Modern science has brought us many wonderful things, but we would be naïve to think that it has made us wonder-full. In fact, our obsession with the empirical has left us wonder-less because we mistakenly believe that everything can be explained. We can, of course, explain how a lot of things in nature work. The problem comes in when we accept these merely mechanistic explanations as the only explanation. Our forefathers may have lacked the empirical skills that we have, but they most certainly were wiser because they were able to order all things. Like ourselves, these wise men and women were obsessed with answering the question why, but unlike us they were unsatisfied with just knowing how nature worked. They wanted to know why it worked the way it did more than how it worked. For all their supposed backwardness they knew that nature could have worked differently, but it worked the way it did for a reason. They sought to discover the reason first. To use Aristotelian language, they wanted to understand formal and final causes and not just material and formal causes.
Scientism
The overemphasis on the how without any concern for the why has led to the heresy of scientism. Notice that I called it a heresy and not just a philosophy. It is a heresy because it rejects the truth that there is a universe. It looks only at objects, but never objects as they fit into the whole. He loves the trees but knows nothing of the forest. To borrow from Chesterton, the scientistic heretic is “moved to discuss details in art, politics, literature…He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe…Everything matters—except everything.” It is a heresy because it ignores the religious implications of Nature. Religious because God is its Creator and He has written into it His-story. Implications because it is just Creation and never meant to be worshipped. It is a sign, a sacrament if you will, that reveals to man His Creator. In fact, creation exists for man so that He might come to know the Creator. That is its purpose and so we must read it that way. Just as in the Book of Scripture God has revealed Himself, so too in the Book of Creation.
Like any heresy, there is always a temptation to overcorrect and reject scientistic explanations whole cloth. But when we do this we are creating a false opposition between the scientistic and sacramental standards. Both creation and Scripture have the same Author telling the Truth in different forms. Just as it is foolish to remove Scripture and only “find God in Nature”, it is likewise imprudent to diminish the story that God is telling through Creation. Aristotle thought all four causes were necessary to come to a more complete understanding of things. The medievalists may have been wiser because they were able to focus on the formal and final causes, but they were limited in their understanding of the material and efficient causes and therefore were not as wise as they could have been. We, on the other hand, have at our disposal a great power to more fully plum the depths of the material and efficient causes. In short we have an opportunity to be wiser than our predecessors, but only if we avoid the heretical pitfalls we are speaking about here.
Our Lady, the Morning Star
An example will help to illustrate what this might look like. The Litany of Loreto describes Our Lady as the “Morning Star”. This moniker came about because of the wedding of the book of Scripture with the book of Creation. The Church has long interpreted a verse from the Song of Songs (6:9) as descriptive of her: “Who is She that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun?”. Turning towards creation we find that there is, in fact, a “star” that is found in the sky just prior to the rising of the sun. This “star” reflects the light of the sun and suggest the rising of the sun. Our Lady, as the truest reflection of the brightness of her Son, always points to His coming (c.f. Jn 2:5).
Some might accuse Catholics of over-spiritualizing things by doing this until we actually look at this empirically. The planet Venus, which is named for a Roman goddess of fertility (could there be anything more fertile than a Virgin Mother?), has its orbit inside of the Earth’s orbit. This means it is always relatively close to the sun in the sky. When it is on one side of the sun it appears to follow the sun and brightens in our sky just after the sun sets. When it is on the other side of the sun it precedes the sun in our sky so that it brightens the sky just before sun rise. One can readily see how this one aspect of the book of nature perfectly describes Our Lady. Apropos of our impending Solemnity, Our Lady is a Heavenly Body. Nevertheless, even if she is closer to the sun, she still remains inside our orbit as one of us. She always reflects the “Light of the World”, but especially in times of darkness.
We could go on, but you get the point. In fact, the more we wonder about this one particular aspect of creation, the deeper we could make of the connections. Clinging to the complentarity of nature and Scripture enables us to see this in its fullest meaning. If nature is nothing but the random collision of atoms, then you won’t care about why Venus is the way it is. If you think nature something completely doomed for destruction, then you won’t care what it has to say. But if you take the authentically Catholic both/and approach then you will be led deeper into the awareness of how close God is to us.