Providence and us

THE American culture war, whose battlefield now is the current electoral campaign in the US, has led me to dig up this topic. I feel it has become suddenly relevant. I feel many people need to know more about divine providence and the role we play in it.

The trigger of this interest is the choice of the now American sensation Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate for the Republicans. Many good things are said of her—that she is pro-life, a hockey mom who distinguishes herself from the pit bull just by the lipstick, a game-changer, a reformer, etc.

But what immediately caught my attention was the claim that she believes in creationism. Creationism is the belief that the world and us have been created by God. That’s one of the core doctrines, to which I agree. There may be other theories spun around it made by ideologues and these I may not agree.

What’s clear is that we did not come about merely by spontaneous generation, and our development is not all due to the evolution process. There’s a lot of evolution involved, of course, but that alone does not explain everything.

Our creation, our life and existence, our nature involve a supernatural or divine intervention. We did not come to exist just on our own, and by merely natural processes.

At first, I thought, what’s the big deal about this? I have taken this doctrine for granted as a given. For me, it’s a no-question-no-debate matter. Not even when in my university years, I became aware of a group that took a different tack in this topic.

Later, I realized that this topic is a big issue in the US. Many are afraid of this doctrine. One writer even came out with a wild accusation that with this belief of candidate Palin, the US could have its biggest threat, since creationism, said he, is squarely opposed to scientific development.

How that writer arrived at that conclusion, I don’t know. But I thought the fear was completely baseless and entirely irrational. It’s reacting to a phantom, not a real thing.

Even if for the moment we skip discussing the origin of the world and life, since this can involve mysteries and faith, and many people are allergic to these topics, I don’t understand how a person who believes that God created us and the world stands as a threat to science and progress.

In fact, if we are to closely follow Catholic teaching in this matter, we will realize that the doctrine that God created us favors, rather than threatens, science and progress. This is because Catholic faith teaches that God continues his creation through his providence.

God involves us in his continuing work of governing the world, meaning, his providence. He does this without diminishing our freedom. On the contrary, he enhances it as long as we understand that the freedom we have comes from him who also made laws governing our freedom. That’s the moral law.

The problem starts when we think our freedom is solely our own, to be lived strictly according to our own desires, if not whims and caprices.

God creating us is very different from us making things. In the latter, the things we make acquire an existence independent of us. In the former, the creatures keep their existence and their development with God always sustaining and governing them.

God never withdraws from his creatures, because if that ever happens, the creatures revert to nothing. God rules the very existence of things. We, on the other hand, with respect to the things we make, have nothing to do with their continuing existence. We’re only responsible for assembling them.

The issue again brings up the old faith-vs.-science debate, which to my mind is unfairly framed. I believe that the larger picture of this issue is that these two elements actually work together, mutually helping each other, because in the end both come from God.

There may be moments of apparent conflict between the two, and these are more because of our limitations, if not outright confusion and errors in knowledge and judgments about certain aspects of the issue.

But these conflicts are not invincible. They can be overcome as long as with patience we seek to resolve the problems and work out the details of the conflict objectively.