flesh in the form of a man, who is the Messiah of the Jews and the full manifestation of God’s grace. Within the framework of the Hebrew Scriptures, this incarnation of the Word of God is, of course, a pure miracle and quite unforeseen as such, as will be his bodily resurrection in the middle of space/time history after his crucifixion. But in fact both these events may be seen to be rooted in God’s Triune act of creation and in his ongoing interaction with the natural world as recorded in the Old Testament narratives. The church recognizes here both continuity and discontinuity with the prior revelation of God in the Old Testament period; it sees in Christ a fulfillment of the inner meaning of that revelation, which is God’s determination to save the creation that he has lovingly made and that mankind has so grievously distorted.
It is by the Logos of God—God’s ordering Word—that the creation comes into being; and it is by that same Logos, the Word incarnate, that this creation, fallen into disorder through satanic and human rebellion, is redeemed. God is love, and he is omnipotent with respect to the achievement of what he wills to achieve, which means that his plan to share life with creatures, most notably with the creature made in his image, cannot be ultimately thwarted. Creation and incarnation—both the work of the Triune God—are inseparable as they are understood together within God’s primordial intention. As the creation is an expression of divine love—the love between the divine Persons that has them choosing to go out from themselves, from the self-contained Godhead, toward a created other—so the incarnation is similarly an expression of divine love, as the incarnate Word chooses to go out from the security of the divine realm and to subject himself to the miserable human condition even unto death, for the sake of redeeming men and women from their sin and renewing the whole of nature.
Seeing nature through this double lens of creation and incarnation provides a way to understand both the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, within the natural world we know. The creation is good, but has been spoiled and is under grave threat through the disobedience of the fallen angels and of mankind; the incarnation brings to fruition God’s economy of salvation, his redeeming response to the disobedience.
Hope in the return of Christ in glory, a hope based on his promise and of which the gift of his Spirit provides us with a pledge, broadens still farther the conviction that God’s eternal plan will be triumphantly consummated. There is somewhere in the human breast an inherent hope that life has meaning despite suffering and loss, and that death and dissolution are not the finality of being. Something in us—even in the modern age of skepticism and materialism—refuses to believe what I call the nihilistic gospel. Even those who resist God spin some kind of story that gives meaning to their lives, though that meaning and the hope it signifies will be necessarily reduced. Where does this ineradicable hope come from? I believe it is rooted first of all in the revelation that we are made in God’s image; and secondly, in the incarnation of the Son of God, whereby Christ, the very image of God made man, has overcome on our behalf the forces that push toward despair—the devil, sin, and death—and so has opened a vision of eternal life. Certainly this ever-resurgent hope in the human heart is better explained by reference to the Trinitarian God than by the evolutionary mechanisms of mutation and natural selection understood in a materialistic way that excludes God from the process.
V
Let me try now, in my concluding section, to show the relevance of these remarks to various aspects of our lives, and especially to some recent advances in our scientific understanding of the material world. A Trinitarian natural theology enables us to see the world in a particular way, and my thesis is that this way of seeing throws a great deal of light on our experience and knowledge of reality. Limits of time and competence mean that my discussion can be only summary, but my hope is that it will provide you with food for further reflection.
A central issue in the philosophy of science is the explicability of the world. How is it that we human beings can actually read to a considerable extent the book of nature? This ability is in no way to be taken for granted. It requires explanation. Natural theology must seek a fundamental connection between experience and understanding, between perception and cognition.
The language by which scientists penetrate the secrets of the cosmos is mathematics. Cosmologists and physicists continue to be amazed by the effectiveness of mathematics to uncover the laws that govern the operations of the material universe. This purely abstract capacity of the human mind—a mind that has emerged from within nature itself—is able to elucidate to a considerable extent the way physical reality functions, in its macro- and micro-dimensions. Some scientists hold a Platonic view of the mathematical equations that correspond to objective reality: they believe that these are discoveries of preexisting mathematical structures, timelessly present in an ideal realm. Other scientists prefer to believe that they are human constructions that happen to correspond to cosmological reality. In either case, the correspondence is there: epistemology corresponds to ontology, what we can know corresponds to what is. How can this be? And how can we explain the remarkable fact that this mathematical ability has not come into existence to give our race greater survival value? It goes way beyond any basic survival requirements and clearly is not the product of a natural selection process, in the Darwinian sense. Its presence, apparently gratuitous, seems to point to a purpose that far outstrips the question of survival and fitness.
To such questions, the sketch I have given of the Triune God who creates and redeems should help us to provide an answer that has considerable explanatory power. What we know from our experience, and what scientists assume and then demonstrate in their labors, is that nature is ordered. It operates according to laws. Behavior is by and large predictable and dependable. Even what we may wish to call the strangeness of quantum or chaos theory is not beyond the reach of order, even if the nature of that order falls outside the ordinary connotations of that word and concept.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is instructive in this regard. It refers to the impossibility of measuring at once the momentum and the position of an electron on account of the fact that the act of measurement of one of these disturbs things sufficiently so as to make uncertain, indeed impossible, the measurement of the other. Heisenberg went on from this discovery to believe that this uncertainty was not a matter of human ignorance but of ontological indeterminacy in quantum systems themselves. This notion has since received experimental confirmation. We are left with a picture of the universe being indeterministic at its most basic level. But this does not mean that the universe is irrational or chaotic. Paul Davies points out that even if at the basic level of micro-reality intrinsic chance is operative,
the relative probabilities of the different possible states are still determined . . . This statistical lawfulness implies that, on a macroscopic scale where quantum effects are usually not noticeable, nature seems to conform to deterministic laws.1
Epistemological uncertainty reflects the ontological uncertainty that is built into the universe. John Polkinghorne maintains that chance, in the quantum sphere as well as in the sphere of evolution, is evidence not of disorder but of freedom—the freedom given by the Creator to the natural order to create itself, developing as a process within the framework of the Creator’s overall purpose. Chaos theory can be instanced as another theory pointing in this direction. This theory, as I understand it, refers to immensely sensitive physical systems which are unpredictable in behavior because they cannot be insulated from even the tiniest events in the environment, and by “environment” one doesn’t mean just the immediate planetary or even galactic locality but the entire universe.
Polkinghorne, in his Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity, gives the example of air and weather systems.2 The recently posited theory of nonlocality shows that particles that have interacted at some point remain mysteriously linked even if physically separated by vast distances. Some tiny, even microscopic, event can affect an entire physical system such as the weather, in a manner that is altogether unpredictable. But chaos theory goes on to show that the range of possible behaviors is contained within certain bounds and that the randomness itself is contained within a patterned structure. Polkinghorne likes to call the pattern-forming propensity within nature “active information,” and he suggests that the spontaneous generation of order emerging from indeterminate