Thursday, May 22, 2008

A new natural theology?

... Possibly: Sacred evolution, or an ear from the jaw of a fish? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I was hoping Mark would weigh in on Kauffman's essay, which I have been thinking about a lot myself. My one reservation about Kauffman's essay has to do with his view of a Creator God. Human encounters with a transcendent presence have almost always been clumsily translated into human terms. So, for the ancient Hebrews, "I Am Who Am" became a kind of Hammurabi in the sky. For proponents of Intelligent Design, God is the Divine Artificer. If, however, we posit knowing, loving Presence at the heart of being we come nearer to the experience mystics have tried to describe. This would be no Everlasting Edison or Cosmic Emperor, but rather a living Tao or Logos. Wordsworth described it well:

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

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