God, Nature, and Natural Kinds

Abstract

Abstract According to Jean Pepin (1986: 408), ‘nothing seems more foreign to today’s mentality than to make the cosmos, the organized universe, the object of a religious attitude’. Pepin goes on to suggest that ‘the Christian tradition’ has ‘imposed on us the idea of a sort of rivalry between the universe and humanity’. The related notion that it is the J udaeo-Christian tradition that is uniquely responsible for our ecological crisis is frequently repeated. Ecomystics prefer to think of Gaia, the Goddess, poised adorably in emptiness between the four elementary states of physical being, or the four corners of the turning year. Even Christian theologians often seek to distance themselves from what they regard as ‘classical theism’ and its associated anthropocentrism (O’Donnell 1983: 182). In that older view, we are told, the world is not God, because it came from nothing, whereas the Logos is true God from true God (Hippolytus, Refutation of Heresies IO. 33). Both enthusiasts and critics tell us that the material universe, in Abrahamic thought, is made ‘for’ humanity, and so made freely available for any destructive wish we entertain. God is not to be seen in natural process, in earthquake, fire, or wind, but in the ‘still, small voice’ of moral conscience, the summons away from Ur and Haran. ‘See to it that no one makes prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world’ (Paul, Colossians 2: 28). Or as Philo put it: we must follow Abram’s migration from the creed of the Chaldeans to the creed of the lovers of God, that is from the created and sensible to the intelligible and creative cause (Philo, Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres 289 = 1929-62: iv. 433).