Is Nature Just Nature?
If you’ve read much poetry, looked at many paintings, or seen many films, you might have the impression that nature is more than just a random backdrop. It has meaning and purpose.
When someone is sad in a movie, say, it might rain. If there is a conflict going on, a thunderstorm might accompany people’s anger; a raging fire might engulf the area of a fight scene. Or, a calm evening sky is a good ending to many a story.
Nature is a proxy to human experience: it shows the internal, emotional climate of people in art.
But also in scripture: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:3-4).
Here, the psalmist highlights the vastness of the heavens as a means of establishing his own feelings of smallness.
Or consider another example: “He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.” (Psalm 40:2)
This again is an instance where a nature image illuminates the insecurities of the psalmist and the stability God provides.
In these cases, it isn’t that nature is a sublime vista or an imminent danger that matters, but rather the ways in which it prompts reflection on spiritual realities.
The psalmist takes this logic a step further, noting that nature can not only help us explore our experience of God through metaphor, but can also provide additional knowledge of God: “Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” (Psalm 19:2).
This raises the question of whether or not we modern people have a vision of nature that matches this ancient, biblical one where the spiritual and natural are not one and the same, but are decidedly interconnected.
Naturalism
In its strict form, the modern worldview would be scientific naturalism: the confidence that any observed phenomenon can be explained by natural laws or their derivatives.
Naturalism would reduce human experience to the flow of chemicals, the physical interactions of objects, all the way down to the vibration of multidimensional strings if pushed to the theoretical extreme.
Consciousness is the ghost in the machine: an accidental byproduct of fundamental forces.
The sharing of affection between lovers is not an abstraction called “love,” but can be reduced to a strategy for the eventual passing on and copying of genetic material.
The protection of a child by a parent is not “love,” but an instinctive way of assuring the species continues, if indeed that instinct is present in an individual.
If parental affection were lacking, I suppose we would be forced to call that no less natural, from a naturalistic standpoint. An aloof or, worse, abusive parent would be an outworking of nature, seeing as anything that happens in nature is, on this understanding, natural.
This is deeply unsatisfying and even disturbing to contemplate, let alone harmonize with a Christian perspective. Yet, we must ask ourselves, which view of nature is biblical: the one revealed by science or the one corresponding to spiritual significance, art, emotion, and intellect?
Which View of Nature is Biblical?
Both. I think.
“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience-among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” (Ephesians 2:1-3)
A natural life is possible, but not necessarily virtuous. It might simply follow a sort of pre-programmed behavior in moving through the world. If I pursue the appetites for food, pleasure, sex, drink, and such, then I am acting instinctively, as an animal might.
A lemon honey cake I made. Instinct might make me crave sweet, high-caloric foods for the energy boost. A bit of reflection on whether I need those calories might give me pause.
To some degree, there’s no shame in those things, but the problem comes in when the desires are uncontrolled. It makes us “children of wrath” in God’s eyes to simply do what comes naturally, without restraint.
Which is not to say all natural instinct is all bad: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11).
A bowling trip with the kids was a surprise present they both liked…
Jesus acknowledged that people can do some good, but also noted that God will do all the more good, being beyond the natural world.
Another example of the idea that not all natural things are bad says: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.” (Romans 2:14)
In other words, it is a possibility to follow God’s law through some–but certainly not all–natural inclinations.
So, what do we do with this understanding of nature as a reflection of spiritual realities and a way of life that may or may not be what God intends?
Creation and the Children of God
I have been places where people have created nightmares out of the raw stuff of creation: concentration camps, impoverished neighborhoods, destroyed fields, ruined by war or human carelessness.
Yet, Christians are to be nothing less than the beginning of an answer to the destructive side of natural living: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:19-21).
What if we had a vision of a way to live in nature as God intended, not through exploitation of nature to our dubious or outright immoral ends, but through an understanding of nature as pointing to the glory of God?
Conservation of natural spaces and resources could be a part of this, but also the sort of things we do use natural resources to achieve might play a role.
We are participants in nature, as biological beings, but also in a renewed nature by God’s intervention in our lives. What would it mean to live like it? What would we do to others and to the world around us?
To close, I’d quote from a favorite film of mine that deals with these issues: “The Tree of Life”: “There are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.”
