The Two Books
What are the two books?
There is a medieval maxim that says that God wrote two books: Scripture and Nature (a.k.a Creation). The two books build off of each other. The book of scripture discloses the details of who God is to us in human terms. The book of creation teaches us about the author in the way that a work of art reveals the artist. Of the two, God wrote the book of nature first. There is no contradiction between these two books; between Faith and Science. This has always been the Catholic impulse. The more you learn about creation the more you grow in knowledge and love of the Creator. To quote a poet: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” When have you sensed this truth?
The 5 senses as a road to God
John Senior, professor of the Integrated Humanities Program at KU wrote,
“A child can’t honestly admire the Maker until he first honestly admires the things that He made. It’s an insult to ignore the artist’s work while praising him on hearsay…Taste and see. This thing is good; it couldn’t’ make itself; therefore we know He who made it is good.” Restoration of Innocence, 79.
In other words when we encounter real creation, not virtually but with our 5 senses, we experience the goodness of the things God has made. This experience is prerequisite to knowing the goodness of God. We do not learn abstract truths floating around like angels, rather, we experience things with our bodily senses, and from those senses we abstract the deeper truths. This is how we come to know and love God: we experience a sunrise, we gaze at the stars, we marvel at a bird or a flower, we feel the love of a parent. Reality leads us to God.
One wonders though…what might happen if our senses were somehow cut off from reality? It might be hard, but try to imagine a world where virtual reality was more readily available than REAL reality…what would it do to our knowledge of God?
How do science and love connect?
“Science cannot see without the light of love. Love first then seek to understand…the lover is the only one who really sees the truth about the person or the thing he loves.” - John Senior Final Essays, 118
What does this mean? Simply put, the only thing that drives us to know something in greater detail is love. The person that loves the most will see the most. Think about this truth: Only mother who truly loves can really see both the faults and real potential of her children. Only a man who loves can see the real faults and potential of his spouse. God loves more than anyone else and he also sees more about you than anyone else; He loves you more and He knows you better. Psalm 139 says, “When you [God] were putting me together there [in my mother’s womb], 16 your eyes saw my body even before it was formed.” (Psalm 139: 15-16). This principle is the same in any field of study.
The irony of our day
Some people have noticed a great irony in our day: there is a phenomenon in modern man where we learn about many beautiful advanced scientific details and somehow have missed their connection with reality. For example, we can learn about how rocks are made of atoms and somehow come to think that the atoms are more real and that rocks are less real. (Fr. Bethel John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, p. 145) We forget that the scientific discoveries are actually built on real things that are themselves lovely. This is a great tragedy, one that the great scientists would be greatly troubled at: science is born of a love of physical reality. But when virtual reality replaces reality itself, we come to know facts without loving the things that gave us the facts.
Psalm 119 tells “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” Where can I take time to marvel at God’s beauty?
Science and Wonder
When we perceive something beautiful it evokes wonder in us. What is wonder? Dennis Quinn writes wonder is the reverent fear we feel in response to something greater than ourselves. This type of fear is not terror or fright or a reaction to evil like when we are running away from a bear, but rather the emotion we feel when we are in the presence of something of that is greater than ourselves; something that exceeds our ability to know it completely; when something is beyond our reckoning. It is the feeling we get when we are in the presence of a great mystery. Wonder for creation is the womb where science is born. “He who studies biology must wonder at life, the mathematician, at numbers, if they are going to aspire to a deep and real knowledge of their subject” (Fr. Francis Bethel, John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, p 162). How do we continue to teach from this place?