God and Nature

The major idea in the sermon yesterday was that of finding God in the beauty of the world – that beauty is of God and that we should take time to notice it. I find this idea both very appealing and kind of dangerous.

The dangerous comes in mostly in how we then perceive other people. And it was mentioned that we're not talking here about what I think of as the cosmetic industry's idea of beauty. But we still have to be careful with that beauty-is-of-God idea when it comes to our fellow human beings. Just by chance, some people will be born with more symmetrical features than others. Some will be healthier or go through life with fewer scarring injuries. Some will more closely match the prevailing standards of beauty for body shape and size. And we all know it's ridiculous to say that if someone is more beautiful, that means they're closer to God. There have been some very homely saints, and there are people who are gorgeous but also self-centered or cruel. With humans, I think all we can say is that beauty is one kind of gift from God. Like musical talent or health or intelligence, it's good as part of God's creation, and it's nice to have or to appreciate in others, but it can be used for good or evil purposes and its presence or absence is not evidence of one's degree of righteousness.

That said, I still do think there's something in this idea that beauty is of God. I definitely see God in the beauty of the natural world. In flowers and trees, of course, and in mountains and seas and butterflies and songbirds. But also in bracket fungi and slime molds, in mice and snakes, in spiderwebs and weeds. I find nature to be incredibly beautiful both in its visual patterns of color and shape and in its complexity and interconnectedness, and I'm filled with wonder at the fullness of God's world.

Even so, I struggle with what that means when the natural world is also often so violent. The webs that shimmer so beautifully with tiny droplets after a storm are death traps for insects, built so that the spider can paralyze its prey and later liquefy it from the inside out. The smooth curves of a hawk's beak and talons have that shape in order to grab and tear apart unsuspecting rodents. And again, I feel wonder at how well these creatures are adapted for their environments and for their roles as predators, but I also question where God is in the harshness of nature, in the way so many life-forms have to get their energy and structural materials by taking them from other living things, in the way even those that aren't predators or parasites are still competitors both with other species and with members of their own. In general, you're not going to learn compassion for the weak or love for your enemy by looking at nature.

I don't know what this means. At least one of the stories in Genesis seems to indicate a fully harmonious world before the fall, in which even the tigers were vegetarians. It's not stated outright that predation was a result of the fall, but I've seen interpretations in that direction – that the fall was when death entered the world for all living things, not just for humans. If you accept evolution, however, that's impossible to take literally – dinosaurs were killing and dying long before humans showed up.

One way to deal with this is to take almost a science fiction parallel universe idea of the fall. It's an idea that sounds kind of nuts, but one way that helps me make sense of both the truth I feel in the stories and the reality I see around me. So maybe sometime in a two-dimensional, sort of loop-like sense of time, there was something like a garden of Eden, and there was something much more like the fall as a single choice with echoing consequences. And maybe those echoes rippled backwards in time in addition to forwards, so that that harmonious creation was disrupted to the point of never having existed, and so we get evolution instead, and all the trouble of having brains in beta as our mark of original sin. The advantage of this interpretation is that it speaks to that idea of the whole creation as being redeemed in Christ, and that it gives some explanation to the harshness of the natural world. The disadvantage is that it really does sound like something out of a sci-fi story, and that I completely made it up.

Another possibility is that for most things, death isn't as bad as it is for humans because of the lack of self-awareness. I'm pretty confident that my life has more value to me than the life of a deer has to it. I probably care more about the survival of longleaf pine as a species than the longleaf pine does. And so the fact that there are wasps that lay their eggs in living caterpillars so the wasp larvae can eat the caterpillar from the inside out isn't as horrible as it sounds. (Though the fact that there are parasites that do awful things to humans who do suffer and who do mind dying is still an issue).

But even then, some animals do seem to have some capacity for suffering – certainly enough that most of us find it morally wrong to inflict that suffering on them unnecessarily. And I'm not sure how far chimps are from us in terms of self-awareness, though I don't think they have the nearly lifelong awareness of their mortality that we have to deal with. So it seems like self-awareness exists on some sort of a continuum rather than being a black-and-white issue. And maybe that continues past humans. After all, for us humans, much of our mind is unconscious and inaccessible. It's part of us, but we can't fully know it. I have trouble imagining that God doesn't fully know God's self. How else could He be entirely trustworthy, as Scripture and Tradition tell us over and over that He is?

I'm afraid I've ended with more questions than answers again. I find wonder and beauty in nature that speak of me of God, but I also find that much of life has to destroy or outcompete other life in order to survive, and I don't know why a God that's full of love for everything He's made would create a world that way. Maybe someday we'll know.