Here is TG Darkly Podcast #4: The Triune God and Creation.
Use the player below to listen, or download the file.
Category: Science and Religion
James Kidder, a Christian paleontologist, comments on Al Mohler’s most recent critique of BioLogos. Mohler’s view of science seems to rest on an “appearance of age” argument. According to Mohler, “given a plain reading of Scripture, there is every reason that Christians should reject a uniformitarian presupposition.”
Big words like “uniformitarian” and “presupposition” make this idea sound smart. It is, however, profoundly anti-intellectual. I mean “anti-intellectual” here not in the sense of opposing the “academic elite” as a class. I mean it literally: adopting Mohler’s epistemology destroys our ability to “known” anything. It is, in fact, a relativistic, Gnostic and nihilistic world view, which is not at all compatible with Christianity.
Mohler effectively sells out a Christian realist view of the universe to Descartes’ Demon. Descartes was troubled by empiricism. How can I really know for certain, he wondered, whether the things I observe with my senses are “real?” I can’t prove, he reasoned, that the apparent reality I observe isn’t just an illusion created by a malevolent demon to keep me deluded. After all, whatever proofs I might offer would be part of the illusion. Thus he resolved to the one fact he thought could not be an illusion without self-contradiction: that of his own existence. “I think, therefore I am.”
Mohler’s epistemology says that Descartes was right to be afraid after all. The world that we think we observe, with its distant starlight, its layers of fossils, its rates of radioactive decay, and so on, is illusory. It may “appear” to be very old, but it is in fact something very different.
But, Mohler would say, Descartes’ Demon is vanquished because a “plain reading of scripture” tells us what really happened. Here is the insurmountable problem: a “plain reading of scripture” depends on “uniformitarian” assumptions about history. It assumes that the text we now have is really an ancient text, created thousands of years ago. It assumes that there really was a Jewish community and subsequently a Christian Church that existed in the past and preserved and handed these documents down as scripture. It assumes that people in the past used certain words that have meanings that can be known with a high degree of certainty through historical study.
If Mohler’s view of history is correct, then all of his assumptions about scripture are up for grabs. Absent a “uniformitarian” view of history, there is no way to be sure that what we now think of as “scripture” wasn’t poofed into existence with the “appearance of age” only moments ago. There is no way to know with any certainty what the “plain meaning” of these documents might be or whether there is any “language” with meaning at all. Indeed, there is no way to know whether Jesus really lived and truly rose again.
If your world view causes you to deny that history is real, that is a sure sign of trouble. Without history, there is no meaning.
In the previous podcast, we discussed God’s transcendence. Today we will cover a complementary topic: God’s immanence.
God’s “immanence” refers to God’s presence in creation. If we were to speak only of the ways in which God is “transcendent” – how He is other than, above, and hidden in creation – we would be left with a god that seems more like an abstract force than a person. The God of the Bible, the God revealed in Jesus Christ, however, is a personal and relational God. This sort of God does not merely wind up creation like a watch and then sit back to watch it run. This sort of God is always intimately involved with His creation.
God’s immanence in creation is bound to God’s character as a relational being characterized by love. In our next podcast, we’ll explore in more depth why the doctrine of the Trinity – the fact that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons in one substance – is vital to our theology of creation. For now, we’ll focus on the truth that all of creation is a product of who God is: as 1 John 4:8 says, “God is love.”
Creation is a product of love. God did not need to create. God in Himself knows no shortage of anything. The fact that God did create, then, reflects an outpouring of God’s generosity and love. Indeed, this is echoed in the poetic refrain of Genesis 1: God declares the creation ”good.” It is profitable to let this truth sink deep into our souls: the world God made is good because all of it is the abundant expression of God’s love. It is sadly true, of course, that the creation is affected by our sin, and we will discuss what this may mean in later podcasts. But it is still God’s creation, and therefore it is still in its essence good.
In fact, creation is continually sustained by God’s love. An important corollary to God’s immanence in creation is the contingency of the creation. If God were an absent watchmaker, the creation could run on its own, without anything from God beyond the initial wind-up. But if the creation is such that God is immanent in and throughout it, then the creation does not exist apart from God. The entire creation depends utterly on God’s sustaining will and power for its ongoing existence. From the perspective of Christian theology, there is simply no such thing as “nature” without God. And despite our sin, God has not abandoned the creation. This too is a thought worth meditating upon: God has never withdrawn His presence from the creation; He has not given up on what He has made; it all remains entirely His and it all continues because of His love.
This is not to say that God’s immanence in creation deprives creation of its own integrity. Creation is characterized by a beauty and order that reflects God’s own character. In His love, God has graced creation itself with causal freedom, within the probabilities of quantum physics and emergent physical laws.
Consider, for example, the Bird of Paradise, which engages in elaborate mating displays involving the construction of bowers out of colorful flowers and other materials. A female might be courted by several males, and ultimately will choose one as a mate based in some way on the quality of his display. We should not imagine that God somehow directly instructs the female about which mate to choose. The causal relationship between the male’s display and the female’s choice of mate has its own integrity, as does the evolutionary history of the birds’ plumage and social rituals. We can understand these causal relationships without invoking immediate Divine intervention. Classical theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas called this “secondary” causation.
But creation cannot run on its own, because there is a deeper, “primary” level of causation, which is God’s creative and sustaining will and power. In classical theological terms, all “secondary” causes, because they are entirely dependent on God’s “primary” causation, are subsumed within God’s “primary” causation. In this way, we can think of creation as possessing inherent created freedom while at the same time existing entirely under God’s sovereignty.
Yet, if creation possesses causal integrity at least at the level of secondary causation, why should we invoke God at all? Does God become an unnecessary appendage, to be elided by Ockham’s Razor? Should we repeat the famous adage of the astronomer Laplace – who, when the Emperor Napoleon asked where God fit into the cosmos, replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis?”
No, because the brute fact of the universe’s existence alone does not adequately explain all – or even most – of what we as human beings believe is important. We might suggest that the universe as brute fact alone cannot explain the fact of itself. Why does this universe exist? Why does this universe seem so finely tuned to produce the sort of carbon-based life that results in human beings who are able to reflect on the meaning of it all? The best response of materialist scientists to date is the “multiverse” theory – a curious idea that we’ll explore in a future podcast – one that, even if it could be considered a true “scientific” idea, merely pushes the “why” question, and indeed the “how” question of the origin of physical laws, further back into the mists.
Perhaps more importantly, the universe as brute fact alone cannot explain what is “good” or “just” or “beautiful” or “true,” unless we strip those terms of any real meaning. The universe as brute fact alone cannot account at all for “love” – again, unless we reduce and redefine the meaning of “love” to a mere interaction of brain chemicals. (We’ll also discuss this sort of reductionism in a future podcast).
Finally, from a Christian perspective, most importantly of all, the universe as brute fact alone cannot explain the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Indeed, a truly Christian perspective is one that views the universe through the lens of the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and not the other way around. We start where the scriptures start: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). We understand the immanence of God in creation most directly through Christ, the Word, the Logos, by whom all things were created, in whom all things hold together, and who himself took on flesh and became both creator and creature.
And this brings us back to the notion of God’s immanence. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…”, we read in John 3:16. Everywhere in creation, we should see the cross of Christ. We should see God present to such a degree that God Himself was willing to suffer and die in the person of the Son, in union with the groaning of all creation. All of creation – all of its beauty, all of its majesty, all of its power, all of its complexity, all of its simplicity, all of its suffering – points to the Logos, the Christ, who shaped it, who suffered with it and for it, and who will redeem it. This means that Christ himself is never far from any of us. He is not absent or far off; he has not abandoned what he has made. With the eyes of faith, wherever we look, we can see him; with the expectation of hope, in every season we can turn and find him right there; with the delight of love, we can enjoy and care for all the good things he has made as though he were enjoying them and caring for them along with us – for he is indeed Emmanuel, God With Us.
Here is the text of my second God and Creation podcast.
Categories
God of the Multiverse
A fascinating article on God and string theory from Christianity Today.
Here’s the text of my most recent podcast.
Introduction: God’s Transcendence
If we want to talk about God, creation, and science, where should we start? It’s easy to begin with conflict. We can claim that the rise of modern science is the root of cultural decline. We can dive right into some of the contentious questions about how the Bible and science relate to each other. We can adopt a posture of defensiveness about what Christians believe and the ways in which some people think science threatens our beliefs. There are, in fact, some important questions that we eventually will need to discuss along these lines.
But this is not a good place to start. The place to start is the place where all good Christian theology must start: with God. (Don’t be put off by the word “theology,” by the way – “theology” is just the very human process of thinking about God).
“In the beginning, God….” These are the first words of the Bible. “I believe in God….” These are the first words of the Apostle’s Creed. If we want to develop wisdom and understanding about the theme of our class – “God and Creation” – then we need to start with the source of everything: God.
But how do we know anything about God? And how can we say anything about God? As we go about our daily lives, we can’t converse with God in exactly the same way that we might talk with our families, friends or neighbors. We can’t touch or smell God like a patch of green grass or taste Him like an apple. We can’t see him like an image on our TV screens. In theological terms, there is a sense in which God is “hidden” to our human senses. Many great Christian thinkers, such as Martin Luther, spent a good part of their lives reflecting on the “hiddenness” of God.
It may surprise you to hear God described as “hidden.” Those of us who have been in the Church for a while often are much more familiar with talk of how God has revealed Himself to us. We seem to gravitate towards detailed and systematic explanations of what we think we can know about God. God has, of course, revealed Himself to us – or else there would be very little point in a class like this one. In scripture, in the proclamation of the Church, in the created world, and most importantly, in Jesus Christ, God has made Himself known. So why start with how God is “hidden?”
The very fact that God cannot be directly perceived by our ordinary human senses tells us something important about God and creation. God is “hidden” because He is “other.” God is not a patch of grass, and a patch of grass is not God. God is not an apple, and an apple is not God. God is not a television image or painting or statute, and a television image, painting or statute is not God. God is not a human being, and human beings are not God. God is not matter, the stuff of the created world, and matter is not God.
In theological terms, God is transcendent. “God” and “creation” are not the same things. This is a basic idea that distinguishes Christian understandings of God from many other philosophies and religions. In fact, as we’ll see when we discuss the cultural background of the Bible’s creation narratives a few weeks from now, this emphasis on God’s transcendence is one important difference between the Hebrew and Christian theologies of creation and the prevailing ideas in the world of the Biblical writers — the ancient near east. It also distinguishes Christian thinking about God and creation from some of the important ideas that are common today.
In fact, two of the most common contemporary perspectives really are very old ideas dressed up in new clothes. One is a notion you might hear, for example, on TV talk shows, in self-help books, or in popular music or movies: that “everything is one” or that “God is in everything.”
The first common popular idea is that “God is in everything and everyone.” In popular culture, what we hear often sounds more like “pantheism” — the notion that God and the world around us really are essentially the same thing. In fact, in American popular culture, this usually boils down to God becoming the same thing as our own individual selves. How often have you hear a line like this in a song or TV show or movie: “what you’ve been looking for has been right inside yourself all along” or “the most important thing is to find out who you are.”
The truth of God’s transcendence is that the real basis for a meaningful and good life lies outside of ourselves. We are part of creation, and therefore we are not God.
Before we become too critical here, we need to preview for a moment an important theme I’ll talk about in the next podcast: that God is also immanent. It is true that creation is an interconnected system and that God is always present throughout all of creation. It is also true that in our created humanity we are made for an intimate connection with God. It is right to look into ourselves as we seek God. An honest search of the self should reveal a nature that is not self-sufficient, that is not meant to be alone, that longs for relationship with a beauty and harmony and love that the individual self cannot sustain. The great Christian thinker Augustine called this a “God-shaped void” at the heart of every person.
Yet we also need to be clear that, while the search may begin with our selves, it must not stop there. God is “other,” so we must continue beyond ourselves, in fact beyond everything we think we see, in order to find Him. And the paradox here is that we can only find the true meaning and purpose of our own selves by going beyond ourselves and finding the God who is other than us and who made us.
The second common popular idea is that “matter is all there is.” Unfortunately, for some people this idea has become the standard for supposedly “scientific” thinking about the world. But this is not a “scientific” idea at all – it is a metaphysical statement (“metaphysical” just means “beyond the physical”) with roots going back to the ancient Greek Stoics. For many educated people in Western culture, if something cannot be verified with the human senses, it is not “real,” or at least it is not worthy of consideration as a matter of “fact” or “reason.”
There are many reasons why this way of thinking about what counts as truth or knowledge has become so influential. Our modern intellectual, political and social systems were deeply influenced by the period from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries known as the “Enlightenment.” We will see as we progress through this class that even modern Christianity has been tinged in significant ways by Enlightenment thought.
The Enlightenment, of course, was not all bad. It gave us some great gifts, including the contemporary scientific method and the political frameworks, such as the U.S. Constitution, that support the freedoms we now take for granted.
But like many exciting moments in history, the Enlightenment produced some unbalanced perspectives. The ways in which human beings can know things in addition to observation of the tangible world around us were lost. The sorts of intuitions and experiences that human beings throughout history had taken as perhaps reaching beyond reason were discredited. The thought that a transcendent God might have broken into history to reveal anything about Himself was increasingly set aside.
Christian theology has always asserted that because God is transcendent, human observation and human reason are neither the starting point nor the ending point for true knowledge, wisdom and understanding. If matter is not all there is, then our search for truth cannot be limited to the material world alone. In fact, the beginning of knowledge and wisdom is the realization that God is beyond and other than the created world.
Again, a word of balance is in order. Human observation and reason do matter, precisely because God created us as part of a world that is in important ways orderly and knowable. The great Christian thinker Anselm said that knowledge is the act of “faith seeking understanding.” “Understanding” – the sometimes difficult process of bringing all our resources, including reason, to bear on the search for truth – depends on and follows “faith.”
We’ll discuss this in another podcast. But for now, it’s important to note that God’s transcendence means that the physical world does not represent the limits of what is true and real. Indeed, the physical world is not the beginning or end of what is true and real. The “beginning and end,” the “alpha and omega,” is the God who is beyond all our thoughts and imaginings.
For the second TGD Podcast, here is the first in a series that I’m doing for a class at my church titled God and Creation.
Categories
A Promo Video
For a class I’m teaching at church. And here is the class website.
Video for Conor Cunningham’s BBC series “Did Darwin Kill God” is up on Youtube. Here is Part 1.
An excellent essay on BioLogos by Pete Enns. This sort of scholarship helps us understand why various Biblical texts were produced, which in turn helps us understand what they were really designed to communicate. Naivetee about the historical circumstances under which the texts were produced leads to naive exegesis, which in turn leads to bad theology.
Pete’s main point is important: “The Pentateuch as we know it was not authored out of whole cloth by a second millennium Moses, but is the end product of a complex literary process — written, oral, or both — that did not come to a close until sometime after the return from exile.” More specifically, quoting Walter Brueggemann, “the Old Testament in its final form is a product of and response to the Babylonian Exile.” The redactors of the Pentatuech, after the Babylonian exile, were “bringing the glorious past into their miserable present by means of an official collection of writings.” This suggests that “[t]he Old Testament is not a treatise on Israel’s history for the sake of history, and certainly not a book of scientific interest, but a document of self-definition and persuasion: ‘Do not forget where we’ve been. Do not forget who we are — the people of God.”
Conor Cunningham — my doctoral advisor at Nottingham if I end up pursuing that degree — offers an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong, on Christian Century. I love his discussion of the early Fathers and his approach to Christ as the hinge of all theology of creation:
Adam, the idea of a Fall and so on can be revealed only in Christ if we are to remain faithful to the church fathers. It is folly to interpret the Fall or the existence of Adam in either positivistic or strictly historical terms, since there is no Fall before Christ. That is to say, there was but a glimmer of its occurrence, and this glimmer was only about Christ and not about some historical event of the same genus as the Battle of Trafalgar. Moreover, before Christ there was neither death nor life nor even sin. For all such concepts find their truth only in the passion of the Christ, and for one very simple reason: creation is about Christ and nothing else. Jesus, as the Word of God, is the metaphysical or ontological beginning and end (telos) of all that exists. This is not some wishy-washy religious nonsense but is, on the contrary, perfectly logical.
We should therefore bear in mind that, for theology, protology leads to eschatology. So, for example, according to the church fathers, Adam was Christ and Eve was Mary, while paradise is the church, and the Fall signals humankind’s redemption in Christ. Indeed, without Christ there would be no need of redemption—so the Fall would not make any sense. Thus the Fall is never a stand-alone item and makes no sense on its own.