Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between Guelph,
Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high school English,
Latin, Greek and science, and served as an officer in the Canadian
Armed Forces Reserve, retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
His latest book, Don’t Throw Out Your Bible,
from which the essay below is excerpted, should be availalbe
by the end of the year (2022). His monograph, A Christmas
You Can Believe In, can be requested as a PDF file from
graphikos@gto.net.
Many
scientists in the Enlightenment era were Christians who assumed
that what they were doing in their discoveries was “thinking
God’s thoughts after him.” They considered that
the scientist and the theologian were reading two books by the
same Author: the scientist reading the book of Nature (general
revelation), the theologian reading the book of Scripture (special
revelation). They assumed that, because “all truth is
God’s truth,” we should be able to read the two
books in ways that do not put them into conflict.
But
whereas science is expansive, theology tends to be static. Science
explores a universe of seemingly endless possibilities; it keeps
finding new things, and new ways of looking at old things, and
it self-corrects as new evidence comes to light. Christian theology,
on the other hand, explores a universe of about 1500 pages –
literary texts handed down from cultures long ago whose understanding
of the world, and whose ways of expressing what they understood,
were quite different from ours.
Those
texts tell us (rightly, I think) that God does not change, that
God’s word (whatever you understand that to be) “will
stand for ever.” But those “for evers” have
fostered a belief among many Christians (wrongly, I think) that
a statement of faith written with the understanding of a previous
age can remain prescriptive for all future ages, despite new
evidence that comes to light, whether in the field of religious
studies or in the physical sciences. The finality of God’s
revelation does not guarantee the finality of our interpretation.
Self-correction is equally necessary whether we’re reading
the book of nature or the book of Scripture. The conceptual
problem here is best described in the title of J. B. Phillips’
little book, Your God is Too Small.
Some
Christians have an understanding of God and the Bible that is
too inflexible to entertain the discoveries of modern science.
Likewise, the God whom many scientists reject (who ought indeed
to be rejected!) is but a caricature of that magnificent intelligence
who conceived everything they know and everything they still
want to know. Of course, we can no more comprehend such a God
than the family dog can comprehend what I’m doing at this
computer. But in fact the dog does know me, within the limits
of its doggy mind – as I think we can know God within
the limits of ours. It is because of those limits, which even
the ancient prophets understood, that we are cautioned against
idolatry – against imagining or creating any concept or
object that may portray God, or become a substitute for God,
but is too small to do justice to the God who really is.
WHY
ARE WE HERE?
In
the 2016 TV documentary, “Why
Are We Here?” Stephen Hawking contends
that the laws of nature afford sufficient explanation of why
things are what they are and do what they do. Because matter
behaves predictably according to its properties, properties
that we can discover, he says that no ‘outside cause’
is needed to explain anything. The recent discovery that sub-atomic
(or quantum) particles behave randomly, he notes, saves us from
determinism (the idea that every outcome is forever fixed) and
assures us that free will is real. Nevertheless, except at the
quantum level, all things remain explainable, and limited, by
natural law.
The
alternative to natural law, Hawking says several times in the
documentary, is magic. But magic is a fuzzy term that Hawking
leaves undefined. If by magic he means events that violate natural
law and are therefore impossible, we must certainly agree. But
if under the label of magic he includes acts of God, events
in which God may intervene in his universe, not by violating
natural law (that could get really messy) but by acting within
the limitations of the laws that he made, then we must disagree.
The real issue, of course, is not whether God could act in such
a way, but whether such a God exists at all. For if such a God
does exist, then it goes without saying that he should be able
to act in that way.
As
you would expect, Hawking’s documentary gives a brilliant
and engaging explanation of the causes that operate within the
material universe. But it doesn’t answer the question
that his title poses: Why are we here? At least, it doesn’t
answer that question in the sense in which we normally ask it.
The
Greek philosopher Aristotle (about 350 BC) considered that the
question Why? may have as many as four different meanings, and
therefore four different answers. He called those four meanings
‘causes,’ though they are not all causes in our
usual sense of that word. His ‘material’ cause refers
to the stuff of which a thing is composed; its ‘formal’
cause is the attributes that describe what it is; its ‘final’
cause is the purpose for which it exists; and its ‘efficient’
cause is whatever brought it about. To avoid an infinite regress
of efficient causes, he inferred that there must be an Unmoved
Mover, an uncaused efficient cause, a self-dependent ‘life’
and ‘thought’ that he called God. To fully understand
a thing, Aristotle thought, we need to answer as many of those
Why?s as may apply to the thing in question.
Hawking’s
focus on natural law addresses the material and formal causes
of things – namely, matter and its characteristics. It
also addresses final causes, but it can understand final causes
only as outcomes, not as goals or purposes, because goals and
purposes require purposeful agents and goal-setters. Likewise,
it addresses efficient causes, going as far back as the Big
Bang; but once it gets back there, it again faces the question:
Why is there something rather than nothing? So the Why? eventually
turns philosophical, or even religious, and that is the sense
in which most of us mean it when we ask Why are we here? It's
a question that the scientific method was never designed to
answer. Within the strict limits of the scientific method, Laplace
was right, Lemaître was right, and Hawking was right:
as long as they were doing science, they “had no need
of that hypothesis.” (A house inspector can do his job
perfectly well without knowing who built the house or who owns
it.) The use of empirical (observable or measurable) evidence,
in controlled and repeatable experiments, is the right method
for studying the sciences.
We
also depend on empirical evidence in circumstances where repeatable
experiments are not possible, as in law courts, journalism and
the study of history. In fact, we rely on empirical evidence
in dealing with many sorts of Truth questions. But it is not
of much use in making value judgments, as in questions of beauty
and goodness (unless we have already made up our minds on other
grounds what we want to call good and beautiful). And with one
exception, empirical evidence is of no more use for getting
knowledge of God than pesos are for getting groceries in North
Dakota. It is simply not the currency of that realm.
The
astronomer Robert Jastrow writes: “For the scientist who
has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story
ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance;
he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself
over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians
who have been sitting there for centuries.”
In
his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902), psychologist William James notes that religion typically
begins not with a reasoned theology or a religious organization,
but with some personal religious awareness or experience. Though
such experiences cannot be validated or falsified by empirical
means, they may nevertheless not be unreasonable. In 1788, the
Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, hardly one to fall
prey to superstition, described such an experience: Two things
fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe,
the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry
heavens above and the moral law within.
Curiously,
those are the same themes that you find in Psalm 19, written
some 2500 years earlier and half a world away: "The heavens
are telling the glory of God . . . The law of the LORD is perfect
. . . "
At
first glance, those two awe-inspiring things seem to be unrelated.
But both, in fact, are powerful manifestations of order: the
natural order around us, and the moral order within. And both
are universal. But each of us experiences them in our own way,
so perhaps you’ll indulge me while I share a personal
story.
A PERSONAL
STORY
I have
vivid memories from my childhood, slushing through the streets
of Vancouver and gazing up into the night sky, puzzled what
to make of the orderly progress of the stars. Did they point
to some Heavenly Architect, or to random chance? Were the heavens
really telling the glory of God, as the Bible says? Or did their
clockwork regularity prove only that blind matter always behaves
according to its properties? Would I one day become extinct,
swallowed up by eternal darkness? Or was my life part of some
grand design, which in due course would reach a divinely appointed
fulfillment?
That
was back in the days when Vancouver reliably had six weeks of
snow in winter and the night sky was not overwhelmed by the
lights of the city. I had just turned ten, so I felt the problem
intuitively but I lacked adequate words to express it. I found
the words several years later in a university English class
– on the last page of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Sons
and Lovers: Everywhere [spread] the vastness and terror
of the immense night – which is roused and stirred for
a brief while by the day, but which returns, and will remain
at last eternal, holding everything in its silence and its living
gloom . . . Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching
out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains,
went spinning round for terror, and holding each other in embrace,
there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny
and daunted.
Perhaps
you have felt that awful gloom, that daunting silence, that
frightening glimpse of your own insignificance. Perhaps, gazing
up into the night sky, you have felt that ultimate ambiguity
in which you perceive cosmic order one minute, chaos the next,
so that in an instant your emotion swings from awe to panic.
I
remember, too, how that ambivalence began to be resolved in
a Grade 10 science class. The teacher was drawing phloem and
xylem on the blackboard, explaining how the nutrient transport
system works in trees. “God!” I marveled, “I
wish I’d designed that!” Then looking up at the
ceiling, and beyond, I said sheepishly under my breath, “You
beat me to it, didn’t You!” Sunshine surged in through
the classroom windows and my heart felt strangely warmed. Here,
it seemed, was evidence of purposeful design, and the purpose
in that design seemed to include even me.
