The Harmony of Discord between Nature and the Supernatural

Image by Andres Ramos

 

Remember this: To get through a night that felt to long, to steady hands that wouldn't stop shaking, to remember which direction was home when they'd lost their way.

Have you ever read an argument on Nature and the Supernatural? No? Yes? Maybe?

Do I have someone you need to meet. He is deader than a doornail but he lives on in his words. The author uses Christianity as his deferment but lets not get that twisted and think you can not substitute your own version of religion or philosophy and see what you come out with. It might be interesting. Let us suspend disbelief and belief for a moment and see what we get out of this.

Get a snack and a beverage. I hope you like reading. 

Here is a passage:

"From the first moment or birth-time of modern science, if we could fix the moment, it has been clear that Christianity must ultimately come into a grand issue of life and death with it, or with the tendencies embodied in its progress. Not that Christianity has any conflict with the facts of science, or they with it. On the contrary, since both is and Nature have their common root and harmony in God, Christianity is the natural foster-mother of science, and science the certain handmaid of Christianity. And both together, when rightly conceived, must constitute one complete system of knowledge. But the difficulty is here; that we see things only in a partial manner, and that the two great modes of thought, or intellectual methods, that of Christianity in the supernatural department of God's plan, and that of science in the natural, are so different that a collision is inevitable and a struggle necessary to the final liquidation of the account between them; or, what is the same, necessary to a proper settlement of the conditions of harmony.

Thus, from the time of Galileo's and Newton's discoveries, down to the present moment of discovery and research in geological science, we have seen the Christian teachers stickling for the letter of the Christian documents and alarmed for their safety, and fighting, inch by inch and with solemn pertinacity, the plainest, most indisputable or even demonstrable facts. On the other side, the side of science, multitudes, especially of the mere dilettanti, have been boasting, almost every month, some discovery that was to make a fatal breach upon revealed religion.

And a much greater danger to religion is to be apprehended from science than this, viz., the danger that comes from what may be called a bondage under the method of science,--as if nothing could be true, save as it is proved by the scientific method. Whereas, the method of all the higher truths of religion is different, being the method of faith; a verification by the heart, and not by the notions of the head.

Busied in nature, and profoundly engrossed with her phenomena, confident of the uniformity of her laws, charmed with the opening wonders revealed in her process, armed with manifold powers contributed to the advancement of commerce and the arts by the discovery of her secrets, and pressing onward still in the inquest, with an eagerness stimulated by rivalry and the expectation of greater wonders yet to be revealed,--occupied in this manner, not only does the mind of scientific men but of the age itself become fastened to, and glued down upon, nature; conceiving that nature as a frame of physical order, is itself the system of God; unable to imagine any thing higher and more general to which it is subordinate. Imprisoned, in this manner, by the terms and the method of nature, the tendency is to find the whole system of God included under its laws; and then it is only a part of the same assumption that we are incredulous in regard to any modification, or seeming interruption of their activity, from causes included in the supernatural agency of person, or in those agencies of God himself that complete the unity and true system of his reign. And so it comes to pass that, while the physical order called nature is perhaps only a single and very subordinate term of that universal divine system, a mere pebble chafing in the ocean-bed of its eternity we refuse to believe that this pebble can be acted on at all from without, requiring all events and changes in it to take place under the laws of acting it has inwardly in itself. There is no incarnation therefore, no miracle, no redemptive grace, or experience; for God's system is nature, and it is incredible that the laws of nature should be interrupted; all which is certainly true, if there be no higher, more inclusive system under which it may take place systematically, as a result even of system itself. 

And exactly this must be the understanding of mankind, at some future time, when the account between Christianity and Nature shall have been fully liquidated. When that point is reached, it will be seen that the real system of God included two parts, a natural and a supernatural, and it will no more be incredible that one should act upon the other, than that one planet of particle in the department of Nature should act upon and modify the action of another. But we are not yet ready for a discovery so difficult to be made. 

Thus far the tendency if visible, on every side, to believe in nature simply, and in Christianity only so far as it conforms to Nature and finds shelter under its laws. And the mind of the Christian world is becoming, every day, more and more saturated with this propensity to naturalism; gravitating, as it were, by some fixed law, through imperceptibly or unconsciously, toward a virtual and real unbelief in Christianity itself; for the Christianity that is become a part only of nature, or is classified under Nature, is Christianity extinct. " (Bushnell 7-9)

How did that make you feel? Do you need to lay down on a couch, or pull up a chair? These young whippersnappers' heads are spinning.

That is gonna be one hell of a campfire talk.

And no, I haven't forgotten about the long lost and uncontrived Jungian post that is eluding me. 

~Courtesy of the AOFH~

Source Cited:

Bushnell, Horace. "Nature and the Supernatural". Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907, p, 7-9