I will be clear once more, I am not writing this series on what the second book of God, nature, can teach us about God to prove God’s existence. While objective evidence for or against God’s existence is crucial, you can neither prove theism nor atheism with certainty on objective evidence alone.

To restate my premise once more, I believe that Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century was right, and he was not the first. God has spoken to humanity via two holy books of equal value. The first is the written, canonical scriptures, and the second is what Aquinas called “nature,” which could also be referred to as reality. This should have been a no-brainer, as reality is the proper gold standard for measuring any book or idea.

Aquinas also said that if there is a conflict between the canonical scriptures and nature, then that conflict must be resolved. If the evidence within the natural realm is highly confident, the most logical reinterpretation is that of scripture. Why? Because the Bible is written with metaphor, history, poetry, etc. It is open to reassigning what was once considered history to metaphor. It is only a recent development in church history (primarily within the American conservative church movement) that all scripture must be held as perfect and literal.

Aquinas also stated, “The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false…” This last statement is profound and almost completely neglected in most of our present science-hating churches.

I will be writing much more about what nature says about God as I wrap this up. But I will say at this juncture, the God that is exclusively of the written canonical scriptures, without the second book of nature, tends to be small. Why? The Old Testament was written by and to people of the late Bronze Age, and the New Testament was written during the Greco-Roman era. Those were times when the cosmos was tiny. A sphere or possibly flat Earth (in some views) with all the heavenly bodies floating in our atmosphere about where commercial jets fly now. Indeed, not us being on one small planet in a solar system, that solar system being one of over two hundred-billion-star systems within our galaxy, our galaxy being one of over two trillion spread out over a 90 billion light-years in distance.

If God had inspired writers of the Old Testament to write about the distance galaxies, quantum mechanics, or human reproduction, it would have been as gibberish until the modern time.

During those earlier eras, we knew almost nothing about the remarkable aspects of biological systems, chemistry, or physics. Yes, the Old Testament God was the creator of the cosmos, but that cosmos was so small we could imagine humans had the technology to create it ourselves, if there were enough workers. The entire known universe was measurable in hundreds of miles. However, we would have no ability to create, or even understand, the profoundly complex and mysterious cosmos that nature has now taught us. The modern God must be mind-blowing immense.

The Problem of the Small God

I will write more about this later, but the problem with a small god is multifaceted. For one, we can create the small god in our own image. We can manipulate him to win our wars… or our ballgames, and subject to our long list of dogmas. Dogmas we have created in our own minds by reading the scriptures like reading tea-leaves. For example, the whole complex system of dogmas that support Christian nationalism is built on a reading of Mathew 16:18 “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it” The number one dogma for most Christians, being anti-abortion, requires an even greater reading of the tea leaves.

This small god is easily religion-ized, incarcerated within our boundaries of rituals and traditions. That small god is so petty that he is easily offended by certain “swear words” that we may say. That our trivial behaviors are of great concern to him, and he must be a him. He’s sexual, like us, thus the word, “He.” Yes, a god created in our own image. Many of the ills, if not all, of the present state of American Christianity can be attributed to a small god.

Before I go on, I must finish the topics of Quantum Mechanics and Mathematics, and what they can teach us about God.

Quantum Mechanics, Another Spooky Thing

Einstein called the weird things of quantum mechanics “spooky.” There is one more spooky thing I must mention. I did address how subatomic particles behave as particles in certain contexts and as waves (energy waves without matter). Another example of that is called Quantum Tunneling. If you consider our macro world, where a tennis ball is hit against a concrete wall, the ball can’t penetrate that wall. Even if you fired it from a cannon, it would destroy the ball before it would go through the wall.

In the quantum world, there are such walls that subatomic particles should not be able to penetrate. However, they do something spooky. At the wall, they behave as an energy wave that vibrates the wall, travels through it as a wave, and reappears on the other side. In the macroworld, think of the same concrete wall that the tennis ball hit, but now imagine a highly energized sound wave hitting the wall on the inside. That sound wave would travel through the concrete and then be released into the air on the outside as a muffled sound. One typical example of quantum tunneling is in semiconductors, which are in all electronics.

Back to Mathematics

It is shocking to some Christians when I say mathematics played an important role in my coming back to God. Part of that reason is that, for the past fifty to seventy-five years, we are living in a time that all religious truth, must be subjective. “I know God is there because I can feel him inside.” To even discuss objective, evidence-based truth as part of the process of accetpting theism or even Christianity, is deeply frowned upon. But that is not the way it has been or should be.

Beyond mathematics being one of the evidences for an intelligent creator, it has a profound statement about who God is. Yes, the written book tells us alot about who God is, but the second, book of nature or reality, also hints at who God is. Matematics is the hidden fondation of all that we see. It is profoundly orderly, and consistent throughout the comos. I will post a video where this topic of math behind reality is discussed much better than if I had done it.

Respectfully, Mike