http://doesgodexist.com/NovDec06/TakingtheBibleLiterally.html
Taking the Bible Literally
If there is a buzz phrase in the evolution/creation controversy, the title of our article has to be a number one contender. The Does God Exist? program has contended for nearly forty years that science and faith are friends and not enemies, and that looking at the Bible literally and looking at what is known in science will always produce agreement and mutual support for these two areas of concern. This position is attacked by many creationists, because they see their denominational creeds threatened by some well-supported evidence in science. It is also attacked by atheists who view science as their private domain and want to use science to support their belief system without any fear that those who believe in God may be able to use science to support faith in God.
The bottom line in this problem is that if there is a God, and if that God is the God who gave us the Bible, then there cannot possibly be a real conflict between the Bible and science. Both science and the Bible have the same author, so they cannot conflict in their message. They may convey different messages about different things, but they have to be fundamentally in accord. If there is a factual conflict then we either have bad science, bad theology, or both. The lesson of history is that there has been a lot of both, and no scientist or theologian is exempt from having misunderstandings or needing to be better informed about the issues of life. Albert Einstein said it well "Unless science and religion work together, they are both worthless" (Science and Spirit, June 2004, page 1).
When someone says that they "take the Bible literally," I always ask them what they mean by that statement. Do they mean that they take a particular translation in English of the Bible out of context and determine what it says by values and standards of the twentieth or twenty-first century? That is NOT taking the Bible literally. To take the Bible literally means that you look at who wrote the passage, who they wrote it to, why they wrote it, when they wrote it, how they wrote it, and how we got it. What we would like to do in this article, is to look at each of these processes and talk about some practical applications of each of these methods of taking the Bible literally.
WHO WROTE THE PASSAGE
It makes a difference whether the passage you are reading was written by a prophet, a king, or an evangelist. Prophets wrote about things that God wanted the people to know about the future and how they would be impacted in the future by what they did now. The books of Daniel and Revelation are frequently misunderstood because they are taken as books of law givers and rulers. People interpret these books as discussions of political rulers in the past and the future which is what Kings do. All Bible prophets are primarily concerned with man's relationship to God and what man needs to do to improve that relationship. The prophets of the Bible, especially the New Testament, are not concerned with nations or political goals. Even Old Testament prophets were primarily concerned with bringing the Nation of Israel back to God--not with achieving world power status.
In the New Testament, letters to groups like the Corinthians, the Ephesians, or the Philippians were letters addressing local situations and problems. While these problems may have existed elsewhere, the letters were written about the local situation. When Paul tells the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 5-7 about sexual matters, he writes as a man who was celibate. It is important to know this as you read the chapters about the problems the Corinthians were having. The fact that Luke wrote the book of Acts helps us in our understanding of the book, since Luke was a medical doctor and would be a special kind of observer of the things that happened. Taking the Bible literally means knowing who wrote the book, what his background was, and how his personal situation would impact the things that he wrote.
WHO THEY WROTE IT TO
Equally important is knowing who the book was written to. If a New Testament book was written to a group of Gentiles, it will; be much different in its expression than if it were written to a group of Hebrews. The books of Hebrews and Revelation especially radiate the Hebrew heritage of the people that they were addressed to. People have butchered the concept of 666 and the antichrist by not understanding how the Hebrews understood these terms.
WHY THEY WROTE IT
The reason for writing a book or letter has a lot to do with how you understand its message. This is especially true of the New Testament. If you don't understand that the purpose of Hebrews and Revelation was to encourage Christians who were being persecuted to the point of death, then you will not understand these books. Some of the bizarre teachings about end times so prevalent today in religious circles come out of not understanding this. People who find UFOs and aliens in biblical passages are not taking the Bible literally. When you read a book like 1 or 2 Corinthians, you have to understand that unlike Hebrews, the book was written to Gentile Christians who had come out of paganism and bizarre heathen practices and morality. Their needs and the instructions given to them are different because they were from a different background.
WHEN THEY WROTE IT
An incredible number of people in the world do not understand the difference between the New Testament and the Old Testament. This is a problem that is not limited to atheists, but is also true of many religionists. The Old Testament is about the Hebrew people and their relationship to God. It gives the setting of the arrival of Jesus Christ into the world, and records history--the good and the bad. The New Testament tells of God's gift of Jesus to save the world from their estrangement from God and bring them back to God. Jesus said clearly that he fulfilled the Old Testament and nailed its legalistic unworkable laws to His cross (Colossians 2:14). We do not sacrifice animals or live by an eye-for-an-eye because Jesus has given us a better way, and a way that we can live by. No one can read Matthew 5-7 and not see the contrast between the old law and the new. Not understanding that and quoting Old Testament commandments and practices as binding on people living in the twenty-first century is not taking the Bible literally. You have to look at when the passage is written to know how it should be applied. The Bible tells us to "rightly divide the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15) and at least part of that instruction involves the dividing of the old and new will of God.
HOW THEY WROTE IT
The messages in the Bible are given by different ways of writing. Some of the Bible is history, some is poetry, some is apocalyptic literature, some is wisdom literature, and some are professional letters. Frequently when people think they have a contradiction in the Bible, it is because they have not looked at how the material is written. If a passage is written in apocalyptic writing, then the message is given in pictures and symbols indigenous to the culture in which it is written. One of the reasons that there is so much nonsense promoted by protestant denominations about the end times is because they are not taking the books of Revelation and Daniel literally. These are apocalyptic works, and so numbers like 7, 1,000, and 144,000 have meaning that is not numerical but rather theological in nature. It takes some study to understand these things, and they have nothing to do with the basic message of the Bible so they are not of monumental importance. The problem is, however, that when attention is not paid to the apocalyptic type of writing involved, the whole purpose and message of the writing is lost.
In the biblical narratives of Genesis 1 and 2 we have another example of errors produced by not taking the Bible literally by not looking at how it is written. Skeptics love to point out that the sequence of life in Genesis 1 is different than in chapter two, with man being created last in chapter one and first in chapter two. The fact is, however, that chapter one is historic in purpose, and chapter two is social in purpose. What I mean by that is that at the end of each chapter there is a statement that tells us what the purpose of the chapter was. At the end of chapter 1 we read "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them" (Genesis 2:1). At the end of chapter two we read "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh" (verse 24). The author makes it clear that chapter two had the purpose of showing the relationship of man to woman, and was not a restatement of chapter one which is stated to be a historic chapter giving the sequence of the creation. When skeptics try to maintain that the two chapters contradict each other, they are not taking the Bible literally. They also are assuming that the author deliberately restated in chapter two what he had stated in chapter one rather than the fact that the author would logically assume that whoever read chapter two would have read chapter one first. Even the choice for the word God in these two chapters shows this. In chapter one the word Elohim is used for God, while in chapter two the word chosen is Yahweh. Because they did not take the Bible literally there have been scholars who have maintained that the two chapters had different authors and thus used different words. It you take the chapters literally in terms of what their purpose of writing was, then the use of Elohim which conveys the power and majesty of God is appropriate for chapter one, while Yahweh which emphasizes the promises of God is appropriate for chapter two. Not taking the Bible this literally causes a person to miss the meaning and purpose of the chapters.
HOW WE GOT IT
We are not so interested in canonicity in this discussion as we are in translation. The study of how we got the Bible, and how we know we have the right books with no books left out or included that should not be, is an interesting study. A thorough investigation of this subject matter will convince an open-minded student that we do not have an incomplete or overwritten Bible. All of the tabloid mentality that wants to add books or challenge books does not change the fact that the Bible we have is well supported academically as being complete and with nothing included that should not be.
What we are talking about in this discussion is the matter of translation and how we got the Bible in English. I have friends who speak fluent Hebrew and other friends who speak fluent Greek who tell me that the language of the Old and New Testament respectively has to be understood to fully appreciate and understand the Bible. I can appreciate the fact that we miss things by not being fluent in the original languages, but I am also sure that the basic message of scripture shines through without a knowledge of these languages. The problem comes up when a subject is explored in scripture that is complex. The Greeks, for example, had five words for love, and each word conveys a different aspect or a different kind of love. The Greek word eros focuses on sexual connotations of love and has nothing to do with agape which conveys a self-sacrificial love and has nothing to do with sex. When Jesus asked Peter repeatedly in John 21:15-17 if he loved Jesus, Peter kept responding with phileo referring to a friendly kind of love instead of the agape kind of love that Jesus was calling him to. If you do not take the time to study this word difference, you miss the whole point of the discussion.
There is rarely a time when you have to go this deep into the meaning of words and how they are translated, but a concordance or lexicon is a necessary tool when deep subjects and the meat of the gospel message to Christians are involved. Translations sometimes miss these things, and in fact can be totally in error. In Genesis 6:1-5 the King James translation totally misses the meaning of the word nephilim in Hebrew. In verse four where the word is used, the King James uses the word "giant" for the Hebrew word nephilim. The reason this happens is that the King James translation of Genesis 6 came from the Vulgate (Latin) translation of the Hebrew. For whatever reason, the Vulgate took the word nephilim and translated it gigantus in Latin. The King James translators did not know what to do with gigantus so they just brought it across to English as giant. The word actually refers to someone or something that is opposed to God, and the context tells us that the message is about man's rejection of God and the resulting flood of Noah. The story has nothing to do with giants and taking it as a giant would not be taking the Bible literally. Taylor's paraphrase Bible, The Living Word, translates the word nephilim as spirit creature, and comes up with the bizarre notion that spirit creatures had sexual affairs with mortal women. This violates our discussion made earlier of looking at who the material was written about. It is true that angels can and have rejected God, but that is not what chapter six is about. That again, is not taking the Bible literally.
Denominational creationists are fond of claiming they take the Genesis account literally. The fact of the matter is that they interpret Genesis in a way that violates most of what we have written thus far in this article. There is good evidence that Genesis 1 was written in Hebrew by Moses. The style of writing is poetic and it is written in nonscientific terms to simply establish the one God as the creator of the cosmos. The first three verses clearly identify one God, one beginning, and a process that is unique to God. There is no attempt to establish methodology, time, or process. These verses are not stated as a summary of the following verses, but are a simple and brief history of the creation process. The creation week (which begins in verse five) is a brief summary of the creation sequence of the animals that man was familiar with. Every Hebrew word used refers to an animal familiar to Moses--cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, etc. Forcing dinosaurs, platypuses, viruses, etc., into these verses is not taking the Bible literally. Trying to make words like leviathan (Job 41:1) or behemoth (Job 40:15) refer to dinosaurs is a massive violation of using reasonable methods to understand what the Bible is telling us. Job is a book with a purpose that does not involve taxonomy or biology, written by a man who is talking about the major theological issue of good and evil,
2 Timothy 3:16 tells us the value and proper use of scripture. "All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. That the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work." Taking the Bible literally allows this to happen, but when humans apply creeds and shallow approaches to specific passages they end up creating conflict between the Bible and reality. This is teaching the traditions of man in substitute for God's will in its very worst form--and the consequences are catastrophic.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
The Christian paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080695
Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational decline, but it probably doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation—and, overwhelmingly, we do—it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.
And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.
Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller number of Americans—about 75 percent—claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior of professed Christians. That's what America is: a place saturated in Christian identity.
But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion—say, giving aid to the poorest people—as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they'd fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?
In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it's not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It's also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose—childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool—we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it's that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it's not as if the numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households that were "food insecure with hunger" had climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003.
This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon. Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate—just over half—that compares poorly with the European Union's average of about four in ten. That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy? We're at the top of the charts. Personal self-discipline—like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask?
Are Americans hypocrites? Of course they are. But most people (me, for instance) are hypocrites. The more troubling explanation for this disconnect between belief and action, I think, is that most Americans—which means most believers—have replaced the Christianity of the Bible, with its call for deep sharing and personal sacrifice, with a competing creed.
In fact, there may be several competing creeds. For many Christians, deciphering a few passages of the Bible to figure out the schedule for the End Times has become a central task. You can log on to RaptureReady.com for a taste of how some of these believers view the world—at this writing the Rapture Index had declined three points to 152 because, despite an increase in the number of U.S. pagans, "Wal-Mart is falling behind in its plan to bar code all products with radio tags." Other End-Timers are more interested in forcing the issue—they're convinced that the way to coax the Lord back to earth is to "Christianize" our nation and then the world. Consider House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. At church one day he listened as the pastor, urging his flock to support the administration, declared that "the war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse." DeLay rose to speak, not only to the congregation but to 225 Christian TV and radio stations. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "what has been spoken here tonight is the truth of God."
The apocalyptics may not be wrong. One could make a perfectly serious argument that the policies of Tom DeLay are in fact hastening the End Times. But there's nothing particularly Christian about this hastening. The creed of Tom DeLay—of Tim LaHaye and his Left Behind books, of Pat Robertson's "The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today"—ripened out of the impossibly poetic imagery of the Book of Revelation. Imagine trying to build a theory of the Constitution by obsessively reading and rereading the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and you'll get an idea of what an odd approach this is. You might be able to spin elaborate fantasies about presidential succession, but you'd have a hard time working backwards to "We the People." This is the contemporary version of Archbishop Ussher's seventeenth-century calculation that the world had been created on October 23, 4004 B.C., and that the ark touched down on Mount Ararat on May 5, 2348 B.C., a Wednesday. Interesting, but a distant distraction from the gospel message.
The apocalyptics, however, are the lesser problem. It is another competing (though sometimes overlapping) creed, this one straight from the sprawling megachurches of the new exurbs, that frightens me most. Its deviation is less obvious precisely because it looks so much like the rest of the culture. In fact, most of what gets preached in these palaces isn't loony at all. It is disturbingly conventional. The pastors focus relentlessly on you and your individual needs. Their goal is to service consumers—not communities but individuals: "seekers" is the term of art, people who feel the need for some spirituality in their (or their children's) lives but who aren't tightly bound to any particular denomination or school of thought. The result is often a kind of soft-focus, comfortable, suburban faith.
A New York Times reporter visiting one booming megachurch outside Phoenix recently found the typical scene: a drive-through latte stand, Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every service, and sermons about "how to discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your debt." On Sundays children played with church-distributed Xboxes, and many congregants had signed up for a twice-weekly aerobics class called Firm Believers. A list of bestsellers compiled monthly by the Christian Booksellers Association illuminates the creed. It includes texts like Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen—pastor of a church so mega it recently leased a 16,000-seat sports arena in Houston for its services—which even the normally tolerant Publishers Weekly dismissed as "a treatise on how to get God to serve the demands of self-centered individuals." Nearly as high is Beth Moore, with her Believing God—"Beth asks the tough questions concerning the fruit of our Christian lives," such as "are we living as fully as we can?" Other titles include Humor for a Woman's Heart, a collection of "humorous writings" designed to "lift a life above the stresses and strains of the day"; The Five Love Languages, in which Dr. Gary Chapman helps you figure out if you're speaking in the same emotional dialect as your significant other; and Karol Ladd's The Power of a Positive Woman. Ladd is the co-founder of USA Sonshine Girls—the "Son" in Sonshine, of course, is the son of God—and she is unremittingly upbeat in presenting her five-part plan for creating a life with "more calm, less stress."
Not that any of this is so bad in itself. We do have stressful lives, humor does help, and you should pay attention to your own needs. Comfortable suburbanites watch their parents die, their kids implode. Clearly I need help with being positive. And I have no doubt that such texts have turned people into better parents, better spouses, better bosses. It's just that these authors, in presenting their perfectly sensible advice, somehow manage to ignore Jesus' radical and demanding focus on others. It may, in fact, be true that "God helps those who help themselves," both financially and emotionally. (Certainly fortune does.) But if so it's still a subsidiary, secondary truth, more Franklinity than Christianity. You could eliminate the scriptural references in most of these bestsellers and they would still make or not make the same amount of sense. Chicken Soup for the Zoroastrian Soul. It is a perfect mirror of the secular bestseller lists, indeed of the secular culture, with its American fixation on self-improvement, on self-esteem. On self. These similarities make it difficult (although not impossible) for the televangelists to posit themselves as embattled figures in a "culture war"— they offer too uncanny a reflection of the dominant culture, a culture of unrelenting self-obsession.
Who am I to criticize someone else's religion? After all, if there is anything Americans agree on, it's that we should tolerate everyone else's religious expression. As a Newsweek writer put it some years ago at the end of his cover story on apocalyptic visions and the Book of Revelation, "Who's to say that John's mythic battle between Christ and Antichrist is not a valid insight into what the history of humankind is all about?" (Not Newsweek, that's for sure; their religious covers are guaranteed big sellers.) To that I can only answer that I'm a . . . Christian.
Not a professional one; I'm an environmental writer mostly. I've never progressed further in the church hierarchy than Sunday school teacher at my backwoods Methodist church. But I've spent most of my Sunday mornings in a pew. I grew up in church youth groups and stayed active most of my adult life—started homeless shelters in church basements, served soup at the church food pantry, climbed to the top of the rickety ladder to put the star on the church Christmas tree. My work has been, at times, influenced by all that—I've written extensively about the Book of Job, which is to me the first great piece of nature writing in the Western tradition, and about the overlaps between Christianity and environmentalism. In fact, I imagine I'm one of a fairly small number of writers who have had cover stories in both the Christian Century, the magazine of liberal mainline Protestantism, and Christianity Today, which Billy Graham founded, not to mention articles in Sojourners, the magazine of the progressive evangelical community co-founded by Jim Wallis.
Indeed, it was my work with religious environmentalists that first got me thinking along the lines of this essay. We were trying to get politicians to understand why the Bible actually mandated protecting the world around us (Noah: the first Green), work that I think is true and vital. But one day it occurred to me that the parts of the world where people actually had cut dramatically back on their carbon emissions, actually did live voluntarily in smaller homes and take public transit, were the same countries where people were giving aid to the poor and making sure everyone had health care—countries like Norway and Sweden, where religion was relatively unimportant. How could that be? For Christians there should be something at least a little scary in the notion that, absent the magical answers of religion, people might just get around to solving their problems and strengthening their communities in more straightforward ways.
But for me, in any event, the European success is less interesting than the American failure. Because we're not going to be like them. Maybe we'd be better off if we abandoned religion for secular rationality, but we're not going to; for the foreseeable future this will be a "Christian" nation. The question is, what kind of Christian nation?
The tendencies I've been describing—toward an apocalyptic End Times faith, toward a comfort-the-comfortable, personal-empowerment faith—veil the actual, and remarkable, message of the Gospels. When one of the Pharisees asked Jesus what the core of the law was, Jesus replied:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Love your neighbor as yourself: although its rhetorical power has been dimmed by repetition, that is a radical notion, perhaps the most radical notion possible. Especially since Jesus, in all his teachings, made it very clear who the neighbor you were supposed to love was: the poor person, the sick person, the naked person, the hungry person. The last shall be made first; turn the other cheek; a rich person aiming for heaven is like a camel trying to walk through the eye of a needle. On and on and on—a call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary, and effective reordering of power relationships, based on the principle of love.
I confess, even as I write these words, to a feeling close to embarrassment. Because in public we tend not to talk about such things—my theory of what Jesus mostly meant seems like it should be left in church, or confined to some religious publication. But remember the overwhelming connection between America and Christianity; what Jesus meant is the most deeply potent political, cultural, social question. To ignore it, or leave it to the bullies and the salesmen of the televangelist sects, means to walk away from a central battle over American identity. At the moment, the idea of Jesus has been hijacked by people with a series of causes that do not reflect his teachings. The Bible is a long book, and even the Gospels have plenty in them, some of it seemingly contradictory and hard to puzzle out. But love your neighbor as yourself—not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but love your neighbor as yourself—will suffice as a gloss. There is no disputing the centrality of this message, nor is there any disputing how easy it is to ignore that message. Because it is so counterintuitive, Christians have had to keep repeating it to themselves right from the start. Consider Paul, for instance, instructing the church at Galatea: "For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment," he wrote. "'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"
American churches, by and large, have done a pretty good job of loving the neighbor in the next pew. A pastor can spend all Sunday talking about the Rapture Index, but if his congregation is thriving you can be assured he's spending the other six days visiting people in the hospital, counseling couples, and sitting up with grieving widows. All this human connection is important. But if the theology makes it harder to love the neighbor a little farther away—particularly the poor and the weak—then it's a problem. And the dominant theologies of the moment do just that. They undercut Jesus, muffle his hard words, deaden his call, and in the end silence him. In fact, the soft-focus consumer gospel of the suburban megachurches is a perfect match for emergent conservative economic notions about personal responsibility instead of collective action. Privatize Social Security? Keep health care for people who can afford it? File those under "God helps those who help themselves."
Take Alabama as an example. In 2002, Bob Riley was elected governor of the state, where 90 percent of residents identify themselves as Christians. Riley could safely be called a conservative—right-wing majordomo Grover Norquist gave him a Friend of the Taxpayer Award every year he was in Congress, where he'd never voted for a tax increase. But when he took over Alabama, he found himself administering a tax code that dated to 1901. The richest Alabamians paid 3 percent of their income in taxes, and the poorest paid up to 12 percent; income taxes kicked in if a family of four made $4,600 (even in Mississippi the threshold was $19,000), while out-of-state timber companies paid $1.25 an acre in property taxes. Alabama was forty-eighth in total state and local taxes, and the largest proportion of that income came from sales tax—a super-regressive tax that in some counties reached into double digits. So Riley proposed a tax hike, partly to dig the state out of a fiscal crisis and partly to put more money into the state's school system, routinely ranked near the worst in the nation. He argued that it was Christian duty to look after the poor more carefully.
Had the new law passed, the owner of a $250,000 home in Montgomery would have paid $1,432 in property taxes—we're not talking Sweden here. But it didn't pass. It was crushed by a factor of two to one. Sixty-eight percent of the state voted against it—meaning, of course, something like 68 percent of the Christians who voted. The opposition was led, in fact, not just by the state's wealthiest interests but also by the Christian Coalition of Alabama. "You'll find most Alabamians have got a charitable heart," said John Giles, the group's president. "They just don't want it coming out of their pockets." On its website, the group argued that taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor "results in punishing success" and that "when an individual works for their income, that money belongs to the individual." You might as well just cite chapter and verse from Poor Richard's Almanack. And whatever the ideology, the results are clear. "I'm tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad," said Governor Riley, "and last in things that are good."
A rich man came to Jesus one day and asked what he should do to get into heaven. Jesus did not say he should invest, spend, and let the benefits trickle down; he said sell what you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me. Few plainer words have been spoken. And yet, for some reason, the Christian Coalition of America—founded in 1989 in order to "preserve, protect and defend the Judeo-Christian values that made this the greatest country in history"—proclaimed last year that its top legislative priority would be "making permanent President Bush's 2001 federal tax cuts."
Similarly, a furor erupted last spring when it emerged that a Colorado jury had consulted the Bible before sentencing a killer to death. Experts debated whether the (Christian) jurors should have used an outside authority in their deliberations, and of course the Christian right saw it as one more sign of a secular society devaluing religion. But a more interesting question would have been why the jurors fixated on Leviticus 24, with its call for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They had somehow missed Jesus' explicit refutation in the New Testament: "You have heard that it was said, 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also."
And on and on. The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their very boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they're talking about. They're like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track. But their theology is appealing for another reason too: it coincides with what we want to believe. How nice it would be if Jesus had declared that our income was ours to keep, instead of insisting that we had to share. How satisfying it would be if we were supposed to hate our enemies. Religious conservatives will always have a comparatively easy sell.
But straight is the path and narrow is the way. The gospel is too radical for any culture larger than the Amish to ever come close to realizing; in demanding a departure from selfishness it conflicts with all our current desires. Even the first time around, judging by the reaction, the Gospels were pretty unwelcome news to an awful lot of people. There is not going to be a modern-day return to the church of the early believers, holding all things in common—that's not what I'm talking about. Taking seriously the actual message of Jesus, though, should serve at least to moderate the greed and violence that mark this culture. It's hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change.
It is possible, I think. Yes, the mainline Protestant churches that supported civil rights and opposed the war in Vietnam are mostly locked in a dreary decline as their congregations dwindle and their elders argue endlessly about gay clergy and same-sex unions. And the Catholic Church, for most of its American history a sturdy exponent of a "love your neighbor" theology, has been weakened, too, its hierarchy increasingly motivated by a single-issue focus on abortion. Plenty of vital congregations are doing great good works—they're the ones that have nurtured me—but they aren't where the challenge will arise; they've grown shy about talking about Jesus, more comfortable with the language of sociology and politics. More and more it's Bible-quoting Christians, like Wallis's Sojourners movement and that Baptist seminary graduate Bill Moyers, who are carrying the fight.
The best-selling of all Christian books in recent years, Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life, illustrates the possibilities. It has all the hallmarks of self-absorption (in one five-page chapter, I counted sixty-five uses of the word "you"), but it also makes a powerful case that we're made for mission. What that mission is never becomes clear, but the thirst for it is real. And there's no great need for Warren to state that purpose anyhow. For Christians, the plainspoken message of the Gospels is clear enough. If you have any doubts, read the Sermon on the Mount.
Admittedly, this is hope against hope; more likely the money changers and power brokers will remain ascendant in our "spiritual" life. Since the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have sought to co-opt the teachings of Jesus. As in so many areas of our increasingly market-tested lives, the co-opters—the TV men, the politicians, the Christian "interest groups"—have found a way to make each of us complicit in that travesty, too. They have invited us to subvert the church of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden calves of ourselves—become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come. When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of the same.
Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational decline, but it probably doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation—and, overwhelmingly, we do—it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.
And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.
Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller number of Americans—about 75 percent—claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior of professed Christians. That's what America is: a place saturated in Christian identity.
But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion—say, giving aid to the poorest people—as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they'd fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?
In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it's not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It's also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose—childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool—we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it's that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it's not as if the numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households that were "food insecure with hunger" had climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003.
This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon. Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate—just over half—that compares poorly with the European Union's average of about four in ten. That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy? We're at the top of the charts. Personal self-discipline—like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask?
Are Americans hypocrites? Of course they are. But most people (me, for instance) are hypocrites. The more troubling explanation for this disconnect between belief and action, I think, is that most Americans—which means most believers—have replaced the Christianity of the Bible, with its call for deep sharing and personal sacrifice, with a competing creed.
In fact, there may be several competing creeds. For many Christians, deciphering a few passages of the Bible to figure out the schedule for the End Times has become a central task. You can log on to RaptureReady.com for a taste of how some of these believers view the world—at this writing the Rapture Index had declined three points to 152 because, despite an increase in the number of U.S. pagans, "Wal-Mart is falling behind in its plan to bar code all products with radio tags." Other End-Timers are more interested in forcing the issue—they're convinced that the way to coax the Lord back to earth is to "Christianize" our nation and then the world. Consider House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. At church one day he listened as the pastor, urging his flock to support the administration, declared that "the war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse." DeLay rose to speak, not only to the congregation but to 225 Christian TV and radio stations. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "what has been spoken here tonight is the truth of God."
The apocalyptics may not be wrong. One could make a perfectly serious argument that the policies of Tom DeLay are in fact hastening the End Times. But there's nothing particularly Christian about this hastening. The creed of Tom DeLay—of Tim LaHaye and his Left Behind books, of Pat Robertson's "The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today"—ripened out of the impossibly poetic imagery of the Book of Revelation. Imagine trying to build a theory of the Constitution by obsessively reading and rereading the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and you'll get an idea of what an odd approach this is. You might be able to spin elaborate fantasies about presidential succession, but you'd have a hard time working backwards to "We the People." This is the contemporary version of Archbishop Ussher's seventeenth-century calculation that the world had been created on October 23, 4004 B.C., and that the ark touched down on Mount Ararat on May 5, 2348 B.C., a Wednesday. Interesting, but a distant distraction from the gospel message.
The apocalyptics, however, are the lesser problem. It is another competing (though sometimes overlapping) creed, this one straight from the sprawling megachurches of the new exurbs, that frightens me most. Its deviation is less obvious precisely because it looks so much like the rest of the culture. In fact, most of what gets preached in these palaces isn't loony at all. It is disturbingly conventional. The pastors focus relentlessly on you and your individual needs. Their goal is to service consumers—not communities but individuals: "seekers" is the term of art, people who feel the need for some spirituality in their (or their children's) lives but who aren't tightly bound to any particular denomination or school of thought. The result is often a kind of soft-focus, comfortable, suburban faith.
A New York Times reporter visiting one booming megachurch outside Phoenix recently found the typical scene: a drive-through latte stand, Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every service, and sermons about "how to discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your debt." On Sundays children played with church-distributed Xboxes, and many congregants had signed up for a twice-weekly aerobics class called Firm Believers. A list of bestsellers compiled monthly by the Christian Booksellers Association illuminates the creed. It includes texts like Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen—pastor of a church so mega it recently leased a 16,000-seat sports arena in Houston for its services—which even the normally tolerant Publishers Weekly dismissed as "a treatise on how to get God to serve the demands of self-centered individuals." Nearly as high is Beth Moore, with her Believing God—"Beth asks the tough questions concerning the fruit of our Christian lives," such as "are we living as fully as we can?" Other titles include Humor for a Woman's Heart, a collection of "humorous writings" designed to "lift a life above the stresses and strains of the day"; The Five Love Languages, in which Dr. Gary Chapman helps you figure out if you're speaking in the same emotional dialect as your significant other; and Karol Ladd's The Power of a Positive Woman. Ladd is the co-founder of USA Sonshine Girls—the "Son" in Sonshine, of course, is the son of God—and she is unremittingly upbeat in presenting her five-part plan for creating a life with "more calm, less stress."
Not that any of this is so bad in itself. We do have stressful lives, humor does help, and you should pay attention to your own needs. Comfortable suburbanites watch their parents die, their kids implode. Clearly I need help with being positive. And I have no doubt that such texts have turned people into better parents, better spouses, better bosses. It's just that these authors, in presenting their perfectly sensible advice, somehow manage to ignore Jesus' radical and demanding focus on others. It may, in fact, be true that "God helps those who help themselves," both financially and emotionally. (Certainly fortune does.) But if so it's still a subsidiary, secondary truth, more Franklinity than Christianity. You could eliminate the scriptural references in most of these bestsellers and they would still make or not make the same amount of sense. Chicken Soup for the Zoroastrian Soul. It is a perfect mirror of the secular bestseller lists, indeed of the secular culture, with its American fixation on self-improvement, on self-esteem. On self. These similarities make it difficult (although not impossible) for the televangelists to posit themselves as embattled figures in a "culture war"— they offer too uncanny a reflection of the dominant culture, a culture of unrelenting self-obsession.
Who am I to criticize someone else's religion? After all, if there is anything Americans agree on, it's that we should tolerate everyone else's religious expression. As a Newsweek writer put it some years ago at the end of his cover story on apocalyptic visions and the Book of Revelation, "Who's to say that John's mythic battle between Christ and Antichrist is not a valid insight into what the history of humankind is all about?" (Not Newsweek, that's for sure; their religious covers are guaranteed big sellers.) To that I can only answer that I'm a . . . Christian.
Not a professional one; I'm an environmental writer mostly. I've never progressed further in the church hierarchy than Sunday school teacher at my backwoods Methodist church. But I've spent most of my Sunday mornings in a pew. I grew up in church youth groups and stayed active most of my adult life—started homeless shelters in church basements, served soup at the church food pantry, climbed to the top of the rickety ladder to put the star on the church Christmas tree. My work has been, at times, influenced by all that—I've written extensively about the Book of Job, which is to me the first great piece of nature writing in the Western tradition, and about the overlaps between Christianity and environmentalism. In fact, I imagine I'm one of a fairly small number of writers who have had cover stories in both the Christian Century, the magazine of liberal mainline Protestantism, and Christianity Today, which Billy Graham founded, not to mention articles in Sojourners, the magazine of the progressive evangelical community co-founded by Jim Wallis.
Indeed, it was my work with religious environmentalists that first got me thinking along the lines of this essay. We were trying to get politicians to understand why the Bible actually mandated protecting the world around us (Noah: the first Green), work that I think is true and vital. But one day it occurred to me that the parts of the world where people actually had cut dramatically back on their carbon emissions, actually did live voluntarily in smaller homes and take public transit, were the same countries where people were giving aid to the poor and making sure everyone had health care—countries like Norway and Sweden, where religion was relatively unimportant. How could that be? For Christians there should be something at least a little scary in the notion that, absent the magical answers of religion, people might just get around to solving their problems and strengthening their communities in more straightforward ways.
But for me, in any event, the European success is less interesting than the American failure. Because we're not going to be like them. Maybe we'd be better off if we abandoned religion for secular rationality, but we're not going to; for the foreseeable future this will be a "Christian" nation. The question is, what kind of Christian nation?
The tendencies I've been describing—toward an apocalyptic End Times faith, toward a comfort-the-comfortable, personal-empowerment faith—veil the actual, and remarkable, message of the Gospels. When one of the Pharisees asked Jesus what the core of the law was, Jesus replied:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Love your neighbor as yourself: although its rhetorical power has been dimmed by repetition, that is a radical notion, perhaps the most radical notion possible. Especially since Jesus, in all his teachings, made it very clear who the neighbor you were supposed to love was: the poor person, the sick person, the naked person, the hungry person. The last shall be made first; turn the other cheek; a rich person aiming for heaven is like a camel trying to walk through the eye of a needle. On and on and on—a call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary, and effective reordering of power relationships, based on the principle of love.
I confess, even as I write these words, to a feeling close to embarrassment. Because in public we tend not to talk about such things—my theory of what Jesus mostly meant seems like it should be left in church, or confined to some religious publication. But remember the overwhelming connection between America and Christianity; what Jesus meant is the most deeply potent political, cultural, social question. To ignore it, or leave it to the bullies and the salesmen of the televangelist sects, means to walk away from a central battle over American identity. At the moment, the idea of Jesus has been hijacked by people with a series of causes that do not reflect his teachings. The Bible is a long book, and even the Gospels have plenty in them, some of it seemingly contradictory and hard to puzzle out. But love your neighbor as yourself—not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but love your neighbor as yourself—will suffice as a gloss. There is no disputing the centrality of this message, nor is there any disputing how easy it is to ignore that message. Because it is so counterintuitive, Christians have had to keep repeating it to themselves right from the start. Consider Paul, for instance, instructing the church at Galatea: "For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment," he wrote. "'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"
American churches, by and large, have done a pretty good job of loving the neighbor in the next pew. A pastor can spend all Sunday talking about the Rapture Index, but if his congregation is thriving you can be assured he's spending the other six days visiting people in the hospital, counseling couples, and sitting up with grieving widows. All this human connection is important. But if the theology makes it harder to love the neighbor a little farther away—particularly the poor and the weak—then it's a problem. And the dominant theologies of the moment do just that. They undercut Jesus, muffle his hard words, deaden his call, and in the end silence him. In fact, the soft-focus consumer gospel of the suburban megachurches is a perfect match for emergent conservative economic notions about personal responsibility instead of collective action. Privatize Social Security? Keep health care for people who can afford it? File those under "God helps those who help themselves."
Take Alabama as an example. In 2002, Bob Riley was elected governor of the state, where 90 percent of residents identify themselves as Christians. Riley could safely be called a conservative—right-wing majordomo Grover Norquist gave him a Friend of the Taxpayer Award every year he was in Congress, where he'd never voted for a tax increase. But when he took over Alabama, he found himself administering a tax code that dated to 1901. The richest Alabamians paid 3 percent of their income in taxes, and the poorest paid up to 12 percent; income taxes kicked in if a family of four made $4,600 (even in Mississippi the threshold was $19,000), while out-of-state timber companies paid $1.25 an acre in property taxes. Alabama was forty-eighth in total state and local taxes, and the largest proportion of that income came from sales tax—a super-regressive tax that in some counties reached into double digits. So Riley proposed a tax hike, partly to dig the state out of a fiscal crisis and partly to put more money into the state's school system, routinely ranked near the worst in the nation. He argued that it was Christian duty to look after the poor more carefully.
Had the new law passed, the owner of a $250,000 home in Montgomery would have paid $1,432 in property taxes—we're not talking Sweden here. But it didn't pass. It was crushed by a factor of two to one. Sixty-eight percent of the state voted against it—meaning, of course, something like 68 percent of the Christians who voted. The opposition was led, in fact, not just by the state's wealthiest interests but also by the Christian Coalition of Alabama. "You'll find most Alabamians have got a charitable heart," said John Giles, the group's president. "They just don't want it coming out of their pockets." On its website, the group argued that taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor "results in punishing success" and that "when an individual works for their income, that money belongs to the individual." You might as well just cite chapter and verse from Poor Richard's Almanack. And whatever the ideology, the results are clear. "I'm tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad," said Governor Riley, "and last in things that are good."
A rich man came to Jesus one day and asked what he should do to get into heaven. Jesus did not say he should invest, spend, and let the benefits trickle down; he said sell what you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me. Few plainer words have been spoken. And yet, for some reason, the Christian Coalition of America—founded in 1989 in order to "preserve, protect and defend the Judeo-Christian values that made this the greatest country in history"—proclaimed last year that its top legislative priority would be "making permanent President Bush's 2001 federal tax cuts."
Similarly, a furor erupted last spring when it emerged that a Colorado jury had consulted the Bible before sentencing a killer to death. Experts debated whether the (Christian) jurors should have used an outside authority in their deliberations, and of course the Christian right saw it as one more sign of a secular society devaluing religion. But a more interesting question would have been why the jurors fixated on Leviticus 24, with its call for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They had somehow missed Jesus' explicit refutation in the New Testament: "You have heard that it was said, 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also."
And on and on. The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their very boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they're talking about. They're like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track. But their theology is appealing for another reason too: it coincides with what we want to believe. How nice it would be if Jesus had declared that our income was ours to keep, instead of insisting that we had to share. How satisfying it would be if we were supposed to hate our enemies. Religious conservatives will always have a comparatively easy sell.
But straight is the path and narrow is the way. The gospel is too radical for any culture larger than the Amish to ever come close to realizing; in demanding a departure from selfishness it conflicts with all our current desires. Even the first time around, judging by the reaction, the Gospels were pretty unwelcome news to an awful lot of people. There is not going to be a modern-day return to the church of the early believers, holding all things in common—that's not what I'm talking about. Taking seriously the actual message of Jesus, though, should serve at least to moderate the greed and violence that mark this culture. It's hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change.
It is possible, I think. Yes, the mainline Protestant churches that supported civil rights and opposed the war in Vietnam are mostly locked in a dreary decline as their congregations dwindle and their elders argue endlessly about gay clergy and same-sex unions. And the Catholic Church, for most of its American history a sturdy exponent of a "love your neighbor" theology, has been weakened, too, its hierarchy increasingly motivated by a single-issue focus on abortion. Plenty of vital congregations are doing great good works—they're the ones that have nurtured me—but they aren't where the challenge will arise; they've grown shy about talking about Jesus, more comfortable with the language of sociology and politics. More and more it's Bible-quoting Christians, like Wallis's Sojourners movement and that Baptist seminary graduate Bill Moyers, who are carrying the fight.
The best-selling of all Christian books in recent years, Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life, illustrates the possibilities. It has all the hallmarks of self-absorption (in one five-page chapter, I counted sixty-five uses of the word "you"), but it also makes a powerful case that we're made for mission. What that mission is never becomes clear, but the thirst for it is real. And there's no great need for Warren to state that purpose anyhow. For Christians, the plainspoken message of the Gospels is clear enough. If you have any doubts, read the Sermon on the Mount.
Admittedly, this is hope against hope; more likely the money changers and power brokers will remain ascendant in our "spiritual" life. Since the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have sought to co-opt the teachings of Jesus. As in so many areas of our increasingly market-tested lives, the co-opters—the TV men, the politicians, the Christian "interest groups"—have found a way to make each of us complicit in that travesty, too. They have invited us to subvert the church of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden calves of ourselves—become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come. When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of the same.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Christianity The Best Friend Science Ever Had
http://www.doesgodexist.org/JulAug97/ChristianityTheBestFriendScienceEverHad.html
The most fundamental theme of the Does God Exist? program and of this journal is that science and Christianity are not adversarial in nature, but rather symbiotic in nature--mutually beneficial. Those who oppose us in this theme are for the most part religious people who hate science and people who hate religion. To view science and faith as antagonists is a very destructive thing to do, because both fields are restricted without the support of the other. Einstein once said, "Religion without science is lame, and science without religion is blind." Science can help religion understand a great deal of what the Bible is talking about and even about the nature of God. Religion can help science determine the use to which scientific discoveries will be put and the ethics and morality of those uses.
Atheists and skeptics argue against these points by trying to bring up cases from the past where religion has opposed or inhibited science, and there certainly have been such cases. What is frequently ignored is all the support Christianity has given to science and how Christianity really made science possible. In this discussion we would like to demonstrate how supportive Christianity has been and how it provided key presuppositions which made modern science possible.
Christianity De-deified the Creation. Historian R. Hooykaas coined the heading of this section, pointing out that the Bible presents nature as a garden, not a god. Most pagan religions turned the natural world into gods. There were sun gods, river gods and goddesses, volcano deities, weather deities, and on and on. All of us have at least heard of gods like Minerva, Sol, Ra, Vulcan, Zeus, Thor, and the like. The Bible's teaching is that nature is God's handiwork, but not God. No where in the Christian system was nature presented as an object of worship. We find the Bible telling us that we can know there is a God through "the things [He has] made" (Romans 1:20); "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise" (Proverbs 6:6); "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1). All of these statements encourage the examination and study of nature, but not the worship of it. Only when nature is no longer an object of worship can it be studied scientifically. Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton have pointed out that ancient cultures like the Chinese and Egyptians developed high levels of technology, but that scientific experimentation and mathematical formulation began in Western Europe where Christian belief had provided the presuppositions upon which modern science depends.
Christianity Established Order in Nature. It is easy to look at things that happen from day to day and assume that nature is totally chaotic and senseless. Tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, pseunomis, and the like do not appear to offer any sense of order on the surface. In the Christian system God is described as, "not being the author of confusion." God is good and reasonable and so his creation must also be good and reasonable. God is also a creator and lawgiver in the Christian system. Historian A. R. Hall says that the concept of natural law was unknown in Asian and the pre-Christian world. Christianity made sense of nature and made nature understandable.
Christianity Taught that Order in Nature is Known by Experiment, Is Mathematical, and Is Understandable by the Human Mind. If God created the cosmos, then God is completely in control of matter. That means that the rules He sets down will be universally true. The Greek word logos from which we draw our English word logic is used 331 times in the New Testament, 126 of these being in reference to the Word or Scripture. The claim is not one of irrationality, but of sense and logic. People like Kepler (and his laws of planetary motion) and Galileo (at the Leaning Tower of Pisa showing the pull of gravity to be the same for all objects regardless of their mass) were people using the Christian view of understandable order to make their discoveries. An expert on Chinese culture named Joseph Needham points out that the Chinese failed to develop science because they viewed nature as unable to be understood by rational human beings because they had no belief in a rational creator.
It is easy to find individuals who made errors in their personal understandings of science and the Bible. The fact is that God repeatedly encourages man to examine the creation and learn from it. It is this spirit of investigation and separation of physical and spiritual things that has led to science and technology. Atheist philosophers from Voltaire to Carl Sagan have attempted to discredit Christianity by portraying it as the enemy of science and progress. The opposite of this view is the actual situation.
The most fundamental theme of the Does God Exist? program and of this journal is that science and Christianity are not adversarial in nature, but rather symbiotic in nature--mutually beneficial. Those who oppose us in this theme are for the most part religious people who hate science and people who hate religion. To view science and faith as antagonists is a very destructive thing to do, because both fields are restricted without the support of the other. Einstein once said, "Religion without science is lame, and science without religion is blind." Science can help religion understand a great deal of what the Bible is talking about and even about the nature of God. Religion can help science determine the use to which scientific discoveries will be put and the ethics and morality of those uses.
Atheists and skeptics argue against these points by trying to bring up cases from the past where religion has opposed or inhibited science, and there certainly have been such cases. What is frequently ignored is all the support Christianity has given to science and how Christianity really made science possible. In this discussion we would like to demonstrate how supportive Christianity has been and how it provided key presuppositions which made modern science possible.
Christianity De-deified the Creation. Historian R. Hooykaas coined the heading of this section, pointing out that the Bible presents nature as a garden, not a god. Most pagan religions turned the natural world into gods. There were sun gods, river gods and goddesses, volcano deities, weather deities, and on and on. All of us have at least heard of gods like Minerva, Sol, Ra, Vulcan, Zeus, Thor, and the like. The Bible's teaching is that nature is God's handiwork, but not God. No where in the Christian system was nature presented as an object of worship. We find the Bible telling us that we can know there is a God through "the things [He has] made" (Romans 1:20); "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise" (Proverbs 6:6); "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1). All of these statements encourage the examination and study of nature, but not the worship of it. Only when nature is no longer an object of worship can it be studied scientifically. Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton have pointed out that ancient cultures like the Chinese and Egyptians developed high levels of technology, but that scientific experimentation and mathematical formulation began in Western Europe where Christian belief had provided the presuppositions upon which modern science depends.
Christianity Established Order in Nature. It is easy to look at things that happen from day to day and assume that nature is totally chaotic and senseless. Tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, pseunomis, and the like do not appear to offer any sense of order on the surface. In the Christian system God is described as, "not being the author of confusion." God is good and reasonable and so his creation must also be good and reasonable. God is also a creator and lawgiver in the Christian system. Historian A. R. Hall says that the concept of natural law was unknown in Asian and the pre-Christian world. Christianity made sense of nature and made nature understandable.
Christianity Taught that Order in Nature is Known by Experiment, Is Mathematical, and Is Understandable by the Human Mind. If God created the cosmos, then God is completely in control of matter. That means that the rules He sets down will be universally true. The Greek word logos from which we draw our English word logic is used 331 times in the New Testament, 126 of these being in reference to the Word or Scripture. The claim is not one of irrationality, but of sense and logic. People like Kepler (and his laws of planetary motion) and Galileo (at the Leaning Tower of Pisa showing the pull of gravity to be the same for all objects regardless of their mass) were people using the Christian view of understandable order to make their discoveries. An expert on Chinese culture named Joseph Needham points out that the Chinese failed to develop science because they viewed nature as unable to be understood by rational human beings because they had no belief in a rational creator.
It is easy to find individuals who made errors in their personal understandings of science and the Bible. The fact is that God repeatedly encourages man to examine the creation and learn from it. It is this spirit of investigation and separation of physical and spiritual things that has led to science and technology. Atheist philosophers from Voltaire to Carl Sagan have attempted to discredit Christianity by portraying it as the enemy of science and progress. The opposite of this view is the actual situation.
The atheist delusion
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/12/18/john_haught/index.html
Theologian John Haught explains why science and God are not at odds, why Mike Huckabee worries him, and why Richard Dawkins and other "new atheists" are ignorant about religion.
By Steve Paulson
Dec. 18, 2007 | Evolution remains the thorniest issue in the ongoing debate over science and religion. But for all the yelling between creationists and scientists, there's one perspective that's largely absent from public discussions about evolution. We rarely hear from religious believers who accept the standard Darwinian account of evolution. It's a shame because there's an important question at stake: How can a person of faith reconcile the apparently random, meaningless process of evolution with belief in God?
The simplest response is to say that science and religion have nothing to do with each other -- to claim, as Stephen Jay Gould famously did, that they are "non-overlapping magisteria." But perhaps that response seems too easy, a politically expedient ploy to pacify both scientists and mainstream Christians. Maybe evolutionary theory, along with modern physics, does pose a serious challenge to religious belief. To put it another way, how can an intellectually responsible person of faith justify that faith -- and even belief in a personal God -- after Darwin and Einstein?
That's the question John Haught has set out to answer by proposing a "theology of evolution." Haught is a Roman Catholic theologian at Georgetown University and a prolific author. His books include "God After Darwin," "Is Nature Enough?" and the forthcoming "God and the New Atheism." He's steeped in evolutionary theory as well as Christian theology. Haught believes Darwin is "a gift to theology." He says evolutionary biology has forced modern theologians to clarify their thinking by rejecting outdated arguments about God as an intrusive designer. Haught reclaims the theology of his intellectual hero, Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died more than half a century ago. Teilhard believed that we live in a universe evolving toward ever greater complexity and, ultimately, to consciousness.
Haught is an intriguing figure in the debate over evolution. He was the only theologian to testify as an expert witness in the landmark 2005 Dover trial that ruled against teaching intelligent design in public schools. Haught testified against intelligent design, arguing that it's both phony science and bad theology. But Haught is also a fierce critic of hardcore atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who claim that evolution leads logically to atheism. He says both sides place too much faith in science. "Ironically," Haught writes, "ID advocates share with their ideological enemies, the evolutionary materialists, the assumption that science itself can provide ultimate explanations."
I talked with Haught about the new atheists, Albert Camus, and how evolutionary biology can be a complement to faith. We spoke about why Christian candidates like Mike Huckabee worry him and why science is ultimately not equipped to answer questions about love, consciousness and the Resurrection.
Your forthcoming book, "God and the New Atheism," is a critique of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. You claim that they are pale imitations of great atheists like Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. What are they missing?
The only thing new in the so-called new atheism is the sense that we should not tolerate faith because, by doing so, we open people's minds to any crazy idea -- including dangerous ideas like those that led to 9/11. In every other respect, this atheism is similar to the secular humanism of the modern period, which said that faith is incompatible with science, that religion and belief in God are bad for morality, and that theology should be purged from culture and academic life. These are not new ideas. But there were atheists in the past who were much more theologically educated than these. My chief objection to the new atheists is that they are almost completely ignorant of what's going on in the world of theology. They talk about the most fundamentalist and extremist versions of faith, and they hold these up as though they're the normative, central core of faith. And they miss so many things. They miss the moral core of Judaism and Christianity -- the theme of social justice, which takes those who are marginalized and brings them to the center of society. They give us an extreme caricature of faith and religion.
You're saying older atheists like Nietzsche and Camus had a more sophisticated critique of religion?
Yes. They wanted us to think out completely and thoroughly, and with unrelenting logic, what the world would look like if the transcendent is wiped away from the horizon. Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus would have cringed at "the new atheism" because they would see it as dropping God like Santa Claus, and going on with the same old values. The new atheists don't want to think out the implications of a complete absence of deity. Nietzsche, as well as Sartre and Camus, all expressed it quite correctly. The implications should be nihilism.
Didn't they see the death of God as terrifying?
Yes, they did. And they thought it would take tremendous courage to be an atheist. Sartre himself said atheism is an extremely cruel affair. He was implying that most people wouldn't be able to look it squarely in the face. And my own belief is they themselves didn't either. Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus eventually realized that nihilism is not a space within which we can live our lives.
But it seems to me that Camus had a different project. He thought there was no God or transcendent reality, and the great existential struggle was for humans to create meaning themselves, without appealing to some higher reality. This wasn't a cop-out at all. It was a profound struggle for him.
Yes, it was. But his earlier life was somewhat different from his later writings. In "The Stranger" and "The Myth of Sisyphus," he argues that in the absence of God, there's no hope. And we have to learn to live without hope. His figure of Sisyphus is the image of living without hope. And whatever happiness Camus thought we could attain comes from the sense of strength and courage that we feel in ourselves when we shake our fist at the gods. But none of the atheists -- whether the hardcore or the new atheists -- really examine where this courage comes from. What is its source? I think a theologian like Paul Tillich, who wrestled with the atheism of Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus, put his finger on the real issue. How do we account for the courage to go on living in the absence of hope? As you move to the later writings of Camus and Sartre, those books are saying it's difficult to live without hope. What I want to show in my own work -- as an alternative to the new atheists -- is a universe in which hope is possible.
But why can't you have hope if you don't believe in God?
You can have hope. But the question is, can you justify the hope? I don't have any objection to the idea that atheists can be good and morally upright people. But we need a worldview that is capable of justifying the confidence that we place in our minds, in truth, in goodness, in beauty. I argue that an atheistic worldview is not capable of justifying that confidence. Some sort of theological framework can justify our trust in meaning, in goodness, in reason.
For years, we've been bombarded by arguments over religion and evolution. And yet you say theology has not yet come to grips with Darwin. What are theologians missing?
Well, this has been one of the most dramatic events that theology -- at least in the West -- has ever had to face. The Darwinian story of evolution seems to give people a whole new creation story. You have to remember that our sense of ethics and the divine came into our religious awareness fixed to a static, vertical, hierarchical understanding of the universe. The fact that there's a special place for humans gave us the sense that we were cared for in a special way by divine providence. But if you suddenly switched to a universe that's 13.7 billion years old, and an evolutionary process that takes almost 4 billion years to lead to humans, then it's very difficult for many people to map this new horizontal, temporal, historical unfolding onto the static hierarchy, which was the backbone of spirituality for so many centuries.
So you're talking about more than just the story of Genesis in the Bible. This is a much bigger issue for modern theology.
The story of Genesis has been hyped as the only problem. I think the fundamental difficulty is the new evolutionary world in process -- that the world's unfinished and still being created is so different from the cosmology that was the backbone of traditional spirituality.
I would think the biggest challenge that evolutionary theory poses to most religions is the sense that there's no inherent meaning in the world. If you look at the process of natural selection -- this apparently random series of genetic mutations -- it would seem that there's no place for ultimate purpose. Human beings may just be an evolutionary accident.
Yes, in the new scientific understanding of the universe, there are no sharp breaks between lifeless matter and life, between life and mind. It seems to many people that the new evolutionary picture places everything in the context of a meaningless smudge of stuff, of atoms reshuffling themselves over the course of time. The traditional view was that nature emanates from on high, so that when you get down to matter, you have the least important level. Above that there's life and mind and God. But in the new cosmography, it seems that mindless matter dominates the whole picture. And many scientists, like Dawkins and Gould, have said evolution has destroyed the notion of purpose. So one thing I do in my theology is to say that's not necessarily true.
Isn't there a simple response to the materialist argument? You can say "purpose" is simply not a scientific idea. Instead, it's an idea for theologians and philosophers to debate. Do you accept that distinction?
I sure do. But that distinction is usually violated in scientific literature and in much discussion of evolution. From the beginning of the modern world, science decided quite rightly that it wasn't going to tackle such questions as purpose, value, meaning, importance, God, or even talk about intelligence or subjectivity. It was going to look for purely natural, causal, mechanical explanations of things. And science has every right to be that way. But that principle of scientific Puritanism is often violated by scientists who think that by dint of their scientific expertise, they are able to comment on such things as purpose. I consider that to be a great violation.
Who are these scientists who extrapolate about purpose from science?
A good example is the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg. In his book "Dreams of a Final Theory," he asks, will we find God once science gets down to what he calls the fundamental levels of reality? It's almost as if he assumes that science itself has the capacity and the power to comment on things like that. Similarly, Dawkins, in "The God Delusion," has stated that science has the right to deal with the question of God and other religious issues, and everything has to be settled according to the canons of the scientific method.
But Dawkins argues that a lot of claims made on behalf of God -- about how God created the world and interacts with people -- are ultimately questions about nature. Unless you say God has nothing to do with nature, those become scientific questions.
Well, I approach these issues by making a case for what I call "layered explanation." For example, if a pot of tea is boiling on the stove, and someone asks you why it's boiling, one answer is to say it's boiling because H2O molecules are moving around excitedly, making a transition from the liquid state to the gaseous state. And that's a very good answer. But you could also say it's boiling because my wife turned the gas on. Or you could say it's boiling because I want tea. Here you have three levels of explanation which are approaching phenomena from different points of view. This is how I see the relationship of theology to science. Of course I think theology is relevant to discussing the question, what is nature? What is the world? It would talk about it in terms of being a gift from the Creator, and having a promise built into it for the future. Science should not touch upon that level of understanding. But it doesn't contradict what evolutionary biology and the other sciences are telling us about nature. They're just different levels of understanding.
What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality?
The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there's no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself -- that evidence is necessary -- holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there's the deeper worldview -- it's a kind of dogma -- that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It's a deep faith commitment because there's no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It's a creed.
Are you're saying scientists are themselves practicing a kind of religion?
The new atheists have made science the only road to truth. They have a belief, which I call "scientific naturalism," that there's nothing beyond nature -- no transcendent dimension -- that every cause has to be a natural cause, that there's no purpose in the universe, and that scientific explanations, especially in their Darwinian forms, can account for everything living. But the idea that science alone can lead us to truth is questionable. There's no scientific proof for that. Those are commitments that I would place in the category of faith. So the proposal by the new atheists that we should eliminate faith in all its forms would also apply to scientific naturalism. But they don't want to go that far. So there's a self-contradiction there.
Do you accept Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria" -- that science covers the empirical realm of facts and theories about the universe, while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value?
I think he's too simplistic. I don't think we want to remain stuck in this standoff position. First of all, Gould defines religion as simply concern about values and meanings. He implicitly denies that religion can put us in touch with truth.
By truth, are you talking about reality?
Yes, I'm talking about what is real, or what has being. The traditions of religion and philosophy have always maintained that the most important dimensions of reality are going to be least accessible to scientific control. There's going to be something fuzzy and elusive about them. The only way we can talk about them is through symbolic and metaphoric language -- in other words, the language of religion. Traditionally, we never apologized for the fact that we used fuzzy language to refer to the real because the deepest aspect of reality grasps us more than we grasp it. So we can never get our minds around it.
We can't get our minds around this transcendent reality because we're limited by our language and our brains?
We have to refer to it in the oblique and fuzzy but also the luxuriant and rich language of symbol and metaphor. But I still think we have the obligation today of asking how our new scientific understanding of the world fits into that religious discourse. I don't accept Gould's complete separation of science and faith. Theology is faith seeking understanding. We have every right to ask what God is doing by making this universe in such a slow way, by allowing life to come about in the evolutionary manner in which Darwinian biology has very richly set forth. So science cannot be divorced from faith. However, I think most people do resort to this non-overlapping magisteria as the default position. It's an easy approach. It allows you to put all your ducks in a row. But it avoids the really interesting and perhaps dangerous issue of how to think about God after Darwin. In my view, after Darwin, after Einstein -- just as after Galileo and Copernicus -- we can't have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.
So if you're a person of faith who wants to be intellectually responsible, you can't just shove all this science into a drawer. You do have to deal with it.
Exactly. Theology has always looked to secular concepts to express, for its particular age, what the meaning of God is. In early Christianity, St. Augustine went to Neoplatonism. Later on, Thomas Aquinas did something adventurous: He went to a pagan philosopher, Aristotle, to renew the understanding of Christianity in his own time. Islamic and Jewish philosophers and theologians have done the same thing. But as we move into our own time, theology has to deal with other concepts in order to make sense of its faith. Darwin's thought seems to be more important intellectually and culturally than it's ever been. My view is that theology, instead of ignoring or closing its eyes to it, should look it squarely in the face. It has everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing so. In my view, Darwin's thought is a gift to theology.
Why? Because it forces theologians to sharpen their thinking?
Yes. I came to this idea of evolutionary theology long ago when I was still a young man. I read the works of a famous Jesuit paleontologist named Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard was saying in the early 20th century pretty much what I'm saying today. In many ways, my vocation as a theologian has been to expand on the work he started. Teilhard was sent by his superiors to study geology and paleontology. He was a priest at the time, trying to figure out what the evolutionary character of life on Earth had to do with his Christianity. He wrote essays synthesizing evolution into a broad understanding of his faith, including a deeper understanding of God. His religious superiors thought these essays were a bit too adventurous. So they shipped him off to China, which is the wrong place to send people who like to dig up old bones. Teilhard got involved in expeditions that uncovered Peking man and other interesting evolutionary phenomena.
During all this time, 25 or so years in China, he was developing his ideas, synthesizing Christianity and evolution, and writing his major work, "The Phenomenon of Man," now translated as "The Human Phenomenon." But he couldn't get it published in his own lifetime because the church wasn't ready for it. But after he died, his lay friends flooded the religious world with his publications, and Teilhard ended up having an enormous influence on religious thought. Some major Catholic theologians were steeped in Teilhard's ideas by the time the Second Vatican Council came along. If you read the documents from that council, you can see the imprint of Teilhard's attempt to unify evolution and Christianity.
Teilhard argued that the universe is still evolving. Wasn't that the cosmic process he was trying to explain?
He put the Darwinian story of nature in the larger context of cosmic evolution. He saw the emergence of what he called "more" coming in gradually from the time of the big bang. Atoms become molecules. Molecules become cells. Cells become organisms. Organisms become vertebrates with a complex nervous system. Nervous tissue developed and eventually became complex in humans. He saw this process of growing complexity as something that's still going on. This planet is itself becoming more complex. And the process is accelerating today at an enormous pace because of communications technology, engineering, economics and politics. The globe is shrinking. We're able to connect instantaneously with other parts of the Earth, in the same way that nerve fibers carry an electronic message from one part of the body to the other. We should place what's happening now in the context of the previous phases of evolution and the cosmos. And we should expect -- and hope for -- the universe to keep becoming "more."
Earlier, you said cosmic purpose is a question that lies outside of science. But it sounds like you're bringing it into science. If you want to look for purpose -- whether it's in evolution or the larger universe -- you'll find it in this inexorable drive toward greater complexity.
We have to distinguish between science as a method and what science produces in the way of discovery. As a method, science does not ask questions of purpose. But it's something different to look at the cumulative results of scientific thought and technology. From a theological point of view, that's a part of the world that we have to integrate into our religious visions. That set of discoveries is not at all suggestive of a purposeless universe. Just the opposite. And what is the purpose? The purpose seems to be, from the very beginning, the intensification of consciousness. If you understand purpose as actualizing something that's unquestionably good, then consciousness certainly fits. It's cynical of scientists to say, off-handedly, there's obviously no purpose in the universe. If purpose means realizing a value, consciousness is a value that none of us can deny.
Are you suggesting there's some kind of cosmic consciousness -- a consciousness pervading the universe that has some connection to God?
I'm looking for an explanation that's robust enough to account for the kind of universe that is able, from within itself, to develop and unfold in this ongoing process of complexification. So the idea that some sort of providential presence is accompanying this process seems not at all irrational. And I like to think of God in these terms.
The whole question of consciousness raises all kinds of difficult scientific problems. Virtually all neuroscientists say consciousness is a direct product of the brain. As far as we know, the human brain evolved within the last few million years. This suggests that there was no consciousness before this time.
Certainly, consciousness has a physiological correlate. But here again, I would want to approach the question of consciousness in the same layered way I did with the boiling teapot. Suppose you asked me, why am I thinking right now? I could say, my neurons are firing, the synapses are connecting, the lobes of my brain are activated. And you could spend your whole career, as neuroscientists do, unfolding that level of understanding. But I could also say I'm thinking because I have a desire to know. I want to figure things out. That's an explanation that can't be mapped onto the first because a dimension of subjectivity enters in here. You cannot find it by the objectifying method of neuroscience.
So science as it's now practiced has nothing to say about subjective experience, about what happens in our minds?
I think science, especially neuroscience, does a very good job of saying what has to be working cerebrally and in our nervous systems in order for consciousness to be present. And it can also do a very good job of pointing out what has broken down physically and chemically if my brain is failing to function -- for example, in Alzheimer's. But it doesn't have the complete explanation. Many cognitive scientists and brain scientists are saying the same thing. They're almost in despair at times about whether we'll ever be able to jump from the third-person discourse of science to the first-person discourse of subjective consciousness.
Let me try to pin you down a little more. You're saying the scientific method has only so much explanatory power. At least right now, it has very little to say about subjective experience. That still leaves open the question, is the mind more than the brain? Or does consciousness always have some physical correlate?
Don't get me wrong. I want to push physical explanations as far as possible. I'm a man who loves science. I'm in awe of science. I don't ever want theology to put restraints upon science. I believe every thought we have has a physical correlate. But at the same time, I believe there's something about mind that does transcend, while at the same time fully dwelling incarnately in the physical universe. I see that as a microcosmic example of what's going on in the universe as a whole. So I want a worldview that's wide enough to ask the question, why does the universe not stand still? Once radiation came about early in the universe, why didn't the universe say, "Well, we're just fine here. This is a pretty good universe." Instead, there's a restlessness, a tendency of the cosmos to go beyond itself.
We experience this in ourselves. We're just as much a part of the universe as rivers and rocks are. Therefore, we should use what's going on in our own experience as a key to what's happening in the cosmos as a whole. I call this a "wider empiricism." Most modern science has acted as though subjectivity and consciousness are not part of the natural world. It doesn't reflect adequately on why subjectivity enters the universe at all. Why does the universe transcend itself from purely material to living and then to conscious phenomena? Teilhard himself said that what science left out was nature's most important development -- human phenomena.
You have carved out an interesting position in the debate over science and religion. You are critical of atheists like Dawkins and Dennett, who believe evolutionary theory leads to atheism. Yet you testified at the 2005 Dover trial against intelligent design. What's wrong with intelligent design?
I testified against it because, first of all, teaching it in public schools is a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. There is something irremediably religious about the idea. Try to deny it though they might, advocates of intelligent design are really proposing a kind of watered-down version of natural theology. That's the attempt to explain what's going on in nature's order and design by appealing to a nonnatural source. So it's not science. I agree with all the scientists who say intelligent design should not be made part of science. It's not a valid scientific alternative to Darwinian ideas. It should not be taught in classrooms and public schools. It's also extremely poor theology. What intelligent design tries to do -- and the great theologians have always resisted this idea -- is to place the divine, the Creator, within the continuum of natural causes. And this amounts to an extreme demotion of the transcendence of God, by making God just one cause in a series of natural causes.
This becomes the "God of the gaps." When you can't explain something by science, you say God did it.
Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, said that kind of thinking was the foundation of modern atheism. Careless Christian thinkers wanted to make a place for God within the physical system that Newton and others had elaborated. That, in effect, demoted the deity as being just one link in a chain of causes that brought the transcendent into the realm of complete secular immanence. The atheists quite rightly said this God is unnecessary.
The debate over evolution has entered the presidential campaign. Mike Huckabee, the former evangelical pastor, calls himself a "Christian leader" and says intelligent design should be one of the theories taught in public schools. But he says his personal views about evolution don't matter because education is a matter for states to decide. Should we be alarmed by his comments?
I think so. To admit that he "personally" rejects evolution may sound harmless enough at first sight. But when any Christians reject evolution these days, one may presume that they usually, though not always, do so on the basis of a literalist style of biblical interpretation. It's this that concerns me. Combined with the principle of private interpretation of Scripture, biblical literalism can end up short-circuiting the process of public debate, justifying almost any domestic and international policies one finds convenient. I don't know for sure that this is the case with Huckabee, but I'm still worried.
It seems to me that we need to be clear about what we mean by "religion." You have used that word in various ways. You've suggested that some scientists are inherently religious because of their quest to understand ultimate causes, even though they may not believe in God. What is your definition of religion?
There are thousands of different definitions of religion. But I like to think of three main ways of understanding it. The first way -- and I think almost all of us are religious in this sense -- is to define religion as concern about something of ultimate importance. This was Tillich's broad definition: Religion is ultimate concern. Even the atheist who says that science is the only reliable road to truth, and nature is all there is, is setting up something that's ultimate. It's like the top stone of a pyramid that conditions everything else in the pyramid. In our own lives, we all have something like a top stone. If it were suddenly removed, it would cause our lives to fall apart. So we're all religious in that sense. In a narrower sense, religion is simply a sense of mystery. Einstein, for example, was someone who couldn't conceive of people -- especially scientists -- living without a sense of mystery. There are many scientists -- sometimes they're called "religious naturalists" -- who are deeply satisfied with the scientific universe that has given us an exhilarating sense of new horizons. That sense can fulfill a person's life.
They want to reclaim the word "religion." And they say hardcore atheists are missing out on the sacred. But they don't want any part of God.
Yeah, but there's a deep division among scientific atheists on this question. People like Dawkins and Weinberg are reluctant to go along with that idea of sacredness. But let me get to my third understanding of religion. That's a belief that this ultimate reality is at heart personal, by which we mean it is intelligent and is capable of love and making promises. This is the fundamental thinking about God in the Quran and the Bible -- God is personal. Theologically speaking, personality is a symbol, like everything else in religion. Like all symbols, "personality" doesn't adequately capture the full depth of ultimate reality. But the conviction of the Abrahamic religions is that if ultimate reality were not at least personal -- at least capable of everything that humans are capable of -- then we could not surrender ourselves fully to it. It would be an "it" rather than a "thou" and therefore would not reach us in the depth of our being.
But why? There are many people who lead profound spiritual lives who don't accept the idea of a personal God. And there are entire religious traditions, like Buddhism, which don't have a concept of God, and certainly not a personal God.
I'm not denying that they're religious. They certainly would fit into the second, and sometimes the first, understanding of religion. Nor am I denying that they are capable of living with deep morality and compassion. I'm just delineating three understandings of faith. It's when you come to the belief in a personal God that the question of science and religion becomes most acute.
Einstein is certainly relevant in this context. He called himself a "deeply religious nonbeliever." He talked about having genuine religious feelings when he marveled at the inherent order and harmony in the universe. But he thought the idea of a personal God was preposterous. He couldn't believe in a God who interfered with natural events or intervened in the lives of people.
Let's look at why Einstein found that idea of God objectionable. Einstein was a man who thought the laws of physics have to be completely inviolable. Nature is a closed continuum of deterministic causes and effects, and if anything interrupted that, it would violate the fundamental scientific worldview that he had. So the idea of a responsive God -- a God who answers prayers -- would have to violate the laws of physics, the laws of nature. This is why Einstein said the problem of science and religion is caused by the belief in a personal God. But it's not inevitable that a responsive God violates the laws of physics and chemistry. I don't think God does violate those laws.
Let's take the example of prayer. You are a Christian. Do you believe God answers your prayers?
Yes, but I have to go along with Martin Gardner here and ask, what if God answered everybody's prayers? What kind of world would we have? I also have to think of what Jesus said when his disciples asked him to teach them to pray. What he told them, in effect, was to pray for something really big. He called it "the kingdom of God." What that means is praying for the ultimate fulfillment of all being, of all the universe. So when we pray, we're asking that the world might have a future. I believe God is answering our prayers but not always in the ways we want. In the final analysis, we hope and trust that God will show or reveal himself as one who has been accompanying our prayers and responding to the world all along, but not necessarily in the narrow way that the human mind is able to conjure up.
What do you make of the miracles in the Bible -- most importantly, the Resurrection? Do you think that happened in the literal sense?
I don't think theology is being responsible if it ever takes anything with completely literal understanding. What we have in the New Testament is a story that's trying to awaken us to trust that our lives make sense, that in the end, everything works out for the best. In a pre-scientific age, this is done in a way in which unlettered and scientifically illiterate people can be challenged by this Resurrection. But if you ask me whether a scientific experiment could verify the Resurrection, I would say such an event is entirely too important to be subjected to a method which is devoid of all religious meaning.
So if a camera was at the Resurrection, it would have recorded nothing?
If you had a camera in the upper room when the disciples came together after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we would not see it. I'm not the only one to say this. Even conservative Catholic theologians say that. Faith means taking the risk of being vulnerable and opening your heart to that which is most important. We trivialize the whole meaning of the Resurrection when we start asking, Is it scientifically verifiable? Science is simply not equipped to deal with the dimensions of purposefulness, love, compassion, forgiveness -- all the feelings and experiences that accompanied the early community's belief that Jesus is still alive. Science is simply not equipped to deal with that. We have to learn to read the universe at different levels. That means we have to overcome literalism not just in the Christian or Jewish or Islamic interpretations of scripture but also in the scientific exploration of the universe. There are levels of depth in the cosmos that science simply cannot reach by itself.
Theologian John Haught explains why science and God are not at odds, why Mike Huckabee worries him, and why Richard Dawkins and other "new atheists" are ignorant about religion.
By Steve Paulson
Dec. 18, 2007 | Evolution remains the thorniest issue in the ongoing debate over science and religion. But for all the yelling between creationists and scientists, there's one perspective that's largely absent from public discussions about evolution. We rarely hear from religious believers who accept the standard Darwinian account of evolution. It's a shame because there's an important question at stake: How can a person of faith reconcile the apparently random, meaningless process of evolution with belief in God?
The simplest response is to say that science and religion have nothing to do with each other -- to claim, as Stephen Jay Gould famously did, that they are "non-overlapping magisteria." But perhaps that response seems too easy, a politically expedient ploy to pacify both scientists and mainstream Christians. Maybe evolutionary theory, along with modern physics, does pose a serious challenge to religious belief. To put it another way, how can an intellectually responsible person of faith justify that faith -- and even belief in a personal God -- after Darwin and Einstein?
That's the question John Haught has set out to answer by proposing a "theology of evolution." Haught is a Roman Catholic theologian at Georgetown University and a prolific author. His books include "God After Darwin," "Is Nature Enough?" and the forthcoming "God and the New Atheism." He's steeped in evolutionary theory as well as Christian theology. Haught believes Darwin is "a gift to theology." He says evolutionary biology has forced modern theologians to clarify their thinking by rejecting outdated arguments about God as an intrusive designer. Haught reclaims the theology of his intellectual hero, Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died more than half a century ago. Teilhard believed that we live in a universe evolving toward ever greater complexity and, ultimately, to consciousness.
Haught is an intriguing figure in the debate over evolution. He was the only theologian to testify as an expert witness in the landmark 2005 Dover trial that ruled against teaching intelligent design in public schools. Haught testified against intelligent design, arguing that it's both phony science and bad theology. But Haught is also a fierce critic of hardcore atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who claim that evolution leads logically to atheism. He says both sides place too much faith in science. "Ironically," Haught writes, "ID advocates share with their ideological enemies, the evolutionary materialists, the assumption that science itself can provide ultimate explanations."
I talked with Haught about the new atheists, Albert Camus, and how evolutionary biology can be a complement to faith. We spoke about why Christian candidates like Mike Huckabee worry him and why science is ultimately not equipped to answer questions about love, consciousness and the Resurrection.
Your forthcoming book, "God and the New Atheism," is a critique of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. You claim that they are pale imitations of great atheists like Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. What are they missing?
The only thing new in the so-called new atheism is the sense that we should not tolerate faith because, by doing so, we open people's minds to any crazy idea -- including dangerous ideas like those that led to 9/11. In every other respect, this atheism is similar to the secular humanism of the modern period, which said that faith is incompatible with science, that religion and belief in God are bad for morality, and that theology should be purged from culture and academic life. These are not new ideas. But there were atheists in the past who were much more theologically educated than these. My chief objection to the new atheists is that they are almost completely ignorant of what's going on in the world of theology. They talk about the most fundamentalist and extremist versions of faith, and they hold these up as though they're the normative, central core of faith. And they miss so many things. They miss the moral core of Judaism and Christianity -- the theme of social justice, which takes those who are marginalized and brings them to the center of society. They give us an extreme caricature of faith and religion.
You're saying older atheists like Nietzsche and Camus had a more sophisticated critique of religion?
Yes. They wanted us to think out completely and thoroughly, and with unrelenting logic, what the world would look like if the transcendent is wiped away from the horizon. Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus would have cringed at "the new atheism" because they would see it as dropping God like Santa Claus, and going on with the same old values. The new atheists don't want to think out the implications of a complete absence of deity. Nietzsche, as well as Sartre and Camus, all expressed it quite correctly. The implications should be nihilism.
Didn't they see the death of God as terrifying?
Yes, they did. And they thought it would take tremendous courage to be an atheist. Sartre himself said atheism is an extremely cruel affair. He was implying that most people wouldn't be able to look it squarely in the face. And my own belief is they themselves didn't either. Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus eventually realized that nihilism is not a space within which we can live our lives.
But it seems to me that Camus had a different project. He thought there was no God or transcendent reality, and the great existential struggle was for humans to create meaning themselves, without appealing to some higher reality. This wasn't a cop-out at all. It was a profound struggle for him.
Yes, it was. But his earlier life was somewhat different from his later writings. In "The Stranger" and "The Myth of Sisyphus," he argues that in the absence of God, there's no hope. And we have to learn to live without hope. His figure of Sisyphus is the image of living without hope. And whatever happiness Camus thought we could attain comes from the sense of strength and courage that we feel in ourselves when we shake our fist at the gods. But none of the atheists -- whether the hardcore or the new atheists -- really examine where this courage comes from. What is its source? I think a theologian like Paul Tillich, who wrestled with the atheism of Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus, put his finger on the real issue. How do we account for the courage to go on living in the absence of hope? As you move to the later writings of Camus and Sartre, those books are saying it's difficult to live without hope. What I want to show in my own work -- as an alternative to the new atheists -- is a universe in which hope is possible.
But why can't you have hope if you don't believe in God?
You can have hope. But the question is, can you justify the hope? I don't have any objection to the idea that atheists can be good and morally upright people. But we need a worldview that is capable of justifying the confidence that we place in our minds, in truth, in goodness, in beauty. I argue that an atheistic worldview is not capable of justifying that confidence. Some sort of theological framework can justify our trust in meaning, in goodness, in reason.
For years, we've been bombarded by arguments over religion and evolution. And yet you say theology has not yet come to grips with Darwin. What are theologians missing?
Well, this has been one of the most dramatic events that theology -- at least in the West -- has ever had to face. The Darwinian story of evolution seems to give people a whole new creation story. You have to remember that our sense of ethics and the divine came into our religious awareness fixed to a static, vertical, hierarchical understanding of the universe. The fact that there's a special place for humans gave us the sense that we were cared for in a special way by divine providence. But if you suddenly switched to a universe that's 13.7 billion years old, and an evolutionary process that takes almost 4 billion years to lead to humans, then it's very difficult for many people to map this new horizontal, temporal, historical unfolding onto the static hierarchy, which was the backbone of spirituality for so many centuries.
So you're talking about more than just the story of Genesis in the Bible. This is a much bigger issue for modern theology.
The story of Genesis has been hyped as the only problem. I think the fundamental difficulty is the new evolutionary world in process -- that the world's unfinished and still being created is so different from the cosmology that was the backbone of traditional spirituality.
I would think the biggest challenge that evolutionary theory poses to most religions is the sense that there's no inherent meaning in the world. If you look at the process of natural selection -- this apparently random series of genetic mutations -- it would seem that there's no place for ultimate purpose. Human beings may just be an evolutionary accident.
Yes, in the new scientific understanding of the universe, there are no sharp breaks between lifeless matter and life, between life and mind. It seems to many people that the new evolutionary picture places everything in the context of a meaningless smudge of stuff, of atoms reshuffling themselves over the course of time. The traditional view was that nature emanates from on high, so that when you get down to matter, you have the least important level. Above that there's life and mind and God. But in the new cosmography, it seems that mindless matter dominates the whole picture. And many scientists, like Dawkins and Gould, have said evolution has destroyed the notion of purpose. So one thing I do in my theology is to say that's not necessarily true.
Isn't there a simple response to the materialist argument? You can say "purpose" is simply not a scientific idea. Instead, it's an idea for theologians and philosophers to debate. Do you accept that distinction?
I sure do. But that distinction is usually violated in scientific literature and in much discussion of evolution. From the beginning of the modern world, science decided quite rightly that it wasn't going to tackle such questions as purpose, value, meaning, importance, God, or even talk about intelligence or subjectivity. It was going to look for purely natural, causal, mechanical explanations of things. And science has every right to be that way. But that principle of scientific Puritanism is often violated by scientists who think that by dint of their scientific expertise, they are able to comment on such things as purpose. I consider that to be a great violation.
Who are these scientists who extrapolate about purpose from science?
A good example is the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg. In his book "Dreams of a Final Theory," he asks, will we find God once science gets down to what he calls the fundamental levels of reality? It's almost as if he assumes that science itself has the capacity and the power to comment on things like that. Similarly, Dawkins, in "The God Delusion," has stated that science has the right to deal with the question of God and other religious issues, and everything has to be settled according to the canons of the scientific method.
But Dawkins argues that a lot of claims made on behalf of God -- about how God created the world and interacts with people -- are ultimately questions about nature. Unless you say God has nothing to do with nature, those become scientific questions.
Well, I approach these issues by making a case for what I call "layered explanation." For example, if a pot of tea is boiling on the stove, and someone asks you why it's boiling, one answer is to say it's boiling because H2O molecules are moving around excitedly, making a transition from the liquid state to the gaseous state. And that's a very good answer. But you could also say it's boiling because my wife turned the gas on. Or you could say it's boiling because I want tea. Here you have three levels of explanation which are approaching phenomena from different points of view. This is how I see the relationship of theology to science. Of course I think theology is relevant to discussing the question, what is nature? What is the world? It would talk about it in terms of being a gift from the Creator, and having a promise built into it for the future. Science should not touch upon that level of understanding. But it doesn't contradict what evolutionary biology and the other sciences are telling us about nature. They're just different levels of understanding.
What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality?
The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there's no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself -- that evidence is necessary -- holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there's the deeper worldview -- it's a kind of dogma -- that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It's a deep faith commitment because there's no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It's a creed.
Are you're saying scientists are themselves practicing a kind of religion?
The new atheists have made science the only road to truth. They have a belief, which I call "scientific naturalism," that there's nothing beyond nature -- no transcendent dimension -- that every cause has to be a natural cause, that there's no purpose in the universe, and that scientific explanations, especially in their Darwinian forms, can account for everything living. But the idea that science alone can lead us to truth is questionable. There's no scientific proof for that. Those are commitments that I would place in the category of faith. So the proposal by the new atheists that we should eliminate faith in all its forms would also apply to scientific naturalism. But they don't want to go that far. So there's a self-contradiction there.
Do you accept Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria" -- that science covers the empirical realm of facts and theories about the universe, while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value?
I think he's too simplistic. I don't think we want to remain stuck in this standoff position. First of all, Gould defines religion as simply concern about values and meanings. He implicitly denies that religion can put us in touch with truth.
By truth, are you talking about reality?
Yes, I'm talking about what is real, or what has being. The traditions of religion and philosophy have always maintained that the most important dimensions of reality are going to be least accessible to scientific control. There's going to be something fuzzy and elusive about them. The only way we can talk about them is through symbolic and metaphoric language -- in other words, the language of religion. Traditionally, we never apologized for the fact that we used fuzzy language to refer to the real because the deepest aspect of reality grasps us more than we grasp it. So we can never get our minds around it.
We can't get our minds around this transcendent reality because we're limited by our language and our brains?
We have to refer to it in the oblique and fuzzy but also the luxuriant and rich language of symbol and metaphor. But I still think we have the obligation today of asking how our new scientific understanding of the world fits into that religious discourse. I don't accept Gould's complete separation of science and faith. Theology is faith seeking understanding. We have every right to ask what God is doing by making this universe in such a slow way, by allowing life to come about in the evolutionary manner in which Darwinian biology has very richly set forth. So science cannot be divorced from faith. However, I think most people do resort to this non-overlapping magisteria as the default position. It's an easy approach. It allows you to put all your ducks in a row. But it avoids the really interesting and perhaps dangerous issue of how to think about God after Darwin. In my view, after Darwin, after Einstein -- just as after Galileo and Copernicus -- we can't have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.
So if you're a person of faith who wants to be intellectually responsible, you can't just shove all this science into a drawer. You do have to deal with it.
Exactly. Theology has always looked to secular concepts to express, for its particular age, what the meaning of God is. In early Christianity, St. Augustine went to Neoplatonism. Later on, Thomas Aquinas did something adventurous: He went to a pagan philosopher, Aristotle, to renew the understanding of Christianity in his own time. Islamic and Jewish philosophers and theologians have done the same thing. But as we move into our own time, theology has to deal with other concepts in order to make sense of its faith. Darwin's thought seems to be more important intellectually and culturally than it's ever been. My view is that theology, instead of ignoring or closing its eyes to it, should look it squarely in the face. It has everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing so. In my view, Darwin's thought is a gift to theology.
Why? Because it forces theologians to sharpen their thinking?
Yes. I came to this idea of evolutionary theology long ago when I was still a young man. I read the works of a famous Jesuit paleontologist named Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard was saying in the early 20th century pretty much what I'm saying today. In many ways, my vocation as a theologian has been to expand on the work he started. Teilhard was sent by his superiors to study geology and paleontology. He was a priest at the time, trying to figure out what the evolutionary character of life on Earth had to do with his Christianity. He wrote essays synthesizing evolution into a broad understanding of his faith, including a deeper understanding of God. His religious superiors thought these essays were a bit too adventurous. So they shipped him off to China, which is the wrong place to send people who like to dig up old bones. Teilhard got involved in expeditions that uncovered Peking man and other interesting evolutionary phenomena.
During all this time, 25 or so years in China, he was developing his ideas, synthesizing Christianity and evolution, and writing his major work, "The Phenomenon of Man," now translated as "The Human Phenomenon." But he couldn't get it published in his own lifetime because the church wasn't ready for it. But after he died, his lay friends flooded the religious world with his publications, and Teilhard ended up having an enormous influence on religious thought. Some major Catholic theologians were steeped in Teilhard's ideas by the time the Second Vatican Council came along. If you read the documents from that council, you can see the imprint of Teilhard's attempt to unify evolution and Christianity.
Teilhard argued that the universe is still evolving. Wasn't that the cosmic process he was trying to explain?
He put the Darwinian story of nature in the larger context of cosmic evolution. He saw the emergence of what he called "more" coming in gradually from the time of the big bang. Atoms become molecules. Molecules become cells. Cells become organisms. Organisms become vertebrates with a complex nervous system. Nervous tissue developed and eventually became complex in humans. He saw this process of growing complexity as something that's still going on. This planet is itself becoming more complex. And the process is accelerating today at an enormous pace because of communications technology, engineering, economics and politics. The globe is shrinking. We're able to connect instantaneously with other parts of the Earth, in the same way that nerve fibers carry an electronic message from one part of the body to the other. We should place what's happening now in the context of the previous phases of evolution and the cosmos. And we should expect -- and hope for -- the universe to keep becoming "more."
Earlier, you said cosmic purpose is a question that lies outside of science. But it sounds like you're bringing it into science. If you want to look for purpose -- whether it's in evolution or the larger universe -- you'll find it in this inexorable drive toward greater complexity.
We have to distinguish between science as a method and what science produces in the way of discovery. As a method, science does not ask questions of purpose. But it's something different to look at the cumulative results of scientific thought and technology. From a theological point of view, that's a part of the world that we have to integrate into our religious visions. That set of discoveries is not at all suggestive of a purposeless universe. Just the opposite. And what is the purpose? The purpose seems to be, from the very beginning, the intensification of consciousness. If you understand purpose as actualizing something that's unquestionably good, then consciousness certainly fits. It's cynical of scientists to say, off-handedly, there's obviously no purpose in the universe. If purpose means realizing a value, consciousness is a value that none of us can deny.
Are you suggesting there's some kind of cosmic consciousness -- a consciousness pervading the universe that has some connection to God?
I'm looking for an explanation that's robust enough to account for the kind of universe that is able, from within itself, to develop and unfold in this ongoing process of complexification. So the idea that some sort of providential presence is accompanying this process seems not at all irrational. And I like to think of God in these terms.
The whole question of consciousness raises all kinds of difficult scientific problems. Virtually all neuroscientists say consciousness is a direct product of the brain. As far as we know, the human brain evolved within the last few million years. This suggests that there was no consciousness before this time.
Certainly, consciousness has a physiological correlate. But here again, I would want to approach the question of consciousness in the same layered way I did with the boiling teapot. Suppose you asked me, why am I thinking right now? I could say, my neurons are firing, the synapses are connecting, the lobes of my brain are activated. And you could spend your whole career, as neuroscientists do, unfolding that level of understanding. But I could also say I'm thinking because I have a desire to know. I want to figure things out. That's an explanation that can't be mapped onto the first because a dimension of subjectivity enters in here. You cannot find it by the objectifying method of neuroscience.
So science as it's now practiced has nothing to say about subjective experience, about what happens in our minds?
I think science, especially neuroscience, does a very good job of saying what has to be working cerebrally and in our nervous systems in order for consciousness to be present. And it can also do a very good job of pointing out what has broken down physically and chemically if my brain is failing to function -- for example, in Alzheimer's. But it doesn't have the complete explanation. Many cognitive scientists and brain scientists are saying the same thing. They're almost in despair at times about whether we'll ever be able to jump from the third-person discourse of science to the first-person discourse of subjective consciousness.
Let me try to pin you down a little more. You're saying the scientific method has only so much explanatory power. At least right now, it has very little to say about subjective experience. That still leaves open the question, is the mind more than the brain? Or does consciousness always have some physical correlate?
Don't get me wrong. I want to push physical explanations as far as possible. I'm a man who loves science. I'm in awe of science. I don't ever want theology to put restraints upon science. I believe every thought we have has a physical correlate. But at the same time, I believe there's something about mind that does transcend, while at the same time fully dwelling incarnately in the physical universe. I see that as a microcosmic example of what's going on in the universe as a whole. So I want a worldview that's wide enough to ask the question, why does the universe not stand still? Once radiation came about early in the universe, why didn't the universe say, "Well, we're just fine here. This is a pretty good universe." Instead, there's a restlessness, a tendency of the cosmos to go beyond itself.
We experience this in ourselves. We're just as much a part of the universe as rivers and rocks are. Therefore, we should use what's going on in our own experience as a key to what's happening in the cosmos as a whole. I call this a "wider empiricism." Most modern science has acted as though subjectivity and consciousness are not part of the natural world. It doesn't reflect adequately on why subjectivity enters the universe at all. Why does the universe transcend itself from purely material to living and then to conscious phenomena? Teilhard himself said that what science left out was nature's most important development -- human phenomena.
You have carved out an interesting position in the debate over science and religion. You are critical of atheists like Dawkins and Dennett, who believe evolutionary theory leads to atheism. Yet you testified at the 2005 Dover trial against intelligent design. What's wrong with intelligent design?
I testified against it because, first of all, teaching it in public schools is a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. There is something irremediably religious about the idea. Try to deny it though they might, advocates of intelligent design are really proposing a kind of watered-down version of natural theology. That's the attempt to explain what's going on in nature's order and design by appealing to a nonnatural source. So it's not science. I agree with all the scientists who say intelligent design should not be made part of science. It's not a valid scientific alternative to Darwinian ideas. It should not be taught in classrooms and public schools. It's also extremely poor theology. What intelligent design tries to do -- and the great theologians have always resisted this idea -- is to place the divine, the Creator, within the continuum of natural causes. And this amounts to an extreme demotion of the transcendence of God, by making God just one cause in a series of natural causes.
This becomes the "God of the gaps." When you can't explain something by science, you say God did it.
Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, said that kind of thinking was the foundation of modern atheism. Careless Christian thinkers wanted to make a place for God within the physical system that Newton and others had elaborated. That, in effect, demoted the deity as being just one link in a chain of causes that brought the transcendent into the realm of complete secular immanence. The atheists quite rightly said this God is unnecessary.
The debate over evolution has entered the presidential campaign. Mike Huckabee, the former evangelical pastor, calls himself a "Christian leader" and says intelligent design should be one of the theories taught in public schools. But he says his personal views about evolution don't matter because education is a matter for states to decide. Should we be alarmed by his comments?
I think so. To admit that he "personally" rejects evolution may sound harmless enough at first sight. But when any Christians reject evolution these days, one may presume that they usually, though not always, do so on the basis of a literalist style of biblical interpretation. It's this that concerns me. Combined with the principle of private interpretation of Scripture, biblical literalism can end up short-circuiting the process of public debate, justifying almost any domestic and international policies one finds convenient. I don't know for sure that this is the case with Huckabee, but I'm still worried.
It seems to me that we need to be clear about what we mean by "religion." You have used that word in various ways. You've suggested that some scientists are inherently religious because of their quest to understand ultimate causes, even though they may not believe in God. What is your definition of religion?
There are thousands of different definitions of religion. But I like to think of three main ways of understanding it. The first way -- and I think almost all of us are religious in this sense -- is to define religion as concern about something of ultimate importance. This was Tillich's broad definition: Religion is ultimate concern. Even the atheist who says that science is the only reliable road to truth, and nature is all there is, is setting up something that's ultimate. It's like the top stone of a pyramid that conditions everything else in the pyramid. In our own lives, we all have something like a top stone. If it were suddenly removed, it would cause our lives to fall apart. So we're all religious in that sense. In a narrower sense, religion is simply a sense of mystery. Einstein, for example, was someone who couldn't conceive of people -- especially scientists -- living without a sense of mystery. There are many scientists -- sometimes they're called "religious naturalists" -- who are deeply satisfied with the scientific universe that has given us an exhilarating sense of new horizons. That sense can fulfill a person's life.
They want to reclaim the word "religion." And they say hardcore atheists are missing out on the sacred. But they don't want any part of God.
Yeah, but there's a deep division among scientific atheists on this question. People like Dawkins and Weinberg are reluctant to go along with that idea of sacredness. But let me get to my third understanding of religion. That's a belief that this ultimate reality is at heart personal, by which we mean it is intelligent and is capable of love and making promises. This is the fundamental thinking about God in the Quran and the Bible -- God is personal. Theologically speaking, personality is a symbol, like everything else in religion. Like all symbols, "personality" doesn't adequately capture the full depth of ultimate reality. But the conviction of the Abrahamic religions is that if ultimate reality were not at least personal -- at least capable of everything that humans are capable of -- then we could not surrender ourselves fully to it. It would be an "it" rather than a "thou" and therefore would not reach us in the depth of our being.
But why? There are many people who lead profound spiritual lives who don't accept the idea of a personal God. And there are entire religious traditions, like Buddhism, which don't have a concept of God, and certainly not a personal God.
I'm not denying that they're religious. They certainly would fit into the second, and sometimes the first, understanding of religion. Nor am I denying that they are capable of living with deep morality and compassion. I'm just delineating three understandings of faith. It's when you come to the belief in a personal God that the question of science and religion becomes most acute.
Einstein is certainly relevant in this context. He called himself a "deeply religious nonbeliever." He talked about having genuine religious feelings when he marveled at the inherent order and harmony in the universe. But he thought the idea of a personal God was preposterous. He couldn't believe in a God who interfered with natural events or intervened in the lives of people.
Let's look at why Einstein found that idea of God objectionable. Einstein was a man who thought the laws of physics have to be completely inviolable. Nature is a closed continuum of deterministic causes and effects, and if anything interrupted that, it would violate the fundamental scientific worldview that he had. So the idea of a responsive God -- a God who answers prayers -- would have to violate the laws of physics, the laws of nature. This is why Einstein said the problem of science and religion is caused by the belief in a personal God. But it's not inevitable that a responsive God violates the laws of physics and chemistry. I don't think God does violate those laws.
Let's take the example of prayer. You are a Christian. Do you believe God answers your prayers?
Yes, but I have to go along with Martin Gardner here and ask, what if God answered everybody's prayers? What kind of world would we have? I also have to think of what Jesus said when his disciples asked him to teach them to pray. What he told them, in effect, was to pray for something really big. He called it "the kingdom of God." What that means is praying for the ultimate fulfillment of all being, of all the universe. So when we pray, we're asking that the world might have a future. I believe God is answering our prayers but not always in the ways we want. In the final analysis, we hope and trust that God will show or reveal himself as one who has been accompanying our prayers and responding to the world all along, but not necessarily in the narrow way that the human mind is able to conjure up.
What do you make of the miracles in the Bible -- most importantly, the Resurrection? Do you think that happened in the literal sense?
I don't think theology is being responsible if it ever takes anything with completely literal understanding. What we have in the New Testament is a story that's trying to awaken us to trust that our lives make sense, that in the end, everything works out for the best. In a pre-scientific age, this is done in a way in which unlettered and scientifically illiterate people can be challenged by this Resurrection. But if you ask me whether a scientific experiment could verify the Resurrection, I would say such an event is entirely too important to be subjected to a method which is devoid of all religious meaning.
So if a camera was at the Resurrection, it would have recorded nothing?
If you had a camera in the upper room when the disciples came together after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we would not see it. I'm not the only one to say this. Even conservative Catholic theologians say that. Faith means taking the risk of being vulnerable and opening your heart to that which is most important. We trivialize the whole meaning of the Resurrection when we start asking, Is it scientifically verifiable? Science is simply not equipped to deal with the dimensions of purposefulness, love, compassion, forgiveness -- all the feelings and experiences that accompanied the early community's belief that Jesus is still alive. Science is simply not equipped to deal with that. We have to learn to read the universe at different levels. That means we have to overcome literalism not just in the Christian or Jewish or Islamic interpretations of scripture but also in the scientific exploration of the universe. There are levels of depth in the cosmos that science simply cannot reach by itself.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Does Biblical Morality Make Sense?
http://doesgodexist.org/JulAug03/DoesBiblicalMoralityMakeSense.html
For the time will come when men will not endure logical teaching, but will heap to themselves professors because they have itching ears (2 Timothy 4:3).
All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for correction, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness, that the man [or woman] of God may be perfect, completely furnished into every good thing (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
Expecting mother These two passages of Scripture provide an incredible challenge to people living in the twenty-first century. We live in a time when the media, some preachers, and popularizers of science are telling us that the old biblical absolutes simply do not apply to today's world. No thinking person can deny that things have changed from the first century. Women now have a choice as to whether to have a baby or not. Western society at least has removed its negative social view of sexual conduct so that nudity, premarital sex, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, cohabitation, and virtually any method of sexual practice are accepted. I recently had a college student say to me, "When you found the girl you wanted to marry, you were looking for a virgin. I'm looking for a woman who has had less than half a dozen men she has slept with." This may be an exaggeration for some of us, but it speaks strongly to the situation that exists in our culture today.
For many readers, what has been said above may be very depressing and even alarming. I would suggest that there is a very positive aspect to the situation in which we find ourselves. Never has there been a clearer contrast between the teachings of the Bible and what the world in which we live offers as an alternative. In the past, Christian values had saturated our culture to the point where even people who had no relationship to Jesus Christ still lived in ways that conformed to biblical teachings. What was right and what was wrong was fairly universally agreed upon 100 years ago, but today the heroes of the media and entertainment industry are almost always people who hold no moral beliefs compatible with what the Bible teaches. It is the best of times and the worst of times, and the future survival of our way of life may hang in the balance of how our society deals with the moral choices available in the future.
One of the causes of the current moral climate of America, in this writer's view, is the failure of the Christian community to make convincing arguments for the validity of the biblical system. There is a need to speak frankly about moral choices, how they are to be made according to the Bible, and what the consequences are when these standards are not followed. We would like to attempt to do that in this article. We are going to select general issues that we believe make our point clearly, but obviously we cannot consider every point that could be made.
Sex Is Not a Spectator
nor Recreational Sport
The Bible presents sex as a creation of God designed specifically to bring one man and one woman together in a very special relationship. Genesis 2:24 summarizes the creation account by saying, "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father and cleave unto his wife and they shall become one flesh." That oneness is used in the New Testament to describe the relationship of the Church (the people who make it up) and Christ (John 10:16; John 15;12-17;John 17:21; Ephesians 4:5; 1 John 4:12). In 1 Corinthians 6:15-17, Paul graphically describes the man who goes to a prostitute as one who united the Church of Christ with a whore, thereby contaminating the whole spiritual body. People who engage in sexual unions outside of marriage are described as adulterers and fornicators regardless of what the illicit sexual behavior may have been (see Romans 1:24-32; Galatians 5:19-21; and Ephesians 2:1-3). This is not to suggest that the Bible fails to see the enjoyment in a sensual way of sex. Proverbs 5:19 tells a man to be satisfied with his wife's breast. 1 Corinthians 7:2-5 tells couples not to allow themselves to become vulnerable to sexual temptation by going too long without sexual relationships. Paul talked about the importance of not burning with passion in 1 Corinthians 7:9. Sex is portrayed as a beautiful special thing, built into God's plan for marriage and in fulfillment of the needs of men and women.
Detractors of the Bible will suggest that all of that is well and good, but far too restrictive. When your hormones are working overtime, waiting until you are ready for marriage financially and emotionally is not reasonable to many people. In this view, sex is something to enjoy by any method you wish to use. How you engage in sexual activity, with whom, and how often is your own business.
This is an appealing viewpoint and obviously one that our society to a great extent has bought into. Recreational sex and its spin-offs are a huge industry and one that is growing. Does the biblical plan make sense? Is recreational sex really a problem, or is the Christian viewpoint just a narrow-minded attempt to restrict and control other people. We would like to make three points that support the biblical position. These are logical, factual points, not theological or philosophical exercises.
Recreational sex is a naive view that fails to bring the total promise of sexual pleasure. The promoters of recreational sex tout one primary objective to sex--maximum ejaculation or total orgasm. This viewpoint puts sex on a totally mechanical level. As long as you can find enough stimulation to achieve ejaculation or orgasm, you have achieved the goal. I can feel nothing but pity for people who have their sexual understanding reduced to such a level. What this does is to equate recreational sex to masturbation, which in fact many recreational sex promoters publicly advertise. In a marriage, there is a oneness in which both partners have as a major concern the needs of their partner. The sexual experience brings a oneness and a unity to the relationship that speaks of commitment. Studies by researchers like Masters and Johnson have consistently shown higher satisfaction in sexual relationships among long-term sexual partners than short ones.
Recreational sex by its nature is medically dangerous. Any sexual behavior that involves more than one partnerautomatically makes the probability of contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD) high. Those who study venereal diseases tell us that when you have sex with someone, you essentially have sex with everyone that person has had sex with as well as their partners. Moving fluids from one person's body to another carries all bacteria, viruses, and chemicals that are in that person's body to yours. The STD rates in America are staggering and continue to grow astronomically as more and more people experience sex with multiple partners. As medicine attempts to find ways of treating AIDS, herpes, chlamydia, human papilomis, gonorrhea, syphilis, etc., new STDs continue to show up. The cost is staggering in every way we can imagine, and that fact will not change.
Violation of biblical moral standards always brings negative results. Data never supports any claims of superiority in alternative lifestyles to the Bible. People who live together before marriage do not have a lower divorce rate than those who do not--in fact, the divorce rate is significantly higher. (There are many studies that support this--see "The Myth of Safe Sex" by Robert Noble, Readers Digest, September, 1991, page 24-25; "Really Good Sex" by William Frey, Christianity Today, August 19, 1991, page 12.) In these studies, emotional wellness and happiness in marriage are also consistently higher. Many recreational sex techniques bring damage to the reproductive systems of men and women. The use of pornography can become an addiction that causes enormous problems for all associated with the addicted person. Claims of positive results are simply not seen in the lives of those who immerse themselves in lifestyles in opposition to the biblical standard.
Altruistic Values Are
Impossible Without God
Many of my atheist friends will bristle at any suggestion that the Bible is necessary to have altruistic values, and I want to make it clear that I am not saying that atheists are bad people. The fact is though that there are two things followers of the Bible have that those who reject the Bible do not have:
A standard to go by. The Bible gives a solid, clear, workable set of rules to live by. If a follower of Christ needs to know whether something is right or wrong, they can go to the Bible and find out. As we have already tried to point out, the teachings of the Bible work. We have only looked at one area, but similar arguments can be made for all decisions--not just decisions about sex.
What standard is used by a person who rejects the Bible (or any other religious standard) as a way of making decisions? Any answer that is given is based on current human understanding. It may be the person's feelings, the values of the peer group, the opinion of a particular philosopher or psychologist, the latest law, or the values of family or friends--but it is going to be a current human's view. No human has the ability to do this in a perfect way. Yesterday's expert is today's idiot and charlatans exist in such enormous numbers that a person can never be sure what the real reasons are behind the advice we have been given. Following Ayn Rand's advice as a college student destroyed the lives of many of my college friends and associates. The list of destructive leaders over the past 50 years is endless--O'Leary, Heffner, Russell, etc. All of these offered marvelous alternatives to biblical teachings that did not work.
Motivation to follow the standard. It is not difficult to follow a moral standard that allows you to do any and everything you want to do. Altruistic values are a far different matter. Many atheists would agree that promiscuous sex is not a good thing, but what motive would exist for not engaging in it if you think it will bring you great pleasure? Why would I find it a moral necessity to give food to a starving man when I myself might be faced with hunger?
As a Christian, my relationship with God and my faith in God provide me with motivation to do things and give things that might not be in my own self interest. It is not that I am afraid God will send me to hell if I do not do them as much as it is that the teachings of Jesus tell me that my life's goals revolve around serving others and bringing good things to others. I have learned to find joy in these things and to trust God to make things work. One frustration I have with the media is that they will put the failure of a Christian on the front page of the newspaper, but the work of churches in soup kitchens, relief efforts, care of AIDS patients, alcohol recovery programs, care of children, care of senior citizens, construction of hospitals, development of schools, etc., are never identified. No other religion or philosophy on earth does the amount of good in all areas than is done by people who do so as an expression of their convictions about Jesus Christ.
A skeptic will respond by pointing to negatives done by people who claimed to be Christians--the Crusades, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Jones, David Koresh, etc., as a result of Christianity. These groups and people may have worn the title Christian for political reasons, but what they did and practiced was in total violation of everything Jesus taught.
We have taken just two areas as demonstrations of the validity of the biblical standard. Our discussion has been in practical, realistic terms. The Bible does make sense and gives mankind the only workable guide for life and the motivation tools to make it work The verses in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 are absolutely true, and Romans 1:19-25 certainly describes the world in which you and I live.
For the time will come when men will not endure logical teaching, but will heap to themselves professors because they have itching ears (2 Timothy 4:3).
All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for correction, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness, that the man [or woman] of God may be perfect, completely furnished into every good thing (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
Expecting mother These two passages of Scripture provide an incredible challenge to people living in the twenty-first century. We live in a time when the media, some preachers, and popularizers of science are telling us that the old biblical absolutes simply do not apply to today's world. No thinking person can deny that things have changed from the first century. Women now have a choice as to whether to have a baby or not. Western society at least has removed its negative social view of sexual conduct so that nudity, premarital sex, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, cohabitation, and virtually any method of sexual practice are accepted. I recently had a college student say to me, "When you found the girl you wanted to marry, you were looking for a virgin. I'm looking for a woman who has had less than half a dozen men she has slept with." This may be an exaggeration for some of us, but it speaks strongly to the situation that exists in our culture today.
For many readers, what has been said above may be very depressing and even alarming. I would suggest that there is a very positive aspect to the situation in which we find ourselves. Never has there been a clearer contrast between the teachings of the Bible and what the world in which we live offers as an alternative. In the past, Christian values had saturated our culture to the point where even people who had no relationship to Jesus Christ still lived in ways that conformed to biblical teachings. What was right and what was wrong was fairly universally agreed upon 100 years ago, but today the heroes of the media and entertainment industry are almost always people who hold no moral beliefs compatible with what the Bible teaches. It is the best of times and the worst of times, and the future survival of our way of life may hang in the balance of how our society deals with the moral choices available in the future.
One of the causes of the current moral climate of America, in this writer's view, is the failure of the Christian community to make convincing arguments for the validity of the biblical system. There is a need to speak frankly about moral choices, how they are to be made according to the Bible, and what the consequences are when these standards are not followed. We would like to attempt to do that in this article. We are going to select general issues that we believe make our point clearly, but obviously we cannot consider every point that could be made.
Sex Is Not a Spectator
nor Recreational Sport
The Bible presents sex as a creation of God designed specifically to bring one man and one woman together in a very special relationship. Genesis 2:24 summarizes the creation account by saying, "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father and cleave unto his wife and they shall become one flesh." That oneness is used in the New Testament to describe the relationship of the Church (the people who make it up) and Christ (John 10:16; John 15;12-17;John 17:21; Ephesians 4:5; 1 John 4:12). In 1 Corinthians 6:15-17, Paul graphically describes the man who goes to a prostitute as one who united the Church of Christ with a whore, thereby contaminating the whole spiritual body. People who engage in sexual unions outside of marriage are described as adulterers and fornicators regardless of what the illicit sexual behavior may have been (see Romans 1:24-32; Galatians 5:19-21; and Ephesians 2:1-3). This is not to suggest that the Bible fails to see the enjoyment in a sensual way of sex. Proverbs 5:19 tells a man to be satisfied with his wife's breast. 1 Corinthians 7:2-5 tells couples not to allow themselves to become vulnerable to sexual temptation by going too long without sexual relationships. Paul talked about the importance of not burning with passion in 1 Corinthians 7:9. Sex is portrayed as a beautiful special thing, built into God's plan for marriage and in fulfillment of the needs of men and women.
Detractors of the Bible will suggest that all of that is well and good, but far too restrictive. When your hormones are working overtime, waiting until you are ready for marriage financially and emotionally is not reasonable to many people. In this view, sex is something to enjoy by any method you wish to use. How you engage in sexual activity, with whom, and how often is your own business.
This is an appealing viewpoint and obviously one that our society to a great extent has bought into. Recreational sex and its spin-offs are a huge industry and one that is growing. Does the biblical plan make sense? Is recreational sex really a problem, or is the Christian viewpoint just a narrow-minded attempt to restrict and control other people. We would like to make three points that support the biblical position. These are logical, factual points, not theological or philosophical exercises.
Recreational sex is a naive view that fails to bring the total promise of sexual pleasure. The promoters of recreational sex tout one primary objective to sex--maximum ejaculation or total orgasm. This viewpoint puts sex on a totally mechanical level. As long as you can find enough stimulation to achieve ejaculation or orgasm, you have achieved the goal. I can feel nothing but pity for people who have their sexual understanding reduced to such a level. What this does is to equate recreational sex to masturbation, which in fact many recreational sex promoters publicly advertise. In a marriage, there is a oneness in which both partners have as a major concern the needs of their partner. The sexual experience brings a oneness and a unity to the relationship that speaks of commitment. Studies by researchers like Masters and Johnson have consistently shown higher satisfaction in sexual relationships among long-term sexual partners than short ones.
Recreational sex by its nature is medically dangerous. Any sexual behavior that involves more than one partnerautomatically makes the probability of contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD) high. Those who study venereal diseases tell us that when you have sex with someone, you essentially have sex with everyone that person has had sex with as well as their partners. Moving fluids from one person's body to another carries all bacteria, viruses, and chemicals that are in that person's body to yours. The STD rates in America are staggering and continue to grow astronomically as more and more people experience sex with multiple partners. As medicine attempts to find ways of treating AIDS, herpes, chlamydia, human papilomis, gonorrhea, syphilis, etc., new STDs continue to show up. The cost is staggering in every way we can imagine, and that fact will not change.
Violation of biblical moral standards always brings negative results. Data never supports any claims of superiority in alternative lifestyles to the Bible. People who live together before marriage do not have a lower divorce rate than those who do not--in fact, the divorce rate is significantly higher. (There are many studies that support this--see "The Myth of Safe Sex" by Robert Noble, Readers Digest, September, 1991, page 24-25; "Really Good Sex" by William Frey, Christianity Today, August 19, 1991, page 12.) In these studies, emotional wellness and happiness in marriage are also consistently higher. Many recreational sex techniques bring damage to the reproductive systems of men and women. The use of pornography can become an addiction that causes enormous problems for all associated with the addicted person. Claims of positive results are simply not seen in the lives of those who immerse themselves in lifestyles in opposition to the biblical standard.
Altruistic Values Are
Impossible Without God
Many of my atheist friends will bristle at any suggestion that the Bible is necessary to have altruistic values, and I want to make it clear that I am not saying that atheists are bad people. The fact is though that there are two things followers of the Bible have that those who reject the Bible do not have:
A standard to go by. The Bible gives a solid, clear, workable set of rules to live by. If a follower of Christ needs to know whether something is right or wrong, they can go to the Bible and find out. As we have already tried to point out, the teachings of the Bible work. We have only looked at one area, but similar arguments can be made for all decisions--not just decisions about sex.
What standard is used by a person who rejects the Bible (or any other religious standard) as a way of making decisions? Any answer that is given is based on current human understanding. It may be the person's feelings, the values of the peer group, the opinion of a particular philosopher or psychologist, the latest law, or the values of family or friends--but it is going to be a current human's view. No human has the ability to do this in a perfect way. Yesterday's expert is today's idiot and charlatans exist in such enormous numbers that a person can never be sure what the real reasons are behind the advice we have been given. Following Ayn Rand's advice as a college student destroyed the lives of many of my college friends and associates. The list of destructive leaders over the past 50 years is endless--O'Leary, Heffner, Russell, etc. All of these offered marvelous alternatives to biblical teachings that did not work.
Motivation to follow the standard. It is not difficult to follow a moral standard that allows you to do any and everything you want to do. Altruistic values are a far different matter. Many atheists would agree that promiscuous sex is not a good thing, but what motive would exist for not engaging in it if you think it will bring you great pleasure? Why would I find it a moral necessity to give food to a starving man when I myself might be faced with hunger?
As a Christian, my relationship with God and my faith in God provide me with motivation to do things and give things that might not be in my own self interest. It is not that I am afraid God will send me to hell if I do not do them as much as it is that the teachings of Jesus tell me that my life's goals revolve around serving others and bringing good things to others. I have learned to find joy in these things and to trust God to make things work. One frustration I have with the media is that they will put the failure of a Christian on the front page of the newspaper, but the work of churches in soup kitchens, relief efforts, care of AIDS patients, alcohol recovery programs, care of children, care of senior citizens, construction of hospitals, development of schools, etc., are never identified. No other religion or philosophy on earth does the amount of good in all areas than is done by people who do so as an expression of their convictions about Jesus Christ.
A skeptic will respond by pointing to negatives done by people who claimed to be Christians--the Crusades, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Jones, David Koresh, etc., as a result of Christianity. These groups and people may have worn the title Christian for political reasons, but what they did and practiced was in total violation of everything Jesus taught.
We have taken just two areas as demonstrations of the validity of the biblical standard. Our discussion has been in practical, realistic terms. The Bible does make sense and gives mankind the only workable guide for life and the motivation tools to make it work The verses in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 are absolutely true, and Romans 1:19-25 certainly describes the world in which you and I live.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Four Foundations of Life
http://doesgodexist.org/JanFeb01/FourFoundationsOfLife.html
Some time ago, I had the privilege of hearing a fine lesson taught by Oliver Rogers in Bloomington, Indiana. The lesson dealt with the art of successful living, and the more I studied my notes from that lesson the more it seemed to be a great lesson of Christian evidences. I would like to share some of the of the concepts of that lesson with you.
All of us--whether we are atheists, agnostics, Christians, or of some other persuasion--have a keen interest in living successful lives. No one wants to be unhappy, frustrated, depressed, angry, empty, or any number of other conditions described by similar adjectives. We all want to be satisfied, fulfilled, happy, at peace, secure, and so forth. The CA big question is, "How do we do this?" What formula will give us a good life? The answer to this question can be derived both logically and biblically. There are four obvious foundations that every human being can build which will guarantee the best possible life we can live. This is not to say that there will be no problems or calamities in our lives, but it is to say that we can have a high quality of life no matter what happens, and it is also to say that we can control our lives and consciously build foundations that lead to this high quality. Let us now look at four basic foundations which lead to a successful life, and let us examine these logically as well as pointing out the biblical basis of each of these areas.
The Foundation of Faith
For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith (Romans 1:17).
But without faith it is impossible to please Him: for he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him (Hebrews 11:6).
It may seem somewhat redundant to point out that the Bible places an emphasis on faith. The point that every person needs to contemplate on this matter, however, is that faith is essential to having a successful life. This is admittedly a controversial statement, but it is one that lies in a basic argument for the existence of God.
The person who believes in God has a sharp, identifiable purpose in life. They also have a guide for making decisions. The person who has no faith, on the other hand, has no fixed purpose in life. The only reason to live is the physical pleasure or emotional reward that one may obtain from whatever they do. There is no guarantee that the reward or pleasure will actually be there or that it will be what is expected. There is no Building supplies assurance that the basis of making decisions is correct. There is no security offered beyond the present and no common bond between oneself and a body of people who share a common bond or security.
It is interesting to notice how easy it is for those promoting things that offer a substitute for faith to draw adherents. We have discussed the religious nature of ancient astronaut claims, alien involvement in the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, psychic phenomena, transcendental meditation, and a myriad of other similar claims in this publication in the past. For many people, this kind of thing offers a faith substitute but one that is woefully inadequate. It is the author's contention that the instability frequently observed in individuals involved in these things is a reflection of that inadequacy. I have personally observed in myself and others that atheists are frequently angry, hostile people--even with those they love.
Faith is not an inherited characteristic. Faith is something that is consciously built. The Bible tells us that we can know there is a God "through the things He has made" (Romans 1:19-23) and makes statements like "the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork" (Psalm 19:1). The Bible tells us we can know that God is and gives us ways of building our faith, and that is what the Does God Exist? work which produces this bulletin is all about. It is important to understand, however, that one can have the element of faith in the head and not have faith in the heart; and having it in one's head alone is not the foundation we are discussing. Nikita Krushchev, the famous Russian leader, could quote Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from memory, according to his contemporaries. Obviously he did not have a sustaining faith, and in fact epitomizes a man who had an angry, unhappy life.
The sad part of all this is that some who claim to be Christians have as poor a foundation for life as Khrushchev did. All of us must strive to build our faith and develop a confidence that sustains our lives. Romans 1:19-23 says that we can know there is a God--that there is no excuse for unbelief. We must strive to build our faith--not just wait for God to pour faith into us against our will or without our involvement.
The Foundation of Honesty
Working Carpenter
Recompense no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men (Romans 12:17).
One of the least recognized contributors to having a successful life is the foundation of honesty. Even the Internal Revenue Service receives literally thousands of dollars of "guilt money" every year. This is money sent in anonymously by taxpayers to pay for cheating that they have done on their income tax forms. Every so often, I have had a student come in and confess something that they had done in my class that was dishonest to "clear their conscience."
In Acts 24:16, Paul emphasizes the necessity of always having "a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men." There is no way that a blatantly dishonest person will ever be happy or have a secure and positive life. The correlation between dishonesty and the occurrence of emotional and mental problems is extremely high at all levels of society, but especially when a high socioeconomic level is considered.
Honesty is critical for successful living in religion also. In 2 Corinthians 4:1-2, we read:
Therefore seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not; But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.
There are many unhappy religious people. In a huge percentage of people, their unhappiness is rooted in dishonesty and a deceitful handling of the word of God--either by themselves or by someone else. This lack of honesty can involve holding on to a religious position when it clearly is not found in God's word. It can involve placing taboos or restrictions on someone that are not found in the Bible. It can simply be someone who has all the answers and is unwilling to recognize that it is possible to misunderstand something. And it can also be the selfish, egotistical, criminal attempt to gain money or reputation by abusing and using others. We can be the cause or the victims of such people, but either way the result is a poor life built on a poor foundation.
The solution to religious deceit is to not rely upon others for our beliefs and understandings. We cannot trust any human, but we can trust God. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12). "Study to show yourselves approved unto God, a workman that needeth not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15).
The Foundation of Moral Integrity
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).
No one feels good about his or her life when they are lacking moral integrity. I make that statement on the basis of personal experience. During my years as an atheist, regardless of how much I claimed that I was happy and fulfilled, I was empty and frustrated. The anger and hostility evident Bricklayer building a wall in the lives of a huge percentage of atheists is a testimony to this fact.
In Galatians 6:7, we are told, "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." It has been said that we sow a bushel of wild oats and get a whole field of trouble. Some of us have a hard time learning that, but life will teach you that it is true--eventually.
The beauty of Christianity in all this is its corrective capability. In the passage in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 quoted above, Paul states "and such were some of you." These people had at one time been deeply involved in immorality, but their lives were no longer torn by the consequences of their life style. Paul says that they had been justified by becoming Christians. Being washed in the blood of Christ did to them what a justifying typewriter does to a typewritten page. When we justify a page, every line--no matter how out-of-balance and irregular it is--becomes the same. The blood of Christ does the same for us, taking our lives and bringing them even with God's design. We no longer need to be wracked with guilt by what we have done. We are cleansed, justified, and able to start over from where we are. There is no guilt in the Christian system. Our lives can be positive, secure, harmonious, and peaceful. We also can be people of ever-increasing moral integrity and our lives will be that much better as God gives us the ability to overcome the temptations around us.
The Foundation of Truth
Sanctify them through thy truth: Thy word is truth (John 17:7).
Philosophers and "great thinkers" have tried all kinds of interesting ideas to determine what "truth" is. A person who is not sure that what they are following is true is going to be an unhappy and insecure person. Listening to philosophers debate what truth is has always been a very depressing experience to me because it is obvious that they will never agree. In fact, based upon his own mental abilities, man will never know what truth is because one simply puts one fallible man's ideas against another fallible man's ideas. House
The Bible claims to have truth. If people will examine the teachings and principles developed in the Bible, they can see even in their limited human intellect a system that is radically different from man's. Not only is the system absolute in claim and design, but it is beautifully workable. We can be confident that we have truth if what we use to guide our lives is the Bible. This confidence not only is found in the claims the Bible makes, but also in observing the success that application of biblical principles brings. In moral areas especially, we can see the wisdom of biblical teaching. As man has gone through countless attempts to change or replace the biblical standards of moral conduct, he has consistently reaped all kinds of disasters. The system works and has consistently worked in the lives of people who have been willing to apply it to their lives for nearly 2,000 years. Something that is fraudulent cannot stand that test of time.
This is not to say that everything that men teach in the name of religion or the Bible is true. In Romans 1:21-25, we read:
Because that, when they knew God, they gloried Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.
Notice that "the truth of God" can be "changed.into a lie" by men. All one has to do is to look at the myriad of different teachings found in religions (all of which claim to be Christian) and the statement of the writer of Romans is clearly seen. We cannot trust men to give us truth. Only by the study of God's Word can we be confident that we have the "truth that will set us free." People work at making the Bible hard to understand and require "expert" help to get its message which is usually a man who knows no more than anyone else. By simply reading what Jesus said and following His message, we can have the answers to life's most complex problems.
If your life is not what you want it to be, there is an answer. All four of the foundations we have discussed are things that you can do! You can build a strong working faith in God by examining the evidence for His existence. You can build a life style of honesty and credibility which will serve you in all aspects of what you do. You can develop moral integrity in all aspects of your life. You can find truth through the study of God's word. You do not acquire these things genetically nor can they be given to you by someone else. They are foundations you lay and upon which you build your life.
Some time ago, I had the privilege of hearing a fine lesson taught by Oliver Rogers in Bloomington, Indiana. The lesson dealt with the art of successful living, and the more I studied my notes from that lesson the more it seemed to be a great lesson of Christian evidences. I would like to share some of the of the concepts of that lesson with you.
All of us--whether we are atheists, agnostics, Christians, or of some other persuasion--have a keen interest in living successful lives. No one wants to be unhappy, frustrated, depressed, angry, empty, or any number of other conditions described by similar adjectives. We all want to be satisfied, fulfilled, happy, at peace, secure, and so forth. The CA big question is, "How do we do this?" What formula will give us a good life? The answer to this question can be derived both logically and biblically. There are four obvious foundations that every human being can build which will guarantee the best possible life we can live. This is not to say that there will be no problems or calamities in our lives, but it is to say that we can have a high quality of life no matter what happens, and it is also to say that we can control our lives and consciously build foundations that lead to this high quality. Let us now look at four basic foundations which lead to a successful life, and let us examine these logically as well as pointing out the biblical basis of each of these areas.
The Foundation of Faith
For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith (Romans 1:17).
But without faith it is impossible to please Him: for he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him (Hebrews 11:6).
It may seem somewhat redundant to point out that the Bible places an emphasis on faith. The point that every person needs to contemplate on this matter, however, is that faith is essential to having a successful life. This is admittedly a controversial statement, but it is one that lies in a basic argument for the existence of God.
The person who believes in God has a sharp, identifiable purpose in life. They also have a guide for making decisions. The person who has no faith, on the other hand, has no fixed purpose in life. The only reason to live is the physical pleasure or emotional reward that one may obtain from whatever they do. There is no guarantee that the reward or pleasure will actually be there or that it will be what is expected. There is no Building supplies assurance that the basis of making decisions is correct. There is no security offered beyond the present and no common bond between oneself and a body of people who share a common bond or security.
It is interesting to notice how easy it is for those promoting things that offer a substitute for faith to draw adherents. We have discussed the religious nature of ancient astronaut claims, alien involvement in the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, psychic phenomena, transcendental meditation, and a myriad of other similar claims in this publication in the past. For many people, this kind of thing offers a faith substitute but one that is woefully inadequate. It is the author's contention that the instability frequently observed in individuals involved in these things is a reflection of that inadequacy. I have personally observed in myself and others that atheists are frequently angry, hostile people--even with those they love.
Faith is not an inherited characteristic. Faith is something that is consciously built. The Bible tells us that we can know there is a God "through the things He has made" (Romans 1:19-23) and makes statements like "the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork" (Psalm 19:1). The Bible tells us we can know that God is and gives us ways of building our faith, and that is what the Does God Exist? work which produces this bulletin is all about. It is important to understand, however, that one can have the element of faith in the head and not have faith in the heart; and having it in one's head alone is not the foundation we are discussing. Nikita Krushchev, the famous Russian leader, could quote Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from memory, according to his contemporaries. Obviously he did not have a sustaining faith, and in fact epitomizes a man who had an angry, unhappy life.
The sad part of all this is that some who claim to be Christians have as poor a foundation for life as Khrushchev did. All of us must strive to build our faith and develop a confidence that sustains our lives. Romans 1:19-23 says that we can know there is a God--that there is no excuse for unbelief. We must strive to build our faith--not just wait for God to pour faith into us against our will or without our involvement.
The Foundation of Honesty
Working Carpenter
Recompense no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men (Romans 12:17).
One of the least recognized contributors to having a successful life is the foundation of honesty. Even the Internal Revenue Service receives literally thousands of dollars of "guilt money" every year. This is money sent in anonymously by taxpayers to pay for cheating that they have done on their income tax forms. Every so often, I have had a student come in and confess something that they had done in my class that was dishonest to "clear their conscience."
In Acts 24:16, Paul emphasizes the necessity of always having "a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men." There is no way that a blatantly dishonest person will ever be happy or have a secure and positive life. The correlation between dishonesty and the occurrence of emotional and mental problems is extremely high at all levels of society, but especially when a high socioeconomic level is considered.
Honesty is critical for successful living in religion also. In 2 Corinthians 4:1-2, we read:
Therefore seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not; But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.
There are many unhappy religious people. In a huge percentage of people, their unhappiness is rooted in dishonesty and a deceitful handling of the word of God--either by themselves or by someone else. This lack of honesty can involve holding on to a religious position when it clearly is not found in God's word. It can involve placing taboos or restrictions on someone that are not found in the Bible. It can simply be someone who has all the answers and is unwilling to recognize that it is possible to misunderstand something. And it can also be the selfish, egotistical, criminal attempt to gain money or reputation by abusing and using others. We can be the cause or the victims of such people, but either way the result is a poor life built on a poor foundation.
The solution to religious deceit is to not rely upon others for our beliefs and understandings. We cannot trust any human, but we can trust God. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12). "Study to show yourselves approved unto God, a workman that needeth not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15).
The Foundation of Moral Integrity
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).
No one feels good about his or her life when they are lacking moral integrity. I make that statement on the basis of personal experience. During my years as an atheist, regardless of how much I claimed that I was happy and fulfilled, I was empty and frustrated. The anger and hostility evident Bricklayer building a wall in the lives of a huge percentage of atheists is a testimony to this fact.
In Galatians 6:7, we are told, "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." It has been said that we sow a bushel of wild oats and get a whole field of trouble. Some of us have a hard time learning that, but life will teach you that it is true--eventually.
The beauty of Christianity in all this is its corrective capability. In the passage in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 quoted above, Paul states "and such were some of you." These people had at one time been deeply involved in immorality, but their lives were no longer torn by the consequences of their life style. Paul says that they had been justified by becoming Christians. Being washed in the blood of Christ did to them what a justifying typewriter does to a typewritten page. When we justify a page, every line--no matter how out-of-balance and irregular it is--becomes the same. The blood of Christ does the same for us, taking our lives and bringing them even with God's design. We no longer need to be wracked with guilt by what we have done. We are cleansed, justified, and able to start over from where we are. There is no guilt in the Christian system. Our lives can be positive, secure, harmonious, and peaceful. We also can be people of ever-increasing moral integrity and our lives will be that much better as God gives us the ability to overcome the temptations around us.
The Foundation of Truth
Sanctify them through thy truth: Thy word is truth (John 17:7).
Philosophers and "great thinkers" have tried all kinds of interesting ideas to determine what "truth" is. A person who is not sure that what they are following is true is going to be an unhappy and insecure person. Listening to philosophers debate what truth is has always been a very depressing experience to me because it is obvious that they will never agree. In fact, based upon his own mental abilities, man will never know what truth is because one simply puts one fallible man's ideas against another fallible man's ideas. House
The Bible claims to have truth. If people will examine the teachings and principles developed in the Bible, they can see even in their limited human intellect a system that is radically different from man's. Not only is the system absolute in claim and design, but it is beautifully workable. We can be confident that we have truth if what we use to guide our lives is the Bible. This confidence not only is found in the claims the Bible makes, but also in observing the success that application of biblical principles brings. In moral areas especially, we can see the wisdom of biblical teaching. As man has gone through countless attempts to change or replace the biblical standards of moral conduct, he has consistently reaped all kinds of disasters. The system works and has consistently worked in the lives of people who have been willing to apply it to their lives for nearly 2,000 years. Something that is fraudulent cannot stand that test of time.
This is not to say that everything that men teach in the name of religion or the Bible is true. In Romans 1:21-25, we read:
Because that, when they knew God, they gloried Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.
Notice that "the truth of God" can be "changed.into a lie" by men. All one has to do is to look at the myriad of different teachings found in religions (all of which claim to be Christian) and the statement of the writer of Romans is clearly seen. We cannot trust men to give us truth. Only by the study of God's Word can we be confident that we have the "truth that will set us free." People work at making the Bible hard to understand and require "expert" help to get its message which is usually a man who knows no more than anyone else. By simply reading what Jesus said and following His message, we can have the answers to life's most complex problems.
If your life is not what you want it to be, there is an answer. All four of the foundations we have discussed are things that you can do! You can build a strong working faith in God by examining the evidence for His existence. You can build a life style of honesty and credibility which will serve you in all aspects of what you do. You can develop moral integrity in all aspects of your life. You can find truth through the study of God's word. You do not acquire these things genetically nor can they be given to you by someone else. They are foundations you lay and upon which you build your life.
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