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Admiration for the Beauty, Order, and Simplicity of God’s Handiwork

by Michael F. McLean, Ph.D.
President, Thomas Aquinas College
Matriculation 2016

Welcome to our incoming freshmen and to all of our returning students.

I will begin with a quotation from the 19^th Psalm: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims His handiwork.” Essential to the Catholic intellectual tradition, and to the Church’s teaching on the relation between faith and reason, is the idea that the natural world is God’s creation, and that the existence, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator can be seen in it, not only with the eyes of faith, but by the efforts of natural reason.

The five proofs for God’s existence in the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas — which you will study in the Junior Year — exemplify these words of the Psalmist in that all of them begin from something learned from the philosophical study of nature, as undertaken, for example, in Aristotle’s Physics, which you will study in the Sophomore Year. Each of the ways concludes to the existence of God. The first way begins with the philosophical definition of motion and concludes to the existence of an unmoved mover. The second begins with the order of efficient causality seen in nature and concludes to the existence of an uncaused cause. The fifth begins with the philosophical principle that nature acts for an end and concludes to an intelligence governing the whole of the natural world.

If the general understanding of nature provided by philosophy is enough to anchor the proofs for God’s existence, one might ask why a program of Catholic liberal education requires its students to pursue the more detailed and particular knowledge of nature afforded by natural science. This is the topic for my reflections this morning.

The first reason for the study of natural science is to satisfy the wonder that is essential to our human nature and which, as the College’s mission statement, A Proposal for the Fulfillment of Catholic Liberal Education, says, “is the proper human motive for higher education.”

If one sees the general order in nature revealed by philosophy, there is, or should be, a natural desire to see that order in the more particular and determinate way that is the province of natural science. It is one thing, and a very important thing, to learn — as you will, I trust, in your Sophomore Year — that motion is the “act of the potential as such.” It is quite another thing to learn that the heavenly bodies are tracing elliptical paths or that their motion around the sun is in accord with an inverse square law.

No one is saying these are easy things to see. They weren’t easy for Kepler, they weren’t easy for Newton, and they probably won’t be easy for you. One should take joy and pleasure in seeing these things, however, and, in doing so, one should grow in admiration for the beauty, order, and simplicity of God’s handiwork; for its intelligence, and for its proportionality to our intelligence. At Thomas Aquinas College, ours is the conviction that some knowledge is worth pursuing for its own sake and that it is intrinsically good to satisfy our desire to know the world and its creator in as determinate a way as possible.

Sophomores sometimes wonder, however, about the worth of studying a natural scientist, Ptolemy, for example, who turns out to be wrong. For I have been speaking of natural science as though it is part of the pursuit of truth even though it might be argued that much of it belongs in the realm of opinion or hypothesis. We should say, first, that natural science is a legitimate part of the pursuit of a determinate knowledge of nature, even if particular scientific theories do not always contain the complete truth about nature. The desire for such knowledge is proper to our nature as rational and wondering animals.

Ptolemy is an inspiring example of just such a wonderer, and his hypotheses about the motions of the heavenly bodies are natural beginnings insofar as they hew closely to our first experiences of the heavens, and to our intrinsic sense of what is beautiful and orderly. All subsequent astronomy, moreover, is a reaction to Ptolemy and cannot be understood without some grasp of the Ptolemaic system. To make a long story short, natural science is worth pursuing even if it does not contain the fullness of truth or the certitude of the strictly demonstrative sciences.

In addition, to the extent that the theories of Ptolemy, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, for example, borrow their principles from mathematics, and apply those principles to the motions of natural bodies, they are examples of what Aristotle and St. Thomas call subalternate sciences, and, as you will learn later on, it is useful in Catholic liberal education to be familiar with such examples.

This leads naturally enough to another reason for the study of natural science — viz., to become better acquainted with its methods and with its place among the other disciplines. We want to be able to distinguish between what is known or proven in science, on the one hand, and what is assumed, or is a matter of hypothesis, on the other; between what is empirical or mathematical, on the one hand, and what is philosophical on the other. Studying the works of the great natural scientists enables us to make these judgments for ourselves, and helps us to see what in science is more or less certain or perhaps not certain at all.

A proper understanding of the order of the disciplines helps us to see that nothing in science can contradict the general, philosophical understanding we have of nature, an understanding rooted in common sense and common experience. It helps us to see as well that nothing in science can contradict what we know to be true by Divine revelation. Being able to judge these things for ourselves helps us to find our way in the modern struggle between faith and reason, and between religion and science.

The faith of entirely too many Catholics has been needlessly weakened by the mistaken idea that modern science has refuted central claims of the Catholic faith, or otherwise rendered our belief in them unreasonable. Well-educated Catholics should not be subject to this danger. “A specific part of a Catholic University’s task,” said Pope St. John Paul II in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, “is to promote dialogue between faith and reason so that it can be seen more profoundly how faith and reason bear harmonious witness to the unity of all truth” (17).

Having given some account of the importance of natural science to Catholic liberal education, let us conclude by considering its place in the curriculum as a whole. Again in the words of our mission statement, “divinely revealed truth will be the chief object of study at Thomas Aquinas College as well as the governing principle of the whole institution, giving order and purpose even to the teaching and learning of the secular disciplines.” Theology is the queen of the sciences and occupies pride of place in our curriculum.

Second to theology is philosophy. As our mission statement says, “under the Christian dispensation, philosophy is seen not only as worthy of pursuit for its own sake, but as a handmaid to theology.” Only after theology and philosophy do we get to the seven liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium, wherein is found natural science along with mathematics and logic. The seven liberal arts are ordered to the study of philosophy and, hence, to theology. In the words of Hugh of St. Victor, “The seven liberal arts are introductory disciplines by which the lively soul enters into the secrets of Philosophy.”

Yours are lively souls. You freshmen will soon join your fellow students in experiencing the power of natural science to provoke wonder about issues proper to philosophy and ultimately to theology — questions about instinct, purpose, the infinite, place, time, motion, and the continuous, for example, and you will soon experience the power of the College’s curriculum and pedagogy to satisfy that wonder. You will also soon experience the power of natural science to manifest the teaching of the Book of Wisdom — “He has disposed everything in weight, number, and measure” — and so deepen your knowledge of God and His marvelous works.

Thank you, and may God bless your years at Thomas Aquinas College.