The World Was Never Just a Machine: A Catholic Vision of Nature That Science Is Rediscovering
Did Christianity destroy the environment — or did it give us the deepest reason to protect it?
For over 50 years, a single academic article has blamed Christianity for the ecological crisis. Dr. Paul Allen, Academic Dean of Corpus Christi College, dismantles that claim — and replaces it with something far more beautiful.
In this lecture delivered at Catholic Pacific College (February 25, 2026), Dr. Allen explores:
The difference between natural theology and a theology of nature — and why it matters for how we see creation
Why Lynn White's famous 1967 accusation that Christianity is "the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen" simply doesn't survive scrutiny
How cutting-edge science — from Barbara McClintock's "jumping genes" to Suzanne Simard's Mother Tree theory — is rediscovering what Augustine and the Church Fathers knew all along: the world is a whole
How Augustine's rationes seminales (seed principles) anticipated evolutionary thought by 1,500 years
Why the Cappadocian Fathers' relational ontology offers a richer model of nature than Cartesian mechanism
What Laudato Si' contributes to this ancient and ongoing conversation
And why recapturing the spiritual meaning of nature isn't nostalgia — it's one of the most urgent tasks of our time
This lecture moves from contemporary environmental science back through the richness of the Patristic tradition — Augustine, Basil of Caesarea, John of Damascus, and the Desert Fathers — to show that Christians have been thinking seriously about the natural world for nearly two thousand years. Not because environmentalists told us to. But because Creation is the second great book of God's Revelation.
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