LITMIR.BIZ

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beings exist qua existence, as distinct from the natural causes and forces that account for them coming into existence as they have and being the sorts of natural things that they are – which is what physics and the other natural sciences study – cannot itself be the result of simply other antecedent causes and forces of the same sort. Hence the term «creation.» In fact, contingent beings’ existence per se must be radically different in kind – of a sort that literally, albeit admittedly inconceivably, has its source in what can and does create everything out of nothing. And logically, although again incomprehensibly, it must be creation out of nothingness – because anything antecedent that was not self-subsisting of its very character would be another contingent, dependent being in need of the same sort of explanation. Whatever all of the natural sciences taken together explain about how everything that exists fits together is a conceptually different story, the objects of which study are entirely and necessarily included within the metaphysically and logically more fundamental account of their existence – because one cannot study something in any discipline, whether in the natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities, that does not exist at all. For anything to exist, there must be a non-contingent source and sustaining ground of all contingent beings. Regardless of where and in what discipline it begins, any logically progressive, restlessly and consistently rational reflection on reality will inevitably end up here – moving from the humanities or social sciences to the natural sciences, and within them eventually to physics, until physics reaches its limits. As a corollary, Hart therefore rightly says that «naturalism – the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural – is an incorrigibly incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking» (17). Confronted with an unavoidable inference at the most fundamental level of rational reflection, protagonists of naturalism stubbornly champion a sheer «it’s-just-there» irrationalism. It almost seems as if they are dogmatically committed to whatever it takes, no matter how radically incoherent, to avoid the acknowledgment of a necessary, non-contingent, supra-rational ground of all contingent realities – and where such an acknowledgment might lead.

Is this sustaining ground of all contingent beings God? It seems to me not only intellectually correct but also prudent both to note the features that this source of creation ex nihilo shares with God as understood in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as the possibility of rationally affirming the reality of this source of creation without implying that such an affirmation automatically entails a further faith commitment. This distinction provides an analytical basis for arguing against the constrictive scourge of metaphysical naturalism without immediately raising the additional, fraught, complicated issue of faith and religion – an important consideration given the character of our current, prevailing intellectual culture. Strategically, this distinction opens a space for rational dialogue – at least with those who are not irrational fundamentalists in their materialism – to question and, if they are rational, eventually to reject metaphysical naturalism without any adjunct pressure also to make some sort of faith commitment.¹⁹ Of course, perhaps some who do so will come to faith as well, and in ways consistent with their rational reflection on the contingency of creation. But creating a non-threatening space for dialogue seems desirable from a purely pragmatic point of view, considering how many problematic expressions of religion are evident in the world today, which tend to render many direct efforts of proselytization ineffectual. So too, resistance to religion is bound to come from deeply ingrained habits of self-determination and individualist autonomy so widespread especially in the modern West, and the pervasive assumption that any and all religion compromises this autonomy in oppressive ways. Prudentially, then, it seems wise to maintain a distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of faith.

At the same time, of course, it would be contrived to ignore the overlap between the rationally entailed features of this God of the philosophers and many of the traditional attributes of God as understood in the monotheistic traditions: the creator ex nihilo who is one, necessarily exists, is eternal (in the sense of atemporal rather than temporally perduring), is transcendent, sustains all contingent beings, is infinitely powerful, and is incomprehensible. Hart discusses these and other rationally entailed attributes of God.²⁰ Whether this God also called the ancient Israelites to be his chosen people, or became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth in first-century Palestine, or revealed himself to his last and greatest prophet Mohammed in the early seventh century are additional, analytically distinct questions – yet they are not questions about some other God, but rather about the only one whose reality and sustaining power explains how and why anything exists at all. And far from trivially, this is the same God whose existence, if more than just a matter of metaphysical and logical necessity, is also the ground and source of the uninvented values, meaning, moral norms, and sense of purpose affirmed by these religious traditions and which a materialist naturalism does not and cannot provide.

      The positive implications of this understanding of God for Roman Catholic and much other Christian theology can only be noted briefly here. Keeping the rationally inferred metaphysical transcendence of God clearly in mind insulates Christians against the intuitive tendency, reinforced by the grammar of ordinary language, to speak and think of God as a highest being among other beings, a comparatively greatest demiurge within existence, rather than the logically necessary prior ground for any and all possible and actual existent, contingent beings. The similarly incomprehensible eternity of God – not an entity that has always existed in temporal everlastingness, but one for whom there is no passage of time – eliminates the tendency to think of God as a cosmic supercomputer somehow able to process simultaneously all the data of all events in the universe in real time over 13.7 billion years. God’s transcendence means God needs no «room» to be what he is, and so, being in no sense spatial, points to how God could be present to every bit of matter-energy (including dark matter and dark energy), no less than his eternity points to how he could be present to every moment in the history of all possible universes. This has important implications for a theology of divine providence, because it is precisely God’s metaphysical transcendence that far from precluding entails his presence in and through all physical reality. And God’s radical, incomprehensible otherness helps to provide a formal, theoretical way for thinking about the nature of Christ as truly human and truly divine (rather than as a party-human, partly-divine theological centaur), as well as for a sacramentality (underpinning a robust Catholic sacramental theology) in which grace can be and is present in and through the material world, because the material world, as creation, is not and can never be devoid of God’s sustaining presence as the necessary ground of all that exists. To be blunt, God could become incarnate in Christ, and the sacraments can convey grace, because metaphysical naturalism – with its abstracted, mistaken view of matter as «mere» and separate from its supernatural, sustaining source – is a false, irrational view of reality.

      We have all heard and continue repeatedly to hear variations of a narrative in which the rise of modernity beginning in the seventeenth century meant intellectually, and fundamentally, that a purely natural, scientific, empirical, materialist, anti-supernatural worldview progressively and gradually displaced premodern, prescientific, religious worldviews in which variously unenlightened persons superstitiously believed in supernatural reality, because science has shown that everything that exists can be explained, or will eventually be explained, via its empirical, reductionist methods. This narrative is not only mistaken, but based on a foundational, philosophical amnesia. It presupposes an obliviousness of the conditions necessary for its own existence by neglecting the conditions necessary for the existence of anything at all. Obviously, humanistic scholars and social scientists would be foolish and irrational to imagine that the biological species whose complex cultures and histories they study could somehow «just be there» without the evolution of life on our planet. Similarly, cell biologists would be foolish and irrational to imagine that the molecular and genetic processes they study could somehow «just be there» without the chemical compounds made of the physical elements involved in all of those processes. So too, but for a different kind of reason, physicists and cosmologists – and all others, for that matter, who subscribe to such a view – are foolish and irrational to think that the universe itself, or its most basic laws

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