I’m leaving for the airport in just over an hour so this will be a very brief post on a subject that demands heftier treatment. As such, I aim to return to it at greater length in a later post.

The topic in question is the natural trinity, or the presence of the Trinity in nature.

Neo-atheists hold the Christian belief in the Trinity to be evidence that Christians accept utter nonsense in the name of faith. How can anyone seriously believe that Three can really be One? Isn’t this arrant nonsense? Doesn’t it show the laughable and ridiculous gullibility of Christians?

The neo-atheists, in contrast to the gullible Christians, insist that their position is the only logically sustainable one. In the words of Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited they believe only in three dimensions perceived by five senses. The problem, however, is that their own reductionist creed contains its own mysterious trinity. The three dimensions that they worship as the beginning and end of all reality are as mysterious as the Trinity. Indeed, the three dimensions of space are a trinity. The very unity of space, the fundamental “stuff” of the cosmos, is only experienced in three. One dimension does not exist, except as part of the other two dimensions. It’s a natural trinity as real and as mysterious as the Holy Trinity.

And what is true of the trinity of space is equally true of the trinity of time. Time is experienced as past, present and future. We cannot experience the past without being present in the present; we cannot imagine the future except in terms of the experience of the past; we cannot exist in the present except as a consequence of the past. Time, like space, is a trinity. That which was, and is, and is to come, is One!

None of this should surprise a Christian. We expect to see the fingerprints of the Trinity in the Trinitarian nature of reality. It does, however, provide a problem for the neo-atheists. Christians accept mystery because we accept that there are supernatural realities beyond our ken; atheists, in their pride, refuse to accept such mysteries. Yet the time and space that they idolize are themselves transcendental mysteries! Their natural presumptions rest on supernatural realities.

We could say much more about the presence of the trinity in nature. We could talk about the trinitarian nature of reason, which is rooted in the trinitarian nature of the imagination. We could talk about the trinitarian nature of love. We could discuss the trinitarian connection between the good, the true and the beautiful.

This is all for the future. For the present, I leave you with a prayer to the Trinity that creates all trinities.

Loving God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, pour forth Thy grace into our hearts that we may grow in faith, hope and love into the image and likeness of the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Amen.