In his book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart explains very elegantly the relationship between Being and Intelligibility. Hart relies on philosophical argumentation as well as a multiplicity of traditions that point to three ways for us to reach for ultimate reality.

First, there is Being/Non-Being/the Ground of Being/the Father/Sat/Emptiness. This is the inexhaustible ground of possibility of all that exists. We can also say the Non-Being, the transcendent Potential out of which everything emerges. This is what grounds the formless potential we see at the bottom layer of physics. When we contemplate the fact that there exists something rather than nothing, when we ponder the very possibility of things, not only temporally but ontologically at every instant, we are trying to get at this Ground of Being.

Second, you have Consciousness/Logos/the Ground of Intelligibility/the Son/Chit/Dharma. This is the underlying Ground of constraints that shape the emergence of things from the Potential we just talked about. As I’ve explained in previous articles,¹ the emergence we see from the Ground of Being does not happen willy-nilly. There are intelligible constraints that shape it. The laws of fundamental physics, for example, constrain the emergence of fundamental particles from the potential at the bottom layer of physics. Similarly, the laws of chemistry constrain the emergence of molecules from atoms, which are still full of potential. Higher up, cognitive science aims at discovering laws that constrain the emergence of consciousness. More fundamentally, mathematical truths constrain all of nature. And at least as fundamentally, beneath all those sets of constraints, there is a Ground of Intelligibility which gives rise to them. In other words, there is a Logos which constrains the potential given by the Ground of Being. Whenever we contemplate the Intelligible structure of things, we are trying to get at this Logos, the fundamental Ground of all constraints.

Third, you have Bliss/the Spirit/Relevance Realization/Ananda, which is the union between Being and Consciousness, between Potential and Intelligibility. It is the blissful drive of Being towards Logos, and of Logos towards Being. Hart speaks of bliss here because this is precisely the experience we can have. Whenever we witness patterns meeting potential, we experience this bliss to a certain degree. For example, when we finally understand some concept, or when we participate in bringing about some moral pattern into concrete reality, or when we see some artwork where a pattern elegantly meets its material support, we taste the Spirit. The human drive towards truth, goodness, and beauty for their own sakes is in fact precisely a drive towards the divine Bliss between Being and Intelligibility Themselves. This drive even allows us to participate in the union of Being and Intelligibility.

Now, my purpose in this article is not to review Hart’s book. I rather want to make use of it to answer a few classical challenges raised by John Vervaeke in a recent discussion we had with Paul Vanderklay.² The problems center on teleology and particularly on the extent to which Christians can legitimately claim that the Incarnation redeems matter and history. Those problems are classical, and I will do my best to defend a classical answer to them. To do so, I will start by using the book by Hart just mentioned to frame the idea of teleology in history. I hope to do so in a way that John will find compatible with his basic metaphysics. I will then move to the problem of Evil, where I will make use of another book by Hart, namely The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?, and I will also use a book by Keiji Nishitani titled Religion and Nothingness. I will explain that it is ultimately Easter that realizes the Christian narrative and solves the problem of Evil.

Vertical and Horizontal Teleology

But first, I need to introduce the notion of teleology in history. This idea has been very muddled by Christians and non-Christians alike over the last few centuries, so it’s best to start pretty much from scratch. To do so, let me note that there is a kind of reciprocal vertical teleology between Being and Intelligibility. As I just mentioned, there is a reciprocal drive for potential to be shaped by constraints, and for constraints to shape potential. There is an eternal dance in every created thing between Being and Intelligibility, between the Father and His Son, the Logos.

I suspect that John would not oppose my calling this a kind of vertical teleology, because that’s not the heart of the issue. More importantly, the question is whether there is horizontal teleology in there as well—that is, a teleology across time, a narrative. Well, there isn’t in a straightforward sense of course, since the Ground of Being and the Ground of Intelligibility are, strictly speaking, outside of time, or beyond time. They do not undergo change and they exist at a level of reality that is prior to space and time, and therefore, of course, beyond narrative. That is why I spoke of a vertical teleology between Being and Intelligibility. That is also why the classical tradition has always rather affirmed that God is autotelic—infinitely blissful in Himself as the communion of Being and Intelligibility. God is, Himself, His own end. As discussed above, think of the Father and the Son blissfully rejoicing in one another in the communion of the Spirit.

But speaking of vertical teleology in God is what allows me to bridge the gap to horizontal teleology in history, or so I hope. My contention is that horizontal teleology appears in history as the spatiotemporal and partly contingent unfolding of the vertical, necessary, and eternal teleology taking place between Being and Intelligibility. Potential springs forth from Being, as constraints spring forth from Intelligibility, and the two poles meet to produce beings at the different layers of reality. It is in the spatiotemporal unfoldment of those patterns that you can see horizontal teleology take place. It is secondary to vertical teleology, and nonetheless real.

Some of that teleology is very simple, such as the tendency of electrons, protons and neutrons to gather and form atoms, or the tendency for fire to emerge from matches when struck. But of course, those are not the kind of narratives and teleology people have debates over. Even debates about the purpose of organs in a body or of animals in an ecosystem are not all that interesting or controversial. Where it starts getting interesting and controversial is rather at the human level.

That is because humanity plays a special role in realizing horizontal teleology. As mediators between abstract eternal patterns and concrete spatiotemporal reality, humans can mediate between abstract narratives and concrete events. We can co-create history with the Logos.³ We are shaped by our stories, and we reciprocally make our stories by our actions. Even our agonizing search for purpose in history, with all our contingent doubts and errors, are in fact part of this co-creation. The Scriptures are full of men attempting to discern the will of God and being constantly surprised by Him, only retrospectively understanding, and in a sense creating, the narrative they’ve been a part of. We can think of the apostles finally understanding the Incarnation only at Pentecost, after spending over three years in the story. We can also think of the Book of Revelation, where the meaning of history is precisely revealed. In temporally extended relevance-realization, we simultaneously perceive and create narrative history. And as Jonathan Pageau explained at the end of a conversation with Paul Vanderklay and John Vervaeke, the fact that we reframe and update our narratives does not necessarily negate their reality.⁴ Our contingent struggles can in fact be part of the narrative, part of the pattern.

Still, the question remains: does all this reframing converge towards something? Will our narratives just keep changing? Worse: will our narratives just die with us? In the rest of this essay, I will of course be defending the ontological reality of the Christian narrative, but this requires saying a few words about Evil first.

Evil, Enlightenment, and the Incarnation

While Christianity does assert that Being and Intelligibility are bound to meet fully at the end of our current narrative, we must clearly state that this isn’t a “bland cosmic optimism”,⁵ to reuse the words of David Bentley Hart. The universe isn’t the carefully designed mechanical system of the deist, optimized as the best of deterministic worlds. The human co-creation of horizontal teleology is fraught with genuine impediments to its resolution.

In the New Testament, our condition as fallen creatures is explicitly portrayed as a subjugation to the subsidiary and often mutinous authority of angelic and demonic “powers” which are not able to defeat God’s transcendent and providential governance of all things, but which certainly are able to act against him within the limits of cosmic time.⁶

To put it in more naturalistic language, we are continually subject to all kinds of destructive patterns that really do break the union of Being and Intelligibility in the present—not completely of course, but significantly. We enter into deceptive patterns, whether the deception be against ourselves or others. We fall prey to violence and are all too often swept up by warring narratives. Traumatically, the 20th century even showed us how easily we can fall into nation-wide scapegoating narratives, within which we willingly participate in mass torture and genocide. Christianity fully acknowledges our subjection to such negative higher-level patterns in the present, or, to put it traditionally, our subjection to principalities and powers in the present. All of those are wounds in the manifestation of the Logos.

But that’s of course not all there is to the story. The world is fundamentally the self-realization of the real, the union of Being and Intelligibility, the manifestation of the Logos, and this cannot be obscured forever; the Logos is bound to shine through. Buddhist enlightenment, for example, is a way to overcome our subjection to these principalities and powers. It is a genuine way to reassert the Logos/Dharma in ourselves and those around us.

Interestingly, there is a deep parallel between Buddhist enlightenment and the Christian narrative. In his book Religion and Nothingness, Keiji Nishitani, Buddhist scholar, explains that it is precisely by willingly plunging yourself into non-being, into nihility, that you ultimately transcend nihility.

Nihility is an absolute negation aimed at all “existence,” and thus is related to existence. The essence of nihility consists in a purely negative (antipodal) negativity. Its standpoint contains the self-contradiction that it can neither abide in existence nor abide being away from it. It is a standpoint torn in two from within. Therein lies its transitional character. We call this the standpoint of nihility, but in fact it is not a field one can stand on in the proper sense of the term. It is no more than a spot we have to “run quickly across.”  As essentially transitional and a negative negativity, it is radically real; but the standpoint itself is essentially hollow and void, a nihility. The very standpoint of nihility is itself essentially a nihility, and only as such can it be the standpoint of nihility.

The standpoint of sunyata is another thing altogether. It is not a standpoint of simply negative negativity, nor is it an essentially transi­tional standpoint. It is the standpoint at which absolute negation is at the same time, in the sense explained above, a Great Affirmation. It is not a standpoint that only states that the self and things are empty. If this were so, it would be no different from the way that nihility opens up at the ground of things and the self. The foundations of the stand­ point of sunyata lie elsewhere: not that the self is empty, but that emptiness is the self; not that things are empty, but that emptiness is things. Once this conversion has taken place, we are able to pass beyond the standpoint on which nihility is seen as the far side of existence. Only then does the standpoint appear at which we can maintain not merely a far side that is beyond us, but a far side that we have arrived at.⁷

There is a flip that happens at the bottom of things. When you strip away all you hold that is illusory, not only the principalities and powers in which you operate but all of yourself, in despair and nihilism, you ultimately reach the ground of everything where you actually transcend despair and nihilism. You come to see the whole hierarchy of your being as profoundly anchored in this ground, and not illusory at all. It is like recognizing all of your sins and repenting to reunite with the Father. Non-being becomes an anchor for being rather than a judge or a mere abyss. Your doubt doubts itself and becomes an affirmation. It is not unlike Christ’s use of principalities and powers against themselves. We shouldn’t have to go through all of those layers of death to become enlightened, but if we let our nihilism go to its end, it will consume even itself and turn things right side up again, because creation is fundamentally good.

Only when such an extreme is reached, however, is the funda­mental conversion able to occur. It is the turnabout from the Great Death to the Great Life. It is something of which we cannot ask why. There can be no conceivable reason for it, and no conceivable basis for it to take hold of. That is to say, this conversion is an event taking place at a point more elemental than the dimension on which events occur that can be spoken of in terms of reasons and bases. If a reason is to be sought, it can only be as the traditional religions have all sought it: on the “other” side, in God or in Buddha, in something like Divine Providence, Love of God, or the Original Vow of Amida Buddha. But a reason that is on the side of God or Buddha is not the sort of reason man is after when he asks why. (The Book of Job cuts deeply into this state of affairs.) After all, we can do no other than to say: it is so.⁸

In other words, the fundamentally good and blissful union of Being and Intelligibility is properly basic. It is axiomatic. There are no reasons that ground it, it rather grounds everything else. We know this truth by its manifestation, namely by the mere existence of the world and by mystical experiences. Indeed, upon reaching this Ground, the mystic sees all of creation as a wonderful dance of Being and Intelligibility, even as it is tainted by our sin and by death.

After this experience, the enlightened one can come back to everyday life and unfold that blissful harmony experienced at the Ground of Being and Intelligibility. He can help enlighten others. Nihilism is turned against nihilism, not unlike Christ’s defeat of death by death. And beside the Buddha, we can also place Socrates, and other figures, who were arguably enlightened. I have tremendous admiration for the heroic efforts of those figures and their schools. Their achievement of enlightenment, their victory over principalities and powers while outside of a historical relationship to the incarnate Logos, is simply astounding and deserves respect and even praise.

But as John Vervaeke, Paul Vanderklay and I discussed,⁹ their victory remains local. Individuals can achieve it, but human history remains one of people who are by and large not enlightened. The promise of Christianity is an answer to this; a redemption of all history and material reality. The promise is that what the Buddha achieved in his person is being achieved narratively and cosmically by Christ.

The Logos became flesh and plunged fully into nihility. He submitted Himself to all that principalities and powers could throw at Him, from poverty to temptation, defamation, torture, betrayal, and ultimately to being nailed naked on a cross. This is the biggest rending of Being and Intelligibility you can possibly imagine, the biggest wound that can be inflicted on the realization of the Logos. But the Logos also rose again, of course, because creation is fundamentally the blissful manifestation of the Logos. Further, Christ re-emerged from that nihility with a new and transformed kind of human nature, carrying the promise of the general Resurrection. Where the Buddhist re-emergence from nihility is a personal and local victory, Easter is a narrative and cosmic victory.

Easter and History

However, as John Vervaeke also explained in our discussion, this claim is intermeshed with a few traditional problems. The first among them is the classical problem of evil: how is Christ’s redeeming of history and matter consistent with Auschwitz? To answer this question, I must clearly restate that divine providence “is not the same thing as a universal teleology.”¹⁰ Second, I must also clearly state that it is ultimately Easter that realizes the Christian narrative and answers the problem of Evil. Without Easter, narrative teleology would just die with us and so would our hopes to ultimately conquer Evil. I have no argument from first principles showing that Easter was metaphysically necessary, or that all shall be well for us in the end. Easter was a genuine victory, genuinely emergent, and I have no argument from first principles that God could not instead have flooded the world to restore it to its primitive spotlessness. In fact, I suspect that such arguments would be heretical, since the truth of Easter has traditionally been held to rest on revelation.

What I claim, more modestly, is that Easter solves the problem of Evil. It makes the Christian narrative real and everlasting, just like us. What awaits us at the Eschaton, if Easter is true, will really wipe away all tears. I highly recommend David Bentley Hart’s short book The Doors of the Sea on this subject. It is the best treatment of theodicy I have come across. In fact, my strategy for the remainder of this essay will consist in merely collecting and explaining relevant passages from that book.

God has fashioned creatures in his image so that they might be joined in a perfect union with him in the rational freedom of love. For that very reason, what God permits, rather than violate the autonomy of the created world, may be in itself contrary to what he wills. But there is no contradiction in saying that, in his omniscience, omnipotence, and transcendence of time, God can both allow created freedom its scope and yet so constitute the world that nothing can prevent him from bringing about the beatitude of his Kingdom. Indeed we must say this: as God did not will the fall, and yet always wills all things toward himself, the entire history of sin and death is in an ultimate sense a pure contingency, one that is not as such desired by God, but that is nevertheless constrained by providence to serve his transcendent purpose. God does not will evil in the sinner. Neither does he will that the sinner should perish (2 Peter 3:9; Ezek. 33:11). He does not place evil in the heart. He does not desire the convulsive reign of death in nature. But neither will he suffer defeat in these things.

Providence works at the level of what Aquinas would call primary causality: that is, it is so transcendent of the operation of secondary causes—which is to say, finite and contingent causes immanent to the realm of created things—that it can at once create freedom and also assure that no consequence of the misuse of that freedom will prevent him from accomplishing the good he intends in all things. ¹¹

The idea is that God is the primary cause of everything, and that he exerts this causality through non-competitive secondary causes. There are several analogies we can use to try and understand the distinction between primary and secondary causality, though they are all bound to fall short. For instance, when I use a piece of chalk to write on a board, the piece of chalk is a cause of what I write, but it is secondary to and non-competitive with my intention to write on the board. In short, I act through the chalk. My intention and the chalk exist at different layers of reality and cooperate in my writing.

To draw another example from this scenario, consider the diverse muscle cells in my arm. They are also causes non-competitive with and secondary to my intention of writing on the board. I write through my cells. Interestingly, there is plenty of contingency in the way that my cells cause my writing. Indeed, there is a lot of randomness and you might even say freedom, in the myriad chemical reactions going on in them, which is nonetheless constrained by my overall desire to write such-and-such on the board. In general, secondary causes can be contingent and nonetheless constrained by higher-level causes.

Another relevant example can be taken from parenting. It is possible for an experienced parent to convince their child to voluntarily do their homework, for instance. If your child really likes cookies and playing hockey, for example, you know that if your child does not immediately agree to do their homework upon being asked, you can always resort to hockey or cookies as incentives. The genuinely free and contingent choice of your child is, in this case, a cause of your child doing their homework, but it is secondary to your own desire for your child to do their homework. Both desires exist, cooperate and have causal power, but yours is more fundamental.

Now, all those analogies of course fall short of expressing how the Creator God acts through His creatures. All that I’ve mentioned above are created and secondary causes that exist in time, including your decision to raise your arm or to get your child to do their homework. On the other hand, God is uncreated, necessary, simple, immutable, and outside of time altogether. He needs no deliberation, no forethought. There is no distinction between His creation of the world and His action in the world.¹² But I nonetheless hope that these examples suffice in giving you an idea of how history, full of genuinely free, contingent, and often evil human decisions, can nonetheless be constrained towards God’s simple and immutable purpose, namely Himself, where Being and Intelligibility blissfully meet.

Until that final glory, however, the world remains divided between two kingdoms, where light and darkness, life and death grow up together and await the harvest. In such a world, our portion is charity, and our sustenance is faith, and so it will be until the end of days. As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God but the face of his enemy. Such faith might never seem credible to someone like Ivan Karamazov, or still the disquiet of his conscience, or give him peace in place of rebellion, but neither is it a faith that his arguments can defeat: for it is a faith that set us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead. Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history‘s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes – and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new”.¹³

I must here admit that my language of “redeeming history” was perhaps not my best choice. “Remaking” would have been better. The Incarnation is much more an invasion of a fallen history by a restorative history. Everything is ultimately brought into the story of the Incarnation, but much of current history ends up being condemned within that overarching story. Further, if Easter is true and a new kind of life is emerging with Christ from the Tomb, then all tears will really be washed away. Death is defeated and the glory that awaits us will make the atrocities of Auschwitz irrelevant, or maybe even somehow participative.

That is a hopeful and even a harsh statement, but I think it is one that Christians must affirm. As an analogy, consider every other time a new kind of life emerged in nature. The emergence of life from mere matter redeems the greater part of the cosmos that is merely material; one plant is worth more than a hundred empty galaxies smashing in entropy. Similarly, the emergence of sentient life is worth all of the struggles of plant life. And while things get muddled at the human level because of our sins, all of the natural death and life cycles of animal life are not worth the life of one saint. And similarly, the Christian claim is that the emergence of eternal life in Christ redeems all of human life, with all its tragedies.

Let me here take a moment to remind readers that hope in this general Resurrection is reasonable. It is like recognizing from the emergence of plant life that plant life will spread over the earth, or like recognizing from the emergence of animal life that it will also come to spread over the earth. Similarly, Christ is the firstborn from the dead, and numerous saints have followed Him in His elevated kind of life. Even in the reductionist West, where so many of us have buffered ourselves from higher-level causes, and where the placebo effect is the last remnant of narrative causality viable to us, we can still meet saints who inhabit a world of richer patterns, a higher level of reality, a higher kind of life. Miracles still happen in church, especially in Africa and South America, where people are less buffered. As I have explained elsewhere using the works of C.S. Lewis,¹⁴ if you look at the miraculous claims of Christianity, what you see is precisely an invasion by a new kind of life, a life imbued with rich narrative causal powers.

Joining the body of Christ, becoming a saint, is thus to strive to participate in Christ’s victory. It is recognizing that a new kind of life has emerged, and that we can join it like the saints before us. It is like recognizing that the world is being flooded and jumping into the ark. It is like joining the Allied forces in 1944, where the war is fundamentally won, but where victory is yet to be fully consummated, and where the death throes of the Axis forces only make them multiply their atrocities. It is joining a winning invasion. Faith in Christ’s Resurrection assures us that the day of final victory is coming, although “of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.”¹⁵ And until then, we can expect dying and parasitic principalities and powers to only ramp up their havoc. The wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest. The Book of Revelation is very grim for that reason, though we can already live joyfully in the Resurrection.

The cross is thus a triumph of divine apatheia, limitless and immutable love sweeping us up into itself, taking all suffering and death upon itself without being changed, modified, or defined by it, and so destroying its power and making us, by participation in Christ, “more than conquerors” (Rom. 8:37). God does not simply submit himself to the cycle of natural necessity or to the dialectic of historical necessity but shatters the power of both, and thereby overthrows the ancient principalities, the immemorial empire of death. Easter utterly confounds the “rulers of this age” (I Cor. 2:8), and in fact reverses the verdict they have pronounced upon Christ, thereby revealing that the cosmic, sacred, political, and civic powers of all who condemn Christ have become tyranny, falsehood, and injustice. Easter is an act of “rebellion” against all false necessity and all illegitimate or misused authority, all cruelty and heartless chance. It liberates us from servitude to and terror before the “element”. It emancipates us from fate. It overcomes the “world”. Easter should make rebels of us all.¹⁶

The resulting state for the Christian is thus both more pessimistic and more optimistic, both more sorrowful and more joyful, than what I see in Buddhist or Socratic enlightenment. Hart quotes St. Isaac the Syrian to give us a taste:

What is a merciful heart? A heart aflame for all of creation, for men, birds, beasts, demons, and every created thing; the very thought or sight of them causes the merciful man’s eyes to overflow with tears. The heart of such a man is humbled by the powerful and fervent mercy that has captured it and by the immense compassion it feels, and it cannot endure to see or hear of any suffering or any grief anywhere within creation. Hence he constantly lifts up tearful prayers for God’s care for and mercy upon even unreasoning brutes and enemies of truth and all who do him injury. He prays even thus for the family of reptiles, on account of that immeasurable, God-like compassion blazing in his heart.¹⁷

You can see in this quote that the answer of Christianity to the problem of Evil is more existential than it is intellectual, which is normal after all, since the problem of Evil is itself more existential than intellectual. What Christianity offers in the face of Evil is a transformation, a metanoia, operated by the contemplation of Christ’s charity on the Cross, and by growing faith in the meaning of Easter. It is about learning to see all of creation, even demons and Auschwitz, as groaning and travailing towards eternal narrative life in the Logos, only temporarily held back by sin.

To see the world as it should be seen, and so to see the true glory of God reflected in it, requires the cultivation of charity, of an eye rendered limpid by love. Maximus the Confessor taught that it is only when one has learned to look upon the world with selfless charity that one sees the true inner essence – the logos – of any created thing, and sees how that thing shines with the light of the one divine Logos that gives it being. But what the Christian should see, then, is not simply one reality: neither the elaborate, benign, elegantly calibrated machine of the deists, smoothly and efficiently accomplishing whatever goods a beneficent God and the intractable potentialities of finitude can produce between them; nor a sacred or divine commerce between life and death; nor certainly “nature” in the modern, mechanistic acceptation of that word. Rather, the Christian should see two realities at once, one world (as it were) within another: one the world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish; and the other the world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply “nature” but “creation” an endless sea of glory, radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once, to regard the world as a mirror of infinite beauty, but as glimpsed through the veil of death; it is to see creation in chains, but beautiful as in the beginning of days.¹⁸

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1. For recent examples, see Marceau, Jean-Philippe. Prayer, Time and Causality, The Symbolic World Blog, February 2021, https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/prayer-time-and-causality/. Marceau, Jean-Philippe. Possibility, Intelligibility, and the Incarnation. The Symbolic World Blog, April 2021, https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/possibility-intelligibility-and-the-incarnation/.
2. Miracles Ep. 2: Enlightenment and Incarnation w/ Vervaeke and Vanderklay. YouTube, April 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr-Uq1BM_gc
3. Vervaeke, John. Ep.3 – Awakening from the Meaning Crisis – Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar, YouTube, February 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1AaqD8t3pk
4. Vanderklay, Paul; Vervaeke, John and Pageau, Jonathan. Emergence and Narrative. Youtube, August 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5enaol6dGWU
5. B. Hart, David. The Doors of the Sea at 66, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapid Michigan/Cambridge U.K., 2005
6. Hart at 65
7. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness at 138-139, translated by Jan Van Bragt. University of California Press, 1982
8. Nishitani at 231
9. Miracles Ep. 2: Enlightenment and Incarnation w/ Vervaeke and Vanderklay. YouTube, April 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr-Uq1BM_gc
10. 85
11. Hart at 82-83
12. if you would like to learn more on that subject, I highly recommend Father Michael Dodd’s book Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas.
13. Hart at 103-104
14. Marceau, Jean-Philippe. Investigating Miracles with Lewis and Vervaeke. The Symbolic World, October 2020. https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/investigating-miracles-with-lewis-and-vervaeke/
15. Bible, Mark 13:32
16. Hart at 81
17. Hart at 59-60
18. Hart at 60-61