More Questions without Answers: In the Beginning by Karen Armstrong and Abba's Heart by Neill Lazano

Karen Armstrong's In the Beginning doesn't begin at the beginning. She opens with the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel to illustrate her main point: God is confusing, it takes work to understand Him, and you may get hurt in the process.

It is a hard struggle to discern a sacred reality in the flawed and tragic conditions in which we live, and our experience will often be disconcerting or contradictory.

My faith tradition tends to emphasize answers: Jesus is the answer, love is the answer, on the day I called, He answered me. And in previous posts I've talked about how aggressively I pursue answers.

The Bible is also really good at answers that are not what I wanted to hear, for example:
Me: "Why can't I just try harder and be better?" The Bible:"Because you're a sinner by nature; trying harder will never work." Me:"What can I do about my mistake?" The Bible:"You are going to have to apologize." Those kinds of answers are okay too, I mean once I get over the initial disappointment, because at least now I know what I'm working with.

But I've also talked about how okay I am with realizing there is no answer, and that's a space Armstrong likes to operate in. In fact, sometimes I wish she'd stay in that space more frequently; I'm very distracted by her constant references to two authors of Genesis and an editor. I think I would be similarly distracted by constant references to the "real" identity of Homer in a discussion of the Odyssey. But when she's not referencing this to my mind overly complicated and somewhat outdated interpretation of the origins of Genesis, she does something I really appreciate in a Biblical scholar: she encourages you to see what is actually there in the words themselves.

Of course other Bible commentators do the same. I've also been reading Abba's Heart. Neill Lazano discusses Luke chapter 15, where Jesus talks about the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son. He talks about a shepherd who leaves 99 healthy sheep out in the open so he can go retrieve one that has wandered; he talks about a woman who spends all day looking for a coin, and then throws a party when she finds it; he talks about a man who allows his son to blow half the family legacy on partying and then welcomes him home with open arms; and he talks about them all as if they are perfectly normal people! In Sunday school we just draw pictures of shepherds carrying lambs; we don't face the fact that the behavior described is actually kind of strange. Jesus, surprise, is not teaching platitudes, and Karen Armstrong feels that Genesis also is a story that, if we are really paying attention, is meant to unsettle us.

For example, Armstrong writes about Cain: "God gave no reason for his rejection of Cain and his gift; he simply told him that he had the power to resist the surge of anger and rage rising in his heart." Not so unlike that father of the prodigal son, who had a similar message for the resentful elder brother who had always done everything right. Now, commentators and Sunday School teachers have come up with many ideas about why Cain's offering was rejected, but Armstrong is strictly correct: in the text, God does not tell Cain or us. I imagine myself opening gifts from my kids and saying, "Yeah, I'll wear this scarf, but not this other one." I would never do that, but God does, and doesn't seem to think there's a problem.

This point particularly resonates with me because I have been thinking a lot lately about the fact that in the Bible, envy is called a sin. From the Ten Commandments to the letters of Paul, wanting what someone else has, whether their cow or their position in the family, is just plain wrong. Being jealous of someone else for any reason (other than to protect monogamy) is not, in the Bible, an emotion that you need to learn to control, like anger or worry, but a sin you need to choose against. So already in the 3rd chapter of Genesis, God seems to be bringing up this point, saying to Cain: "So I liked your brother's gift better than yours. It happens. Get over it." And honestly, couldn't Cain be overreacting just a tiny bit? It's not like God said he liked Abel himself better. Cain and God were obviously still in relationship, so what was Cain's problem?

See, when you dare to see what's actually in the passage, it does make you look at the story differently. The story of Cain and Abel becomes not some kind of convoluted foretelling of the necessity of blood sacrifice for sin, but just the first of many times that life is not going to be fair, materially or relationally, and that God is trying to give us the tools to cope with that inescapable fact.

220-229: Through the Bible in one Dewey Decade

Melvil Dewey dedicated a full decade to the Bible and commentaries on it. I read the Bible every day, but it didn't seem in keeping with the spirit of this project to just check that box and go on to 230-239. So I looked at the offerings in the church library I manage, and came home with these choices:

J. Vernon McGee's commentary on Daniel is pretty much still cheating. I have gone through stretches where I have read McGee every day. His plain-spoken style and opinionated observations, originally developed for the Through the Bible radio program, certainly translate well to print. I've been consulting him as I've been reading through the overwhelming and mysterious details of the prophecies in Daniel. While I am always mindful that he's coming from a specific perspective which includes a sort of Left Behind eschatology about which I am agnostic at this point, Daniel himself identifies the weird animals he sees with various existing nations of his day, so it's not some kind of weird mythology to say the winged lion is Babylon.  What McGee adds, and I'm sure the other commentators would do the same, is the historic information about how the activities of the empires moving across the Middle East correlated with Daniel's vision.

Hard Sayings of the Bible, available as software here, was recommended to me by a fellow member of my church. It is really long and not something you read straight through. I've referred to it as I've been reading the visions of Daniel and that tough stretch in Romans where Paul is talking about God's  continuing relationship with the Jews in the midst of the welcoming of the Gentiles.... well, if you want 1000 words about whether Daniel's prophecy of the 70 weeks depicts one Messiah or two, this is your resource. If you don't really want answers to questions you didn't even have, maybe this is one you don't need.

I was surprised to find Karen Armstrong's In the Beginning in our church library, even though I'm the one who catalogued it. Faithful readers may remember that I tried and failed to read another of Armstrong's books earlier in this project. (She's really more of a Buddhist than a Christian, in my opinion, and I find the Buddhist approach to self-improvement very depressing). I thought I would try again when the subject was more theological, and this time I was not disappointed. Although Armstrong makes a lot of assertions with no attribution-- not unlike J. Vernon McGee, I guess-- her perspective has just the right amount of distance from mine. I can learn from her even when I don't agree with her, and that's the heart of this whole project: to learn about topics I never thought I cared about, to hear voices I would never seek out otherwise.

(And, by the way, to discover that someone, somewhere, has used a child's set of zoo animals and some hot glue to make models of Daniel's prophetic beasts!)

A Theistic Physicist Identifies "Questions without Answers": More about God's Universe

"What passes for truth in science is a comprehensive pattern of interconnected answers to questions posed to nature-- explanations of how things work (efficient causes), though not necessarily why they work (final causes)." Owen Gingerich finds that physics never found a question that it didn't at least think it could answer, but that it eventually always runs up against metaphysics, which poses questions for which we do not expect to ever have definitive answers in this life. However, that does not keep him from trying!

Why is there something instead of nothing? Given that there is something, why does it take a form that includes sentient life? This is where Gingerich finds the theistic worldview more compellng than the atheistic, although both require faith. "Without quite knowing what the purpose of the universe is, we can at least conjecture that somewhat we are part of that purpose, and that perhaps understanding the universe is a part of that purpose. In that case, the universe might just be comprehensible because it is part of its purpose to be so."

Is humanity (or at least some kind of being able to appreciate it) the point of the universe? Gingerich says we'll never know. You can't prove that homo sapiens was the objective of evolution, but you can't prove it wasn't. "One can believe that some of the evolutionary pathways are so intricate and so complex as to be hopelessly improbably by the rules of random chance, but if you do not believe in divine action, then you will simply have to say that random chance was extremely lucky, because the outcome is there to see."

Which makes me wonder: why do lesson plans on "imperfect adaptations" always seem to have as their main objective disproving Intelligent Design? Since ID is not asking the same question as evolutionary theory, it's really neither here nor there. Just teach imperfect adaptations and let the students sit with their own unanswerable questions: did God make the eye inside-out for some reason, or is it just the result of natural processes (whether engineered by God or themselves the product of other natural processes?

Which in turn prompts an even more burning question: What is the point of having a face instead of a muzzle? You just don't have enough room to put all your teeth, and you can't open doors with your nose, carry things very conveniently in your jaws, or eat very neatly without your hands. Sure, it's a great example of an imperfect adaptation, but why did it even occur in the first place? What evolutionary advantage did flat-faced humanoids have? I get that we didn't need snouts after we acquired hands, but wouldn't they have been, well, handy to keep around anyway?

Should theistic scientists do science differently? Gingerich is convinced that they cannot. ".. my subjective, metaphysical view, that the universe would make more sense if a divine will operated at this level to design the universe in a purposeful way, can be neither denied nor proved by scientific means. It is a matter of belief or ideology how we choose to think about the universe, and it will make no difference how we do our science." It seems to me that maybe it's the atheist scientists who should change their methods, because after all the whole endeavor of experimental science is based on the idea that the universe is rational and orderly, and why should it be if no one's in charge?

"The idea of a vast and ancient universe making itself, which I have to some extent adopted in the foregoing ruminations, yields only a distant God of large numbers. Awesome as the creating transcendence is, it is the sort of deity that few would worship. What good is a God who does not interact with creation?"

Nancy Cartwright contributes a final unanswerable question: "Is everything that happens in the natural world fixed by the laws of physics?" In the real world outside the lab, "Some important areas of systematic behavior are precisely predictable, but in other swaths we can predict what will happen only for the most part." So the space described by physics may have room within it for a theistic space, a universe where God can move, "unnoticed by science, but not excluded by science." So instead of a divine engineer of a perpetual motion machine, the notorious watchmaker who wound up the universe and then left it lying around for us to stumble upon, he is a painter like Turner, who did not hesitate to add new compositional elements to his work even after it was hung for display! (Thanks to my daughter-in-law for drawing my attention to this analogy).

Theologically, this conception of God-- this attempt to answer a radical unanswerable-- resonates with me because it reinforces what I believe about His involvement in human lives. I believe that stuff happens on this planet, and that God doesn't always directly intervene. Sometimes I can't find a parking place. Sometimes a volcano erupts. Sometimes someone shoots up a school. None of that is God's fault or was God's responsibility to stop. But sometimes God does stop stuff from happening. Sometimes (usually) I get up and get dressed and eat toast without a big conversation with God about it. Or sometimes God does speak to me about what to eat or what to wear. There's room in the Universe and in this planet for Him to act or to let things run their course. That's what I see in Scripture, and that's what Nancy Cartwright sees in the world.

I said in my last post that I love questions and seeking answers to questions. But I also love that moment when, in all my searching, I come to that brick wall with the sign on it: "You're done now. No further answers available." I just need to find out for myself where that wall is, not take anyone else's word for it!

Intelligent Design vs. "intelligent design": in Praise of Questions (More on God's Universe)

Gingerich starts his second lecture by talking about miracles, and whether Hebrews 1:3 means that God is constantly working miracles in the universe to keep it running. That was Newton's belief, but "Leibniz replied that it was a mean notion of the wisdom and power of God which would imply He could not have gotten the universe right in the first place"! He then examines various aspects of organic and star chemistry that make possible the extremely long lifespan of the universe required for consciousness to come about via evolution. Here is a vision of God as Creator not of a painting or a drawing but of a "machine that would go of itself," of a sort of perpetual motion kinetic sculpture. And indeed, what does every child like best at the museum? The interactive art and the art that has a component of engineering to it. If God's Creation requires His constant interference just to operate, it does become more of a performance piece, doesn't it? Not that there's anything wrong with that, I suppose-- God can create whatever He likes, but to see Him, as William Blake did, as not the divine artist but as the divine engineer, is a glorious vision in this technological age.

But now, about Intelligent Design specifically. If evolution is the mechanism through which species arise, there are two big problems, one philosophical and one logistical. The first is that every child is not the same species as its parent. There may be a Scriptural issue with this idea, but more important, I think, is that it seems intuitively incredible or even repugnant on the basis of our own experience. Has a human ever given birth to a non-human? Our very laws depend on the impossibility of such an occurrence. Or has any domesticated animal in the history of farming ever produced an offspring not of its own species? Such an event is unrecorded, although Gingerich refers to the complexity of the structure of DNA to argue that this is theoretically possible.

The second problem is that, again, based on observation and on reasoning, we see that most mutations are harmful. "Everyone will agree," says Gingerich, "that on the basis of merely random mutations the process is extremely unlikely to come up with successful products." Gingerich goes on to provide the best elevator speech for Darwin's achievements I have ever heard. Darwin's way of resolving the latter issue was to posit lots and lots of time-- that the earth was very old-- and lots of lots of tries-- that life was very generous and given to prodigious rates of reproduction.
"Granted these two fundamental conditions, fecundity and antiquity, combined with mutations, [Darwin] then brilliantly argued that the competition inherent in natural selection would take care of the rest, even though he had essentially no information concerning how the variations themselves could arise," meaning that he had no knowledge of the structure of DNA.

Intelligent Design theorists do not dispute the antiquity of the universe and the earth, nor yet the fecundity of life. "At issue for them," explains Gingerich, again providing them with a better elevator speech than they ever wrote,

"is whether random mutation can generate the incredible amount of information content required to produce even the simplest of cells, and whether even the great antiquity of the universe could make this possible. Here science, dealing with extremely low probabilities balanced against vast numbers of opportunities, is frankly on very shaky turf."

Given that Darwinians and ID theorists both run aground only on the point of random mutations and natural selection as the mechanism for the origin of species, Gingerich finds himself unable to join the camp of the ID theorists even though and because he believes that a Designer is a more compelling explanation for the existence of the universe than time or chance. His reason is that "It might be that the physics and chemistry of life's origins are forever beyond human comprehension, but I see no way to establish that scientifically." He feels that ID theorists say, "God did it, that settles it," and thus end scientific endeavors, whereas if God is indeed conceived as a master engineer, the greater likelihood is that there is a mechanism for the creation of species, and that that mechanism is discoverable.

Gingerich does not allege that the ID theorists make an error in their science. He agrees that our current state of knowledge absolutely leaves room for God to intervene to steer the process of mutation and selection, as they postulate. What he objects to is their confusion of the question, "How can time, chance and possibly divine intervention produce species," which is a physical question, with the question, "Did time and chance alone produce species, or was the universe designed by an Intelligence that created time and chance in such a way as to produce species?" which is a metaphysical question.

"I am holding a fragment of the Allende meteorite in my hand, and I propose to let go. You will not be surprised by what happens. It drops to the floor. Why? I could say that it is God's will that the stone falls. I am not being facetious, for I firmly believe that God is both Creator and Sustainer of the universe....I could declare that part of God's sustaining power consists in the maintenance of the laws of the natural world. In fact, the very expression, "laws of nature," from the time of Boyle and Newton, derives from the concept of divine law, and it is probably not accidental that science arose in such a philosophical/theological environment. However much we might assert that the stone fell because of divine will, though, such a statement does not pass muster as a scientific explanation. What science requires is a broader explanatory schema..."

So the problem with Intelligent Design is not that it is wrong, or that it contradicts known, proven discoveries in the fossil record or in our observations. Its problem is that it is not answering the same question the unfinished theory of evolution is exploring! ID is talking about final causes, but the theory of evolution is talking about efficient causes, and for the exploration of efficient causes, "methodological naturalism" is the only functional research strategy. "As a philosophical idea ID is interesting, but it does not replace the scientific explanations that evolution offers."

Gingerich is not, however, an evangelist for evolution as the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything, like Richard Dawkins.

"Evolution as a materialist philosophy is ideology, and presenting it as such essentially raises it to the ranks of final cause. Evolutionists who deny cosmic teleology and who, in placing their faith in a cosmic roulette, argue for the purposelessness of the universe are not articulating scientifically established fact; they are advocating their personal metaphysical stance. This posture, I believe, is something that should be legitimately resisted. It is just as wrong to present evolution in high school classrooms as a final cause as it is to fob off Intelligent Design as a substitute for an efficacious efficient cause."

Proverbs 25:2 has always meant to me that it is the job of a certain portion of humanity to figure things out. Some Christians talk about the dangers of thinking too much or asking too many questions, but I disagree strongly with that view. In my view, God gave some of us thinking, questioning hearts so the rest of us could live peacefully trusting what was so discovered. So I believe God may have appointed and gifted some scientists to continue to press the inquiry into the mechanical origins of life, just as he appointed and gifted some to learn more and more about the mechanical origins of disease. If Christians had all been content to accept, for example, childbed fever as the sovereign hand of God instead of the dirty hands of a doctor, we would still have a maternal infection rate of close to 20% instead of the 2% we now experience. Who knows what blessings may accrue as Christian scientists press their inquiries just as far as they can, assuming that the universe, created by a master engineer, is a rational, knowable place that will yield explanations to those who know how to ask.

Is Physics Theology? or, Physics and Metaphysics: God's Universe, by Owen Gingerich

Owen Gingerich is a retired Harvard professor and Smithsonian Institution astronomer. These days he writes articles about global warming and gives lectures about Copernicus. He also wrote a book called God's Universe. The introduction sets the tone for the whole book by pointing out that naturalistic explanations of how things happen neither contradict nor confirm teleological explanations of why they happen. Yet Gingerich also rejects the non-overlapping magesteria (NOMA) model proposed by Stephen Jay Gould, wherein science sticks to how and lets religion deal with why.

Gingerich opens this series of talks by explaining that for him,

"a final cause, a Creator-God, gives a coherent understanding of why the universe seems to congenially designed for the existence of intelligent, self-reflective life.... Somehow, in the words of Freeman Dyson, this is a universe that knew we were coming. I do not claim that these considerations are proof for the existence of a Creator; I claim only that to me, the universe makes more sense with this understanding." (p. 12) 

And this statement is typical of Gingrich's tone. He is not strident, he is not doctrinaire, and he does not seem to be trying to bend facts to fit his theology, nor bend theology to fit the latest scientific findings, nor yet to wall the two fields off from each other. 

In the first lecture included in this book, he demonstrates at some length how the Copernican principle, also called the principle of mediocrity, is both an essential aspect of a certain perspective on physics and a strong basis for the conception of the universe as having been designed to support life. And yet he demonstrates that it has never been found useful to solve any actual question in astronomy! From there he meanders over to the tantalizing possibility that we are not alone in the universe, as expressed everywhere from Star Trek to SETI. His sense is that although the Copernican principle almost requires that there be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, attempts to communicate with it, as the SETI project does, are, paradoxically, deeply anthropocentric. They assume that ET not only exists but developed along lines so similar to ours that we will be able to find a point of contact.

Yet evolutionary theory presents us with a path to consciousness that is truly a garden of forking paths, a virtually infinite number of possible outcomes. How many dice had to be rolled the right way for life to even exist at all? And how many more for the emergence of the human brain, which Gingerich calls "the most complex physical object known to us in the entire cosmos"? Therefore, intelligent life was not inevitable on this planet, nor on any other, and the forms it could have taken here or could take elsewhere are by no means inevitable.

Gingerich then, supported by Paul Davies, provides this rather unexpected summary of "two diametrically opposed worldviews":

"The one view, that intelligent life emerges at best very rarely through extraordinary and improbably contingencies, encapsulates a strict Darwinian understanding: humankind is a glorious accident. The other view, that the universe is abundantly inhabited by intelligent creatures, carries the hidden assumption of design and purpose, in other words of teleology." (p. 40)

So you would think that Gingerich, who has already said he finds theism to be the most compelling explanation for the why of the universe, would come down in favor of the principle of mediocrity, that is, the idea that our solar system, our intelligence, our very self-awareness is not unusual but is the natural consequence of a universe designed for life by a life-loving God. And yet Gingerich concludes, "We human beings are the most extraordinary creatures we know about, and part of our glory is that we can imagine we are not the most remarkable creatures in the entire universe."

Reading Gingerich does not make me feel like I understand everything, or, for that matter, anything, about physics. It makes me feel like I can fearlessly learn more and more, never fearing that I will come to the end of what can be known, because, to rip a verse right out of its context, "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!" (Romans 11:33)

210-219: Is God Necessary?

The Dewey numbers 210-219 are reserved for the intersection of philosophy, science and theology. Allow me to contrast a sample of the county library's holdings in this section:

with some from our church library:

I'm always up for CS Lewis or John Polkinghorne, but I also selected a couple of items from the public library. 

Honey from Stone, by Chet Raymo, is subtitled "A Naturalist's Search for God." It makes me wonder whether I could be reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in this Dewey decade. It recommended itself to me primarily because of its lovely woodcut illustrations. The search takes place on the Dingle Peninsula of Ireland, a geography about which I know absolutely nothing. The book was published by the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, a monastic order of the Episcopal Church about which I also know nothing. So, prime opportunity to branch out if this is the book I actually read.

God's Universe, by Owen Gingrich, is a slim volume published by Harvard and recommended by Polkinghorne. It looks like it might be appropriate for devotional reading, and, in any case, at 120 small pages, it would be faster just to read it than to try to guess exactly what the author is at. This may be exactly the kind of book I've been looking for-- an intersection of physics and theology. It seems so likely to me that physics IS theology, I've been surprised how much difficulty I've had finding books that would explain it to me.

In Praise of Learning Things You Are Pretty Sure Are Not True: Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero

After listening to Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero, here is what I know:
The United States will always be a secular state by law because of the establishment clause. It will always be a religious country by choice because of the free exercise clause. So everyone can stop panicking. The Religious Right (whoever that is) will never make the US a theocracy, and the Godless Commies (or whoever today's Great Satan is) will never outlaw Christmas.

The reason nobody knows anything any more is not because of the Godless Commies. It's because of the Godfearing and truly nice people who thought it would be a good idea to focus on where we agree, not on those pesky doctrinal points that divide us. So back in the first half of the 20th century, Protestants united against Catholics, which meant they had to stop arguing about baptism and predestination. Then Protestants and Catholics united against everyone else, which meant they had to stop arguing about whether salvation is by faith or works and what to do about Mary. Then Jews joined the party and we started hearing about Judeo-Christian values, which meant we needed to stop talking about Jesus (VERY divisive!). And then, after the excesses of post 9-11 hostility towards Muslims, it just seemed so... well, so mean to insist that Islam was substantively different from Judaism or Christianity. After all, it's nice to be nice, and we can all hold hands and feel terrific. And so, while loss of consensus in schools meant no more Bible reading there, a desire to seek greater consensus among people of faith stripped weekend and evening religious teaching of its meatier content.

The fact is, people of faith don't all believe the same thing. We may not even be interested in the same goals. And the more we know about each other, the less we might agree! So, much more pleasant to focus on the big picture. And the more diverse America gets, the smaller the big picture is, until we reach the least common denominator of faith: a "Universe" which we all agree we live in and that we all hope is somehow benevolently disposed. Next thing you know, Christians think Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, and Muslims think God got married, and we can't even have a conversation that makes any sense. And that's not even counting the growing number of Americans who claim no religion.

But Prothero argues that, like the students in Modesto, California who take a world religions class, we should all pull up our socks and just learn some facts. Even if a given religion, or religion in general, is not important to us, it is important to the people around us. Newsmakers are constantly giving Bible references and claiming religious motivations and practicing their unfamiliar customs in our civic spaces, so it would be worth knowing something about how their religions work. This is the case for religious literacy.

Here's the case against it: We will learn that Islam and Christianity and Judaism cannot all be true, at least not in all particulars, because, for example, they take mutually contradictory views on the identity of Jesus. We will discover that not all disagreements stem from misunderstanding; some of them spring from extremely accurate understanding!

But we're all grown-ups here-- can't we face the fact that people hold differing opinions? Are we that insecure -and that ignorant- of what we claim to believe that we are afraid to even hear other ideas?

As for me, I learned some facts about my own religion from Religious Literacy. Most startling was that the letters of Paul were written before the Gospels, and that Protestants and Catholics divide up the 10 Commandments slightly differently. I also learned some facts about other religions-- I think I almost can explain the difference between Sunni, Shiite and Wahabi Islam, and (at least today) I know the Four Noble Truths, if not the Eightfold Path, of Buddhism. Take this quiz and see if you know enough religious facts to read a newspaper intelligently!

Remember: you don't have to believe an apocalyptic interpretation of the Bible to learn what it is. You don't have to belong to any of the major sects of Islam to benefit from knowing what they are. "The truth will set you free," that's from Jesus Himself. It doesn't sound like He's afraid of information, and you don't need to be either.