ABSTRACT
Certainly there are different conceptions or understandings of the ideas of God, of nature and of art, but there have also been, and perhaps still are, different concepts of these. It strains coherence to say that two people are merely differing in their conception of the nature of God when one allows that deity must have and another denies that it may have a material embodiment. Again, where someone says that nature is the sum total of matter in motion, and another that it is an integrated ecological system of flora and fauna, we should allow that they are differing over more than the right account of what is otherwise the subject of broad definitional agreement. Delineating the boundaries within and between concepts, and charting the
course of intellectual development from one concept or conception to another, requires analytical acuity and considerable historical knowledge. Here I shall not test my competence or readers’ patience by engaging extensively in these forms of conceptual and historical study. Nor for my purposes is it necessary to do so, since whatever the differences it is clear enough that there is a significant tradition within Western culture (and beyond) of finding in the experience of nature, and in the making of art related to nature, intimations of a transcendent creative cause: God. For these purposes I understand nature to be the empirically observable material world as it is independent of human construction.2 I take art to be the domain of human production in which objects (broadly construed) are created primarily for aesthetic effect, to be experienced for their compositional, expressive and/or narrative content. And I take God to be the unique ultimate cause; personal, active and providential; infinitely good, powerful and knowledgeable. Previously we saw St Paul writing of the cosmos as manifesting divine activity
when he noted that ‘Ever since the creation of the world, [God’s]
invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be perceived in the things that have been made’ (Romans 1:20). Far from suggesting a passing thought, the brevity of this remark indicates Paul’s assumption that his readers were already familiar with this idea. Certainly educated people knowledgeable in the speculations of Greek and Roman philosophers and poets would have been used to the notion that nature manifests design. In words echoing Cicero, Paul began his presentation of the case for deities by saying ‘What can be so obvious and clear, as we gaze up at the sky and observe the heavenly bodies, as that there is some divine power of surpassing intelligence by which they are ordered?’ Then later he adds that the greatest reason for believing in a creator is ‘the individuality, usefulness, beauty, and order of the sun and moon and stars’.3
