Cosmology Without God?: The Problematic Theology Inherent in Modern Cosmology (Veritas Book 35)

by David Alcalde

In this initial chapter, I have argued that modern science operates under extrinsicist theological and metaphysical presuppositions. This is so because nature is assumed from the beginning to be essentially indifferent to God. Whether God exists or not makes no difference to the natural world. Therefore, God is presupposed in such a manner that he can only be extrinsically related to the world. This presupposition is the core idea of methodological naturalism, which is accepted by virtually every scientist. The extrinsicism present in modern science is wrong for several reasons. First, it falsifies both the concept of God and the concept of nature. On the one hand, God’s transcendence is lost because God is reduced to an external agent acting on the same level as any natural agent. On the other hand, nature loses its own interiority and unity; it is reduced to a mechanism composed of unrelated parts.228 Second, it contradicts science’s self-understanding as indifferent to both metaphysics and theology because science is indeed intrinsically related to metaphysics and theology. Third, it makes the dialogue between theology and science impossible because of the reduced notions of God and nature assumed. Theological extrinsicism can be seen everywhere, from the theologians using science to give scientific evidence for the existence of God to the atheistic scientists using their science to negate the existence of God. Hanby has shown and criticized this problematic theological...

And by the words, “God saw that it was good,” it is sufficiently intimated that God made what was made not from any necessity, nor for the sake of supplying any want, but solely from His own goodness, that is, because it was good. And this is stated after the creation had taken place, that there might be no doubt that the thing made satisfied the goodness on account of which it was made.280

Before finishing this section, I want to explain how the real distinction conveys not only the radical difference between God and creation but also the analogical likeness between them.

The real distinction between essence and existence entails creatures’ radical dependency on God; for all created beings participate in God’s existence.

is important to note that primary causality does not rival secondary causality because “divine causality and creaturely causality function at different metaphysical levels.”410 Aquinas said that “one action does not proceed from two agents of the same order. But nothing hinders the same action from proceeding from a primary and a secondary agent.”411 When a concrete effect is attributed to God and to a natural agent, it is erroneous to affirm that the effect “is partly done by God, and partly by the natural agent; rather, it is wholly done by both, according to a different way, just as the same effect is wholly attributed to the instrument and also wholly to the principal agent.”412 Thanks to the different metaphysical levels, we can say that “any created effect comes totally and immediately from God as the transcendent primary cause and totally and immediately from the creature as secondary cause.”413

If “the Trinitarian processions are the cause (exemplar, efficient, and final) of the procession of creatures, . . . [then] the full and precise understanding of creation . . . requires the knowledge of the procession of the divine persons.”

only a trinitarian doctrine of God is able to give a positive account of creaturely difference.

The latter argument assumes “the sort of temporally ordered causal series like the chicken and the egg,” and defends the existence of a first cause in a chronological sense. In contrast, the Thomist argument talks “about a very particular kind of causal series, one in which the causes and effects are not linearly ordered in time, but they are hierarchically ordered at one moment of time. And

This distinction, and the priority of ontological origin to temporal origin, transforms the meaning of temporal origin, making time not simply a linear series of instants but a participation in the actuality of eternity, as I suggested in the second chapter. According

As outlined in that chapter, “Creatio ex nihilo is not primarily an answer to the question of temporal origin. . . . Creatio ex nihilo is, instead, about the ultimate ontological origin of reality—most fundamentally it describes in a very bald and unadorned way the ultimate dependence of everything on the Creator.”

The extrinsic image of God goes hand in hand with an extrinsic relation of science to theology and metaphysics. For example, Spitzer considers that “God is not an object or phenomenon or regularity within the physical universe; so science cannot say anything about God.”605 He is unable to realize that science always tacitly presupposes an image of God, since the world’s intrinsic relation to God is reflected in science’s intrinsic relation to theology and metaphysics, as previously discussed in the first chapter. An extrinsicist scholar, whether a theologian or a scientist, defends a science that is neutral regarding theology and metaphysics. These two subjects are placed outside the realm of scientific knowledge. There

Because of their positivism, the proponents of a multiverse cannot think about God as ipsum esse subsistens. He becomes “a finite object juxtaposed to and in competition with the world.”828 This extrinsic image of God is inherently related to the image of the universe as a collection of unrelated pieces put together. Once God ceases to be the fullness of being, becoming a mere external designer, the universe loses its inner unity, and it becomes an artificial aggregate. Even more, creation has nothing to do with the transition from non-being to being, or the ontological structure of the world, and becomes mere design. Ultimately, the image of god rejected by the adherents of the multiverse theory is the same one accepted by the defenders of the design argument based on anthropic coincidences. This is not a coincidence, but the consequence of both having the same theological and ontological presuppositions.