Joel Clarke Gibbons

Man and God in the World Joel Clarke Gibbons

Man and God in the World is a book about the truths of our human nature and about our expanding knowledge and understanding of ourselves. All insight into human nature begins from the fact that the Lord god fashioned us in his own human image and likeness. The great medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, working from the joint wisdom of the Judaic and Greek traditions, continued to ponder the nature of humanity and of our place in the world. Now, in this age, we witness the explosion of systematic knowledge brought to us by the social and life sciences, a cornucopia of knowledge about our nature. No one can tell what truths lie ahead of us as we explore that source, but the entire evolution of understanding is a single theme which is the subject of this book.


Book Review

Man and God is a thought-provoking romp through a wide range of topics crucial to contemporary intellectual and political debates. The author s reflections are thoughtful, well informed, and, at times, innovative.


Book Reviews

Joel Clarke Gibbons, Man and God in the World: A Treatise on Human Nature(Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2009)

Reviewed by Lloyd E. Sandelands, Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan

How can the findings of social science be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church? Although the two canvas the same subject human nature they conceive it in different ways. The individual organism and social collective examined by science are not the human person and spiritual communion ministered to by the Church. Where the former are material facts in a natural world, the latter are spiritual facts in a supernatural world. Indeed, one can be forgiven for wondering if the phrase Catholic social science might not be an oxymoron.

Joel Clarke Gibbons faces this challenge with glee in this smart, engaging, and wonderfully unclassifiable book. I say this last about the book because it is not plainly one kind or another. Although it draws heavily from social science, and particularly from economics and sociology, it is not quite a work of social science. And although it draws heavily from philosophy and theology, it is not quite a philosophical or theological tract. But it is as described in its subtitle a treatise on human nature a systematic account of the subject that is us. To my mind, it is a book of the best kind a book for everyone written by a powerful intelligence who wonders about this humanity of ours fashioned by God in the image of Jesus Christ.

Gibbons confronts social science and the Faith without pretense or compromise. He knows he has opened a door on issues that have perplexed legions before him. And he knows he can no more resolve these issues than his forbearers. His message is the paradox that gives hope to all faithful science. On the one hand, with Saint Thomas Aquinas, he confirms that faith and reason do not contradict one another, that the laws uncovered by science are those of God who created them:

There is one common thread that runs through ... our understanding of man, and that is the reality that our human nature comes to us from Jesus, who is the most human of all beings. When a physicist or chemist pursues his chosen field, he can proceed confidently in the knowledge that Jesus, the architect of the cosmos, has made it logically consistent and knowable. The social scientist has, if anything, an even more profound confidence because his science is a reflection of the being of Jesus himself (p. 8)