NATURAL PROVIDENCE
Rev. Dr. George F. Dole
Bath
4-6-14
Isaiah
55:6-11; Matthew
24:29-44; Divine Providence 4:4, 7
* * * * * * *
For as the heavens are higher than the
earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your
thoughts. Isaiah
55:9
I want to begin
by misquoting a paragraph from a very famous book by a very famous author. I'll
be changing only two words, and I'll give you a few seconds to guess the author
and title of the book. Here's the misquote:
Any
guesses?
Well, the answer
is . . . The Origin of Species, by
Charles Darwin. I just took out his words, "natural selection," and
put in Swedenborg's "divine providence." It looks very much as though
Darwin and Swedenborg both looked at what was going on in the world and saw the
same thing. They just came up with different metaphors to describe it. Darwin
said that it happened "naturally," which I presume means that nature
itself, the way things are, is the cause. When it came to describing how nature
works, he chose the metaphor of selection; and we need to recognize that this
is a metaphor. To select, my dictionary tells me, is ""to choose or
pick out from among others," and this is not something we can actually see
happening over the millennia. This is something we ourselves do, and it
involves discerning alternatives, affirming the ones we see as good, and rejecting
those we see as bad. It is very definitely a purposeful process.
"Nature," though, "the way things are," is not a person, so
Darwin is quite right in telling us that he is speaking metaphorically.
This, too, he
has in common with Swedenborg. "The infinite itself," he wrote,
"which is above all the heavens and beyond the very deepest depths of
human beings, cannot be made known except by something that is both divine and
human, which is the case only in the Lord" (Secrets of Heaven 1990:2). In support of this he cites a familiar
verse from the Gospel of John: "No one has seen God at any time. The
only-begotten son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him"
(John 1:18)—or better, "he has explained him," using a verb whose
direct descendant is our word, "exegesis."
This is a major
theme in our theology. My index of Scripture quotations tells me that
Swedenborg refers to John 1:18 no fewer than seventy-eight times. In fact, we
should probably say that the incarnate Christ is a metaphor for the
incomprehensible, infinite Divine, the very best that Divinity could do to make
itself known.
In the Latin
text of Secrets of Heaven, "the
infinite itself" is not Infinitus,
masculine, but Infinitum, neuter,
impersonal. The pronoun used is not "he," but "it"; and it
is surely worth noting that the same is true for the phrase "divine
providence." The same can be said for "natural selection."
Perhaps we
should be more sympathetic with people who find it hard to believe that a
personal God could attend to all the details in the universe. It is
understandable, because the only first-hand experience we have of what defines
a "person" is based on our experience of our own little selves. All
we have to do is consider how minute we are in comparison to the universe to
realize that we are dealing with something vastly beyond our comprehension. We
have learned a lot since Isaiah's time, yes. We have sent individuals off into
the heavens, and NASA reported last October that Voyager 1 had left the solar
system, but let's face it, in comparison to the size of the universe, that is
barely sticking our nose out of the door. We have learned that the heavens are
far, far higher above the earth than Isaiah could imagine. I can sympathize
with one skeptic when he looks at snowflakes and writes, ""no one but the most ardent
fundamentalists would suggest that each and every such object is lovingly and
painstakingly and, most important, purposefully created by a divine
intelligence. In fact, many laypeople as well as scientists revel in our ability
to explain how snowflakes and rainbows can spontaneously appear, based on the
simple, elegant laws of physics."[1]
The
strange thing is, though, that religiously skeptical scientists seem to have no
trouble believing that the laws of nature apply to every snowflake. When you
get right down to it, the laws of nature that we are talking about are no more
than our own descriptions of how things happen. In the words of one physicist,
". . . physical laws can't push anything either. They only explain and predict"[2]—which
statement itself, incidentally, seems to be "a metaphor that personalizes
the laws. It is our minds that frame the laws as explanations and use them to
predict. We may think of them as describing reality, but describing an apple as
red does not make it red. It certainly does not create any apples.
So
when Swedenborg writes about "the laws of divine providence," it is
still providence that is doing the work, doing it according to the laws. Let
then take a look at what it is doing. If we take our third reading seriously,
its goal is that everything should be as perfect as possible, which means that
its constituent members should be distinguishably different and yet united.
This
calls for a kind of dialogue between distinguishing and uniting, and if we look
at the history of the universe as it is presently constructed, this is what has
been happening from the word go. In the first nanoseconds after the big bang,
for some unknown reason particles began to form—to become distinguishably
different—and to unite in various stable combinations, which combinations began
to combine with others, through the building up of the atomic table the
formation of compounds, leading to molecules, to cells, to bacteria, to plants,
to animals, and finally—so far—to us.
Providence
has not finished its work. For a fresh look at a contemporary view of us, I
would turn to a branch of psychology that goes by the rather ungainly name of
"object relations theory." Its main premise is that we mature by
making increasingly subtle and significant distinctions between the self and
the non-self, as when children become able to observe their impulses and
therefore choose how they respond to them, or when adolescents begin to
distinguish themselves from their the family and find a new way to relate to
it. A psychologist named Robert Kegan describes it like this:
Of
the multitude of hopes and earnings we experience . . . two seem to subsume the
others. One of these might be called the yearning to be included, to be a part
of , close to, joined with, to be held admitted, accompanied. The other might be called the yearning to be
independent or autonomous, to experience one's distinctness, the
self-chosenness of one's directions, one's individual integrity.
.
. . what is most striking about these two great human yearnings is that they
seem to be in conflict, and it is, in fact, their relation—this tension—that is of more interest to me at the moment
than either yearning by itself. I believe it is a lifelong tension. Our
experience of this fundamental ambivalence may be our experience of the
unitary, restless, creative motion of life itself.[3]
Set this in the
context of our theology, and we find ourselves called to be distinctive
individuals who are in harmonious community with other distinctive individuals,
which sounds very much like that other phrasing of the goal of divine
providence, namely "a heaven from the human race" (Divine Providence 27). We find ourselves urged in this direction by
"life itself," which calls to mind Swedenborg's frequent statement
that "the Lord is life itself."[4] We
find that "life itself" has been working on this for some thirteen
billion years.
"Survival of
the fittest" is popularly understood as involving a life-and-death
struggle, as "might makes right," so to speak. Darwin himself, though
warned the reader that he intended the phrase, "struggle for
existence," "in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence
of one being upon another."[5]
After all, if natural selection is continually affirming the good and rejecting
the bad, it must be significant that it has not rejected predators. It may say
more about Darwin's readers than about Darwin himself that we think of
evolution in terms of the triumph of the
strong and the death of the weak, this in spite of his own persistent emphasis
on adaptation, as well as the fact that there are a lot more "weak"
creatures than there are "strong" ones. The livestock population of
the world is estimated to be twenty-four billion—24 followed by nine zeros. The
insect population is estimated to be 1018—ten followed by eighteen
zeros. Tyrannosaurus Rex is no longer with us. The horseshoe crab seems to be
doing quite well, thank you.
John Titus
traveled through grief to "clarity of mind and a deep feeling of
interconnectedness." Divine providence presses us toward distinctive
individuality, which requires clarity of mind, in intimate community, which
requires a deep feeling of interconnectedness. Natural selection works for
"the improvement of each organic being in relation to its . . . conditions
of life." No matter how you spell it, the message is the same. It makes
all kinds of sense. There is an
abundance of evidence—thirteen billion years of it. How dumb do we have to be
not to understand it?
Amen.
Divine
Providence 4:4, 7 Emanuel Swedenborg
A form makes a unity more perfectly as its
constituents are distinguishably different, and yet united. . . It is
the intent of divine providence that everything created, collectively and in
every detail, should be this kind of whole, and that if it is not, that it
should become one. This means that there should be something of divine love
and something of divine wisdom together in everything that has been created, or
(which amounts to the same thing) something good and something true in everything
that has been created—or a union of what is good and what is true.
[1] Lawrence M. Kraus, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is
Something Rather than Nothing (New York: Atria, 2012), p. xxi.
[2] David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that
Transform the World (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), (p. 117).
[3] Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in
Human Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 107.
[4] Eighteen times in Secrets of Heaven alone: §§42, 287, 290,
880, 1735, 2004, 2025, 2261, 2657, 2888, 3043, 3424, 3607, 5070, 6685, 7507,
9103, and 9383.
[5] Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 33.
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