With Pride

On a State Visit in Great Britain

It continues to amaze me that this handsome couple could be and are the President and First Lady of the United States.  Perhaps the day will come when we have finally moved beyond racial politics and a now suppressed but still real fixation with skin color.  But that day has not yet arrived, which makes the presidential election of 2008 such a momentous one.  President Obama's substantial victory was a small but important step away from racialism.  For a moment, we transcended our politics.  The racialist fear-mongering of the so-called tea party and the ugly politics-as-usual games that have followed since November 4, 2008, do not detract from that moment.  We did good that day.  We have a right to be proud.  And I am proud that this couple represents me in the eyes of the world.

God & the Big Bang

"The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation.  It forces the conclusion that nature had a definite beginning.  I cannot see how nature could have created itself.  Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that."

Francis S. Collins

The Language of God,  p. 67

Our Fish vs. Their Fish

I couldn't pass this one up.  In preparing yesterday's post on the idea of a reverse God-of-the-gaps, I came across this image (here) of the Christian fish symbol (an ancient symbol from Greek for fish, ichthys, which was taken to stand for "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour."), labelled as "Truth," eating the Darwinian fish parody of the Christian fish.  The image beautifully images the current war going on between religion-ism and science-ism, a subset of the larger culture war engulfing our nation.  Somewhere on line there is probably a Darwin fish eating the Christian fish.

One side labels itself "Truth" and eats (destroys, consumes) the other.  There's no room for dialogue, no place for the old-fashioned concept of a market place of ideas—just warfare between two ideologies masking themselves as "true" religion and "true" science.  We really do need to find another way.  I guess that's the point.  Religion is about faith.  Science is about investigation.  Neither is inherently an ideology, but protagonists on both sides have turned them into battlefield ideologies.  And the rule is that war always has unintended consequences, rarely good.  We need another way.

A Link of Interest

A member of First Presbyterian Church, Lowville, recently wrote an excellent letter to the editor of the Watertown Daily Times concerning the birther controversy.  You can read it at this link.  Good one, Pat!

Reverse God-of-the-Gaps

In his 2006 lecture, "The Origin of the Universe," cosmologist and physicist Stephen Hawking discusses the history of scientific views of the origins of the universe.  Until the 1920s, scientists generally accepted Aristotle's philosophical argument that the universe is eternal and without a moment of creation based on the premise that things eternal are superior to things created.  The findings of astronomy and physics, however, forced scientists to begin to change their minds, and in 1965 they obtained conclusive proof that the universe was created with the discovery of "a faint background of microwaves throughout space."

Hawking's larger conclusion is that these microwaves form a map of the sky.  He writes, "So look well at the map of the microwave sky.  It is the blue print for the structure in the universe.  We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe. "  Then, tongue in cheek, he continues, "God really does play dice."

That is to say, "God" isn't really in control of the ongoing process of creation but, rather, like a gambler rolled the dice and our present universe is what came up. Hawking has been quoted in a more recent news posting as saying, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.  Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.  It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”  Creation is a spontaneous event.  Once it happened random forces were at work.  We don't need God to explain any of this.

Let's see: science by definition excludes supernatural explanations of natural phenomena.  Hawking, as a scientist, discerns entirely natural explanations for the origin of the universe.  He sees no scientific reason for God to have created the universe and therefore God is not the creator of the universe.  He does not see, in other words, what the blinders of his discipline preclude him from seeing and therefore what he does not see does not exist.  This is nothing more than reverse God-of-the-gaps thinking.  Whereas believers have often asserted the presence of God in the gaps where science has not yet made discoveries, here we have a scientist asserting the absence of God because he doesn't see God using the cognitive tools of science, which by definition exclude God from the scientific equation to start with.  Science creates a God-gap and then scientists assert that since they don't see God therefore they don't need God to explain the natural phenomena they study.

It is understandable that large majorities of scientists reject religion, but one wishes they would just leave theology alone altogether.  Not believing in God, they make really lousy theologians.  Of course they don't see God's hand in the origin of the universe.  As scientists they can't.  As people of faith, we do.  And, actually, we are thankful for the findings of science because they only further substantiate how incredibly awe-inspiring God's creation is.  But, come on, guys (& gals), you do your science thing and let us do our theology thing.  The problem is, of course, that some scientists are engaged in a war with fundamentalist religionists and feel a need to lob their bombshells into theological territory.  All they produce for their trouble, however, is theological gibberish.

Review Notice

There is a new book review on Rom Phra Khun Reviews. The book is  Not God's Type: A Rational Academic Finds a Radical Faith by Holly Ordway.

Today is International We're Still Here Day

Harold Egbert Camping

As many readers know,  ultra-conservative Christian radio broadcaster, Harold Camping predicted some time ago that the Christ's second coming was going to take place at 6:00 p.m. last evening, May 21st.  He based his prediction on a complex set of "computations" dervided from various cherry-picked Bible passages.  The computations (using the word loosely) are described in a Time NewsFeed posting entitled, "By the Numbers: How May 21, 2011, Was Calculated to Be Judgment Day."  Camping is so ultra-right wing that other evangelical and conservative groups and scholars—even those who themselves believe that the end times are coming soon—made light of his prediction.  (CNN interviewed one conservative Texas pastor who basically said that Camping is wrong, but if he's right I'm ready).

Robert Fitzpatrick - believer

One cannot help but wince at this sort of thing.  Camping's predictions (this is his second time, the first being 1994) only serve to make the Christian faith look silly.  How can anyone take this kind of religion seriously?  We don't, of course, but as people of faith we tend to get lumped in with "people of faith" like him.  His use of the Bible, furthermore, only perpetuates the misuses and misunderstandings regarding the nature of scripture that we must already contend with.  It is sad to see the Bible used to "prove" outlandish pet theories and narrow ideologies.  Finally, we can only shake our heads sadly at those, such as New Yorker Robert Fitzpatrick, who allow themselves to be duped by the likes of Camping and to invest their life savings, as Fitzpatrick did, advertising his message.

A parishioner recently asked me about the description of the last days in II Timothy 3:1-9.  He noted that it sounds a lot like things going on today.  It does indeed, but it also sounds like the 1960s, the 1930s, and numerous other periods in human history.  Honestly, the first generation of Christians were wrong about the end times, which they believed were coming soon. Apocalyptic thinking was "in the air" in their times, and they appropriated it for their faith. Their descriptions of the end times in and of themselves provide, however, are still useful to us.  They provide excellent portraits of how human brokenness affects us and our world.  It serves no purpose, however, to perpetuate this sad, silly game of predicting the second coming will come on this day or that.  Enough already.

Oh, and welcome to the Day After. Hope you didn't give the car away.

Thinking About God

Prof. Stephen Hawking

In June 2010, ABC journalist Diane Sawyer interviewed the renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking.  In the course of the interview, the question of God came up, and Hawking told Sawyer that,

"'What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of as God,' Hawking told Sawyer. 'They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.'"

He's right.  Given the almost limitless size of the universe, a human-like God who is a person in the sense that we usually understand personhood is impossible.  In biblical times, when the Earth was believed to be flat, covered by a dome from which the celestial bodies hung, and encompassed by vast oceans below and above, it was quite possible to believe that a "human-like person" could create the universe and rule it from heaven.  Hawking is correct in saying that kind of a God seems not possible.

Biblical view of the Universe

This being the case, some conclude that there is no God.  Some conclude that there may be a "god-principle," but there is no personal God. Tens of millions of believers of various religions, meanwhile, maintain their firm belief in a personal God.  Effectively, they still live in the tiny universe of ancient times.  They know that universe doesn't exist, but they have not adjusted their thinking about God.  When atheist scientists ridicule the notion of God, it is this old-fashioned God they find so amusing and impossible.

There is another way to think about God and the universe, however, using both modern cosmology and traditional theology as if they are the two lenses of a pair of glasses.  Together they bring God into a single focus as being at one and the same time Beyond all of our conceptions of what God might be and yet Present in ways we can experience personally.  On the one hand, it is reasonable to think that Something existed before the universe and caused it to happen—created it.  That Something, logically, is God.  On the other hand, as people of faith we know that there is also Something greater than us that still touches us in ways that can be deeply moving and personal.  We know that prayers are answered.  We know that people of all cultures have mystical experiences.  We know that there are aspects of life that cannot be explained by mechanistic evolutionary theory.  That experientially present Something is God.

When we look through the twin lenses of science and faith, then, we see God who is both Beyond and Present, both transcendently universal and profoundly personal.  Amen.

The Search for the Historical Judas

"The Judas Kiss" by Doré.

 In May 2006, the National Geographic did a feature story on the newly discovered and translated Gospel of Judas entitled appropriately enough "The Judas Gospel."  For a brief moment, some thought that this new "gospel" (it's not really a gospel), which dates back to within about 100 years of Jesus, might force us to reconsider the entire story of Jesus' last week and death on the cross. The Gospel of Judas, after all, presents a very different picture of  Judas.  There he is the only disciple who truly understands who Jesus was and received special secret instruction from Jesus.  In the end, however, the Gospel of Judas proved to be a tempest in a teapot.  The last week in the life of Jesus was not rewritten.  Christians were not forced to readjust their faith.  The world went on as before.  The Gospel of Judas doesn't even actually "shed new light on history's most hated man" in spite of the claims of the National Geographic.

In an article entitled,  "Why Did Judas Do it?", written at the time, James Martin observed that all we really know about Judas Iscariot historically is that he was one of Jesus' inner circle of disciples and that he handed Jesus over to the authorities.  We don't know what "Iscariot" means although there are a number of theories (speculations, really).  We don't know why Judas betrayed Jesus.  We don't even know how he died, since the New Testament gives two different versions.  Matthew writes that he hanged himself; the Book of the Acts says he fell and blew apart.

In its own time, the Gospel of Judas was rejected by most Christians as not being a true account of Jesus or Judas.  It may have been the product of a small sect or splinter group critical of the rest of the Christian movement and its leaders. The theology in the "gospel" is different, believing among other things that the God of the Hebrews is an inferior God and that Jesus is the Son of a the highest, true God, who did not create the spiritually inferior physical universe.

What the Gospel of Judas does reveal is that a century after Jesus Christians were already divided theologically.  Early Christians understood Christ in different ways and fought with each other about their views.  That is to say that the search for the historical Judas, like the quest for the historical Jesus brings us back to the early church.  It is through their writings and interpretations that we have access to the Jesus and Judas of history.  That is why the New Testament and especially the four gospels are so important to us: they are the only sources we have for our knowledge of  Christ.


Some Sources for the Gospel of Judas

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Text of the The Gospel of Judas.
Eduard Iricinschi, Lance Jenott, and Philippa Townsend, "The Betrayer's Gospel".
Pheme Perkins, "Good News From Judas?"

Consequences

Not more than about five minutes after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, a debate broke out between those who believe in torture and those who don't.  The whole debate is based on doctrines, ideology, and belief systems.  The believers avow that torture provided the Obama Administration with "key" clues that led to finding and "taking out" bin Laden.  Their evidential base is slim, but they are sure they are right.  The anti-torture folks, working from the same slim evidentiary base are equally adamant that torture did not provide any clues at all.  It couldn't have.  Torture never results in trustworthy information.  You see, it's a matter of faith between those who believe in torture and those who don't.  The actual truth of the matter hardly seems to matter.

Both sides of the debate have missed the point.  Torture is a form of violence, whether it "works" or not.  Violence has ugly, hurtful, and unintended immoral consequences.  Always.  Unavoidable.  Violence spawns violence.  It is the breeding ground of hatred and revenge.  For those naive souls who believe that in this case "the ends justify the means," it seems not to sink in that the ends and the means are the same thing.  When we practice the violence of torture, we become the violence we practice.  In some rare instances, perhaps, we do have to "fight fire with fire," but the usual way of putting out fire is with its opposite, a fire retardant.  In 999+ out of a thousand cases, the only antidote for violence is its opposite, peace.

No sane, moral person tortures another person.  The consequences to the human spirit are beyond bearing for the both the person being tortured and the one doing the torture.  It requires insanity and a lack of morality to torture—the kind of insanity and immorality spawned by violence.