Sunday 30th July
Imagine No Religion? #4
Job 38: 1-21; 1 John 4: 7-12
Speaking from a whirlwind God challenged Job:
“ Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements – surely you know.”
After a long, long silence and plenty of suffering on Job’s part, the LORD broke silence and deluged Job with question after question about the complexity of creation.
We all see and sense the marvels of nature. It is absolutely amazing that the universe is just right for life. If the earth tilted slightly differently on its axis, or the oxygen levels were fractionally different we wouldn’t exist. There are a host of details about the cosmos which led scientist, Paul Davies, call it the Goldilocks’ Universe.
Maybe you have read the marvellous science book by Bill Bryson ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything? Or watched David Attenborough’s wonderful documentaries about creatures, great and small? Possibly you’ve seen astronomer Brian Cox as he explores the wonders of the cosmos?
And, if you have … you probably have noticed that God is not invoked.
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The Big Explanation for life and all its mysteries these days is Science. Everyone, believer or unbeliever, lives under its umbrella and its compounding experimental discoveries.
In public conversation God is rarely evoked, unless it concerns terrorism, same-sex marriage, or euthanasia. The stereotype of Christians often suggests die-hard conservatives, clinging to old ways of thinking left behind in the dust of scientific discoveries. Religion is portrayed as anti-science, that people of faith are cloth heads.
The marvels, and indeed miracles, of science have transformed human understanding and experience. Electricity, computers, communications, transport, medicine and surgery are a handful of marvels which have transformed life. Religious believers have been as much involved in these discoveries as non-believers. The human genome project ( led by a Christian, Francis Collins) has had a huge impact on understanding life and disease. Few of us could explain what underlies these discoveries yet we all benefit.
There are scientists and others who say the idea of God needs to be left in the dust of history. One is the biologist, Richard Dawkins. His scientific writings have been very influential, but so have his opinions on religion – for which he has little time. He describes himself as a ‘passionate rationalist’, believing that evoking God is a cop-out.
His intellectual commitments are Scientism, the belief that Science explains Everything. It’s an assumption that pervades a secular world-view. Yet many Christians see no fight between faith and science.
Public examples include John Polkinghorne and Alister McGrath, both scientists and Christians, who are passionate about the intersection of faith and science. Over the centuries Christian theologians have been convinced that God speaks through two ‘books’ : nature and revelation, the glories and mysteries of earth and the heavens, and God’s revelation in history – for Christians especially the life and witness, the death and resurrection of Jesus.
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It’s only in the past couple of generations that a secular worldview has dominated our imagination and experience. The watershed was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution ( “Origin of Species” published 1859) which clearly showed that evolution was a natural process. Rather than a special creation the earth had evolved over billions of years. It shocked many Victorians to their core, and became a battleground for some believers and nonbelievers.
Richard Dawkins claims it was this theory that made it possible to be intellectually fulfilled atheist, but most people found such claims horrifying. There were many, many people in the working class of Victorian Britain who never darkened the doors of a church, but the default position was belief in God – who promised heaven or threatened hell. That was the default belief and fuel for many preachers, believers and non-believers.
In contrast the secular, naturalist view is that this life is all there is – in all its wonder and glory.
Traditional Christian belief in God assumed the existence of the soul. Humans were comprised of two realities – a human body thoroughly visible, and an invisible soul thought to be the essence of a person. The soul animated the body with eternal existence.
The doctrine was a marriage between Greek philosophy and Christian belief in an afterlife. The conviction was the soul returned to God at death. It’s not a biblical idea – which has two strands – death is the end, and resurrection is the new creation.
How this worked out was for centuries the Roman Catholic Church taught that unbaptised children who died in infancy would go to limbo, a kind of celestial waiting room. “Christian” babies were baptised as soon as possible after birth, as an insurance if they died early – they would go to heaven. This powerful idea of souls lingered.
What is the soul? Is it a tangible something or a metaphor for the profundity of human life? We speak of soul music, soul friends, soul food, old souls and so on to evoke something which sustains us.
A famous medical experiment in the early 20th century sought to weigh the soul with people being weighed before, and after death. The experiment was totally inconclusive.
In the 150 years since Darwin published his theory of natural selection – the theory has been greatly developed and become an established fact.
I have no argument with the reality that earth has evolved- from simple to complex life forms. Also I have no problem with the reality that our ideas and experience of God evolve.
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Our ideas, our beliefs, our commitments change as they receive new insights, ideas and possibilities. One core conviction that illustrates this is our belief that God is love.
You find this conviction in different books of the Bible. But it took a long while for this to seep into the consciousness of churches which all to often were preoccupied with a wrathful god.
An example in the Psalms is “The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” (Ps 103:8).
Or we might think about that famous verse John 3: 16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son …”
The quintessential passage is found in the first letter of John: “ Beloved, let us love one another because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God … for God is love…”
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This conviction is not subject to scientific experimentation.
It is not owned by culture, colour or creed.
Love exists in relationships – between people , communities and nations.
It cannot be measured, weighed, bought, sold, or traded.
Love creates freedom, expresses justice, practices mercy and kindness.
Love is gift, and it is universal – for believers and non-believers ,
people of all religions and people with none, the religious and spiritual.
Love is the within-ness, beyond-ness and boundary-less gift for all creation – creatures great and small – wrapped up in this good news that
“God is love and those who abide in love
abide in God, and God abides in them.”
Rev David Carter 30/7/17