Fri 21 Aug, 2009
Just published at BreakPoint: God and Science Do Mix, beginning,
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that is replete with unintended irony, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss says, “Science and God Don’t Mix.”
With all due respect for a man who has contributed significantly to what we know about the universe, on this point Krauss is wrong…
Mon 6 Jul, 2009
From Bill Vallicella:
One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the “deformation” of the concept of God: “I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation.” (206) He speaks of “the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts.” (205)
Why speak of deformation rather than of reformation, transformation, or refinement? Dennett’s view is that the “original monotheists” thought of God as a being one could literally listen to, and literally sit beside. (206) If so, the “original monotheists” thought of God as a physical being: “The Old Testament Jehovah, or Yahweh, was quite definitely a super-man (a He, not a She) who could take sides in battles, and be both jealous and wrathful.” (206, emphasis in original).
[Link: Maverick Philosopher: Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept]
Vallicella has insightful things to say about this. I would add that Dennett’s view of God in history is refuted very early in the Bible: the first ten words of Genesis.
Wed 11 Feb, 2009
The question at New Scientist was, how did we ever come up with the idea of gods? The answer begins,
It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods. Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. “It’s not that religion is not important,” says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, “it’s that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress.” The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions….
Two thoughts on this:
1) “Science has largely shied away from asking why…. but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions.”
The obvious underlying assumption is that until science tells us, we don’t know; for there is no other way to know but through science.
2) “It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times…. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.”
This is marvelously consistent with our having been created in God’s image, for relating with God. What’s lacking in that answer? Sure, we can also “conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods, and monsters,” but this is easily understood also from a Biblical perspective: our relationship with God has been broken, and in our alienation we worship the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:20-23).
The New Scientist article proposes two cognitive features of humans as sources of our religiosity: the way wementally treat living things as opposed to non-living things, and an “overdeveloped sense of cause and effect.” There’s no need to doubt these are true of humans, from childhood on. There’s also no need to doubt that they contribute to beliefs in that imaginary world. But is there a need to assume that the explanation for religion is entirely natural and evolutionary? No, for God has spoken to us, we have his revelation of where our belief in him first originated, where it has gone wrong, and what he has done through Christ to bring us back to him.
Sun 25 Jan, 2009
This came to me by email this morning, and there are good questions here. The sender agreed that it would be good to answer here on the blog. I’ve changed her name here, as we also agreed.
Hi, I’m a Christian, but I’m having some problems. I was thinking that maybe some naturalists believe what they believe because naturally the universe just has to “be”, I guess, in the way that a circle and a square can’t be the same thing at the same time. And you can’t really create the fact that a circle and square can’t be the same thing because it just has to be so, which is the height of logic, isn’t it?
Also, I think, like Tom Clark said, a supernatural God, upon further investigation, wouldn’t actually be supernatural because that really wouldn’t be possible, again, in the same way that a square and circle can’t be at the same time. There always has to be a way and means for anything to happen, right? I mean, nothing could just simply happen with no way for it to happen. It seems like this would sort of answer the reason why for everything, maybe, in the way that, if there is anything at all than there simply can’t not be anything. So, because it just has to be, that’s why it is, like it’s impossible for it not to be.
Do you understand what I mean? Also, it wouldn’t matter if you had evidence for evolution or not because this fact would have to be so, anyway. I’ve been obsessing almost every waking moment over the past few days about science and psychology and I’m not sure I can really think of a way out of this argument. Please let me know what you think. Thanks. Heather.
Does the Universe Exist Necessarily?
There’s more than one question there, obviously. We’ll start by considering whether it’s possible that the universe exists just because it’s one of those things that had to be. Is the universe something that exists necessarily? Actually Heather wrote a significant piece of the answer to this herself, in the second paragraph of her email. She may not have intended it to be used in this connection, but it’s an insight that’s important for this issue:
There always has to be a way and means for anything to happen, right? I mean, nothing could just simply happen with no way for it to happen.
That’s exactly right. I would word it this way: everything that begins to exist must have a cause, or every event must have a cause. God is not an event, and his existence does not have a beginning, so his existence does not require a cause; he is eternal.
There was a time when scientists and other thinkers thought the universe might be eternal and beginningless. That was before Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding outward at great speed. Astronomers modeled what this must have meant going backward in time. It led to the rather surprising conclusion that billions of years ago, the entire universe must have been compressed into an almost infinitely small volume. That in turn implied that the universe began in a huge explosion, which astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called a “Big Bang.” As you know, the name stuck.
This was rather upsetting to some scientists: they knew all too well what it implied, which I’ll come back to in a moment. There was hot debate over the Big Bang vs. Steady State theories until a couple of scientists at Bell Labs noticed a “cosmic microwave background radiation”—you could think of it as a small degree of heat—distributed everywhere throughout the cosmos. It was exactly what had been predicted by the Big Bang theory. That and some further research confirmed the Big Bang theory.
This means the universe began to exist. And remember, whatever begins to exist must have a cause. The universe could not have caused itself. You can’t even coherently describe what it would mean for something to cause its own beginning. It would have to exist before it existed if it were to do that! Since then the question has been what or who caused the Big Bang.
Is it possible, then, for the universe not to be? Certainly. Go back 15 billion or so years, and there was no universe. The universe’s non-existence is surely possible, since it did not exist more than about 15 billion years ago.*
Is God Part of Nature?
It will come as no surprise that I think the cause of the universe was God. I had been convinced on other grounds that God was the Creator, long before I became aware of things like I just discussed. But the Big Bang suggests a very powerful and personal God as the “beginner” (the one who begins) the universe. Whatever caused the Big Bang had to be immensely powerful, since the effect of his or its work was to create all the hundred billion galaxies that exist. The cause also had to be personal, though. If it were something impersonal, with no ability to choose, and yet it had the ability to cause the Big Bang, it would not have been able to choose to exercise that ability, or choose not to exercise it, or choose when to exercise it. This impersonal cause could not have existed without immediately causing the Big Bang, for where there is a cause capable of producing an effect, the effect necessarily happens immediately (taking all factors into account, obviously). The cause of the universe and the universe itself would be the same age, about 15 billion years old. This seems strange and highly unlikely; and it leads to further questions about what caused the cause.
This impersonal cause almost sounds like the picture of God Heather is wrestling with in the second paragraph, actually. It’s a being that’s part of the machine. A personal God who created the universe, not as part of himself but as a separate thing from himself, is not part of the machine.
But then how does God insert himself into the actions of the machine? He does it by his own spiritual power, which he first exercised through creation and continues to employ up until now.
Is That Really An Answer?
Is that a satisfactory answer? Not to some people: they want that “how” answer to be a lot more descriptive than that. Here’s the problem, though. When God works in nature, it involves an interface between his spiritual essence and the natural world we live in, which are two entirely different things. Part of the transaction has to take place on the spiritual side of that interface. People who press for a more descriptive “how” are asking for something that looks like a natural description, but if we gave a natural description, then we wouldn’t be talking about God, we would be changing the subject. The one who asks “how could God do this?” must expect and allow that the answer not be entirely in the form of a physical description. This is as logically necessary as that a square cannot be a circle.
To say otherwise would be analogous to asking how a magnet attracts iron, and adding “but you cannot answer in terms of the properties of a magnet.” If we want to know how God does something, part of the answer has to be given in terms of who and what God is. Thus it is simply wrong to expect the explanation to work entirely as we’re accustomed to scientific explanations working.
The next objection I’ve heard, following this, has often been, “But then you have no explanation!” To which I say, “God is the explanation! Do you insist that explanations involving God be just like physical explanations? Then you’re demanding that the way God the creator works must be just like the way his creation works. It’s saying that you’ll consider God as an explanation, as long as this God isn’t God. That doesn’t quite seem logical, does it?“
God is not one of us. To accept that is to be appropriately humble before him.
The Evolution Question
Your third question, Heather, was whether evolution itself might have been a necessity. I don’t think there’s anyone, even among highly committed evolutionists, who would say that the origin of life was inevitable in a universe that’s only natural. It happened (they say), and we’re, shall we say, the lucky beneficiaries, but it didn’t have to happen that way. If the origin wasn’t inevitable or necessary, then the whole rest of it could not have been either.
For this (and also to some extent for the first question) I would refer you here to read about the incredible odds against our universe being suitable for any complexity at all, much less the complexity of life.
The Other Big Question
You also asked, “Do you understand what I mean?” I hope I do. It’s always possible that I missed it completely, and that none of this is much help for what’s really on your mind. If so, please let me know and I’ll take another shot at it.
*Some think there might have been a different universe before the Big Bang. Rather than taking space to address that here I will refer you to these articles by William Lane Craig, especially The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe.
Tue 8 Apr, 2008
Several commenters have raised questions about God and spirituality from a New Age perspective in the past two weeks. Anna’s is the most trenchant:
Who is God? Good question. Who really knows? I believe God to be overall consciousness. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Bereket Teka had already offered an opinion:
Man is a thinking being, brought forth (or created) from a higher and supreme thinking being (God). As man can think and create his own reality, so can the “Universe” – which I prefer to claim it to be God, in his Omniscient presence in the universe. So, yes one can think and create his own reality – a reality that is governed by the highest thinking being and in accordance to the will and purpose of God.
I find that to be rather vague, and much too closely tied to the so-called “Law of Attraction” which claims we can create reality by our thinking. “Who is God?” remains a good question. We could back that up another step to “How could we even know the answer?”
Here’s what I find when I read New Age spirituality books: a whole lot of assertion, and little to support it. I’ve already expressed my strong doubts about Rhonda Byrne’s understanding of physics. She invents a whole new class of “energy” and makes unsupportable claims on its behalf. How does she know this energy exists? Her book, The Secret, is long on assertion and very short on solid evidence. Its appeal is to desire rather than to reason. As Henry Cloud has pointed out, that is not all wrong. Yet it is suspiciously convenient: believe that you are “God in a physical body,” and that “The earth turns on its orbit for You, The oceans ebb and flow for You,” and you can make your life anything you want it to be.
But I believe in the God of the Bible, about whom the same question is very frequently asked. How do we know this God is real? Proofs that can satisfy every mind do not exist, but in contrast to New Age spirituality, there is at least a plethora of strong evidence (see here and here for starters).
And who is this God of the Bible? He is actually the satisfaction of every true desire. New Age spirituality does not go wrong in seeking personal fulfillment. The true God is, however, the fulfillment of true desire, whereas much (most?) human desire is marred by counterfeit feelings and wishes. God is true love, true joy, true wisdom and knowledge, true mercy. These are commonly mentioned goods in the New Age literature, and yet books like The Secret settle for surface satisfaction. Why settle for money or comfort when you can have a forever relationship with the great and loving God of the universe? Why should we, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, reject God’s offer of a holiday at the seashore because we’re so enamored of making mud pies in the slum?
He is also Creator, and he stands in a position of Other next to his creation. He is an absolutely intimately, lovingly, connected other; but his relationship to creation is not sameness but of connected love. The closest analogies to that in human experience might be that of artist to painting, composer to music, sculptor to sculpture; and yet also in a different way parent to child. The artistic creator is not the artistic creation, but is indelibly expressed throughout. The parent is not the child but loves her with an unmatched devotion. God as creator shares in and is the perfect expression of these.
He is also true personhood, the ultimate expression of a Self. Compared to this, New Age belief that “all is one, God is all, all is God,” falls far short. Christianity teaches a relationship with God in which love is celebrated, not obliterated by the annihilation of self as in New Age.
He is also true justice, based on true holiness. Holiness in this context means God is morally perfect. He cannot do wrong, because his nature is fully good, unmixed with evil, not marred by rebellion as ours is. His justice flows from this: where evil exists, it is inexorably dealt with, for he cannot condone evil
God is not, then, the fulfillment of false desires: the desire for independence from our Creator, the desire to harm self or others, the desire for power and prestige for their own sakes, the desire to control others, or desires for many other kinds of satisfaction outside the context for which they were created. We believe we can get what we want apart from God. That cannot be, though: he did not create us that way. Yet we proceed on that false basis and violate God’s holiness. We deserve his justice.
Yet he is also true mercy, through the work of Jesus Christ. Christ was in fact God in the flesh. In him we can see the fullness of God’s moral perfection; we see the character of God. Always loving, always teaching, sometimes rebuking, always standing for true worship of the true God; always standing against hypocrisy and perversion of religion; never compromising; so thoroughly unwilling to bend on these principles that he was killed by the enemies he made in the process. Even his death was in his plan, though. Through it he paid the penalty demanded by God’s justice for our rebellion, so that, justice being satisfied, God can express his mercy toward those who accept Christ’s work for them.
Jesus Christ is also the ultimate answer to “Who is God, and how would we know?” He said he was God in the flesh, and he backed it up through his perfection of life, his miracles, and ultimately his resurrection from the grave. Seeing his character, we know much about the character of God. Seeing his works, we have strong confidence that we are in touch with truth.
This God is not one we would have made up. He is not molded to our everyday surface wishes. He is a God whose awesome power, otherness, and justice are to be “feared:” to be held in absolute, terrific awe and reverence, knowing how much more infinitely great and good he is than us. He makes strong demands upon us: he demands that we live according to the plan for which he created us. He metes out justice where we fail to meet his demands. In his love, through Christ, he takes the payment of justice upon himself. Then he helps us meet those demands and we discover what they are, and discover more of what God is through them: His demand, ultimately, is that we live for the greatest and deepest possible love and joy.
The pantheistic “God” of New Age spirituality already seemed exceedingly unlikely. Now, in comparison to the true God, this false god also seems bland, pale, and boring.
Tue 15 Jan, 2008
Returning to this series after a short break, I’m also taking a short detour. What Christ does for us depends on who He is.
It’s just a few weeks since the Christmas season, and I’m sure readers know about Christ in a manger, born to a virgin. The gospel of Luke tells us He was conceived in Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit. In human terms he was of the lineage of David. David had been the king of Israel many years before, and to him God had made a promise that his offspring would have an eternal kingship. Jesus Christ, many generations, was God’s fulfillment of that promise.
But Christ was also “conceived of the Holy Spirit,” as the Apostle’s Creed phrases it, indicating His godly lineage; He was and is in fact, God Himself (all references from the English Standard Version):
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1)
The following context identifies “the Word” with Jesus Christ. He took a dispute with unbelieving religious leaders to a climax with this:
“I and the Father are one” (John 10:30)
And they understood exactly what he was getting at, even though they disagreed:
The Jews answered him, It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God. (John 10:33)
He is what no mere man could ever be, the exact representation of God, as spoken in Hebrews 1:2-4:
In these last days he (God) has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.
And there we see much more of the greatness of Jesus Christ. He is “heir of all things,” meaning that all creation is to be handed over to Him and put under His rule. He is the One through whom all creation was made (and “without him was not anything made that was made,” John 1:3, somewhat a redundancy but an intentional one for clarity). He “upholds the universe by the word of his power,” He made purification for sins, a topic we’ll return to later as we consider what Christ has done for us. He rules next to God the Father. He is far superior to the angels, with the most excellent name of all.
Paul wrote similarly in Colossians 1:15-20,
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
How the superlatives run rampant! And this is hardly the beginning; to do this topic justice would take a book (like this one, for example).
I was listening yesterday to a podcast on this by William Lane Craig (mp3; note also his follow-up on how Christ’s deity came to be recognized by the early church). Craig was making no attempt at raising emotions; he was explaining and teaching, not stirring up anything intentionally. And yet I was moved to deep worship. This man Jesus, whom we know by His life and teachings on Earth, is also the God who holds the universe together! Theologically He is understood as being one person, having both a human and divine nature (more on that here or here). Certainly there are mysteries there about how this can be true, but that it is true is as certain as anything the Bible teaches.*
The greatest passage of all describing the majesty, the sacrifice, and the exaltation of Jesus Christ is Philippians 2:5-11:
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
We will indeed all bow to Him. We will all, someday, recognize His divine majesty, and part of our worship will be based on recognizing how He sacrificed Himself on our behalf. None of us sees it clearly now, but on the day of his full revealing, it will no longer be a matter for doubt or debate.
As we move later into the story of Christ’s life on Earth and His work on our behalf, this backdrop of His divine identity will be essential at every stage.
Part of a Series: What Christ Does For Us
Related: How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions. This post elicited a short question, to which I’m writing a very long answer in the form of this series.
*Though this is an apologetics-oriented blog, I reserve the right at times to state what I am convinced is true without explaining each time why I am so convinced. The purpose of this series is not to prove the story of Christ but to tell the story of Christ. That story is powerful in its own right. For those who doubt or question it, by following this series you will at least know better what you are doubting and questioning.
Click To Play:
Click To Play:
Thu 10 Jan, 2008
Earlier in this series (see below) I described what Scripture says about God’s original intent and purpose for humankind, and how we fell away from it. God in His love intended that we live in close, intimate fellowship with Him. He gave humans their start in conditions of harmony with the world, with genuine intellectual and moral significance, and in real, closely connected relationships with God, the environment, and each other. They were rightly dependent on God, their Creator, and they acknowledged Him as their loving Master.
We are still dependent on God for every breath, for He still holds everything in His hands. We still experience God in every joy of nature and in every relationship of love. But ever since the first humans chose independence from God, we’ve lost sight of Him in these things, and we’ve especially turned away from Him as the one in charge of His own world.
The loss is ours. God in His love expresses grief over our rebellion, and in His justice expresses what the Bible calls righteous anger over it. But we experience death, distance, alienation, sweat, struggle, all the misfortunes and tragedies that we can never seem to grow accustomed to in spite of centuries of living them them.
God’s purpose since then has been to restore us to the original plan: that we would rightly bow to Him in worship as our Master and God, that we would experience the fullness of love in relationship to Him and to one another, and that our alienation from the rest of the world would be repaired. This is what Christ came to do for us. In very brief outline form:
I’m not able this evening to take time to flesh this out fully as it should be. (My daughter is playing trombone in a school concert not long from now.) It seems to me anyway that, since I’ve been taking a narrative approach in the first posts in this series, I ought not stray too far away from that yet. Better to view this list of four restorations as a preview of what we’ll encounter as we continue to walk through the story of what God has done for us through Christ.
Part of a Series: What Christ Does For Us
Related: How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions — a post that elicited a short question, to which I’m writing a long answer
