Nature referred to as God
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Editor,
This is my second contribution to an exchange with Rick Jore over the meaning of the word God in the Declaration of Independence, especially in the phrase Nature’s God.
The practice of referring to nature (in its largest sense) by the word God has a long tradition. This began with philosophers in the mid 17th Century and persists today. It reached its pinnacle with the Enlightenment in the 18th Century when the Declaration was written. Its use today is largely confined to physicists. Take for instance the recent confirmation of the Higgs Boson sub-atomic particle which many of them refer to as the “god particle.” Another example was when Albert Einstein stated that “I don’t believe God plays at dice” when referring to some implications of quantum mechanics theory which imply that events can occur without a cause or from a cause which is physically distant.
Jore suggests that words should be considered in terms of “what they were meant to mean by those who wrote or spoke them.” Yes, but that’s my side of the argument.
Harold Young
St. Ignatius
