Divine Transcendence: A Pastoral Approach to Design

In the late Old Testament (Septuagint) Book of Wisdom we read the inspired author’s interpretation of man’s labored — and sometimes idolatrous — response to the marvels of the created universe:

If through delight in the beauty of these things men assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them. And if men were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them how much more powerful is he who formed them. For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator. Yet these men are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him. For as they live among his works they keep searching, and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful. Yet again, not even they are to be excused; for if they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things? (Wisdom 13:3–9)

He then goes on (Wisdom 13:10–14:13) to mock the artisan’s production of idols of metal, wood, and stone as one false response to perceiving the powers and beauties of creation.

St. Paul echoes these sentiments in his letter to the Romans:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse . . . (Romans 1:18–20)

Thus, in the West, civilization has progressed throughout the Christian era with the understanding that creation and its order, directed toward its end, are only possible because both are the work of an omnipotent divine designer, “whom we call God” (SummaTheologiae I, Q. 2, art 3).¹ Western scientific inquiry has developed since the sixteenth century, and especially since the industrial revolution, by using ever more sophisticated instruments to measure the effect of one changing or independent variable on another dependent variable. With this data, analysts search for mathematical relationships or laws relating one to another, especially in chemistry and physics. In the fields of biological science, similar inquiry has gone on apace. Engineering then endeavors to turn scientific discoveries into useful tools and procedures. This has given the West even more industrial development and more sophisticated tools for additional inquiry, leading to what we know as the modern technological society. Much of the post-medieval study was done in harmony with the Church, and much of that was done under ecclesiastical sponsorship, but the philosophy of science was also corrupted by radical empiricists. Their study of science, following Francis Bacon’s philosophy, was oriented toward gaining power over nature for their own benefit. Truth for its own sake became a secondary end.

In philosophy, much thought is centered about quiddity, “what-ness.” For instance, Thomas Aquinas devotes a great deal of attention in both Summae to the issues of “what God is” and “what creation is.” But the philosophy of the empiricists, as Michael Hanby puts it in No God, No Science? “[evacuates] the world of its object: the mystery of being.”² Such a corrupted process “does not simply eliminate quiddity. Rather, it tacitly equates quiddity with measurability.” If there is nothing to measure, then there is no instrument to measure it, and, for the empiricist, it does not exist. This presupposition has caused no end of mischief. After all, one cannot measure what one cannot sense, and transcendent reality is outside the ken of our five senses.

In the nineteenth century, expanding investigations into the many orders and species in the plant and animal kingdoms led to competing theories of speciation. The most famous and revolutionary of these is certainly that of naturalist Charles Darwin, who postulated that random changes in physiology, selected based on the positive impact of any change on survivability of a species, would over many generations and a series of small, incremental changes, lead to the vast variety of animal and plant species found in the present day. This is now widely considered by educators to be the fundamental theory of biology. It’s how I was instructed to teach biology in high school.

Many atheists then use the theory of undirected evolution to argue, as Richard Dawkins does in The Blind Watchmaker,³ that a divine designer is unnecessary as a foundational hypothesis, and that atheism is thus intellectually acceptable. Each biological system could have arrived at its current state by small steps taken over many millennia from a more primitive one. As Darwin held, then, such a development can proceed from random mutations and evolve modern species from more ancient ones. The most recent theories hold, for instance, that today’s myriad species of bird evolved from primitive dinosaurs.

To this developmental drama has been added a field best called “Intelligent Design,” (ID) which looks at biological organisms and systems and argues from multiple perspectives that biological systems appear to have been designed by a master biological engineer. Moreover, even admitting natural selection, genetic drift, mutation bias, sexual selection and genetic linkage, proponents of ID claim there have been inadequate eons in the universe’s existence for randomness to account for current and past species diversity.⁴ Especially, it seems clear from a study of biochemical systems, that even the simple biochemical changes going on in cells require so many different enzymes and coenzymes having evolved simultaneously as to have been impossible of occurrence. This latter principle, introduced by Michael Behe with Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution⁵ and elaborated by him and others in books, scientific papers and Internet postings over the intervening years, is called “irreducible complexity.” Many systems are made up of so many complementary biochemical mechanisms, each vital to the overall function, that the system could not have evolved by a series of simple steps. When studying biochemistry at Stanford with Dr. Linus Pauling, over fifty years ago, I saw this complexity in the oxidative-metabolism Krebs cycle, but we who studied it just presumed that someone had worked out the evolutionary steps of that series of reactions. Nobody had worked it out. To this date, that remains true.

A careful look at biological systems leads to the generalization that “everyone agrees that life looks designed.”⁶ One notion that is certainly shared by both evolution scientists and supporters of Intelligent Design is that Darwinian evolutionary theory is fundamentally as materialist as its contemporary economic theory, Karl Marx’s dialectic materialism.⁷ No outside agency, such as divine providence, is postulated or allowed. However, using that understanding as a departure point, the two theories must head in different directions. Evolution scientists then reject any inferred reality when a biological system has design elements. They reject wholesale any possibility that there is design, or a designer, because it appears to demand a god-like interference in the process, which is incompatible with basic materialist assumptions. Any apparent design must, like all “permitted” inferences in Darwinian studies, be a result of Darwin’s randomness-based laws.

Now a more careful analysis of modern materialist evolution authors, as Hanby has discovered, reveals the “god” postulated by the design-doubter is definitely not the God taught by the Church that gave birth to modern physical and biological science. That “god” resembles more the demiurge of the ancients rather than the entirely other God only manifest in human form as Jesus.

Alternatively, scientists investigating systems that appear to have design elements, particularly those of irreducible complexity, at the least admit that at this time some systems cannot be shown to have developed by chance in small incremental changes, such as allowed by the random substitution of one base for another in the replication of DNA, or the loss or substitution of a single amino acid residue in an enzyme. And the most critical of them all are reluctant to speculate on how the engineering of such systems could have been arranged. All they will say is that random small changes, as predicted by Darwin, could not have brought about the design.

Weak Theological Underpinnings

Reviewing the more popular of the atheist arguments against the existence of divine influence in human affairs and development reveals a common error in the underlying anti-theology. Authors appear to conflate the God of Western philosophy and Jewish and Christian theology with a kind of superhuman being, a Heracles with enormous power and understanding who as creator of all living things has the ability and desire to change those other beings. The problem with this idea is that the true God cannot be what most people would call a “Supreme Being.”⁸ In fact, thinking that way automatically leads to errors both in the theology and the science. Human language is inadequate to describe God, because God is not “made,” nor does He consist of matter. The divine reality must be, as Aquinas taught, immaterial and incorporeal (ST I, Q. 3, art 1-5 and 7). In modern English, using such terms implies that introducing the reality into the discussion of “why and how did we come into being like this” is unimportant, when the transcendence of God is the most important fact to work with if we want any valid understanding of reality.

Popular culture and media are in no way helpful to those seeking a transcendent reality. If life is discussed at all, we either get “death is the end of existence” or some kind of fuzzy idea that there may be something “on the other side” after one has “passed.” As an example, in the TV series Northern Exposure, from the 1990s, a courtroom scene depicts Joel Fleischmann, a non-observant Jew, discussing the human brain. He allows only two ways of thinking about the brain, either a Cartesian dualist (soul-body) or materialist model. He ignores any possible transcendence.

The Hebrew Scriptures are not as helpful in this regard as we would want. For good reason (that humans ourselves are the image and likeness of God) the Torah forbids the making of images of God, in the elaboration of the first commandment (Ex 20:4). This was something new to the Israelite religion, since the gods of Egypt the people had left behind in the Exodus were represented by idols of silver, gold and carved stone and wood. Moreover, as Moses dwelled, communing with God, on the mountain of Sinai for forty days, the people convinced or coerced his brother, Aaron, to make for them a golden calf, an idol of the god who they imagined brought them out of captivity (Ex 32:1–6). After all, in Egypt such animal-image gods were the ones they had been used to.

To make things even more challenging, although graven idols were forbidden, the later Scriptures have at least one rather dramatic depiction of God, as written in Daniel 7:9–10:

“As I looked, thrones were placed

and one that was ancient of days took his seat;

his raiment was white as snow,

and the hair of his head like pure wool;

his throne was fiery flames,

its wheels were burning fire.

A stream of fire issued

and came forth from before him;

a thousand thousands served him,

and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him;

the court sat in judgment,

and the books were opened.”

If atheist writers think of God as merely a superhuman being, an “old man with white hair and a beard,” it’s likely they imagine what the human author is imagining as he writes. This is completely wrong but persists in both popular and scientific thought and writing.

Thomas Aquinas uses reasons from movement, causation and contingency for admitting that “there is someone by whose providence the world is governed. And this we call God,” (Summa Contra Gentiles I-14).⁹ From this, he asks how to “inquire into his nature.” (Ibid, I-14)

And in his “greater” Summa Theologiae, refuting the notion that God is contained in a genus, he gets right to the point: “God is not a measure proportionate to anything.” That is a statement deriving from the reality that God is unique, not one “thing” in a constellation of “other things.” God is not a “thing” at all. Therefore, even though His image, man, is called the “measure of all things,” that implies “that everything has being only according as it resembles [God].” (ST I, 3, Art. 5) Since God does not have attributes in the strict sense, perhaps the judgement of Psalm 147:5 shows the best understanding. “His understanding cannot be measured.”¹⁰

Contrasting the Narrowness of Materialist Empiricism

Empirical science is at its best when it can measure matter and energy phenomena and use the data that results to determine relationships between physical quantities. As an example, if there is a point source of non-varying intensity light, with a meter stick and digital illuminance photometer, a table of received light intensity at varying distances can be generated. From this, with repeated experiments, an equation can be developed showing the relationship of light intensity received L against distance between point source and meter D. This equation shows the reciprocal square relationship that results, with k a constant determined from the data developed:

I = k x (1/D²)

This relationship is often explained in texts with a diagram or picture showing how, as distance increases, the intensity can be imagined as an area of light shining on a piece of white paper. Since area is proportional to distance squared, it can be imagined that the mathematical relationship demonstrating that light intensity falls off faster than a simple linear relationship would predict, is in fact sensible.

Now every measurement, according to Heisenberg and the experience of every lab scientist, has a built-in uncertainty, which is graphed along with the data in the best peer-reviewed papers. Moreover, any secondary or post-secondary science teacher who uses digital measuring devices and related software knows that curve-fitting applications can produce more than one equation that fits the limited data produced in the lab. Sometimes these anomalies are explained by going to the accepted equation and waving hands in front of the data to convince students to put aside their doubts because the lab has been done thousands of times and on the average, it fits very well. But recall that the “phlogiston” theory dominated thought among scientists for over a hundred years until the discovery of oxygen. In my experience, there is no such thing as “settled science.” When I taught chemistry and theology to high school sophomores, after teaching the uncertainty principle, I claimed that theological statements were generally more accurate than empirical statements from the physical sciences.

Thus, the most rigorous empirical science demands both measurement of physical or energy quantities, using appropriate instruments, and modeling, which is the physical expression of the human imagination.

When empirical scientists, then, turn to the existence of a Being that is other than (above) all other beings, infinite in power and comprehension and understanding, outside time yet present at all times to every particle and photon and thought in the universe, sustaining all in existence, what will they do? They will rely on imagining the unimaginable and measuring the unmeasurable and judge the entire enterprise impossible. Therefore, they conclude because of the inadequacy of both instruments and modeling that there is no God.

In contrast, Thomas Aquinas, in Book IV of the Summa Contra Gentiles, begins his natural-law based inquiry with the statement, “Insofar as the human intellect acquires knowledge in a manner conformable with its nature, it cannot by itself arrive at an intuitive knowledge of the divine substance in itself, since the latter infinitely transcends the whole range of things sensible [read “measurable”] — nay, all other beings whatsoever.” (SCG Prologue)

Is there a word that helps us to summarize how it is that empirical science can have no experience of the divine that fits its twin needs as science searches for understanding? Yes, and the word is “immensity.” God is simply immense.

The dictionary definition of “immense” reads “unmeasured, infinite. Commonly: very great; huge; vast.” This common definition ejects the rigorous one from the average person’s mind. But the best way to think of the reality is, perhaps, not “immense things have not been measured,” but, rather, “the immense being cannot be measured.” And, with the Divinity, it is not because God is too big to measure, but that He is not accessible to any measuring instrument. Unlike pagan “gods,” made of silver or gold or hardwood or even computer chips, God is not made out of anything. God is not a creature; it’s not even reasonable to think of God as a thing. God is beyond everything. God is the totaliter aliter, the totally other. Undefinable and immense. The tools of empirical science — measuring and modeling — are completely useless in the interaction with the divine.

This inability of materialistic empiricism to comprehend the immensity of God is the reality that cripples their ability to deal with the compelling data supporting the theory of Intelligent Design. It is, therefore, easier for them to deny the science behind ID.

Given this difficulty, what is the pastor or teacher to do to help congregants and students look “above” the narrow understanding most have of transcendent reality? I believe whenever it is possible — not just convenient — we must show the narrowness of materialism and scientism, and the reasonableness of traditional Christian anthropology and theology. That means focusing on immeasurable realities such as love, devotion, and mystic vision enjoyed by the great saints like Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross. In a science class, it helps to use limited data to arrive at scientific formulae, and then, for example, to force the instrument a little bit beyond its useful range in either direction. Typically the data will exhibit anomalous behavior. Then, too, students can be challenged to find areas of exploration that do not yield to empirical modeling. That doesn’t have to be limited to conjecture about Loch Ness and Area 51. The field of psychology is full of theories of human behavior that have not withstood the ravages of time. Evolutionary biology is just another one of these. Students will spend a great deal of time, for instance, finding out just one easy biochemical system that can be explained by small, incremental changes in cellular reactions. That may help them begin to open their minds to the meaning of divine immensity.