Brewer and Flagg’s Insect Choirs

The second half of the nineteenth century saw two partly competing, partly overlapping explanations for the intricate relations of organisms to the environment. Starting from William Paley’s idea of Natural Theology and Ernst Haeckel’s concept of ecology, and how these two strands of looking at nature come together in Pope Francis’s both teleological and Wordsworthian ecological approach in Laudato si’, this essay concentrates on the way two successful naturalist writers, Cobham Brewer in England and Wilson Flagg in America, express their enchantment with the ‘music’ produced by insect choirs through their respective religious and ecological ideas of nature

Divine Openness for Physical Relationship

The success of the atheistic hiddenness argument depends on the “consciousness constraint” it imposes on the divine-human loving relationship: namely, that this relationship requires human conscious awareness of being in the relationship with God. I challenge the truth of this proposition by introducing the concept of a physical relationship with God that is not subject to this constraint. I argue, first, that a physical relationship with God is metaphysically possible; second, that its plausibility is supported by natural theology; and third, that a perfectly loving God would prefer physical relationships with human beings over consciousness-constrained relationships, because a perfectly loving God would prefer to preserve the integrity of human freedom of participation and allow inclusion of all people regardless of their natural cognitive capabilities. I also offer an interpretation of apparent divine hiddenness in the light of the idea of God’s openness for physical relationships.