O is for Ordering

All our diminishing of God has been strong and building during the last 200-300 years. It is not coincidence that during that time researchers have discovered and explained more and more how the universe works: the mathematical formulae that gravity obeys, the rules of genetics, the patterned ebbs and flows of ecosystems. Our scientific age has been so successful in revealing and explaining that our expectations have grown. We are disappointed that economists and meteorologists cannot predict better; we are miffed the few times when our physician cannot say what is wrong with us.

How could decreasing God come from increasing understanding of how God's universe runs? If a medieval person witnesses many events that have, to her, no understood cause, she could attribute them to God's micro-managing the affairs of daily life. But if her great-great (etc.) granddaughter sees those same events as the results of weather patterns, microbial infections or sunspots, then she might not think God is involved. Of course, that need not be her conclusion. Understanding the patterns God lays on his creatures could lead, instead of to shrinking God, to magnifying him in awed admiration for the Creator's craft. Instead of seeing God's powerful hand mainly in exceptions, see it in the rules, innumerable and infinitely good.

How big is God? In this view, big enough to get credit, to be worthy of praise, for all things bright and beautiful. Astronomers can explain that it is the sunlight reflecting off the full moon's surface that makes Wisconsin's winter woods glow. But that does not mean that moonlight could happen without God! Rather, it describes how God provides that mystical, alluring and strange light. Similarly, all scientific explanations, from physical laws to the theory of evolution, do not tell us how things happen without God but they explain how God makes cloud-blazing sunsets, rainbows, northern lights, and the scattered piercing brightness of a black, starry sky.

So, since increasing knowledge of the patterns of God's creation ought to lead to an increased, not diminished, estimation of God, why has God shrunk? We already know. God's bigness is a trial of our faith. Divine magnitude was great comfort to the prophets and psalmists who had faith to believe that God was on their side. But if we humans are mindful of how obliged we are for God's daily supply of all our needs, or fearful of how easily he can pass judgment on us all, without faith to believe that for some reason he is on our side anyway, then what will we do?

People have always made idols, fashioning gods according to their perception or liking. Lacking faith to take comfort in God's bigness, wouldn't it be tempting to make a smaller, less intimidating, more manageable version? Instead of looking through an astronomer's telescope the proper way at God, magnifying him (to borrow Mary's phrase), one might prefer to look through it backwards at God, to make him appear very small and distant. What a loss! The loss is pushing away that very God whose mercy for us is so big. How big is God's mercy? Big enough that God himself makes himself small for our sake.