Introduction to Nanotheology

There is a stained-glass window in the National Cathedral called Angel in the Garden of Eden that has an angel in the center of three windows, flanked by two side windows. It's the side windows I like the best: the one on the left has a sponge and a fish at the bottom, with several other animals above, including a brontosaurus, pteranodon, and archaeopterix; the one on the right has the pyramids at the bottom, then above it the Parthenon, what looks an awful lot like Mont-St. Michael above that, all the way up to an airplane at the top. What do you know, everything cool in one stained-glass window! And that's not even counting the famous Space window in the same cathedral that actually contains a moon rock embedded in the glass.

As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it in "God's Grandeur":

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. ...

Or his predecessor ~3000 years earlier:

When I consider Your heavens,
the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars,
which You have ordained,
What is man
that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him? (Psalm 8:3-4)

Both of these poems make you feel alternately small and big, small from the size and quantity of the surrounding created universe, and big, because you are part of that overflowing quantity.

My question is, if we get this sense from looking around with our eyes, and from looking around with our telescopes, what sense do we get from looking around with our microscopes?

So that's what I want to introduce as "nanotheology." I'm a bit surprised that this term hasn't come up too much in my Google searches, and the contexts in which it comes up are negative: no, we shouldn't make stem cells from embryos, no, we shouldn't pollute the environment, no, we shouldn't play with self-replicating nanobots that might start replicating and building little nanobot shrines to us. Well, sure, let's talk about those "no"s, but what about the "yes"es? In what way does the improved view given by chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, how does that strengthen our faith beyond giving us forbidden fruit dangling, tantalizingly, just out of reach? How does it give us a new way to "taste and see"? I want to think about positive nanotheology, not just what we shouldn't do. New creation as well as the ten commandments.

So my initial ideas are to think about the sacraments. Baptism and Eucharist are visceral, physical experiences involving earthy elements arranged just so. If we can think about digestion, and eating as a community together, perhaps we can find some meaning in the enzymes that cause that digestion. If we can think about the act of covering someone in water, perhaps we can think about what's special about the molecules of water we're covering her with. In piecemeal fashion, from time to time, I'll set out admittedly nascent ideas about these things, and let's see what emerges.

Ground rules to hedge against misunderstandings:
1.) Nanotheology is natural theology, and natural theology is always problematically more about nature than it is about theology. No amount of looking at Nature alone can discern the movement of the spirit. We've got to leave room for the Spirit, and for revelation of an emergent, relational sort. Nanotheology, as natural theology, is always looking at the house rather than listening to the architect -- but, if he's a master architect, the architect does indeed try to communicate through the house, doesn't he?

(From the house's mouth -- you heard it here first!)

2.) This is not about how God made the world, it's more about just the fact that God made the world. A strong faith in a Creator is more important than the amount of time and methodology that creator used to create. Let's face it, unless you're a specialist you will generally skip the Methodology section of a research article. Let's get to Results and Discussion, and Methodology if need be. But the sacraments, as present events that reach into the past and the future, are focused on the present -- so shall we be. I don't hold to Intelligent Design and neither does my nanotheology. Rather, I think it's about worshipful contemplation of what, for complex reasons involving the nature of faith, may be meaningful, but may be a universal happenstance. If so, what wonderous happenstance!

3.) As for me and my blog, we'll be biochemical about these things. I'm well aware that physicists gets to write and think about these things a lot. In fact, I'm mildly jealous of the "Brian Greene set" for their special privilege. But if biochemistry means something, if it means anything, we can talk about what it is that it means. Even the Christian biologist Kenneth Miller, when he gets around to positive natural theology in his book Finding Darwin's God, only talks about quantum uncertainty and the room for revelation in that. He's a biologist when talking about origins but he becomes a physicist when he talks about God! What could a biochemist have to say about God or the church that is distinctly biochemical? I don't quite know yet, but here's to trying to find out.

If people can find the face of St. Paul in their pot roast or the Virgin Mary in the iridescence of a highway sign, or if you can go cloudbusting in Central Park and see interesting shapes in the clouds, I think we can look at proteins and processes and come up with some possible insights about how we should live and consider nature, as well as God. Some of it will be silly missteps, some of it will be overreaching forced analogies, sure, but for those with hears to hear, I propose we should listen to creation with one ear, to Scripture and church history with another, and see what we hear in stereo. Who's with me?

Let's give Gerard the last word to finish his poem as we consider "deep down things":

...
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.