In the first chapter of “The God Delusion”, Richard Dawkins describes the difficulty he has with reconciling that which scientists know and hypothesise about the natural world with traditional religious belief. He quotes Carl Sagan in “Pale Blue Dot”
“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded ‘This is bigger than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our great prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, my God is a little god and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
In embracing the belief that all good things come from God, we have drawn boundaries around what God is, and then dismissed anything which does not fit into our traditional understanding of God. Our response to a world that is more complex, more beautiful and more vast than we have understood it to be has been to protect the ground we’ve always stood on, and to hold tight to the truth we know. It’s what the church did to Galileo, and when we put our fingers in our ears and sing “la la la I’m not listening” to increased scientific pontification around origins of life, etc we do the same thing.
So here’s the question: where are we as the church, still doing this? The challenge here has to be to recognise where we’ve limited God to our previous understanding of theology, and allow that theology to become flexible enough that we can see God in the Universe and even in scientific discovery, rather than seeing God opposed to these things. Where would your theology be too inflexible to accomodate for scientists discovering more about our world?
This could be a long series - two posts and I’m only 5 pages in.
3 Comments
You’ve opened up an interesting can of worms there Geoff. What happens when our presuppositions about what God’s truth is, don’t reconcile with the world around us?
Throughout history we’ve got some pretty sensational examples of God-believers getting it wrong. People have done awful things in God’s name. So it’s pretty safe to say, that sometimes we little theologians get it all dead wrong.
It typically comes back, as you say, to our interpretation of scripture. I think it’s really easy, particularly for us ‘church kids’, to back ourselves into a corner by being dogmatic about that things we’ve accepted since childhood as bedrock truths. Philip Yancey has some great examples about racism in the church in the days of Martin Luther King Jr. and the contrasting truth.
The only general solution I can think of to those possible blind spots, is to go to the Bible acknowledging that we come to it with other stuff that complicates the way we interpret it.
In terms of history, it means we have to ask whether books like 1 Kings are primarily a history of Israel, or whether they are primarily theodicean.
In terms of science, it means we have to ask ourselves questions like whether or not we take the creation story in Genesis as a definitive record of the formation of the universe. Is it a scientific document or, perhaps, was the author’s purpose to stop people worshiping the creation over the Creator?
It doesn’t really matter where you come down on those issues specifically, unless of course you’re holding on to one faltering interpretation so tightly that faith in God becomes an exercise in trying to pretend that something is true, rather than being willing to at least question our underlying assumptions.
Understanding God is a work-in-progress for every follower of Jesus that I know. Is that just another cop-out, so that I can keep believing things that don’t always fit into logical boxes? Sometimes it probably is. I don’t always like that being the case. But calling it all a great big delusion doesn’t really reconcile either. For me, it would feel like I was throwing my hands up in the air and tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
it is a difficult Q - let’s face it we look back at the abolition of slavery now and think how could christians ever own slaves - maybe in 200 yrs time future christians will look back at us and ask, how could they ever drive cars?
I think we need to be careful about how categorical we make our pronouncements sometimes -there is no gay gene, for instance, when we don’t really know and are just hoping there isn’t one.
Maybe we just need to be a bit more humble and appreciative of science - it can tell us a lot of the why and maybe we need to be in dialogue to think through the ethics etc.
Paul seems to have summarised the reasons why for me, the whole God vs Science debate is a non-event.
I just don’t find the two to be in conflict in my worldview. The only conflict I have ever had has been between poorly founded dogma and empirical research, and I thank God for the dedicated scientists who have put paid to a flat world and a literalist bible.
I have a logical refutation to the idea that the bible is the literal word of God. Consider when Paul states that he speaks as a man, and not with the authority of “the Lord” on certain topics. If the bible is the express word of God, then the express word of God is that Pauls words are not the express word of God. This self-looping contradiction is the philosophical equivalent of the classic: “This statement is false.”
This forces us to the logical conclusion that the bible is a text written by fallible men who were at best empowered and inspired by God, and leaves us with the scary posibility that on occasion they took liberties with the factual basis of their subject.
To use that uncertainty as a basis to denounce the whole bible, or to assert that the bible must be considered infalable, lest it be corrupted, are, I believe two extremes: both insecure and untenable positions.
The historians seeking to establish a Jesus family tomb have so far come closest to producing evidence that there was no ressurection of Christ. That, could it be proven, would be a fair blow to any certain belief. But since it is by nature, based in probability, it leaves plenty of space for faith.
While science may have disproved many things, and failed to disprove others, establishing patterns of raw realities, laws, and orders for the known world… it has never so far imagined anything as wonderful as kindness or as frivolous as self sacraficial love… and should those things be no more than myth, they would still be worth believing in.