Q: Can We Find God in Nature?

Creation and its creatures must be beheld as Christ himself

Earlier this spring, my friend Ken Tanner finally managed to prod me into revisiting (his idea) and rewriting (my idea) a catechism of the faith which I had begun several years ago.

Here’s the 14th Question/Answer under the first rubric, God the Father.

Here is the previous post: How Should We Speak about God?

And here is the one before it: How Should We Picture God?

You can find the others in the Archive.

14. Can we find God in nature?

Yes.

And no.

Yes:

Because God is the Cause of all existence and continually holds all things in their existence, every tiny mundane thing in creation is a sacrament of God’s love and grace, and creation— not nature— should be celebrated joyfully as a gratuitous sacrament of the God whose nature is love. Creation is so evidently the handiwork of the Lord its sacramentality became a rule of faith for Israel:

“Look at the heavens and the earth…and acknowledge that God made them.”

— II Maccabees 7.28

And no: