God is not Jove
Guy Consolmagno, S.J., is curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory and writes a regular reflection that appears on the back page of The Tablet of London. His latest piece reflects on what science might be able to tell us about the end of the world, the explosion of the sun, etc. He has this intelligent paragraph towards the end:
We don’t know yet how life arose, much less how it will die. The astrobiologists have no fear of running out of things to study. To say “God does it” is an insufficient answer, reducing him to nothing more than a new Jove. It’s a new paganism. The medieval scholastics understood the difference between primary and secondary causes, and indeed the ancient Hebrew author Genesis happily adapted Babylonian science while rejecting Babylonian gods. If their cosmologies could handle that, so can ours.
The article is for subscribers only apparently, but the idea you’ve mentioned deserves wide play.
Acceptance of secondary causality is a very helpful intellectual safeguard against nominalism, which brings along other problems, especially theodicy.
“To say ‘God does it’ is an insufficient answer, reducing him to nothing more than a new Jove.”
Actually, I have some mild concern about Fr. Consolmango’s sentiment there. Eventually, you do get to a depth where all you can say is that “God does it.” You don’t want to say it to soon, but my sense is that too many scientists find that statement puts the fear of God into them, which it shouldn’t.
I’d want to know what you’re referring to when you say that eventually we have to say “God does it.” I think Fr. C. was criticizing the “God of the gaps” mentality, or the one that conceives of God as just like a creaturely cause, only older and more powerful.
For anyone who is interested, Fr. Michael Heller’s “Creative Tension” is an excellent collection of essays on the intersection between science and religion.