Archived Posts For Emerging Questions
dawkins’ deity, part ii - responding to transcendence
Posted on November 25, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Books, Emerging Questions | 3 Comments
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.
dawkins’ deity, part i - preliminaries
Posted on November 22, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Books, Emerging Questions | Leave a Comment
This is the beginning of a series on Richard Dawkins’ book: “The God Delusion”. I’ll be writing the series “as I read it”, which given the way that life has been looking recently, could result in this series finishing around late 2020, but with a little bit of application, we should be able to get “something” out on this weekly (or so).
I believe that while the easiest, and most tempting response to the sort of criticisms that a fundamentalist atheist such as Dawkins presents is to dismiss him out of hand as a radical who doesn’t have any concept of what Christianity is really on about, I don’t believe that such a response is sensible, nor is it helpful. Whether we like it or not, voices like Dawkins, along with Sam Harris, etc. are being heard loud and clear. So this is an attempt to respond to “The God Delusion” and to sort the truths that the church needs to hear from the “other stuff”.
Because I’m attempting to find the “things we need to hear” and even some issues to wrestle with, this will (attempt to) be the last time I’ll address the style in which Dawkins’ has written his manifesto. I admit, I’ve seen Richard appear on television interviews before, so I was a little prepared for what I would be reading. He writes as he talks, with a steady, calm, English gentleman sensibility - all the while conveying sentiments which border on ridicule. His rhetoric includes regularly referring to religion as one would a virus, commonly using references to the bodies immune system as imagery for those who resist religious thought and ideas.
There is little doubt in reading the little I have already, that Dawkins writes with a deep personal conviction that he is hoping to help people out of a “broken” way of thinking. I don’t think he “hates” religious people, but I think that he has seen a great deal of hurt and “backward thinking” and has identified that he believes the root cause to be this thing we call religion, or even this idea of “God”. Richard Dawkins sets out his intentions early in the book:
“If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.”
and I’ve laid out mine. I realise this post might not have much to comment on it, but stay tuned because coming soon: chapter 1 - a deeply religious non-believer.
modern crusades and the story
Posted on November 20, 2007 by Rebecca Matheson
Filed Under Culture, Emerging Questions | 3 Comments
I’m not a great fan of the whole ‘pass the email petition along’ but I was especially disturbed when I received one about the author Phillip Pullman (of the controversial series: His Dark Materials) and the soon to be released movie of The Golden Compass. Pullman is controversial in his anti-C.S Lews, anti-Christian/Religious themes. What disgusted me, was not that these books were now ‘a bit more public’, but that emails like this are sent with ‘all the information needed’ for an individual to create a certain opinion.
People’s naivety is conducted into some kind of modern crusade. It becomes a propaganda of distrust of perhaps even hate, which doesn’t seem very Christ-like to me! I understand the concern, but I think there are limits as to how far we can jump moral our hobby horse and ride it.
We claw at the few often minor imperfections in light of our often ridiculous ‘Christian’ moral positions and forget to search fiction such as this (or Harry Potter) for it’s redemptive themes, it’s story and the why of the story. Why are things like this written? Why don’t we bravely engage the debate rather than sulk from the sidelines? Why don’t we tell the story we know.
Following on from this, but less related directly to crusades, I was reading an interview between Phillip Pullman and the Archbishop Rowan Williams. Williams says the following,
“You can’t communicate Christianity simply as a set of ideas. At some point you’re going to have to sit down and tell a story. And tell a story which, because it’s a story, is bound to have some loose ends, some awkwardnesses. As it is we have four versions of the story of Jesus in the New Testament, because of that sense that a story can always be retold. And that introduces a bit of this irony in the narrative, which is very important in reinforcing the sense that this is something mysterious. I think there is something in that fundamental characteristic of Christianity which helps to enable a particular kind of storytelling.”
His words ring brilliantly true after a discussion I had with a guy this week about why I believe in this Christianity stuff. Anything of worth that I said (and I said more that was not valuable than was) came from a personal narrative within God’s broader narrative and not the relaying of facts.
I would like to see an approach of beginning to understand Christianity coming from more of a narrative than set of ideas.
has it occurred to you that you might be wrong?
Posted on November 13, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Emerging Questions | 2 Comments
The above clip is more of your traditional “tell-a-funny-story-that’s-vaguely-related” rather than making a specific point. And the title is taken from a often referred to peanuts cartoon (stole the linked image from pomomusings - hopefully they don’t mind). But here’s what I’ve been pondering. A big part of what the “emerging conversation” and considering “post-modernism” has been doing to my feeble little brain has been to reinforce this notion that there are things I’ve been “certain” of, that might actually be wrong. Some of those things I’m quite sure I was outright wrong about.
Now, if we consider that:
“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1)
then I’m a little bit flummoxed about how we ought to act in regard to things we could quite well be wrong about. Because it’s easy to mistake faith for intellectual arrogance. I could try and unpack this a whole lot more but I think the discussion might be better served if I leave it there. How does humility about the things we “know about God”, interplay with wanting to act and live out of a place of faith?
a bit of a dream for advocacy
Posted on October 25, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Crazy Idealism, Emerging Questions | 18 Comments
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ’sinners’ love those who love them. 33And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even ’sinners’ do that. 34And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even ’sinners’ lend to ’sinners,’ expecting to be repaid in full. 35But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
- Luke 6: 32-36
I know that I said I was finished with the feminism conversation for the time being, but stick with me, that’s not what this is primarily all about. But in interacting with that discussion there were two, fairly obvious and unsurprising general trends:
- The strongest, loudest pro-feminist voices were primarily women
- The most reluctant voices with regards to feminism were from men
I realise that about now you’re wanting to award me the Nobel Prize for Pointing-Out-The-Blatantly-Obvious, but stop being so rude and let me finish. What if we, as followers of the man who spoke the words in the quote above, chose to live to a higher standard? What if our most passionate responses came in defence of causes that cannot benefit ourselves? This isn’t a potshot at those in either category 1 or 2 above - that’s just how I got here. But what if we passionately got behind the issues that mean letting go of our own control.
Imagine if the church’s loudest feminists were men? If the loudest advocates for the poor came from financially prosperous backgrounds? If the advocates for Aboriginal Australians came from the white people? What if we were able to give up the causes that could benefit ourselves the most, in place of those which benefited us the least?
OK, now if you’re willing to put up with one more rhetorical question: what if the loudest voices for improving homosexual rights came from the Christians who believed that homosexuality is a sin? What a church that might be.
