Why We Compete

So, some more thoughts on competition. There are plenty of reasons why we compete as adults. Of course, I can only speak for myself but I hope I can shed some light on this idea. For many years, my main competitive motivation was pride. I wanted to be the best. I felt that I was entitled to be the best. The truth is I’m not the best…no one is. So, in its infancy (or before we “grow up“) competition is a product of our desire for personal esteem. Small amounts of this are okay I suppose but not the level we normally associate with narcissism. And even into adulthood, occasionally we find the individual who is still captured by their own potential for greatness and their willingness to steam-roll others to get there. I must say that the majority of my experience with competition falls into this category. It’s drives our love of football teams and our aspirations of climbing some sort of corporate ladder. It’s the driving force that makes someone at Catalyst wish they were that person speaking on stage and network their brains out behind the scenes to “connect” with the next ministerial conquest.

But there’s a much more devious form of competition that enters when we grow up. Competition based on fear. And unless you’ve been under a rock somewhere, this is the most common form of competition you will encounter. It is the foundation for much of our business practices and even affects our churches. When you are economically secure or work in a safe corporate culture or a church environment that is open, you don’t see this type of competition. But when our families are threatened, our finances are at risk, reputations are jeopardized, or people start throwing around terms like “divisional restructuring,” cooperative trust and loyalty disappear. And this is the mantra of fear-based competition: “I don’t have to be first…just don’t let me be last.” This competition based on fear makes us do some strange things. Though I beleive it’s important to be thankful for what we have, I am amazed at people’s willingness to oversell the value to “2nd tier” schools, vacations, cars, and luxury items simply because “1st tier” is out of reach. I can’t send my kid to an Ivy League college so I’ll talk about how high the average SAT score is and how low the acceptance rate to my public school choice is. I can’t own a beach house in Destin, Florida so I’ll buy one somewhere else and rave about the “up and coming” location. I can’t own a Mercedes but have a Tahoe. It’s the idea that drives the old joke about “Thank God for Mississippi” since Mississippi is worse off than the state you live in.

Churches are designed to be the exception to this simply because the gospel states the opposite. We are all on the same page. Now, you might assume that my next conclusion is that “we are all on the same page because we are all sinners.” And that’s true – I’d put myself in that category. But the church has a more urgent message to convey: we are on the same page because we are accepted in Christ Jesus (Eph. 1:6, NKJV). Everyone is “1st tier.”  But churches don’t always convey this message well. But that doesn’t mean that each person cannot grasp it on their own. I’ll talk about how to do that in the next post.

Reconciling Faith and Science: Quantum Physics

One of the most interesting topics about faith and science to date is quantum physics. First, some background. For the majority of the history of modern science, scientists operated on something called Newtonian physics – based on the work of Isaac Newton.  For centuries, physics was understood in broad sweeping terms – big, simple, measurable, systematic, mechanistic, etc. According to Newton’s world, the universe could be measured in large scale equations. And rightfully so. Everything seen with the naked eye looked big and vast, so the physical properties underneath were assumed to be big and simplistic as well.  And anything that was worth investigating could be measured using classical methods of science. This is part of the reason that those who embraced the view that science and religion were not compatible had no qualms about dismissing God. He did not easily fit into the classical physics mold.

But then quantum physics was born through the work of Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg. Quantum mechanics describes physical things at an atomic and subatomic level. For example, a quantum is the name for the smallest unit of energy – and it’s tiny. Add to that more particles like quarks, gluons, and hadrons and things change drastically. Rather than try to measure things as we have in the past, Planck came up with a constant that made measuring anything very, very small. Planck’s constant looks like this: 6.626176 x 10^-34. The number I want you to notice is the 10^-34. That’s an infinitesimal number. To measure our world, we had to stop using kilometers – now we use nanometers. Heisenberg added to this confusion (or revelation) by introducing the uncertainty principle. He said that when you are measuring two physical properties against each other, the accuracy of one eventually restricts the accuracy of another. In other words, the more you can measure one thing at the quantum level and use it as a reference point for another, the more the second object becomes immeasurable. And scientists have also discovered something called superposition – that these particles can jump from place to place – sometimes existing simultaneously in two different places.

So, what does this stuff mean for people attempting to integrate faith and science? It changes everything, actually. Science in continuing to discover more about our world also exploded our previous understanding of how the world works. The stable uniform world we thought we knew for the past several centuries is now a whirling mass of infinitesimal particles that won’t stay still long enough for us to learn anything about them. Furthermore, general relativity and quantum physics are basically incompatible. So, not only do we have a new way of seeing the world, we can’t even reconcile it with previous models that we know also have supporting data. Scientists are presently attempting to reconcile general relativity and quantum physics with something called string theory (which states the world is made of ridiculously small strings that operate not in three or four dimensions, but in nine or ten). But string theory operates on a scale 16 orders of magnitude smaller than anything we can currently measure.  As with other areas of science, the more we delve into the complexities of the life, from the universe to the structure of a cell, the more issues are raised for which we have no answer. But I want to point something out to you: string theory is considered a rational scientific field of study. Yet, there’s no empirical evidence for its existence other than a hunch or two derived from our inability to perfect quantum mechanics. So what guides the day to day experiments of physicists working in that area? Faith. Faith in the idea that string theory will be able to reconcile all other physical disciplines.

Here’s something else to notice in all of this. In the area of quantum physics, the unknown or “gray” areas of conceptual thought are considered not only appropriate, but are expected. Yet, when theology is experiencing a “gray” area, it is often dismissed as unscientific. In fact, theology is held to a stricter standard of proof than those investigating string theory or chaos theory, much less some grand unified theory. For science, the unknown gray areas somehow represent progress or hope while for religion, they are conceived as doubt. But they both represent the humanness of our endeavors and should be treated with the same level of respect and care. There’s a great verse that Jesus spoke about removing the beam from your own eye before mentioning the speck in another’s. We don’t do that with science and religion – instead, we parade our experts across the stage to discredit the other. We fire shots across the bow or each other’s ship. But both ships are floating on a sea of philosophical beliefs, assumptions, worldviews, and…well…faith. Faith sends one person to church on Sunday while it sends another to the laboratory. And for many scientists who have accepted faith as part of being human, it sends them to both places in the same week.

Reconciling Faith and Science: Cosmology and the Origins of Life, Part 2

Along with the Big Bang I described in my previous post, another scientific method is gaining ground to help us understand the universe: the anthropic principle. It counters a widely held belief called the Copernican principle: the idea that the earth is nothing special in the larger scope of the universe. The implication is that if the earth is nothing unusual compared to everything else, then we are the product of a similar purposeless set of events that resulted in our eventual existence. The anthropic method has raised some serious doubts to this idea simply because of the number of constants required for our existence. The “weak” anthropic principle states that we should be able to observe conditions (expected and unusual) that are necessary for our existence. A few examples of these “fine-tuned” conditions are listed below:

1. If the initial explosion of the Big Bang had differed in strength by as little as 1 part in 10⁶⁰, the universe would have never expanded and collapsed upon itself, or expanded too rapidly for chemical processes to create our present universe. Life would have never begun.

2. Calculations indicate that if the strong nuclear force that holds an atom together had been stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life would be not exist.

3 If gravity had been stronger or weaker by 1 part in 10⁴⁰, stars would not have formed. Coupled with the understanding that life requires favorable conditions created by the Sun, life may not have formed.

There are several others like these - I think about twenty in all. These conditions in and of themselves are significant barriers, However, if we calculate the likelihood of these constants all coming to rest in a state of equilibrium in our universe, the statistical probability becomes ridiculously staggering. Once again, science while answering some questions about life, is perfectly capable of opening a can of worms in the process as well.

Other options exist for the origin of the universe other than a single point of origin:

Multiverse – This theory explains our existence by expanding the number of possible universes that exist in order for life to occur without causative agency. Rather than account for the statistical possibilities within one universe, this theory states that there are an infinite number of universes in which abiogenesis could occur. We live in the universe where it did. Therefore, we are able to see the conditions for our arrival. In other words, rather than having a billion trillion acts on one stage, multiverse entertains the idea of having just a few acts occurring on a trillion stages. The stage/universe upon which we exist obtained the statistical probability necessary for our existence.

Panspermia – Panspermia is the belief that life in the universe exists before us and presently. Somehow, transference of life occurred in our universe either through the collision of non-living matter carrying life (asteroids for example) or direct intervention by extra-terrestrial life. In other words, our planet was “seeded” some other type of life organism, simple or complex. Obviously a couple of problems with this scenario come to mind. First, seeding by complex life would still require intentional causative agency and, secondly, simple life organisms have always existed. Panspermia does not explain where those life forms derived.

So which of these are easier to believe? Causative agency, an infinite number of dimensions, or extra-terrestrial seeding of our planet? There all about the same, actually. They are all beyond empirical verification. In other words, the jury is still out…and looks to be for a long time. Yet, that doesn’t stop anyone from choosing a multiverse explanation over a metaphysical being. That’s because we’ve been conditioned to believe we must make a choice between science and religion. Why? It makes us antsy to not have all the answers. That has nothing to do with science or religion. That has more to do with being human.

Reconciling Faith and Science: Biochemistry

As we get into specific disciplines, I hope you’ll notice is just how much in science is still “open” and available for various interpretations. Many of those who embrace scientific naturalism assume the God must be jettisoned from the picture based on recent developments in science. But actually what we’ll see is that no scientific discipline has conclusive answers concerning the origins and design of anything as of right now. It’s these undetermined variables that should keep anyone from making religion and science exclusive of each other (as if they are mutually exclusive to begin with).

Biochemisty is the study of chemical processes in living things. It includes cells, proteins, enzymes, polymers, lipids, as well as genetics: DNA, RNA, and cellular membrane transport. We’re talking about the parts of life that are very small and very complex. For example, the simplest microbial life forms on earth require somewhere between 1,300 and 2,300 gene products in order to function. Now, be forwarned: the term “God in the gaps” is not the best choice – people have used this idea for centuries and once science discovers a natural cause for a “supernatural” event, people’s faith is shattered. For decades, the “gaps” were shrinking. But with the biochemical renaissance we’ve been in, the “gaps” have become huge. Science no longer simplifies the world – its discoveries are making the world more complex and less reducible to broad uniform theories. We’re no longer explaining the differences in lengths of finch beaks. Scientists are now dealing with the genetic transference in finches and its impact on the molecular composition of bird beaks – things beyond ordinary observation with the naked eye. So, classic Naturalism and religion have both painted with brush strokes that were too large for our present state of discovery.

Let me give you a couple of easy examples of life at a cellular level that make the point. Let’s start with E. coli:

E. coli is a normal inhabitant of our intestinal tract. It has been a favorite to study in science lab for over a century. In the past decade, scientists have particularly been interested in the evolutionary process of E. coli. It duplicates itself about seven times a day and has been grown continuously to thirty thousand generations (the equivalent of about one million human years). But E.coli has not consistently improved itself biologically, nor has it genetically enhanced its makeup. Left to its own devices, E. coli consistently throws away part of its foundational genetic code, specifically the part that makes RNA. Why it does this is what so interesting. The more sophisticated parts of the bacterium’s makeup are also the parts that consume the most energy. So, in an attempt to make itself more efficient, E. coli actually cripples its own ability to replicate. The behavior that random mutation produces in E. coli is positive – but it doesn’t evolve in the way we think it should. Actually, random mutation left to itself actually de-evolves the bacterium.

Next example - the HIV virus:

 Unlike E. coli, the HIV virus is much smaller and has a much greater mutation rate – so much so, that on average, each virus contains one mutation from its parent. So, every one is different. With its rapid mutation rate, every single-point mutation of the virus occurs in an infected individual up to 10⁵ times each day. Double-point mutations (where two amino acids have changed) occur in every AIDS patient at least once a day. In other words, every mutation the virus has ever wrought has occurred over and over for scientists to observe. Left to itself, the HIV virus should be an evolutionary juggernaut, but the opposite is actually the case. Though HIV develops immunity to various drugs (in an unsophisticated way similar to malaria), at the biochemical level, it has done very little. In fact there have been no significant biochemical changes in the virus at all. A hundred billion billion viruses later, biochemists state that the HIV virus binds to its host in the exact same way. Though biochemists have been able to identify better ways for the virus could bind to its host, HIV (left to its own devices under the auspices of random mutation) has not. Neither has it improved itself at a molecular level. No new structural changes or improvements. No gene duplication leading to new functions.

In both of these examples, we have millions of generations and trillions of organisms with little biochemical significance to show for it. So, the belief that an organism can improve its existence through random mutations at a cellular level is inconclusive. Does that prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer? No. That’s a philosophy question, not a science one. On the other hand, can a uniform theory of random mutation explain all improvements at a cellular level? No, particularly since examples like the two above show mutations maintaining the status quo of deteriorating the overall condition of an organism. To draw unquestioned assumption that random mutation always improves upon its predecessor is philosophy as well.

Reconciling Faith and Science: A History Lesson, Part 2

Drawing from the foundations of Enlightenment philosophy and popular forms of Positivism, modern “Naturalism” consists of two underlying precepts: 1) nature is science’s domain and 2) nothing “exists” until it can be be proven by verifiable natural causes and events. And it’s that second part that gets us in trouble.  Naturalism hinges upon the assumption that everything worth proving can only be proven through naturalistic phenomena. Supernaturalism has no value in this worldview. Once again, it’s an “either/or” approach to life where only one explanation is possible. Belief, religion, perspective, and feeling have no place in naturalism, hence all the “prove to me that God exists and I’ll believe” pundits out there. Similarly, many feel that to choose religious meaning makes someone “unscientific” (which is why some reacted strongly to the “humanness” of science posts that start here). Unfortunately, most modern scientific disciplines were drastically affected by post-Enlightenment naturalism at the turn of the twentieth century. For many, evolutionary theory, chemistry, biology, psychology, social sciences, and physics all start with Naturalism.

A dark period in theology followed as theologians and philosophers attempted to remove the “supernatural” elements from the Bible to make it more palatable to the Positivistic age. For example, Thomas Jefferson, believing he was doing Christianity a favor, edited and released a new Bible for the modern thinker. What did Jefferson edit out? All the “supernatural” events in the Gospels. My favorite book title from this period is John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious. Toland’s point was that Christianity was a “reasonable” and rational moral choice when released from the shackles of religious superstition. For you history buffs out there, this all coincided with the rise of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, Moral philsophy, and the rise of the academic freedom movement in higher education.

Though progress seemed to be supporting the advances of science, something in the 1940s changed all of that: World War II. People began to realize that no matter what technological advances were made, they could not free the world from evil. Popular forms of positivism crashed and burned as we entered the Postmodern phase of history. However, “fundamentalists” in the area of science still assert that there is no other option for understanding our world other than Naturalism. The most recent form of Naturalism is particularly nasty and many atheists find themselves in this category. Here are some quotes:

Richard Dawkins (Oxford biologist) (The God Delusion) wrote this: “It may be that humanity will never reach the quietus of complete understanding if we do, I venture the confident prediction that it will be science, not religion, that brings us there.” See, for Dawkins, it’s “either/or.”

Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) states: “Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation for anything important.” Let me point out that Hitchens, a journalist, is thanking inanimate objects here…

 These guys, though highly trained and quite knowledgeable, suffer from something called “explanatory monism.”  Explanatory monism assumes (believes) that there is only one explanation available for anything. The same “either/or” scenario in Rene Descartes’ view of the world. They choose naturalism and therefore feel they must reject supernaturalism of any sort. So, they overreach for natural explanations to religious issues or merely dismiss religion altogether. What’s so sad about this (other than the fact that their mothers should’ve taught them not to be so intolerant of opinions outside their own) is that this singleness of assumption is not necessary for pure scientific inquiry. Yet, it plagues our view of popular science today…and it’s the sole reason that many people believe that science and faith are incompatible. So, we’re not really talking about faith vs. science, are we? We’re actually talking about the technical discipline of science vs. the philosophical system of “scientific naturalism.” Science vs. Scientism.

Here’s that G.I. Joe quote again: “Emotions are not based in science, and if you can’t quantify or prove something exists…well, in my mind it doesn’t.” Anyone can choose to believe this way…so far as they recognize that it’s truly a belief system crafted from of our Western post-Enlightenment milieu. And those who do will never be able to reconcile faith and science. Scientific naturalism keeps them from doing so.

Reconciling Faith and Science: A History Lesson, Part 1

I went to see G.I. Joe two weeks ago. It was absolutely horrible. But one quote in the movie piqued my interest.  A supposedly really smart and highly educated soldier (played by Sienna Miller) said to another soldier “Emotions are not based in science, and if you can’t quantify or prove something exists…well, in my mind it doesn’t.” That quote is a great example of the popular understanding of why faith and science are incompatible to many people. I started this series of posts talking about the “humanness” of science. For some readers, that may have made you uncomfortable. Science should be as absolute as it was for the soldier in that movie. The reason we have this idea is from the historical event called the Enlightenment, a cultural paradigm called Positivism and their modern love child: something called naturalism.

Listen to a quote from Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. Collins describes the Enlightenment in one paragraph: “…the ‘God is the answer to everything’ perspective…held back our scientific understanding of the physical world in the Dark Ages…But with the Enlightenment, we began to search for a more scientific understanding – physics, chemistry, biology, and so forth. Not that we became atheists, but we gained a deeper understanding about how the universe works.”  Everything is so simple and neat isn’t it?  We’re not talking about a science book – it’s a business/management book for crying out loud!  But it’s not at all. What Collins gives us is actually naturalism’s triumphal take on the Enlightenment. God took a backseat once science explained things. Unfortunately, this ”Cliff’s Notes” view of history is the norm for many folks. So, let me unpack this idea for you so you won’t be enslaved by it.

So, how did the Enlightenment happen? Well, it wasn’t an overnight change like it’s often presented. The Enlightenment spans from the 1600s all the way into the 1800s. It was a slow gradual shift in perspective.  For me, the beginning of Enlightment thought started with Rene Descartes. He was a philosopher in the 1600s who came up with a unique way to view the world. Assimilating the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution (Copernicus, Kepler, etc.), he described a perspective in a way that would permeate science, religion, philosophy and politics to this day. The name is Cartesian Dualism: it’s the belief that the world can be artificially divided into two parts – the natural and those things above nature. The physical and the metaphysical. The term “supernatural” didn’t exist until the Enlightenment. Up until then, spiritual answers were acceptable to explain natural phenomena on earth. But Descartes came from the opposite direction. He said that we must approach everything with the assumption that nothing is proven until empirical evidence makes it so.

What’s funny about all of this is that Descartes, a religious person, was actually attempting to “save” God and religion from the onslaught of criticism that began when scientific discoveries began to “prove” the church wrong. Now, there was certainly nothing wrong with challenging the authority of the church…but people began to doubt the importance of religion, too. So, Descartes was attempting to remove God from the natural realm in hopes that critics would leave religion alone since God’s value was beyond empiricism’s grasp. But what this did on a popular level was create an “either/or” approach to our world. Feeling the unncessary need to prioritize different values, the second generation of Enlightenment thinkers pushed God out of the frame completely choosing to value what could be scientifically tested: the natural world order.

Rather than find solace and meaning in religion, something else took precedence in the 1800s: Positivism. Positivism is just a fancy word for choosing to believe that legitimate forms of knowledge are only gained through sense experience. But during that time, Positivism carried other cultural and intellectual connotations. Intellectuals and the general public fully believed that scientific progress was the key to the future. After all, they saw technological inventions and scientific discoveries left and right that confirmed this idea. God was no longer meeting society’s needs; science was. Progress became marked by a culture’s willingness to throw off the chains of religion (often relegated to ”superstition” by Enlightenment thinkers) and embrace the triumphs of science. Everything is supported by natural laws. If humans can learn those laws and utilize them in the lab and in mathematics, we can make a better world for ourselves.

We’ll pick up our history lesson next post…

Reconciling Faith and Science: The “Humanness” of Science, Part 3

More examples of the “humanness” of scientific inquiry…

When Albert Einstein created the General Theory of Relativity, he didn’t like what he discovered. His theory predicted that the universe was slowly expanding or contracting – the universe was moving, one way or the other. At the time, that was a completely unconventional idea. So much so, that Einstein did something very human: the thought that the universe may not be uniform or constant was so repulsive to him that he inserted a “fudge factor”  – a variable constant, retrofitted to keep the universe in a state of eternal equilibrium. Einstein’s theory told him what he didn’t want to accept…so he changed the formula to adapt to his beliefs.

In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble (Hubble telescope) further confirmed that the universe was in fact expanding. So, Einstein actually took a trip to see Hubble’s data with his own eyes. Both men believed in a static universe – but eventually conceded the point. The universe came into existence sometime in the past. Into the thirties and forties, scientists continued to rail against the implications of Hubble’s discovery. In 1938, when asked about the issue, chemist Walter Nerst angrily stated: “We cannot form a scientific hypothesis which contradicts the very foundations of science.”

The dissention continued through the forties, fifties, and sixties. Astrophysicist Arthur Eddington stated: “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning to the present order of nature is repugnant.” Rather than accepting the expanding universe and the beginning of existence, scientists spent their time coming up with alternate theories to contradict it. In 1948, Scientists Gold, Bondi, and Hoyle came up with the Steady State model while other scientists adhered to the “oscillating-universe” model. Both models stated that the universe had no starting point and remained in a state of equilibrium – Newtonian physics was safe. But eventually in 1965, two scientists in the Bell Telephone Lab provided data to support the “big bang”: cosmic microwave background radiation – a left over relic from the origins of the universe. 

 By the 1990s, based on mathematical computation and computer-generated models, most astrophysicists confidently stated that all solar systems in the universe behave in the same way as ours. In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered a planet with similar characteristics to Jupiter orbiting a star in the constellation Pegasus. Everyone assumed this planet with similar physical properties would behave just like Jupiter does in relation to our Sun. They were very surprised to learn that the planet behaved nothing like Jupiter. It hurries around its host star every 4.2 days. It takes the earth 365 days. The planet only measured 1/8 the distance from its star that Mercury is from our Sun. So, it was closer and faster. About these differences, Mayor said, “It was very strange to consider the attitude of people facing something completely in disagreement with theory…some astronomers said things like ‘Oh, this is not a planet because you cannot form Jupiter-like planets close to their stars.’” But obviously, you can. 

Once again, like last week – am I making a case against science? No. I like science. I’m making a case for the very real “humanness” of any academic discipline. Every discipline has stories like these in its history. Yet, though religious ones are paraded for a wide audience, you have probably never heard about these. Next post, I’ll explain why we feel that “humanness” in science is unacceptable.

Reconciling Faith and Science: Are They Compatible?

Based on the limited amount of research I’ve recently completed for my Sunday school class, I plan to post about the relationship between faith and science over the next two months (along with other topics). I hope the information is interesting to you and helps those struggling with this topic find some answers.

I must confess that this is new territory for me, personally. I was raised in a conservative, Southern, evangelical home. The only model I knew (at least for the origins of life) was the creationist model (before you turn your nose up at that idea, realize that presently 44% of Americans believe this way. That’s roughly half of the nation) . I took chemistry, biology, and physics in high school but I found little relevance to my faith. The conservative Christian model has often taught that science and faith are basically enemies. But eventually, I began to notice that there were a large number of scientists who embraced Christianity and had strong personal devotional lives. Of course, that’s the opposite of what I had assumed. I thought that science eradicated all faith in God for the sake of rationalism and logic. And for some scientists, that’s true. But for many, it’s not. Several surveys state otherwise. One survey found that while 80% of the general public believes in God, only 33% of scientists do. U.S. News and World Report described this information as “A Huge God Gap…” However, a similar survey in the 1920s found that 33% believed in God back then, too. Another survey including social scientists upped that number to almost 66%. Among those surveyed, biologists are least likely to believe. A recent University of Chicago survey found that 76% of doctors believe in God and 60% believe in an afterlife. If possible compatibility between faith and science did not exist, then rest assured that number would be zero.

However, my approach to science really began to change for me as I continued to study historical theology. That may sound strange to you, so let me explain. As a young adult, I assumed Christian doctrine appeared on the scene fully formed without complications. But the reality is that it took centuries to hash out the details of the faith. I also began to notice how “human” an undertaking theology was. Church history is full of people making horrible mistakes, treating each other badly, making doctrinal blunders that wouldn’t be corrected for years. People have been starting crazy cults since the inception of Christianity. Faith healers have been around that long, too. Even the “pillars” of the faith are not immune to their own humanness. John Wesley’s wife used to beat him up and throw him out of the house. John Calvin had a rival named Servetus beheaded for not towing the line in Geneva. And our culture has constantly pointed out the mistakes of runaway fringe sects, bombed abortion clinics, and the Crusades. That human element makes Christianity look “unscientific” – for many, that’s synonymous with unimportant.

Like theology I also assumed that science had emerged fully formed and placed in our high school textbooks. But as I studied historical theology, I noticed that up until the Enlightenment, science and theology were not held apart at all. In fact, scientists were also theologians, philosophers, medical experts, herbalists, and occultists of the day. The idea of holding any of these disciplines apart did not exist until recent history. What I found was that science was just as human: riddled with stories of prejudice, subjectivity, and inaccuracy - just like theology or any other area of study. Why? Because humans are involved. And no matter what is said otherwise, humans are incapable of complete objectivity. They believe. They have opinions. They have life histories. And all of these things determine much about how we approach the world.  

I know you have been told differently. We are told science is objective. Certain. Definite. Scietific naturalism teaches us that technical aspects of science are superior to all other forms of knowledge. And once science approves a theory, that theory rarely comes under fire and is never overturned. After all, there’s data, proof, evidence! But the history of science is full of the opposite: squabbling scientists believing strongly in their position despite large amounts of data to the contrary. Even when a scientific theory is overturned by new evidence, many scientists throughout history have had trouble adapting. Why? Because they are human. Somehow, we believe that though other areas of our life are riddled with the weaknesses of emotion and faith, scientific research is somehow capable of being performed in an intellectual vacuum. No outside influences affect the science lab. So, before determining the compatiblity of science and religion, I need to spend time telling you some stories – stories about the “human” element of science. Because until we can agree that our humanness affects everything we do, we won’t be able to see how faith and science are compatible. In the following two posts, I am going to challenge the paradigm you were taught in high school – that science is always an objective process and theology is not. Enjoy the next two posts about the “human side” of science…

I Like Atheists

I came across an atheist site the other day and read for a while. Most of what I saw was standard atheist fare. But I perked up when a well-meaning Christian on the site asked the others for proof from the Bible that God wasn’t perfect. The atheists happily obliged with several answers, two of which interested me.

I like atheists. They are usually good people. And many of the questions they pose concerning Christianity are valid. I have had some of the same questions and have aggressively searched for good answers to them. But in the end, religion requires faith. Even if I could “prove” ninety-nine percent of Christianity to a person, they would still have to believe in one percent. That one percent is whopper though – it encompasses things like the existence of God and the problem of evil.

Most atheist writings I’ve seen are deeply concerned with the character of God. What makes God worth following? Good question. I have found that most atheists are not full atheists. Actually, some would like to believe in deity. But most atheists reject a particular view of God. They see him as controlling of all events, yet unwilling to take responsibility when bad things happen or refuse to alleviate human suffering. Any “educational” lesson humans could derive from a God ordained disaster is immediately swallowed up by the horror of death, famine, disease, etc. Is the death of thousands worth any morality lesson? Honestly, I don’t blame them for rejecting that view of God. That’s not what I’ve come to understand about God anyway.

I have chosen to answer two objections of God given in response to the Christian on that site. The first is biblical and the second philosophical. These answers are out there for anyone to read. Unfortunately most atheists are too busy reading very angry books by Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris that reinforce their predetermined assumptions. And we know everything in those books is “spin-free,” right? Christians often do the same, refusing to interact with people who disagree with them and reading only Christian material for the sake of “strengthening their faith.” But our books aren’t spin-free either.

Response #1: God is not good because Jesus cursed the fig tree (Mark 11).

The gospel of Mark doesn’t tell us why Jesus did this. And it does seem kind of mean – what did that fig tree do to him anyway? Mark says that Jesus looked at the tree and only found leaves. What Jesus actually saw is that there were no taqsh on the fig tree. No what? Taqsh - the Palestinian word for little nodules that appear on a fig tree in early Spring, six weeks before the real figs start to grow. When Jesus saw only leaves (no taqsh), he knew the tree would never bear fruit again. It was barren and taking up ground where a perfectly good fig tree might bear fruit to feed the people. So Jesus cursed it, not because he was being rude or showing off to his friends, but because he was being eco-friendly. Jesus, the environmentalist. How about that? The misunderstanding occurs when people don’t look for the context that informs the biblical passage. How many more of those do you think we might have missed?

Response #2: God is not good/violent because Jesus got angry at the merchants in the temple (Matthew 21).

This response philosophically assumes certain things about God, mainly that a God who gets angry can’t be perfect. God must be free of all passion since passion denotes weakness. If you believe that, you’re not worshipping the God of the Bible, you’re more into what the Peripatetics and the Stoics were into. Atheists often assume (because Christians who don’t any different have told them so) that the Judeo-Christian God is calm, serene, and unaffected by the actions of human beings. The big fancy word for this is impassibility. People who believe this way allegorize the passages in the Bible where God gets angry, changes his mind, and expresses distress over the actions of humans. Unfortunately, to do this (and everyone from Tertullian to Luther has) is to cheapen the biblical view of God. Jesus was angry because the merchants were exploiting the worship of the Jews for money – people made in God’s image. That made him very angry and he did something about it. If anything, by acting out of emotional response similar to that recorded in the OT prophets, anger supports the divinity of Jesus, not dismisses it. And that’s the reason God is so great – he cares enough about you to get angry over injustice.

I’m not against atheism in the least. Most of them (not all – those who have made atheism their religion) are open to honest discussion as to why God does the things he does. They’re inquisitive and honest and authentic in their search. Christians should run to dialogue with them. If they ask something you don’t know, please don’t tell them they are going to hell. Go look it up and answer their question! They are on a journey…just like you.

Did God Kill My Friend?

I had a friend pass away this past year unexpectedly. The initial shock was overwhelming – I didn’t cry for a couple of days until I overcame the numbness. This guy was older than me and was influential in my understanding of the Christian faith as well as what is appropriate within a ministerial setting and what may not be.  For that reason, I looked up to him alot. Sometimes when people pass away unexpectedly and they were particularly “good” people, you feel like the planet was robbed in some way – like we’re all gonna be worse for his absence and, in many ways, the town I live in will be.

However, in the course of all the eulogies and funeral stuff, there are bound to be people asking questions about why such a saintly man would pass away, someone who seemed to be significantly impacting his community for God. Most people assume that God in his omnicausal deterministic theocentric bliss - if he didn’t cause the tragedy - certainly allowed it for reasons unknown to the rest of us. As a pastor I used to have a sick feeling in my stomach as I attempted to explain why God didn’t save someone’s life. Honestly, theology has not produced any satisfactory answers and any answer I supplied a family member would have logical “holes” that they would discover if they thought long enough about it.

Some theologians believe that God is his sovereignty has ordained every single detail of life (including the bad parts) for his mysterious purposes. I know, I know…even writing it down makes it look ridiculous. That viewpoint is quite laughable and never makes any practical sense to anyone.  All it does is make people hate God silently when honestly they probably would fare better by hating him out loud. Peripatetic influence upon Christianity certainly played a large role in defining the attributes of God, but what really strikes me about such a position is that it runs cross-grain to the supposed goodness of God. If God is good, why does he cause or indirectly sanction evil? Others endorse the free-will model yet still believe that God “knows” everything that will occur in the future.  Atheists (for good reason) say, “If God knows about bad stuff but still lets it happen, where’s the love in that?” Good point – I certainly don’t blame them for asking. Process theologians emphasize the dependence of God upon humanity to the point where God is basically helpless in the face of potential tragedy. Obviously that belittles the sovereignty of God, which is not acceptable either.  Open theism attempts to rid Christianity of its Hellenistic presuppositions but still allow God to “be God.” It’s probably the healthiest theodicy available (and the one I most readily subscribe to), but it takes too long to explain to people when they are crying in your office.

So, what do you do? I think the best thing to do is to tell them you don’t know the answer. Because no one really has the answer. Wrangling over compatibilism or levels of omniscience does jack squat for everyday people.  As much as I would like for them to care, they just don’t. I’m finding myself, after seriously studying methods of theodicy, adopting the same position.  There’s something refreshing about saying, “I don’t know.” In the particular case of my friend, there were circumstances of free-will that led to his demise. Why were they not cancelled out by some other natural complexity within temporality? Beats the heck out of me! If God didn’t ordain the event, why didn’t he respond to prayers of loved ones for protection “quick enough” to save his life?  I have no clue. Sometimes, it’s appropriate to say, “It wasn’t the devil, and it wasn’t God, it was (in this case) a traffic accident and that’s all.” In previous years I would have shied away from that comment because I would not have defended God in saying it. As if saying “I don’t know” leaves God exposed in some way. But God really doesn’t need me to defend him, does he? 

All theology (including atheism) is speculative and informed by the personal experiences of the theologian. The theologians who fail to grasp this are the scariest ones. Once you determine that theology doesn’t have to be objective in order to be valid, you’re well on your way to finding answers to some difficult questions. Chances are that in the process, you’ll aggressively pursue God to understand your relationship with him as well. And the answers to questions like, “Did God kill my friend?” lie in a relationship, not in a system.