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Big Bang Faith – The Reverse Projection Theory

April 28, 2012 by 1 Comment

Big Bang Faith

Big Bang Faith – The Reverse Projection Theory
Sycamore Creek Church
April 22, 2012
Tom Arthur

Peace, Friends!

Today we continue our series on faith and science by looking at the science of psychology.  Christianity and psychology have had a somewhat tumultuous relationship ever since the founding father of psychology, Sigmund Freud, wrote:

To begin with, we know that God is a father-substitute; or, more correctly, that he is an exalted father; or, yet again, that he is a copy of a father as he is seen and experienced in childhood – by individuals in their own childhood and by mankind in its prehistory as the father of the primitive and primal horde.

According to Freud, God is simply a projection of our fathers, both current and primal, upon the heavens.  We want a good and powerful father, and we don’t have one, so we imagine one in the sky.

I don’t doubt that too often we project our desires for who we want God to be upon God.  Too often we make God in our own image or in the image of whatever it is that we desire God to be.  But just because we have a tendency to project our image upon God doesn’t rule out that we were first made in the image of God ourselves.  That’s what the Bible claims:

So God created people in his own image;
God patterned them after himself;
male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:27 NLT

While Freud makes a powerful argument, I wonder if the opposite argument can’t be made.  Do we at times project upon the heavens our own desire for there not to be a God?  Freud himself said:

Religious ideas…are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.

Is this not true to some extent of all our ideas?  Religious or atheist?  C.S. Lewis, a contemporary of Freud’s often wrote in response to the new psychology.  When it comes to this idea of religion being wish fulfillment he says:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

So is God just a projection of our wishes upon the sky?  Could be.  But the opposite could be true too.

All Truth Is God’s Truth

It seems that Freud wanted to put a lot of distance between faith and science.  But is there no overlap?  How do the science of psychology and faith work together?  The wisdom of the Proverbs says:

God delights in concealing things;
scientists delight in discovering things.
Proverbs 25:2 The Message

In other words, God didn’t write a text book that explained exactly how everything works.  No quantum theory text book there.  It is God’s delight to hold back his cards when it comes to some things, and let people discover them.  But when it comes to psychology, there is a little more overlap between faith and science.  According to David Myers, a psychologist at Hope College, there are four ways that psychology and faith converge.

2. We are awesome but flawed

When it comes to our brains, we are the most complex organism the world has ever seen.  And yet our brains in all their complexity are prone to judgment errors.  This sounds a lot like the Bible teaching that we are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139) in the image of God, and yet all have fallen short of the glory of God and have sinned (Romans 3).  Psychology and faith converge in agreement upon this point.

2. Self-serving bias

This second place of convergence between psychology and faith grows out of the first.  We tend to act in self-serving ways.  We ignore the needs of others around us to secure our own needs.  Christianity teaches that not only do we sin, but we have a bent toward sin called original sin.  We are unable not to sin.  Psychology and faith converge in agreement upon this point.

3. Attitudes affect action and action affects attitudes

Psychological research has found that there is a reciprocal relationship between our attitudes and our actions.  They affect one another.  It’s not a one way street.  Likewise, Christianity has taught that faith and works go hand in hand.  Faith, our attitude toward God, affects how we live, but also what we do either grows our faith or diminishes it.

4. People and situations influence each other

The fourth place of convergence is an expansion of the third from the personal to the communal: our environment shapes us and we shape our environment.  Who you spend time with and where you spend time are important decisions for the kind of person you will become.  Christianity teaches that God has created a community to help us become who God has created us to become.

Critiques/Limitations of Psychology

While there are at least four if not more points of overlap between faith and psychology, there are some limitations of the science of psychology.  Let’s talk about three.

1.      Scientific Method vs. Psychological Method

Psychology has adopted the scientific method which is based upon the observable phenomena of objects moving and interacting with one another.  But how does one observe a mental process?  Using the scientific method to study phenomena that are not easily observable has some limits.

2.      Not Value Neutral

More so than the physical sciences, psychology must deal with values and values are not neutral.  Take for example the question, “What is healthy?” Can data answer this question?  Theory has to answer this question.  Theory provides a framework for interpreting data.  Values of health that psychologists hold influence psychology in significant ways.  You can see this in one simple way: psychologists don’t all agree on what “healthy” is.

3.      Doesn’t Answer Ultimate Questions

Lastly, while psychology can shed considerable light on our lives, it cannot answer the ultimate questions.  Leo Tolstoy posed these three ultimate questions: “Why should I live?  Why should I do anything?  Is there in life any purpose?”  Psychology cannot answer these three questions, but faith does.  Just to give you an example, the first question of the Westminster catechism is: what is the purpose of man?  The answer is: to glorify God and enjoy him always.

Psychological Value

So what exactly is the value of psychology?  First, I’ve found my own personal experience with psychology to be very helpful. I have sought out counselors several times in my life around two basic issues: relationships and emotions.  When my relationship with my family has been strained, I have sought out a counselor for help.  Likewise I have struggled with two emotions, anger and anxiety, that have sent me looking for some help.  In all of these instances, I have found talking to a counselor helpful in giving me guidance for restoring relationships and managing emotions.

Second, the question arises for a person of faith whether to go to a counselor who is also a person of faith or someone else.  My own sense is that I have always begun by seeking out a person who shares my faith, but this has not always been available to me.  So I have seen both Christian and non-Christian counselors.  Both were helpful, but I found meeting with Christian counselors to be more helpful.  Some of this may simply be that I feel like I have less to explain and more in common.  But even with Christian counselors, there are good and bad counselors.  Wisdom can be found both in Christians and non-Christians, and I would seek out wisdom wherever it is to be found.

Lastly, Christianity is psychology and ministry is counseling.  What we do here at SCC is itself a kind of psychology and counseling.  Psychological research has shown that the more kind of social supports you have around you, the more robust you will be in dealing with psychological challenges.  It turns out that going to church and being involved helps you psychologically.  Practices like being in a small group provide people to talk to who may not be trained psychologists, but are people who will listen and reflect on life together.  Contrary to what Freud suggests, faith isn’t a disease, “the universal obsessional neurosis,” but faith practices make you more healthy!

Conclusion

While the father of psychology had a bone to pick with religion, time has shown that psychology and faith are much more compatible than Freud was able to see.  The church itself even turns out to be helpful to people’s psychological health.  So how involved are you?  How many opportunities are you taking to build social supports through worship and small groups?  Not only will these practices help your psychological health, they’ll also help answer the ultimate questions of life:

Why should I live?
Why should I do anything?
Is there in life any purpose?

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Big Bang Faith – The Who Banged It Theory

April 17, 2012 by 1 Comment

Big Bang Faith

Big Bang Faith – The Who Banged It Theory
Sycamore Creek Church
April 15, 2012
Tom Arthur
Genesis 1:1

Peace Friends!

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
~Richard Dawkins

Religion and science are incompatible, incongruent, and irreconcilable.
~Christopher Hitchens

So say the new atheists.  Science and faith just don’t go together.  Science is about truth.  Faith is about something else.  But is this really true? Are science and faith so incongruent after all?  Or do we need to divorce the two and get on with our lives?

I’d like to suggest to you over the next four weeks that science and faith are not in contradiction to one another.  Sometimes they overlap more than other times, but all in all, science and faith can not only coexist but thrive together.

Perhaps a quick analogy is in order.  Science asks the question How? Science tells us that a kettle boils because gas combusts with oxygen and releases energy in the form of heat.  But is this all that can be said about what’s going on here?  What about the Why?  A kettle boils so friends can sit down for a cup of tea.  Or in the case of one group of friends, a men’s tea party!  Can science answer the question of why a men’s tea party?

Men's Tea Party

Literal or Something Else?

Ok, let’s back up a bit.  Let’s go back to the very beginnings of the clash between science and faith.  Who do we go back to here?  Galileo.  Right?  The big controversy of the day was between Galileo’s teaching that the earth moved around the sun and the church’s teaching that the earth was the center and everything else moved around it.  Who was right?  Galileo.  OK, Galileo, the church was wrong.  We’re sorry.  Please forgive us.

Actually, in apologizing to Galileo we’re making an apology within the Christian community because Galileo was a Catholic and remained one (on house arrest).  He even saw that what he was doing was part of fulfilling God’s purposes for his life.  So when we, the church, apologize to Galileo, let’s remember that we’re apologizing to one of our own.  Just in case he missed it the first time: Galileo, we’re sorry.  We were wrong.  You were right.  Please forgive us.

Now let’s look at some of the scriptures that the church used to argue against Galileo:

The world is firmly established; it cannot be shaken.
Psalm 93:1 NLT

The sun rises at one end of the heavens and follows its course to the other end.|
Psalm 19:6 NLT

Does any Christian of any stripe or flavor today believe that these verses (and others like them) require us to believe that the Earth doesn’t move and that everything else (sun, stars, galaxies, etc.) revolves around the Earth?  No. I have never met even the most ardent fundamentalist who wants to hold that because these two verses are in the Bible that Christians must believe in an Earth-centered universe.  We have noticed since the time of Galileo that these verses are poetic in nature.  They are in the Psalms, a book of poetry!

So let’s look at another more contentious (by today’s standards) verse:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1 NLT

If we continue reading this we all know that the way the story goes, God created everything in six days and rested on the seventh.  The question before us then is this: is this story at the beginning of Genesis more like the poetry of the Psalms or is it more like the history of some other books of the Bible?

You may think that this is a question that has only arisen in modern times by modern Christians wrestling with science.  You would be wrong.  This is a live question throughout almost all of Christian history. Just to give you a taste of Christians who wrestled with this in much earlier times, here are two:

Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first, the second and the third day, and the evening and morning existed without the sun, moon, and stars?
Origin (2nd-3rd Century)

We do not read in the Gospel that the Lord said that I send to you the Paraclete [Holy Spirit] who will teach you about the course of the sun and the moon, for he wanted to make Christians and not mathematicians.
Augustine (4th-5th Century)

Did you catch that?  As early as the second century, Christians were thinking that Genesis chapter one is perhaps not to be taken literally.  So if not literally, then how are we to take Genesis’ creation story?  Here’s my educated guess at this point in my understanding of what is going on in Genesis’ creation story.

Genesis chapter one is a poetic account of God creating his very own temple.  The creation of this temple runs parallel to the creation of the tabernacle as it is told later in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.  When someone creates a temple, what is the last thing that gets put in the temple?  The idol.  Right?  Interestingly enough, the word that is translated “idol” in other places in the Old Testament is translated “image” in Genesis.  Now who or what bears God’s image in creation?  Human beings are made in the image of God.  Creation is God’s temple, and we are God’s images, God’s idols, if you will.  Why is this important?  Because there is a political undertone, a subversive message in a story that says that all humanity (men and women) are made in God’s image.  Remember who was considered God’s image in ancient times?  The kings.  So if a story about creation suggests that the king isn’t the only one made in God’s image, whose power is that story undermining?  The king’s power!  So Genesis is a poetic story of God creating God’s temple and creating all of us as God’s image so that we wouldn’t forget that it’s not just the kings who matter to God.  Genesis’ creation story is less a science book and more a political manifesto.

The Big Bang Theory

Christians have often considered there to be two books by which we learn about God.  The first book is of course the Bible.  We’ve been looking at that book so far.  But there’s another book: the book of creation.  Science is the study of this book.  Science does its best to answer the question of How? when it comes to describing the book of creation.  It should be obvious but let me say it anyway, all truth is God’s truth no matter where you find it.  When you find truth in science, it is God’s truth.  When you find truth in people who aren’t Christians, it is God’s truth.  When you find truth in the Bible, it is God’s truth.  All truth is God’s truth.  Science is an exploration of the truth about creation.

Science tells the story of the beginning of creation in a different way than the book of Genesis tells it.  The title of Science’s story is often called the big bang theory.  In a nutshell, science has shown mathematically how the universe is expanding.  If you take those trajectories and run them backwards, you end up with what science calls a singularity: the moment when all matter is condensed into a single point.  It all had a beginning.

Did you know that the first person to prove this idea mathematically was a Belgian Catholic priest named Georges Lemaître?  Yes, it was a Christian who first proved the Big Bang!  Lemaître even went head to head with Einstein on this.  Einstein said, “Your math is right, but your physics are abhorrent.”  In the end Lemaître won that argument.

Not only did Lemaître win that argument with Einstein, but he also took his information to Pope Pius XI.  This was so compelling to Pope Pius that he proclaimed the big bang theory as compatible with Christian faith.  Pope Pius was more confident than Lemaître about this.  Lemaître was concerned that should his math or physics be proven wrong, then the faith would be disgraced by the Pope’s public proclamation.  Well, in the end neither Lemaître nor the Pope proved to be wrong and the vast majority of physicists believe that the big bang theory is a correct way to describe the beginnings of the universe.

One very interesting piece of science that goes along with the big bang theory is what some physicists call the anthropic principle.  “Anthropic” means human-centered. Here’s how it works: There are six fundamental constants of matter that allow human life to exist because they are exceptionally fine-tuned.

Let’s look at one of those constants called Lambda or sometimes “dark matter.”  Lambda is the parameter which controls the long-range acceleration of the expansion of the universe in relativity.  Did you catch that?  Neither did I.  But basically it has to do with how fast the universe expands from that moment of singularity in the big bang.  The value of lambda is a factor of 10-120.  That’s a one with a hundred and twenty zeros following it.  If lambda were a shade off one way or another, human life could not exist.

So how improbable is it that lambda and these other five universal constants are so finely tuned?  Just to have one of them so finely tuned would be would be equal to “getting the mix of flour and sugar right to within one grain of sugar in a cake ten times the mass of the sun” (Tony Hewish as quoted by Polkinghorne).  Or consider making a hole-in-one on the golf course.  The current record is 448 yards.  The fine-tuning of one of these constants would be like hitting a hole in one teeing off from Pluto times thirteen!  Put all these together, and I’ve heard it described this way: It’s like a tornado blowing through a junk yard and creating a fully functioning 747.  The probability of these things happening as they have is beyond minute.  The universe is exceptionally fine-tuned to support human life.  Did it just happen that way?  Or were the dice loaded?

A Strange World

The world is stranger than we all thought.  In some ways it’s stranger than we could have ever imagined.  Quantum theory has shed a strange light on what we know about the way the universe works.  Classical physics, the brain-child of Isaac Newton (who was a Christian), attempted to describe mathematically the way that objects move, but as we began to be able to see ever smaller and smaller objects (protons, electrons, quarks, and now bosons, nick-named “the God particle”), physicists noticed that they didn’t move the way that classical physics said they should.  Things are weird at the subatomic level.  Matter and energy act like both waves and particles.  Werner Heisenberg developed his famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle: you can know where something is going or where it is but not both at the same time!  In fact if you shoot an electron at a wall with two openings on it and record where it goes, you’ll notice something strange: it appears to have gone through both openings!  String theorists think that the electron going from point A to point B takes every possible path to get there.  This means that every possibility is possible.  And this has led some physicists, like Stephen Hawking, to believe in a multiverse: multiple universes where every possibility plays out at least once.

Faith Seeking Understanding

The world is definitely even stranger than you can imagine.  And yet when I read about these developments, I am inclined to simply be more and more in awe of God.  I don’t see the progression of scientific knowledge as antithetical to my faith.  I see it as informing my faith in a very interesting and dynamic conversation.  And I’m not the only one.  One scientist I have learned a lot from is John Polkinghorne.  Polkinghorne was professor of Mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979 before he left his endowed chair to become a priest.  Now he spends his time lecturing and writing about the intersection of faith and science.  I listened to his introductory textbook , A Short Introduction to Quantum Theory, while preparing for this series.  It’s not a book about faith or God. In fact God never comes up in the book.  It is a basic text book for upper-level physics classes, or perhaps physics for non-physicists.

Polkinghorne is a theoretical physicist scientist through and through, and yet in his book he told the story of researchers finding the positron.  The positron is a subatomic particle the size of an electron (much smaller than a proton) but positively charged.  No one even looked for this particle until a new radical theory suggested it should be there.  So researchers went about looking for it and found it.  They even went back to old experiments and noticed that it could be seen there too.  Polkinghorne comments that “researchers tend not to notice things they aren’t looking for.”

Several hundreds of years earlier, Augustine said basically the same thing: “Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.”  We tend to think that you have to understand before you can believe, but as the search for the positron shows, sometimes you have to believe before you can see or understand it.  Anselm, a Christian scholar writing in the eleventh century wrote a book called, Faith Seeking Understanding.  In it he suggests that Christians should seek understanding about God and our world from a foundation of faith.  There is a kind of humility in both Augustine and Anselm.  It is a humility that recognizes that we don’t know everything.  Our knowledge is and always will be finite.

Christians can learn from science and science can learn from Christians.  Science seeks to answer the question of How?  And faith seeks to answer the question of Why?  Why is there something rather than nothing?  And that brings us back full circle to that men’s tea party.  I’m not so interested in how this exists, but why does it exist?

Men's Tea Party

For Further Exploration
www.testoffaith.com
John Polkinghorne – Questions of Truth
John Lennox – Seven Days that Define the World

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The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman

October 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The Good Man JesusThe Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
By Phillip Pullman
Library
Rating: 5 of 10

This book was picked for our Agnostic Pub Group as a change of pace from C.S. Lewis.  Pullman is at least an agnostic and at most an atheist.  Pullman’s book is an interesting attempt to explore “how stories become stories.”  The basic plot line is that Jesus has a twin brother named Christ.  The two grow up alongside one another, and as adults, Jesus becomes prominent in the public eye and Christ recedes into the background.  Christ begins to follow Jesus around and record what Jesus does.  Along the way Christ meets a “stranger” who encourages him “to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor.  What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was” (emphasis is Pullman’s).  So Christ embellishes the story because “without miracles, without a church, without a scripture, the power of [Jesus’] words and his deeds will be like water poured into the sand.”  In the end, Jesus is crucified, and Christ steps in to provide the resurrection.

Throughout this book I was reminded of two historical/theological debates.  The first is an attempt to make a distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.  This position tends to hold that Jesus did not claim much about himself and was a wandering prophet or social critic.  Thus, claims about Jesus’ divinity were developed in the early history of the church.  This fundamental assertion lies at the base of Pullman’s story.

The second debate that comes to mind is Albert Schwitzer’s critique of the search for the historical Jesus.  Schwitzer claimed that portraits of a historical Jesus always end up looking like the individuals writing them.  Ironically, Schwitzer went on to write a “historical” portrait of Jesus that scholars now think looks a lot like Schwitzer himself!  Thus, the distinction between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith” tends to break down as one attempts to tease the two apart.

Pullman attempts to separate the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith by introducing a very fanciful plot device: the two were really twins.  Pullman is not attempting to say that there really were twins named Jesus and Christ.  The plot device is simply an experiment in exploring how a religion might move from history to faith.  The problem with this exploration is that it requires such a fantastically non-historical plot device to accomplish it that one is left wondering how the “story became a story” without the plot device: twins.  If Jesus didn’t have a twin named Christ, then how did Jesus really end up being claimed to have been God’s son?  Pullman really hasn’t helped the agnostic/atheist imagination see how the “historical Jesus” ended up becoming the “Christ of faith.”

While I didn’t find Pullman’s plot device particularly compelling, I did find his critique of the church compelling.  Pullman rewrites Jesus prayer from John 17.  In this prayer, Jesus is full of doubt and barely believes that God exists, or if God does exist, then God probably doesn’t listen.  So Jesus prays, “Lord, if I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, powerless, and modest.  That it should wield no authority except that of love.  That it should never cast anyone out.  That it should own no property and make no laws.  That it should never condemn, but only forgive.”  The prayer continues in a similar direction.  Pullman really does provide a compelling vision for what a church might or could be.  I don’t agree with everything in this prayer, but the church has unfortunately used its power and authority in abusive and destructive ways.  It is the church’s lack of providing a truly loving community that makes books like The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ possible.  It is important for the church to listen to the prophetic voice of God speaking through those outside the church who critique her.  At times Pullman provides that voice in this book.

Note: Our Agnostic Pub Group is beginning a new book—The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University—on October 20th.  We meet on the 1st and 3rd Thursday at 7PM at Soup Spoon Café (a kind of coffee house/pub).  Join us for great discussion and brew.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Ignite by Nelson Searcy
Recreating the Church by Richard Hamm
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: , ,

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking

June 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The Grand DesignThe Grand Design
By Stephen Hawking
Audio Book
Library (Audio/Book)
Rating: 7 of 10

If you’re looking for an accessible book that brings you up to speed on the current state of physics and what physics has to teach us about the beginning of the universe (cosmology), then this is your book.  While Hawking probably makes this stuff about as easy to understand as anyone would, it still isn’t always easy.  Sometimes the material was flying over my head, or past my ears.  Still, the book is very short (four CDs in the audio version), and after this quick read you come away more amazed at the beauty and complexity of our universe.

Let me give you just a little taste of some of the things Hawking explains (assuming I understood them correctly!).  First, Hawking points out that current quantum mechanics holds that when a subatomic particle moves from point A to point B it takes every possible route to get there.  Yikes!  That’s a lot of movement.  I walked away from this description scratching my head, but also a lot more in awe of the creation.

Second, Hawking explains that current M Theory (no one is really sure what the “M” stands for but maybe, Hawking says, it stands for “mystery”) allows for an infinite number of universes in an infinite number of dimensions.  Hawking goes on to point out that the “anthropic principle” (the idea that our universe is uniquely fine tuned to allow for life) becomes less remarkable when one considers an infinite number of opportunities for fine-tuning.  If the multiple universes theory is correct (it seems there is still significant debate around the issue) and because the anthropic principle has been used to defend the existence of God from creation’s fine-tuning for life, then theologians and Christian who are scientists will have some more creative work cut out for them to integrate this idea with belief in God’s existence.  God’s creation is even more magnificent than we ever understood.

This book is probably not for everyone, but if you’re an armchair cosmologist (someone who studies the beginning of the universe; not to be confused with a cosmetologist who studies beauty, fashion, and style!), The Grand Design is a must read.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman
Love Wins by Rob Bell
Exponential by Dave and Jon Ferguson
The Organic Lawn Care Manual by Paul Boardway Tukey
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
Sacred Parenting by Gary Thomas
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: , ,

Questions 2.0 – Why Believe in God?

June 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Questions 2.0

Questions 2.0 – Why Believe in God?
Sycamore Creek Church
June 12, 2011
Tom Arthur
Psalm 19

 

Peace, Friends!

Blake asks a great question: Why believe in God?  It’s a question most of us find ourselves asking at some point or another.  I myself have asked this question and fallen on both sides of the answer fence at different times in my life, although for the vast majority of my life, I have claimed to believe in God.  I’m taking this question as a basic first question to Christianity about the existence of God.  Does God exist?  How do we know?  Another set of questions that would take another sermon (or several!) would be why believe in the Christian God or in Jesus as God’s Son.  I will not try to answer these questions today.  I will focus more directly on the question of God’s existence.

I’d like to explore this question from the perspective of Psalm 19.  So let’s take a look at this intriguing psalm.

Psalm 19 NRSV

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.

In the heavens he has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy,
and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
and its circuit to the end of them;
and nothing is hid from its heat.

The law of the LORD is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the decrees of the LORD are sure,
making wise the simple;
the precepts of the LORD are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the LORD is clear,
enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the LORD is pure,
enduring forever;
the ordinances of the LORD are true
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey,
and drippings of the honeycomb.

Moreover by them is your servant warned;
in keeping them there is great reward.
But who can detect their errors?
Clear me from hidden faults.
Keep back your servant also from the insolent;
do not let them have dominion over me.
Then I shall be blameless,
and innocent of great transgression.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable to you,
O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.

This is God’s teaching for us today.  Thank you, God!

 

The Moral Law

This psalm has two themes.  The first half has to do with creation and the second half has to do with morality.  I’d like to look at the second half first.  We read in verse seven:

The law of the LORD is perfect,
reviving the soul…
Psalm 19:7 NRSV

The psalm goes on to say quite a bit about this law of the Lord.  I think it points us to a kind of law that is present in all of us: a moral law.  I believe this moral law is one that we all live under and to at least some extent we all intuitively know or understand.

C.S. Lewis, one of the great Christian writers of the 20th century, wrote a little book titled Mere Christianity in which he attempted to defend the basic Christian beliefs that are common among Christians of all stripes.  He begins this book with a discussion of the moral law:

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same thing to you?’—’That’s my seat, I was there first’—’Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’—’Why should you shove in first?’ —’Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’— ‘Come on, you promised.’ People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

Lewis does a great job of making difficult concepts easy to understand.  He takes this idea of the moral law and gives us some footholds and handholds so we can easily grasp hold.  The question he is driving at is this: if there is a moral law, where did it come from?  The answer he suggests is that if there is a moral law, there must be a moral law giver.

The Moral Law & Absolute Truth

I think that sometimes we get tripped up at this point about the moral law because we quickly run into the question of absolute truth.  Truth seems so tricky.  How can we nail down truth so that it is the same thing all the time in all places for all people?  Usually we describe absolute truth as rules that govern what we should do and not do, but I don’t think that’s what Lewis is driving at here.

Consider the rule: Do not tell a lie.  This seems a pretty basic moral rule or truth.  It seems like it should hold up no matter who we’re talking about, where they live, or when they live.  Don’t tell a lie.  But immediately we are confronted with difficult situations where telling a lie seems the right thing to do.  Take Corrie Ten Boom for an example.

Corrie was a Dutch Christian living during WWII in the Netherlands.  When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, Corrie and her family hid as many Jews as they could to save their lives.  They often had to lie to the Nazis to save Jews.  It is a lie that I hope each of us would make if we were in similar circumstances.

Here’s the rub: lying is wrong.  Yes, but in a broken and sinful world, sometimes we are confronted with a situation in which there are no right answers.  All our options (and always keep in mind that there are more than just two options in every situation) are less than perfect and we must choose the one that is the least bad.  I think this complication points to something that is behind each rule: a principle.

What is the principle behind the rule to not lie?  It is the principle of loving your neighbor by treating them the way that you would want to be treated.  In the circumstances that Corrie found herself in, this principle of love was at odds with the rule of truth telling.  Corrie’s Christianity demanded that she take the principle seriously while ignoring the letter of the law in the rule.

Jesus himself points to a kind of hierarchy in God’s law.  When arguing with the Pharisees he says:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.
Matthew 23:23-24 NRSV

Notice the underlined portion.  There are some moral laws that are weightier than others.  Here the Pharisees were following the letter of the law of tithing even when it came to their herbs and spices, but ignoring the more important aspects of the law of treating people mercifully, justly, and faithfully.

Discerning what is weightier in any given situation is not always easy and is best done in a broad and diverse community, and let me be clear that I am certainly not advocating a kind of situational relativism where anything goes.  I think that there will be a day when our character and our actions will all be judged.  The point I’m trying to make is that there is a moral law that points to a moral law giver, and even though sometimes that moral law is a little tricky to discern, it is still there pointing to the moral law giver, or God.

The law of the LORD is perfect,
reviving the soul…
Psalm 19:7 NRSV

Creation

Now we move on to the first half of Psalm 19 which speaks of creation.  We read:

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Psalm 19:1 NRSV

Immediately when we begin talking about creation the question comes up about how to navigate through the relationship between science and faith.  Are they opposed to one another or is there a way that they work in harmony with one another?

Whenever one begins talking about science and faith, it’s not very long before the name Galileo comes up.  Galileo argued that the sun was at the center of our system and not the earth.  Famously the church stood against him.  He was put on house arrest and forced to recant.  He did so (with his fingers crossed behind his back!).

Interestingly enough, one of the key verses in this debate came from this psalm.  We read:

Its [the sun’s] rising is from the end of the heavens,
and its circuit to the end of them;
Psalm 19:6 NRSV

When you look up in the sky, you see the sun move from one side of the earth to the other.  It seems pretty obvious that the sun moves and the earth doesn’t. But what is obvious always has to do with where one stands, as Galileo so clearly saw through his new instrument, the telescope.

Can we ever get past Galileo?  I hope so.  Galileo, we were wrong.  Please accept our apology.  Forgive us for our arrogance.

I think when most of us read Psalm 19 today, we see it as a kind of poetic language.  Our faith in God isn’t shaken by the idea that what verse six literally says isn’t true.  Interestingly enough, the Catholic church has come around to this perspective too.  Pope John Paul II said, “Galileo sensed in his scientific research the presence of the Creator who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions.”  Amen.

I read a book several years ago titled, Galileo’s Daughter.  Her name was Maria Celeste and she was a nun.  I learned while reading this book that Galileo was a Christian!  He wasn’t always the most faithful Christian, but he remained a Christian even amidst this controversy with the church.  Apparently Galileo didn’t have a hard time integrating this new scientific knowledge with his faith.  He said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”  I suspect most of us today could relate to that claim.

Evolution

The question of evolution also often comes up in these kinds of conversations about science and faith.  Is evolution incompatible with a belief in God?  While the church may not have been on the progressive edge back in Galileo’s day, the Catholic church has responded to this question of evolution in a much more proactive way.  Again, Pope John Paul II said of evolution, “New findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis.”  If the pope doesn’t see an essential conflict between faith and evolution, perhaps we shouldn’t either.

It’s not just religious leaders who see a harmony between science and faith.  Many scientists do too.  One of those is Francis Collins.  Collins is a first rate scientist.  He was the director of the Human Genome project which sequenced the 25,000-30,000 genes in human DNA and is the current National Institute of Health director by way of a unanimous vote in Congress.  Collins is also a Christian.  He has recently written a book titled The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.  In this book he makes a well thought out plea for Christians to see science and faith as compatible.  He says, “It is time to call a truce in the escalating war between science and spirit. The war was never really necessary….Science is not threatened by God; it is enhanced. God is most certainly not threatened by science.”  Amen.

I have personally never had a hard time connecting science with my faith.  I wonder if this wasn’t because growing up even though I went to public schools, I had several science teachers in Jr. High and High School who also believed in God.  I saw science and faith integrated together on a regular basis.  I continue to see it today even in our church.  We have several scientists who are members or regularly attend our church.  One of the most well known is Mark Aupperlee who preaches often.  Mark is a breast cancer researcher at MSU.  Mark is married to Jana who is also a scientist.  She is a professor of psychology at MSU.  Then there’s Kathie Brooks who is in the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics department at MSU.  I read some about her research on her faculty page the other day, and I didn’t understand any of it!  We’ve also got two high school science teachers: Chrissy Hager (Leslie High School) and Ben Shoemaker (Mason High School).  Several people in our church are involved with the science of medicine.  Amanda Shoemaker is a doctor, and Bob and Martha Trout, Teresa Miller, Deb Hager, and Deb Ray are all involved in nursing or tech work in hospitals.  You don’t have to look to the big guns of Francis Collins to see scientists who are also people of faith.  Just look right here in our own church.

Let me take a tangent for a moment.  Students, don’t think that to be a good Christian you have to become a pastor or missionary or work in a church.  We need faithful Christians who are also scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and the like.  Don’t be afraid to go into these fields of study because you think your faith will have to be put on the back burner.  Talk to any of the people I just mentioned and you will most likely find a story about how science has strengthened their faith and vice versa.

God and Suffering

One of the big obstacles to belief in God is always the question of suffering.  We read about this in Psalm 19:

Keep me from deliberate sins!
Don’t let them control me.
Then I will be free of guilt
and innocent of great sin.
Psalm 19:13 NLT

When we deliberately sin, we usually hurt others.  Sometimes that hurt is more subtle than at other times.  There is, of course, also suffering caused by creation itself.  Sometimes this earth is a very harsh place to live.  What are we to make of suffering and a belief in God?  Shouldn’t a good and all powerful God have been able to make a world in which suffering didn’t exist?  We’re going to deal with this question more fully in the next series, Why?  But let me touch on it briefly for a moment here.

The primary response to the question of suffering is free will.  Because God has given us free will, or the freedom to choose to follow God or to not follow God, to follow the moral law or not, all of us have at one time or another done harm to others.  But couldn’t God have created a world where free will exists but suffering doesn’t?  C.S. Lewis is again instructive:

If you choose to say “God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God; meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words “God can.”  Nonsense remains nonsense, even when we talk about God.
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Lewis points to a logical incompatibility toward the belief that free will can also be required to always do the right thing.  If it was required to do the right thing, then it would no longer be free will.

Suffering happens to everyone.  Jesus himself says, “For [God] gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and on the unjust, too” (Matthew 5:45 NLT).  For me the difficulty with suffering comes down to one thing: hope.  If you take God out of the equation, there is no hope amidst suffering.

Hope

Psalm 19 speaks to this kind of hope in the very last verse.  We read:

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable to you,
O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.
Psalm 19:14 NRSV

There are three kinds of hope that a belief in God provides: hope for a better life, hope for a better world, and hope for something better than death.

Hope for a Better Life

When we believe in God, we are given hope that we can become better people.  We can grow in character, virtue, and love.  No, belief doesn’t lead to instantaneous perfection.  It’s not like you become a perfect person when you believe in God.  But belief in God leads to particular attitudes and actions that nurture growth in all who believe.  Yes, we still fall down.  Yes, we still sin. Yes, we still mess up on the moral law, but as John Wesley says, “Sin remains but it does not reign.”  Belief in God provides hope that I can be better person.

Hope for a Better World

Of course, if there is hope that each of us can be a better person, then because the world is made up of individuals there is also hope that this world can be a better world.  I look at groups like Habitat for Humanity whose mission is a world without shacks.  To that end they have built over 400,000 homes worldwide.  Or look at UMCOR (United Methodist Committee on Relief).  UMCOR raised over $40,000,000 for Haiti in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake.  There’s also our own mission work with Dr. Mir in Nicaragua where two teams a year go to run medical clinics.  Each of these is motivated by a belief in God that leads us to hope and act for a better world.

Hope for Something Better than Death

Last of all is death.  Death seems so, well, final.  In some ways it is.  It is good for all of us to occasionally be reminded of our mortality.  What is the number one cause of death?  Birth.  We will all die.

Within each of us lies a longing that hopes for something better than death.  It is a longing that death would not be the end of life.  Belief in God provides hope that there is some good and meaningful existence after death.  Once again we turn back to C.S. Lewis who said,

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.  A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food.  A duckling want to swim: well, there is such a thing as water.  Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex.  If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I think we can see this longing in another psalm, Psalm 84:

I long, yes, I faint with longing,
to enter the courts of the LORD.
With my whole being, body and soul,
I will shout joyfully to the living God.
Psalm 84:2 NLT

Our longing for God is there, Lewis says, because the object of our longing, God, exists to fulfill that longing.

Faith & Uncertainty

At the end of this message, I’m not sure I’d say that I’ve presented evidence for belief in God.  I think I’d say that I’ve tried to present reasons why I believe in God, but even amidst these reasons it has been my own experience that I can never come to a place where I am totally certain about belief in God.  Belief requires faith. Paul says, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7 NRSV).

Let me go back to Blake’s question: Why believe in God?  The tricky part of this equation for me has always been that unbelief also requires faith!  I have found no more certainty on the other side of the fence.  Whether you believe that God exists or you believe that God does not exist (or even if you’re not sure), all of these positions require faith.  Uncertainty never goes away.

So perhaps at the end of this message, Blake, you were hoping that I would have presented enough hard core evidence to wipe away all your uncertainties.  I doubt (no pun intended) that I have done that or that I ever could do that.  What I hope to have done is given you some of the reasons why I believe:

I look at the moral law and I think there must be a moral law giver.

I look at our world and even the scientific language and knowledge we use to describe it, and I see the fingerprints of a creator.

I look at suffering, and I see that belief in God offers three hopes:

Hope that I can become a better person,

Hope that this world can become a better world;

Hope that there is something better than death.

The decision is before you.  You can choose to believe or not to believe.  Both require faith.  Which one will you choose?

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The Language of God by Francis Collins

June 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The Language of GodThe Language of God
By Francis Collins
Audio Book
Library (CD/Book)
Rating: 8 of 10

Francis Collins makes you feel good to be a thoughtful Christian.  If you’re not already familiar with Collins, you probably are at least somewhat familiar with the Human Genome Project, which in 2003 completed its task to identify the 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA.  Collins was the director of this project, and since 2009 he has been serving as the director of the National Institute for Health.  Collins is a groundbreaking scientist through and through.  He is also a Christian.

Collins was not always a Christian nor did he grow up in a Christian home.  He grew up an atheist but later in life and in large part through the influence of C.S. Lewis and Lewis’ book Mere Christianity, came to believe that God existed and to follow Jesus as God’s son.  He briefly shares this story at the beginning of the book so that his more skeptical readers might not assume that Collins is slavishly following the religion of his childhood and youth.  Collins then quickly moves on to the meat of the book: the relationship between science and faith.

Collins does not believe that science and faith are at odds with one another.  Rather he sees extreme perspectives on each side of the debate doing more harm than good.  Collins has written this book as a moderating voice amidst those extremes, and most people will resonate with this centrist position.

Collins does an excellent job of tackling especially the question of evolution and faith.  I learned quite a bit about how these two things can work together in harmony.  Collins also helped me understand more fully and in simple language many of the debates raging these days around creationism (Collins implores Christians to let this position go), Intelligent Design (Collins does not hold this position although he does not see it as intellectually problematic as literal six-day creationism), irreducible complexity (a la Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box, which Collins also does not hold to due to recent scientific discoveries), micro vs. macro evolution (I have held to this position myself, but Collins worries that this approach is a God of the gaps argument and the gap is ever shrinking; he convinced me that it is time to let it go), and many bioethics issues in an appendix which covers everything from the beginning of life (conception or later?), stem cell research (fetal and adult), and cloning (animal and human).  By the end of the book I felt like I had a better grasp on the current state of scientific knowledge and debate, and I also felt even better about being a Christian in the midst of it all!  This is no small feat.  Thank you Francis Collins.

One perspective I would have liked Collins to engage with is postmodernism.  Collins is a modernist through and through.  The subtitle of the book is: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.  Sounds very similar to Josh McDowell’s book for the previous generation, Evidence that Demands a Verdict.  All of these approaches to Christianity assume that reason is an objective arbitrator of whether Christianity or belief is, well, reasonable.  Postmodernism has cast significant skepticism on the objectiveness of reason and asked hard questions about how our context and culture predetermines what is and is not reasonable.  Reason it turns out isn’t quite as objective as the Enlightenment has taught us to believe.  How do we take this into account when evaluating a presentation of “evidence”?

In the end, I have personally found that there is no amount of evidence that removes all uncertainty.  Collins is very humble in his approach to the evidence he presents (he reads the audio book himself and you can hear the humility in his voice), and I would have appreciated a humble assessment of postmodernity’s critiques of modernity and science.  I guess every book can’t cover every question one has of it.  Collins has set up an organization called The Biologos Forum, to explore further the continuing issues raised between science and faith.  I have not fully explored this website, so perhaps Collins and his associates interact with postmodernity more fully through The Biologos Forum.

Overall, those who are looking for a respectable and rigorous but easy to understand and relatively brief discussion of the current state of science and its compatibility with faith will find this book exceedingly helpful and inspiring.  On some things it may even change your mind.  It did mine.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman
Love Wins by Rob Bell
Exponential by Dave and Jon Ferguson
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking
The Organic Lawn Care Manual by Paul Boardway Tukey

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Science and Religion on the Daily Show

July 21, 2010 by

Marilynne Robinson, the very talented author of the Pulitzer prize winning novel Gilead, also happens to be a very thoughtful and articulate Christian.  She came to Duke while I was there and spoke.  She’s not the greatest speaker (thankfully her vocation is a writer), but she does an excellent job when recently interviewed by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show about her new book, Absence of Mind, in which she covers the topics of science, religion, and consciousness.  I have not yet read the book, but I am intrigued after watching this interview.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Marilynne Robinson
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party
Filed Under: Ponderings, Video Tagged With: ,