God is transcendent and immanent. That is, He lives as a necessary being, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, His own Act-of-being, but He also exists in each and every thing, each and every second of time, each and every volume of space. Not even the emptiest space of our universe could not continue to exist if God were not immanent in that bit of space, executing acts-of-being.
By creating, God chooses to become immanent in His Creation, else that Creation could not be. It is God’s relationship to that Creation, His freely chosen decision to inhabit it as an act of love that brings that Creation into being.
Modern secularists remain willfully blind to God’s presence in Creation, at least partly because they share the errors of most human beings throughout history — they think of substances as existing in and of themselves. When they think of God as Creator, they are likely to think in terms preferred by the neo-pagans of modern science. If God exists, then surely He is some sort of Mathematician or Physicist or Engineer raised to gigantic proportions. One might write humorously of those who see the limitations of traditional ways of viewing God as a human-style King and then go on to see God as an infinitely bloated version of themselves. I’ll pass on and not do so in this short entry. Instead, I’ll point to the limited truth in seeing God in those terms — as Mathematician or Physicist or Engineer. That is, there are aspects of reality which can be best understood by a serious mathematician or physicist or engineer. As I pointed out in my book “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, God the Creator can also be seen as a King or Lawmaker through some of the aspects of His Creation. I would tend to believe this is less of a distortion than most other ways of seeing God since — at the least — it emphasizes His truly free will. I’ve also emphasized the way in which God is an author and I think that also is less of a distortion than thinking of God as a Mathematician or Physicist or Engineer since it emphasizes that He is a Creator Who has a purpose in His work. Creation is ordered in the way of a moral narrative, however brutal or amoral some of the action seems to be. But that is true of the greatest of human novels as well.
In any case, I’m going to shift to a re-statement in more accessible terms of a critique a Jesuit scientist recently made of Intelligent Design. That critique was in the very dense, meaning-packed language of Catholic Scholasticism: Intelligent Design reduces God to being a secondary cause rather than being a primary cause, a true Creator. That is, it reduces God to a being who works in the way of a human mathematician or physicist or engineer, or lawmaker or author for that matter.
But we see God through His effects. We see God the Creator as a God who made specific decisions which are aligned with human skills and interests — necessarily so since we are part of this world. This world can be seen, and seen truly, by studying its mathematical and scientific aspects, by studying the ways in which nature is similar to human technology, by seeing the ways in which it is orderly but in ways that did not have to be — personal decisions seem to be involved. We see God by telling stories, including our version of the story which is this world, the universe seen as ordered to God’s purposes.
But that God, yes, the Creator Himself, is far too small. He is the true God but He is the true God acting freely to create a particular universe. Because He is acting freely in a specific way to create a particular universe, we see Him in a peculiar role. He is the true God but He is acting in a way analogous to human beings, the inhabitants of this world who have the unique property that their brains, and the minds rising from those brains, are an encapsulation of this developing world, this world which is much like a dynamic narrative.
Our minds themselves, in the way in which they work and in which they encapsulate the world, are the truest source of information about Creation. Our minds are themselves ultimately an encapsulation of those truths which are labeled as ‘natural theology’. As I put it in “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, God’s world is a manifestation of those thoughts which God wished to share with us, wished us to have. We form our minds properly when we respond freely and humbly to our immediate environments and then to the physical universe seen as a pagan cosmos or an Einsteinian universe and then to God’s moral ordering of that universe.
By forming our minds properly, we become truer images of God and begin to align our very beings with God, but there is a problem. First of all, those who form their minds in response to only their immediate environments or even to those environments and some plausible view of the universe are becoming better images not of God but of a finite number of actions of God. They are responding to God the Creator to a limited extent but are ignoring the revelations which tell us something of the God of Jesus Christ, the Triune God in His completeness. That God is far too small. That God is the God of the higher pagans and not the God of Jesus Christ.
I admit to floundering a bit in trying to develop an intuition into a more complete idea. I am fighting my own words and the inflexibility of my own mind. I’ve done that before and truly believe that a proper fight will lead to a more relaxed state in which my mind begins to align itself with not only the Creator seen through His effects but also the God of Jesus Christ with whom we can all have a personal relationship.
It is mostly good to try to see the revelations of Jesus Christ in terms of the current culture, and there is a great value in seeing God the Creator through the eyes supplied by modern science — just so long as we realize that we are seeing God, thinking of God, in analogical terms. And now I’ll follow that thought. If we take seriously the Creator in terms of His actions as Creator, we can be ready to revise many of the speculations of Christian thinkers. I’ll be trying to explore those possible revisions over the remainder of my life, in nonfiction books and novels alike. For now, it is sufficient to point out two major directions in my thoughts, directions already discussed vaguely in “To See a World in a Grain of Sand” and also in my blog entries and in piles of unpublished works.
1. We have perhaps reached the end of the usefullness
of viewing God’s offers of salvation in terms of
human systems of justice; and
2. We have rich possibilities for re-envisioning our
own selves and our unrealized possibilities and,
equivalently, for re-envisioning our relationship
to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as well as
our relationship to His Father and Their Spirit.
If we suddenly return to paganism by seeing a far-too-small God, God seen only in His effects as Creator of a particular world, we risk losing contact with the true God who is far greater than that, far greater than even He who brought what-is into existence from nothing.