Modern human beings, and especially Christians, might misunderstand the work I’m doing. Some might think I’m some sort of champion of modern empirical knowledge for its own sake, a fan of physics and history perhaps. In fact, what’s at issue is respect for God’s Creation and, hence, for the Creator Himself.
You respect Creation by honoring it for what it is, not by imposing comfortable tales upon it, tales embodying knowledge once plausible but now known to be false or incomplete.
You show respect for the Creator by accepting even the hardest truths He presents to us, through His Biblical commandments or through the example of His humble Son or through the knowledge to be gathered from Creation by disciplined efforts. You accept those truths and try to make sense of them by way of hard thought.
How are we to find truth? St. Thomas Aquinas told us the human mind, that which is human thought and not some organ of thought, is shaped by responses to its environment. I’ve added that the human mind can shape itself by responding to even hints of a cosmos or a universe, a greater thing out there which contains all that we can know as reality in this mortal life but is also itself something. A human mind can go still further, struggling to see God’s revealed purposes for Creation in the workings of galactic formation and in the workings of biological evolution and even in the workings of human history.
To turn away from this process is to turn away from the process of perceiving and understanding the truth — however poorly we might perceive truth during this mortal life. To turn away willfully, perhaps because you don’t like the effort of learning history or biology or mathematics in a disciplined way, is another way to say, “non serviam.” “I won’t serve, Lord, because I prefer my own ways and would like to have my own world which can be understood in terms of myths and allegories involving great, god-like creatures who bring us evil or good.” At that point, you’re refusing to acknowledge that truth is to be found in that to which we respond in shaping our minds. If truth cannot be found in that to which we shape our minds, we human beings can’t perceive truth, can’t think in terms of truth. Our minds would be misshapen.
Our one way to perceive truth, however contingently, is to open up to God’s word and His world, shaping our minds to embody some complex understanding of the Lord’s world in light of His word. It’s the faith in God which is most important and specifically the faith in God as an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving Creator. It’s this openness that allowed so many to see profound truths even if they didn’t have an advanced physics or biology. Perhaps surprisingly, you can actually see far without the great Christian faith of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Aristotle saw far with no more than his faith in the reasonableness of what exists which faith he held in terms of a God who was the result of a logical argument rather than a God who revealed Himself out of His great love for us.
Sometimes you find what you’re looking for if you have enough sense to look for something that exists. It might be different than what you thought you were looking for. Then again, is the nature of being much different than was anticipated in the programs of that first mathematical physicist — Plato? Is the flow of events in this universe shaped from that being so much different from what we should have expected if we’d paid attention to the Bible rather than imposing upon it our own ideas?
To quote Bohr out of context: Don’t tell God to do. That is, don’t impose your own expectations upon God, or even upon a god-less Nature if that’s what you believe in. Pay attention first to the universe even if you don’t have faith that it is a phase of Creation which is the work of a personal God. Listen to what that universe has to say, see what things are made from, observe how those things behave, observe the behavior of living creatures also made from the same stuff as nonliving things. (See Einstein and Bohr: Don’t Tell God what to do.)