This statement by Protestant theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg helps to set the context for the question posed in the present essay.2 It goes without saying that abstraction—the consideration of a thing or an aspect of a thing apart from the totality of its meaning or context, for methodological or disciplinary purposes—is necessary and legitimate in scientific research. Indeed, such abstraction is made possible by the Christian understanding of creation itself. The creator God in his generosity grants to the creature its autonomy, a law (nomos) proper to its own nature (autos, “self”). At the same time, as Pannenberg suggests, the relation of the creature to the creator God is sui generis, by virtue of its utterly foundational character: rightly understood, creation in Christianity is ex nihilo.3 If God is the source of my being and the being of all else, then relation to God is just so far given with and constitutive of being.4 Indeed, as Aquinas says, “God is in all things, and innermostly.”5 This means that this relation to God cannot but accompany each being everywhere and at every moment and indeed from its deepest depths.
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1. Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Theological Questions to Scientists,” in The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. A. R. Peacocke (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981/1986), 3–16, at 4–5. The paper was originally presented at the Oxford International Symposium at Christ Church in September 1979. Reprinted in Communio: International Catholic Review 15, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 319–33.
2. This essay was first presented in summary form at the international symposium “Science, Reason, and Truth,” co-sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and Euresis (Associazione per la promozione e la diffusione della cultura e del lavoro scientifico), Repubblica di San Marino, 17–19 August 2007. It appears in David L. Schindler, Ordering Love: Liberal Societies and the Memory of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2011).
3. Creation ex nihilo does not imply “creationism.” An absolute origin of being is not incompatible with evolution, though which theory of the latter is most adequate need not occupy us here. Cf. Michael Hanby, “Creation Without Creationism: Toward a Theological Critique of Darwinism,” Communio: International Catholic Review 30, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 654–94; and Adrian Walker, “Schöpfung und Evolution. Jenseits des Konkordismus,” Internationale katholische Zeitschrift Communio 35, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 55–70.
4. Cf. the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, n. 109: “The likeness with God shows that the essence and existence of man are constitutively related to God in the most profound manner. This is a relationship that exists in itself, it is therefore not something that comes afterwards and is not added from the outside.”
5. Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 8, a. 1.