All the Earth is the Lord's

I think one of the drawbacks of the reformers (among the many excellent things they did) was their negative attitude toward natural theology. But I am excited now because I think that nature is beginning to make a comeback in theology. Hopefully a correct view of nature in Christian doctrine can help us better refute statements like this:

“Evolution is part of a much broader and older inquiry and a deeper contest for our intellectual commitment, a contest between a world system that expects every part of the cosmos ultimately to be explainable in terms of natural properties and processes and one that maintains the existence of a fundamental core of unknowability, of supernatural mystery and controlling hand of an eternal non-worldly Being. This may be humankind’s oldest intellectual puzzle.” (from the preface to Keith Thomson's Before Darwin)

Now, my main disagreement with this sentiment is that modern science was founded upon the Christian belief that if God made nature then it would have order and be worth studying. But now certain individuals within the scientific community want to assign a God-of-the-gaps to Christianity, and then dismantle that God by showing how orderly and knowable the world is (Not that we really know that much about the world now).

I just got Allister McGrath's The Open Secret: A New Vision For Natural Theology and am really excited about it, not only as a means of the defense of nature as God's creation but as an eye opening account of nature that leads me to worship God more when I look out at the night sky.