Sunday, August 7, 2016

Intellectual Arrogance and Faith in Science

All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas. Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.” – Acts 17:21-23

As a trained Pharisee, I’m sure Paul was impressed by the intellectual zeal of the Athenian philosophers. They loved knowledge and understanding, and wanted to approach everything in life with a rational view. Doesn’t this sound familiar! We live in a world where people love the titillation of new scientific discovery, stuff their heads with scientific factoids of no possible value to their lives (like the Large Hadron Collider, pictured at right), and place their hope for the resolution of suffering in technological breakthroughs, surely just around the corner, that will herald a new age of peace, prosperity and happiness.

Of course, this is all fantasy. Or perhaps even a malicious lie.

Just look at the past hundred years. The science of eugenics said that we could perfect the human race only if we selectively remove inferior individuals, which led to the horrors of the holocaust. Chemistry told us that a new wonder called DDT would wipe out mosquitoes and eliminate malaria, which did untold damage to ecosystems. Science has harnessed the stored energy of fossil fuels, which in releasing humans from physical labour have started a global climatic crisis we may not be able to contain.

The problem is, of course, arrogance. We think we understand things, and we do understand them just enough to manipulate them for short term gain. But of course our comprehension is shallow: we don’t fully understand things, and we have absolutely no inkling of the unintended consequences. Our world is far more complicated than we would like it to be, and certainly more complicated than our simplistic models of it.
So it this knowledge, this science really worthy of our love and hope? Where should we put our trust?
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Wednesday, March 2, 2016

What is God like?


The only thing I’m sure about God is that nobody has a correct idea of what God is really like. How could we possibly imagine, much less understand, what an infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being could be like?

We struggle to understand why God allows children to starve, why God allowed Hitler and Stalin to do what they did, why he allows earthquakes and plagues. We struggle with his foreknowledge, which seems to preclude our free will. We often act as if God doesn’t love us or he isn’t watching us. And we have a hard time accepting that he could possibly forgive us despite our selfishness and hypocrisy.

So we have some preconceived notions about what God ought to be like, but sometimes these don’t match how God acts in the Bible, in history and in our lives. There are two possibilities here: either God doesn’t exist, or else he is not at all like what we imagined. As Chrys Jordan said:
I don't actively disbelieve in the "Christian God," so much as I seriously doubt such an entity exists. In my mind, such an entity is far too petty and too small to be the Creator of Everything. When I hear that God made everything in six days, I cannot but think: look at the world. Look at the universe. You think God is so small. When I hear that God is obsessed with trivial matters such as homosexuality, I cannot but think: look at how great the universe is. Do you think the source of all things is obsessed over trivia? The only thing I will say is that God must be great, and the image many Christians have of him must fall short.[1]
We find out some things about God from the Bible, but this is difficult, since much of the Bible is allegorical. For example, God told Abraham to kill his son Isaac and then intervened; does this episode show a hard, demanding God or a forgiving, loving God? Is the lesson to obey God no matter what, or to put an end to the Bronze Age practice of human sacrifice?

We inherit some ideas about God from our culture and religious tradition, but this is shifting sand, since our image of God has changed considerably in the past couple centuries. Consider, for example, the wrathful, righteous, judging God of the Puritans. Our modern idea of God is little like that of John Knox!

We get some of our ideas about God from personal experience. When I cry out to God in anguish and grief, he comforts me in very special ways. When I look at a tree swaying in the breeze, feel the warm sun on my face, listen to a gurgling brook, smell the rich earth on a farm and taste a freshly picked wild raspberry, I am in what the ancient Celts called a thin place and I feel particularly intimate with God.

But my encounters with God are not at all like yours. Some of our very real perceptions contradict each other. Even within my own life, surely some of my profound life-shaping events were pure coincidence or brain chemistry, and not divine intervention.

We have no shortage of ideas about what God might be; I would suggest that we have too much material to work with and we need to do some judicious editing. As Jeff Wilhite said,
I spend a lot of time continually challenging everything I believe. This makes my faith, my love for God and my understanding of Him so much stronger. Some of my most deeply held theological beliefs have been molded and shaped by the need to respond to very valid criticisms.
Some people’s faith is too rigid to bend. If you grow up believing that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and then you are confronted with the possibility that it might not be so inerrant after all, you have a decision to make. Do you throw out inerrancy or do you throw out God?

Many people will tell you that after enough of this theological whittling you will be left with no faith at all so you are better off scrapping it all to begin with, but I vehemently disagree with that sentiment.
In this process of theological whittling, you are only shaving away falsehoods. God is truth, and, as such, He has nothing to fear by your sincere and honest searching for truth. A fundamentalist faith (or even the picture of God many atheists hold) is just a solid, featureless block of wood. But after enough of this sincere searching for truth and whittling away at falsehoods, the face of a good and beautiful God begins to emerge. [2]
We discover God, piece by piece. We will not likely be fortunate enough to have him reveal himself as he did to the prophets of old, but that does not mean that he cannot be found.

Where do we start? When asked many years back what portions of the Bible should be retained as a foundation for one’s evolving faith, I had no good reply at the time; since then I have realized that this is precisely what the creeds were invented for. Take, for example, the Nicene Creed:
We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and Earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. [3]

Nearly all of this is paraphrased from Biblical texts, and that which isn't comes from widely-accepted exegesis of Biblical texts. So this creed is on solid scriptural ground; it is concise enough that it is practical for every day; and it has stood the test of many centuries of examination. While it spends many words to refute heretical ideas, it consists of positive assertions we can use to formulate our own concept of God.



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