evaluate God 'from above'. He cannot hope to set down the laws and principles of this knowledge in autonomy and in independence. In this knowledge and in this relationship of fulfilment, man, like the child at the breast, is partly in a state of limited natural knowledge and much more so in an order of a natural faith, hope, trust and dependent love. As the parent reveals the natural order of dependent knowing and love - the order of 'faith' within which a child lives, breathes and has its being - so also God holds man at the breast and must declare, unroll and nourish him to the full order of man's life, being, and meaning.
This is true from the very communion of science and religion in the nature of man and in the understanding of man. Beyond that basic communion of two orders - reason and revelation - there is also the meaning of supernatural life and destiny which is beyond the first, natural union of science and religion, reason and faith in mankind. We cannot dwell on it now, but the meaning of the supernatural properly as such means that the order of love and of existence unto Himself that God calls us to, is a sharing of the Divine Being - in its own reality and unimaginable bliss.
This is something we could never claim right to or demand by any fact of nature, not even by creation itself even though God is our Creator. But, by very fact of nature there must be from God some order of truth, good, love and joy to be given us by our very creation into the order of existence at all. Even this we could not know in its measure and communion with God unless He revealed it and worked it upon us. This would be an order of 'faith' from very nature, because God is our fulfilment and our Father simply by the fact of our spiritual souls.
The Splendid Vision
At the peak of man's making, then, we must look to God to know who we are and why we exist - what is our bliss and whether it is immortal and eternal as the soul is? Only God can reveal all and give all. What He does reveal and give is so much more than it has entered into the heart of man to conceive or desire. For God gives all that man or nature may ask or desire and He gives so much more besides.
Why do we not give this wonderful vision to mankind at once, here and now ? Here, at one stroke would be the answer to the meaning of the Second Vatican Council. Why did the scientist, in the person of Professor Davies, declare that "science offered a more sure path to real, factual and magisterial", and religion, as he knows it is vague, mythical, emotional, and subjective? We can show him a religion that is founded on fact and certainty, because it takes over the work of the formation and fulfilment of this creature - man - at the point where the guiding Unity-Law of the universe transcends the sciences of matter and passes into the personal work of the God who made both matter-energy and the higher energy and form which is spirit or soul.
Within this vision of the meaning of God, do we not see also the real meaning of religion and of faith. It consists in magistracy and in the nourishment of the spirit. The relationship of the soul of man to God must be in the order of actual and factual nourishment and growth, and the teaching must be in the order of unique and certain truth. It becomes clear to us that, following the line of evidence to the manifestation of God to mankind, we are going to look for a divine and a transcendent 'magisterium'. We perceive from afar the very principle by which we can deal a death blow to the Gnosticism and Humanism, (in older parlance, 'Neo-Modernisrn'), which has made the hopes of the Council a mockery and made the Church herself a laughing-stock to the pagans of the post-Christian era, whom She had hoped to reclaim.
Something Beautiful for God
It would be futile to attempt to draw it out here all the consequences of the argument, but once people today admits that, if not from classic philosophy, then at least from the very mathematics of the universe, we are forced to recognise a mind and will similar to our own and immensely more perfect, acting within the universe - a mind which is at once both immanent and transcendent to that universe - then we will eventually see Christ at the end of our seeking as the very Son of God and Son of Man.
We will meet and recognise the problem of evil in the fact and doctrine of the Fall, in the reality of the self-division of our damaged nature. We will be able to show, with an utter consistency, how and why the Salvation of God - one with the joy of creation and utterly without pain - is turned on the Lord of History, when He came, into a painful and yet acceptable Sacrifice of Redemption and resurrection.
Once God-the-Environer-of-Man - our all and our principle of life and life abundant - has declared Himself to us in the flesh as Son of Man, then, because of His Living Godhead, the Principle of infallible magisterium is brought into human religion from the Incarnation until the end of the economy of God for this planet. It is this authority of God as divine which alone is the life principle of Ecumenism and the only principle by which men, divided by the frailty of human opinion and the pride of the human will, can ever be reunited again as one in God and in His Christ.
We can show such wonderful things. We can make the desert of the empty seminary and the abandoned religious novitiate bloom again like the rose. We can give a newer and purer vision of love and reinforce again within marriage its role as an office in time and in eternity, an office and a ministry too in the Church. Why do we not do this now ? Why do we not do this "beautiful thing for God", to use the language of Mother Teresa.
Finally, why do we not convert ourselves and see in the cosmic vision, given to St. John in the Apocalypse, at once the vision of the communion of science and faith in the order of nature and its consummation in the office of the womb of Mary:
"And a great sign appeared in heaven A woman clothed with the sun, With the moon under her feet, And on her head a crown of twelve stars And being with child, she cried travailing in birth and was in pain to be delivered. And she brought forth a male-child Who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron And her son was taken up to God, and to his throne." (Rev. 12:1-5)
Firstly, planet Earth is 'the woman clothed with the sun' teeming with life and fruitfulness through the womb - fertile ultimately with mankind. The sun has been its principle of life and evolution over countless ages. When the order of faith takes over in man from the order of material, natural law and its order, then, in one and the same vision this earth is with child in the womb of the Virgin Mary; and in her, through the sorrows and travails of sinful men, the Church and all creation with her is impatient to be delivered of the Son of God and the Son of Man.
He is the Lord of Life and History, the Maker and the Restorer of all things. Why do we not give to men this wonderful, beautiful and consistent thing ? Why do we not see within its order, in the patrimony of the Church, a new principle for our times by which to re-evangelize the West and to evangelize all nations as the world moves, through bloody wars, to a final unity of order and community in "the last times"(Hebrews 1:1-4).
Edward Holloway
The rediscovery of God by an ever increasing number of scientists in our day offers an enormous and exciting potential to the Church. This new excitement takes the modern mind to the perception of a cosmos which, in its very mathematical structure alone, is forcing the scientist to admit the existence of God (though as yet of a God who is to the scientist an abstract and impersonal figure). It was to take advantage of this new turn in the affairs of men that the Holy Spirit was at least trying to lead the Church during the Second Vatican Council.
That Council is already twenty years in the past. What are the fair fruits of its hopes and prayers? In the Western world of the older, mature Christendom, at least, the results are nearer to fiasco. The hopes for a new evangelisation have run out of steam. So far, the call for a modernisation of the Church's pastoral life and the framework through which She taught her philosophy and theology, has brought in its stream only the infiltration of that now very old heresy of 'Modernism' which is the reason for the fiasco of the post-conciliar period up to now.
We failed to see the signs of the times twenty and even thirty years ago. The signs were there. The message of the Spirit was given, but men did not have the humility to listen. Now another chance is being offered to seize on this principle of the inter-communion of science with revelation that was at the heart of the 'aggiornamento' which the Church was looking and praying for at the Council.
Beyond Darwin Many scientists today are taking their listeners to the outskirts of a doctrine of creation into meaning and purpose - which is to say an evolution of the universe - which, in man, goes beyond matter even to the manifestation of God. It gives hope of a life which, beginning within the universe, transcends that universe and goes on in meaning and fulfilment into the very bosom of God (John 1: 18). It is therefore a doctrine of creation which gives hope for the individual too within the family of the People of God.
The scientists do not draw out the majesty of that vision, nor the unity of its principle which begins with the poised exactitude of the Big Bang itself. They cannot, they do not have the key. The Church alone has the key, and it is an utter woe for mankind that she has not realised what it is she holds in her hand and has not yet placed it in the lock of human knowledge and opened to mankind a new door to a new perspective.
Professor Bernard Lovell some years ago in his presidential address to the British Association in Guildford Cathedral ( Presidential Address to the British Association 27/8/75 quoting Thomas Carlyle "What is Man? who sees and fashions for himself a universe with starry spaces and long thousands of years … as it were swathed in and inextricably over shrouded; yet it is sky-woven and worthy of a God. Stands he not thereby at the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?" ) did at least insinuate that medieval scholars were not such utter peasants when they made man and his world the centre of the universe. For man indeed is placed at the "centre of immensities", in as much as his being and order alone , (the communion within one creature of both matter and spirit), has been placed at the peak of an ordered system of cosmic evolution. And at that peak - with man - lies the centre of meaning, purpose and fulfilment in the universe.
An Argument from Mathematics? I would dare to say that we can do more than speak of a generalised philosophical argument for the existence of God. There is the argument from simple commonsense, which is presumably the basis of the definition in the First Vatican Council that man can know the existence of God from unaided natural reason alone, and know with it certainty. The argument from more sophisticated philosophy does not introduce any new principle, it only outlines with fuller majesty the content of the first simple apprehension. Both arguments are based on the recognition of dependence for being and for reality upon some other thing. Nothing is its own first cause, nothing its own unaided fulfilment. Nothing is an island in creation.
Creation itself as a harmony of beings that mutually cause, control, fulfil and balance each other, and it all looks for an Absolute outside its own order of total, ontological dependence. But, in following that order of cosmic inter-relatedness - at least in the realm of mathematics and physics - it does seem that we may speak of a proof from mathematics itself in quite a true sense. (For a fuller development of this argument see Catholicism: A New Synthesis p.66)
The modern scientist, tracing back the evolution of the universe to a primal past, has discovered with awe that far from the random movements of vast gas-clouds being a sufficient foundation on which to visualize the evolution of the cosmos, a very precise formulation was necessary to attain, over vast periods of time, the highly ordered, interrelated and interlocked system of life and being within which we live in the universe we know. Some ten years ago Professor Lovell was telling us that the precise frequency of the elements that was needed to evolve a life-bearing universe was determined within, at most, the first three seconds of the primal expansion. Similarly we find Mark Doughty writing in an article in The Tablet
"… the potentiality was there from the start .... modern atomic physics and cosmology are now engaged in establishing that the fundamental conditions that obtained at the very first instant of the Primal Bang, or, - on the newer model, at the moment of initiation of the inflation - were just exactly what they should be to produce this living cosmos by a slow evolution. Not a few, like the professor of theoretical physics at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, are suggesting that "science offers a surer path to God than Religion (cf. Davies: God and the New Physics p. 229). ( Doughty Mark (professor of chemistry at Concordia University, Montreal, 'Beyond Darwin' in The Tablet, 4/2/84):
What causes modern wonder is the realisation, as Professor Davies put it, that if for example the gravitation had been different from what it is by only one trillion, trillion, trillionth, then all stars would been either blue giants or red dwarfs and the universe as we know it would have been impossible (op.cit. p.188) To which one would add that gravitational force is a measure of the amount of matter and energy in the universe, it is probably true to say that the universe is just the right size - at least to a trillion, trillions of a trillionth. to give us life as we know it. There may not be 'spare' atom in the whole universe. The totality is one exactly ordered equation of meaning and function.
Similar statements concerning the universe as an orderly equation of being can be made, or at least divined, without the help of such perfect mathematical precision. For instance, it occurred to me as a youth studying cosmology in Rome, in the despised old days before the Council, that from the relationships of the atoms within the periodic table, and the virtual certainty (even before they had made 'the bomb') that the heavier elements evolved within the interior of hot stars, one could argue that creation must be one continuous mathematical equation. Equations do not suddenly start up within a random universe and then bring in stability everywhere.
It was possible to see the same ordered equation at work in the development of life itself, far beyond the relatively simple sphere of physics. It was possible also to argue, that if creation were one ordered process - ordered by the interplay of one form of being upon another - then almost certainly the evolution of life would be by sudden ordered mutation when the 'precise conditions' of the environment were right. This also is becoming accepted and is the real point of Mark Doughty's title 'Beyond Darwin'. Darwin was right only in his cosmic perspective, totally wrong in the mechanism by which he envisaged the evolution and development of life.
One could consider the evolution of the brain on the basis of the notochord of primitive life all the way to the brain of man. This brain has been built up in a stable manner, over aeons of time, upon the basic laws of primal electric energies in a completely stable way. Moreover, the complexity of that brain has been related to a way of life, becoming ever more complex and versatile, but always ordered with stability to the environment that was developing around. At all times we are in the presence of an 'equational' harmony of being and of mutual control and direction within that 'Equation' by which the developing cosmos is held in stable order. In all fields and in all relationships, from the poising and movements of the galaxies, to the ecologies of life in field, air and ocean, there is a unity of control and direction.
The Unity Law of Control and Direction
This unity of control and direction that harmonizes all things at all stages of evolution and in all relationships of being within the whole universe, we have called: "The Unity-Law of the Universe". This ordered purpose and mutual control of one aspect of being upon another, one form of life upon another - to what is it orientated ? To just one purpose and to one peak.
Teilhard de Chardin makes many a mistake in philosophy and in theology in his own effort to grasp the vision of the cosmos as a unity (most pioneers do) but he is quite right to see the universe and the order of life as a pyramid, broad at the base, rising to one unique and sharp apex in Mankind ! Teilhard was wrong to see the ascent of being in the universe as 'directed chance'. There is, of course, no such thing. He was even more wrong to see the soul in man as one principle of being and order with matter. He just missed the real truth, namely that the movements of energy in the universe in all their 'local' laws are held within one Unity Law of control and direction which works to an overall finality and to a unique purpose at the end of the ages. He just failed to see that the answer to man is not within the material order at all.
The peak of the ascent of being from the primal expansion of energies governed by form, is the brain of man. In the mutation which is man the physical process of evolution reaches the supreme peak of the Unity-Law of control and direction which pervades the universe and works through the universe. The universe cannot give the soul, for the whole order of being that belongs to matter-energy is under the rule of determinism.
However wonderfully versatile it is, the order of purely material life is still programmed, controlled and directed through the interplay of the brain with the environment around it, and within which the brain of any living thing finds the law of its own specific life - its times and its seasons - and responds accordingly, each according to its kind. The answer to the question: 'What is Man?' is much more wonderful and yet so simple in principle, as the things of God always are. In the brain of man, there occurs a mutation for power, energy and 'form' of life which cannot be programmed to the material environment around, because the energy begotten is so totally in excess of the power of that static, deterministic environment to provide a law.
For all that 'nature' around can determine is a life bounded by food, procreation, mating and lair building, holding of territory, evading predators etc. The brain that is to become a constituent of, man' would be a diseased sport within nature, an energy without a 'form' within the universe to which it was directed, and without a life cycle within the environment around to which it could be programmed for its law of life. Because however versatile the animal brain, however much it mimics the 'intelligence' of true man, it is actually always within the order of the programmed and controlled. It is instinctual and repetitive. It cannot do any 'programming' it is made to be programmed, just as much as any computer is.
Man Continuous with Evolution but Special Creation
The miracle of man is that the material mutation which is born within nature to be this new form, with this super power of energy in the brain, is, by its very nature as physical, directed to the order of the spiritual principle, to the soul which is made in the likeness of God and which only God can give. There is no question of God 'deciding' to give this animal a soul. That would be an arbitrary action. Even less possible is the absurd suggestion which I once heard a seminary professor give to us in class, "God could give a cat a soul if He wished". No; God could not.
The two principles of being that make Man - the material body, and the spiritual soul - must be mutually made for each other. The physical 'formula' which is the brain of man was ordered in the beginning as the unique and peak achievement of that' Unity-Law' which framed the universe with exact precision in the moment of the 'Big Bang'. It is the final and utter achievement of that Law of harmonic ascent of being, and in its very physical reality man's body calls for, and is intelligible only in relationship to, that personal 'soul' which God alone can create.
In the act of creating, within the womb, at the moment of 'man', God must give this 'soul' under the very Law of His own wisdom. In this way, 'Man' is at once a product of the evolution of the material creation, and is also a special creation through the soul. There is much more, one suggests, than we usually see in the comment of Christ to Nicodemus: "that which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Holy Spirit, is spirit" (John 3:6.) For the body of man, centred in the brain, is the supreme gift of the flesh and of all material creation. At that peak it becomes related, by necessity of being, to the soul, which only God can give in the act of human creation. This text is of course the first and most recommended in our Baptismal service books. In a much more wonderful way than we can cover in an article, it celebrates the peak of creation-by-development, the finality of the Flesh in its own order, and the finality of God in the order of our sonship and daughterhood of God. It gives the final meaning of all creation and takes 'Man', whether male or female, up into the order of the Divine Being and God's own fulfilment - in the Father, through the Son , in the Holy Spirit who is the love which binds the being of the Father and of the Son.
"In Him We Live, Move, and Are"
The real excitement of the rediscovery of God by men of science begins here. In Man the Unity-Law, which is the working harmony of the universe as a 'going concern' - as an economy or as a progression -now continues in a new dimension. In Man the Unity-Law, which provides the control and direction for man's life, the food and nourishment for man's life, the growth and development in love for man's life, is now in God Himself. It must be so.
This is the wonderful vision and challenge we can and must at once offer to the modern scientist, because what the scientist sees now will become the common stock of 'ordinary perception 'within two generations. Just as, in the same way, the 'scientific' denials of the place and need of God of former years became, in the heart of the common man, the common agnosticism concerning faith and morals and the authority of the Church some generations later.
The scientist may say: 'As a scientist I cannot say anything about that. I am forced to argue to an equation of energy which is always poised in meaning with utter exactitude. I grant that an infinite regress is impossible. I admit a mind that poises and presumably makes matter energy in the poising of its energies under a Unity-Law. I can go no further. The God Iacknowledge is the God of abstract reasoning. This God is real, but impersonal. I know nothing of Him as a person."
Yet this is not true, because the very nature of man is part of reality. It is the peak of reality. Man is not created in an impersonal, neutral condition. In the body he is made by parental love and from birth cries for care and food. In the whole of his person - with the body but through the spirit - he asks "why " and "what for" and looks for wisdom, truth and a lasting and delightful love. He is aware that he is more than an animal of the fields and that the dimensions of his life go out beyond the physical and material to the spiritual, the eternal and the immortal.
How, then, does the Unity-Law within which the universe was framed provide for him and environ him with a law of life and wisdom to which he will respond (and should be eager to respond) ? The answer to this key question is the bond which links together the order of science and of religion in the unity of one wisdom and one economy of God. For this reason the doctrine of the autonomy of science and religion, of reason and of revelation is not acceptable. Religion is the summit of science, because religion is the provision for man who is made under the Unity-Law within which the whole universe is made and poised.
St. Paul gave us the answer so wonderfully at the beginning of the Christian era and the text has been so woefully undervalued, at least in the Latin West among its theologians. Of God he says: "For in Him we live, and move and are, as indeed some of your own writers have said: we are all his offspring". (Acts 17:2S.) There it is. Merely material life is programmed to a law of control and direction that is immanent within nature and within the impact of other material things. When man takes the material, through the soul, into the order of God and spirit, then God becomes man's environmental law.
God provides for man a life-law and wisdom, a truth, a good, a meaning, a final end and the inner nourishment we call "grace" to grow to the plenitude of the likeness of God. Children are not born fully mature, but as babies, although they are in the image of adults. Man is born a spiritual baby, seeking the milk of God, so that outwardly and inwardly, in the public order and in the private communion of the heart, he may grow to the full likeness of God, to the 'perfect man'.
It is really jumping the full evidence and the unrolling of its proof to say it, but we do know in fact that Christ is the full, total, and utterly consistent manifestation of that relationship of God to mankind - the fulness of the Godhead to whose maturity we are born to grow and at once the ultimate meaning of the Unity-Law within which the universe is framed in life, hope, and expectation. "I am come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly" (John10:9-10.)
Science and Faith Not Totally Autonomous
Science has its own proper principles of discovery and, in the evaluation of knowledge in its own sphere, it is autonomous in one sense. Those laws and relationships that arise within the material universe - in physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology - they are valid in their own right and they were so before man ever appeared on the scene. Yet the autonomy of science from religion, of reason from faith, is not so absolute that we can show no organic relationship or dependence between the two, but merely a mutual consistency.
There is more than a communion of orders - namely science and religion - in the being of man. There is, in the fact of man, a communion of reason and faith within a man's one nature. Man's intelligence dominates anything that is less than man, from above. The intelligence of man can know and evaluate the principles of the sciences in their own right, and in its own right (but only because it is Godlike in nature). He does not need religion for this; he does not need faith for this. But in man's own being, both within his own private heart and in the public relationship of humankind by which we form families, communities, nations and eventually one world federation of mankind .... in all of this man does, by very nature, need God as his 'Environer' - his principle of life, meaning, teaching formation and ultimately of all that is expressed in the word "Salvation".
This we say not only from the supernatural order in its technical theological sense, but in the very natural order itself. When Man is created, his being is a communion brought about of the making of the body by nature and the making of the soul by the direct will of God. By very nature, and at the summit of the order of nature, the 'Unity-Law' of creation, within which all things were poised as potential through time and ages, has passed into the Being of God as the determinant of Man.
This has happened by very 'nature' and as part of the creative act of the universe itself. In the presence of God man is like a baby just born. More accurately he is like the tiny fertilized ovum of life itself when just conceived. There is many a period of development and growth in that living relationship to God, within which men as individuals must grow and the communal life of mankind as "Church" must grow.
The scientist cannot hope to evaluate God 'from above'. He cannot hope to set down the laws and principles of this knowledge in autonomy and in independence. In this knowledge and in this relationship of fulfilment, man, like the child at the breast, is partly in a state of limited natural knowledge and much more so in an order of a natural faith, hope, trust and dependent love. As the parent reveals the natural order of dependent knowing and love - the order of 'faith' within which a child lives, breathes and has its being - so also God holds man at the breast and must declare, unroll and nourish him to the full order of man's life, being, and meaning.
This is true from the very communion of science and religion in the nature of man and in the understanding of man. Beyond that basic communion of two orders - reason and revelation - there is also the meaning of supernatural life and destiny which is beyond the first, natural union of science and religion, reason and faith in mankind. We cannot dwell on it now, but the meaning of the supernatural properly as such means that the order of love and of existence unto Himself that God calls us to, is a sharing of the Divine Being - in its own reality and unimaginable bliss.
This is something we could never claim right to or demand by any fact of nature, not even by creation itself even though God is our Creator. But, by very fact of nature there must be from God some order of truth, good, love and joy to be given us by our very creation into the order of existence at all. Even this we could not know in its measure and communion with God unless He revealed it and worked it upon us. This would be an order of 'faith' from very nature, because God is our fulfilment and our Father simply by the fact of our spiritual souls.
The Splendid Vision
At the peak of man's making, then, we must look to God to know who we are and why we exist - what is our bliss and whether it is immortal and eternal as the soul is? Only God can reveal all and give all. What He does reveal and give is so much more than it has entered into the heart of man to conceive or desire. For God gives all that man or nature may ask or desire and He gives so much more besides.
Why do we not give this wonderful vision to mankind at once, here and now ? Here, at one stroke would be the answer to the meaning of the Second Vatican Council. Why did the scientist, in the person of Professor Davies, declare that "science offered a more sure path to real, factual and magisterial", and religion, as he knows it is vague, mythical, emotional, and subjective? We can show him a religion that is founded on fact and certainty, because it takes over the work of the formation and fulfilment of this creature - man - at the point where the guiding Unity-Law of the universe transcends the sciences of matter and passes into the personal work of the God who made both matter-energy and the higher energy and form which is spirit or soul.
Within this vision of the meaning of God, do we not see also the real meaning of religion and of faith. It consists in magistracy and in the nourishment of the spirit. The relationship of the soul of man to God must be in the order of actual and factual nourishment and growth, and the teaching must be in the order of unique and certain truth. It becomes clear to us that, following the line of evidence to the manifestation of God to mankind, we are going to look for a divine and a transcendent 'magisterium'. We perceive from afar the very principle by which we can deal a death blow to the Gnosticism and Humanism, (in older parlance, 'Neo-Modernisrn'), which has made the hopes of the Council a mockery and made the Church herself a laughing-stock to the pagans of the post-Christian era, whom She had hoped to reclaim.
Something Beautiful for God
It would be futile to attempt to draw it out here all the consequences of the argument, but once people today admits that, if not from classic philosophy, then at least from the very mathematics of the universe, we are forced to recognise a mind and will similar to our own and immensely more perfect, acting within the universe - a mind which is at once both immanent and transcendent to that universe - then we will eventually see Christ at the end of our seeking as the very Son of God and Son of Man.
We will meet and recognise the problem of evil in the fact and doctrine of the Fall, in the reality of the self-division of our damaged nature. We will be able to show, with an utter consistency, how and why the Salvation of God - one with the joy of creation and utterly without pain - is turned on the Lord of History, when He came, into a painful and yet acceptable Sacrifice of Redemption and resurrection.
Once God-the-Environer-of-Man - our all and our principle of life and life abundant - has declared Himself to us in the flesh as Son of Man, then, because of His Living Godhead, the Principle of infallible magisterium is brought into human religion from the Incarnation until the end of the economy of God for this planet. It is this authority of God as divine which alone is the life principle of Ecumenism and the only principle by which men, divided by the frailty of human opinion and the pride of the human will, can ever be reunited again as one in God and in His Christ.
We can show such wonderful things. We can make the desert of the empty seminary and the abandoned religious novitiate bloom again like the rose. We can give a newer and purer vision of love and reinforce again within marriage its role as an office in time and in eternity, an office and a ministry too in the Church. Why do we not do this now ? Why do we not do this "beautiful thing for God", to use the language of Mother Teresa.
Finally, why do we not convert ourselves and see in the cosmic vision, given to St. John in the Apocalypse, at once the vision of the communion of science and faith in the order of nature and its consummation in the office of the womb of Mary:
"And a great sign appeared in heaven A woman clothed with the sun, With the moon under her feet, And on her head a crown of twelve stars And being with child, she cried travailing in birth and was in pain to be delivered. And she brought forth a male-child Who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron And her son was taken up to God, and to his throne." (Rev. 12:1-5)
Firstly, planet Earth is 'the woman clothed with the sun' teeming with life and fruitfulness through the womb - fertile ultimately with mankind. The sun has been its principle of life and evolution over countless ages. When the order of faith takes over in man from the order of material, natural law and its order, then, in one and the same vision this earth is with child in the womb of the Virgin Mary; and in her, through the sorrows and travails of sinful men, the Church and all creation with her is impatient to be delivered of the Son of God and the Son of Man.
He is the Lord of Life and History, the Maker and the Restorer of all things. Why do we not give to men this wonderful, beautiful and consistent thing ? Why do we not see within its order, in the patrimony of the Church, a new principle for our times by which to re-evangelize the West and to evangelize all nations as the world moves, through bloody wars, to a final unity of order and community in "the last times"(Hebrews 1:1-4).