Sunday Thought

If it is true that since the Renaissance and the birth of modern science we are not simply accustomed, but indeed conditioned, to understand the world through secondary concepts, is it any wonder that we so seldom experience it as the creation of God? That is to say, we understand—or purport to understand—the mechanics of the natural world through the science whose basis is the abstracted mathematics handed on to us by Descartes et al., but in privileging, nay, deifying that understanding, we uncritically accept a divorce from creation itself while simultaneously divorcing it from the One who called it into being ex nihilo. To be clear, even if we could get behind the modern secondary concepts alone, we would not somehow “see God” or “understand God,” despite what the Romantics down the street might tell you. We would not necessarily be ignorant that there is a creator, but that minutia of theological knowledge should not be overplayed. It’s not a gateway to the Beatitudes.