Writing in the 7th century, the great Father and Doctor of the Church, St. Maximus the Confessor, prophetically warned against treating God’s timing and supernatural method of creation as truths that can discovered by reasoning from our observations of the natural world:
How can the intellect not marvel when it contemplates that immense and more than astonishing sea of goodness [which is creation]? Or how is it not astounded when it reflects on how and from what source there have come into being both nature endowed with intelligence and intellect, and the four elements which compose physical bodies…? What kind of potentiality was it which, once actualized, brought these things into being? …God is the Creator from all eternity…. When the Creator willed, He gave being to and manifested that knowledge of created things which already existed in Him from all eternity….Try to learn why God created; for that is true knowledge. But do not try to learn how He created or why He did so comparatively recently; for that does not come within the compass of your intellect. Of divine realities some may be apprehended by men and others may not. Unbridled speculation, as one of the saints has said, can drive one headlong over the precipice (emphasis added)
Indeed, the false Enlightenment belief that man can explain the origins of man and the universe by extrapolating from his observations of the natural world has led directly to the diabolical disorientation of our times—to the abandonment of God’s Divine Revelation regarding our origins in favor of a naturalistic account that stands in contradiction to the Truth. In “Keep Me as the Apple of Thine Eye: A Theological Reflection on the Absolute Primacy of Christ,” Levi Pingleton shows that geocentrism and the Absolute Primacy of Christ go hand in hand and provide the only coherent framework within which to rightly understand our relationship to God, to Creation, and to our fellow man.
