How magnified are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom hast Thou made them all.
~Psalm 104 (103 in the Septuagint version).
Some people think nature is a giant, complex machine that we must simplify, control, and commodify. Each tree in a forest should be measured by money, and each acre of farm by tonnage produced.
Other people, in opposition to such a soulless, mechanistic approach, attempt to worship nature as divine. Perhaps nature is better than –-and better off without— human beings. Every tree must be left standing, and all animals must be liberated.
Like the false binary set of capitalism and communism, these modern approaches to nature lead to divisive confusion, because both views neglect the central Truth of the world. Just as a tree grows up from the soil, so too does a worldview grow up from a theological basis: if that ground is unsound, the tree won’t bear good fruit. Ecological theories that grow up from the soils of materialism or paganism will be unable to understand, much less solve, ecological problems.
We can only properly understand and relate to nature if we keep in mind that nature is God’s creation. Like everything else in existence, natural phenomena – every pine tree, sunflower, and Jersey cow – all express our Creator’s loving desire for us to freely choose to commune with Him in peace. Environmentalists are correct that we human beings need to take better care of nature. What few understand is that we can only truly love and understand creation as much as we love and understand the Creator. When you begin to live according to God’s love, you gradually learn how that love changes everything.
For my whole life, I’ve been enamored of nature. This love comes from my parents. My father instilled in me a pure excitement about the complex harmonies of nature: how oak trees coordinate their nut production in order to limit the population of squirrels that eat their acorns; how squirrels stash acorns in holes, and then either forget or die, leaving the stash to grow into a new oak grove. My mother showed me how to appreciate the profuse beauty of flowers in spring and the slanting light of an autumn evening.
And yet the implicit theology of my parents, and of my education, was always materialist: God didn’t factor into our understanding of the world. This gave our appreciation of nature a schizoid quality: on one hand, we experienced an emotional (and indeed spiritual) response to the intricacy and beauty of nature, and yet we intellectually assumed that this intricacy and beauty was objectively meaningless. Nature’s infinite complexity and staggering diverse beauty were just the result of atoms colliding in the void. These atoms randomly self-assembled into forms onto which we, apes with opposable thumbs, projected patterns formed in our randomly-evolved brains. This was a problem: upon reflection, it’s obvious that random systems can’t be trusted to interpret any objective truth. This means that we couldn’t consider nature to be truly beautiful: every judgment about nature could only be subjective. Thus, every social consideration about how to treat nature was reduced to a debate between various subjective interpretations of nature. Such subjectivism has led to the deepening division between profiteers and environmentalists. But this division misses the truth entirely, because both sides of the argument are just two sides of a Godless counterfeit coin.
And yet somehow, there was always a quiet voice in me that steadfastly affirmed that nature is truly beautiful and not at all random. One summer, I worked as a wilderness ranger, rambling solo on four-day backpacking trips along high-mountain trails. On the fourth day of one of these trips, when the solitude had settled in my soul, I walked around a bend on a trail atop a high ridge and looked down over a wooded valley. Clouds swirled before me. As they dispersed, they revealed a rainbow arching over a crystal lake, far below. I had never looked down on a rainbow, before. A moment later, the light changed, and the rainbow was gone. At that point, I didn’t know about Christ, but the moment planted the seed of a little idea: the world, designed in beauty, unfolds before each of us as part of a spiritual curriculum. By revealing the rainbow below me, the Lord had whispered to me what St. Paul wrote in Romans 1:20: “The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen… through the things that are made.”
A few hours later, I unrolled my bivouac beside the mountain lake that I’d seen from above. Evening descended and brought hordes of mosquitoes. They ruined the sunset and provided a counterpoint to the afternoon’s glory: nature can also be hostile, inconvenient, and humbling. The natural world, for all its beauty and its aspects of perfect harmony, is also like us human beings: fallen from Grace. The natural world is subject to corruption and change, including, as we’ll see, climate change.
“We can only truly love and understand creation as much as we love and understand the Creator.”
Very true and I’d say this goes both ways. We can only truly love and understand our Creator as much as we love creation! Good piece.