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Setting Truth Free

The banishment of theology from intellectual debate in our universities has been an impoverishment. It has resulted in science locking itself into an empiricist prison, for it will only allow investigations into ‘how’ things come to be. The much more interesting question, ‘why’ is left languishing on the sidelines unremarked on.

Scientism (the belief that the only truth that exists is that which is scientifically, i.e. rationally) provable… together with ‘reductionism’ (which states that you have no more significance beyond being a bag of atoms) has resulted in a poverty of understanding.

I confess to finding the reductionist argument curiously circular. It claims we have no meaning because all we are is a ‘bag of atoms’. And because we are a bag of atoms, (similar to all other life forms), we have no significance. The obvious rejoinder, of course, is to point out that if you are unwilling to see beyond the structure of atoms, then that is all you will see. But by doing so, you will be contenting yourself with a desperately poor understanding of truth. You will only be seeing one waveband in the full spectrum of reality. The compassion of Mother Teresa and the laughter of Billy Connolly will be beyond you… and the historical life, death and resurrection of Jesus will receive nary a nod. As a result, your truth will be imprisoned into a very small space, a space that gives those advocating ‘scientism’ the illusion they can control and understand what’s within it. 

I don’t like academic prisons. I like them even less when people who don’t know much about theology get on an atheistic soapbox and speak about God from the paucity of understanding that comes from their ignorance of all forms of truth.

Contrary to the claims of some, Christianity is not anti-rational. There are good reasons for me to see evidence of ‘mind’ in the cosmos. Nothing else in human experience has ever explained such fine-tuning as we see in the universe other than the operation of a mind.

I am further confirmed in my convictions by the discovery that sub-atomic particles only collapse from being a cloud of probability into being tiny physical particles when they are observed. Quantum physics therefore also points to the existence of mind. 

Similarly, it is difficult to conceive what can put to work the beautiful, highly advanced mathematics of the cosmos so that it will build a universe, if not mind. (Information has to travel from mathematics to the quantum world if it is to build a universe, and the only way know to humankind this can happen is through the agency of ‘mind’.)

And information that informs what we hold to be true doesn’t stop there. When these scientific realities are overlaid with evidence of a morality (which we have a sneaking suspicion, lies beyond us) – and when this is also overlaid with the historic reality of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; the result is a synergy that allows for a very much greater understanding. 

When you allow all these sources of knowledge to speak together, will have a symphony of understanding, a symphony that has been freed from scientism’s empiricist prison… and which whispers the possibility of God.

Boo to the church… and hurrah for Voltaire

“Down with the Christian church! A plague on its legalism and its bullying throughout history. And ‘hurrah’ for Voltaire, that Enlightenment literary wit who tweaked the tail of the Roman Catholic Church, and insisted that science and philosophy be free of ecclesial bullying, superstition and all things metaphysical.” Rationalism and the ‘separation of church and state’, he said, should be the basis of civilised society.

The crowd is cheering for Voltaire… but what’s this? One of those cheering in the crowd looks a lot like Jesus! Why is this?

Three reasons:

First: Just as Voltaire’s greatest critics were the clerics of his time, Jesus’ main enemies were also the religious leaders of his time.

Second: Jesus would agree that non-biblical superstitious accretions adopted by some churches deserve to be ridiculed.

Third: Rational truth makes perfect sense to Jesus, who was the one who created a rational universe that could be understood.

But in a time of quiet, I think Jesus might have had a few things to say to Voltaire – things to do with truth and integrity. 

Despite being a rationalist who claimed to champion truth, Voltaire didn’t let truth get in the way of propaganda. He was responsible for the myth that the early Christian church had fifty different gospels of Jesus’ life, before they settled on just four. Voltaire also claimed that the early church fathers were responsible for the phrase, “I believe because it is absurd” – presumably because it suited his anti-Christian rhetoric.

Jesus might reasonably say that being a rationalist did not give him the mandate to tell outright lies. By lying, he was displaying a classic symptom of what happens when people dismiss God – the one who fundamentally guarantees what truth is.

Voltaire’s scurrilous accusations against French royalty earned him an eleven-month stint in the Bastille, and his intemperate language also resulted in him spending some time in exile in England.

Voltaire’s morality was certainly rubbery. He became distressingly anti-Semitic in his latter years… and he conducted a 16-year-long affair with Émilie du Châtelet, a highly intelligent, unabashed free spirit who – remarkably for her time – was a distinguished scientist. (Émilie was responsible for translating Newton’s Principia into French.)

There have been occasions when the institutional church has engaged in unconscionable behaviour in direct contradiction to the life and teaching of Jesus. It has to be said that whenever the Christian church has been institutionalised and wedded to the monarchy, it has become corrupted by power and greed. However, when it has behaved in an authentically Christian way, it has been beautiful. It has provided legal civility, hospital care, education and social welfare to millions.

If you only commit to human-centred rationalism, it will be impossible for you to believe in anything bigger than yourself. This will inevitably lead to rubbery ethics, a sense of meaninglessness and the deification of self.

But I am not advocating an anti-rational faith. A rational God has created a rational universe designed to point people to him. Christianity is not ‘anti-rational’; it is ‘rationality AND’… Therefore, think big and seek God. Embrace more in your mind than yourself.

Atheism, Truth and Peace

Bertrand Russell (known as “Bertie” to his friends) was arguably the leading academic atheist in the early twentieth century. He wrote a book called, Why I am Not a Christian. Sadly, Russell fell into the trap (later developed into a fine art by Richard Dawkins) of building grotesque caricatures of Christianity – which he found easy to destroy. His daughter, Katherine (who became a Christian) wrote about this habit of his, saying: “When [father] wanted to attack religion, he sought out its most egregious errors and held them up to ridicule, while avoiding serious discussion of the basic message.”[1]

Russell was determined to hold on to his atheism in defiance of his strict Protestant upbringing. His passion for doing so may have been partly fuelled by his sexual appetite, for he found the moral boundaries of Christianity inconvenient to his quest for sexual happiness. However, his atheism came at some cost to his peace of mind. His daughter, Katherine, wrote:

“I believe myself that his whole life was a search for God…. Indeed, he had first taken up philosophy in hope of finding proof of the evidence of the existence of God … Somewhere at the back of my father’s mind, at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul [which he did not believe he had] there was an empty space that had once been filled by God, and he never found anything else to put in it”[2]

Russell’s lack of peace was well expressed in a poem he wrote to Edith, his fourth wife. The first stanza of the poem says:

Through the long years
I have sought peace,
I found ecstasy,
I found anguish,
I found madness,
I found loneliness.
I found the solitary pain
that gnaws the heart,
But peace I did not find.[3]

This is such a terribly sad epitaph.

Atheism is not kind to those who dare to think.

Jesus said he had come to seek and save those who were lost (Luke 19:10). So if you are feeling lost and without meaning, do seek Jesus out.

[1]     Katharine Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell(South Bend, IN:St. Augustine’s Press, 75th edition, 1996), 188.

[2]     Ibid, 185.

[3]     Bertrand Russell, in: Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell, The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921, (Free Press, 2016), xix. Russell wrote this in the preface of his Autobiography.

Finding hope in the face of suffering

I would never have made a good Stoic… although I applaud much of their thinking.

Stoicism was a Greek school of philosophy founded by Zeno in the 3rdcentury BC. It taught that the universe was governed by an all-pervading “Reason” (that Christians know to be “God”). Stoicism was inherently optimistic, for it believed that this “Reason” was good. As such, whatever happened in our world must also be good. We must therefore live in such a way as to not be troubled by the ebb and flow of events.[1] Rather, we should develop self-control and fortitude in order to overcome negative emotions… and develop the sort of clear unbiased thinking that will allow us to understand the universal “Reason” (logos).[2]

What do you think of that?

The trouble with me is that I have way too much passion to be a Stoic. I grieve and weep too much at the cruel injustices of the world, and am brought almost to despair at the level of evil and untruth that exists. But, paradoxically, like the Stoics, I know that the God who created the cosmos is fundamentally “good”.

How can I say this when faced with the obscenity of pandemics, tsunamis, cancer and Nazi extermination camps? Nature itself seems fundamentally flawed. This is entirely consistent with Christian thinking that understands that nature and humankind have both been corrupted and are waiting for God to make all things new (Romans 8:19-21).

Christianity gives me three reasons to hope:

  1. God the Father has assured me in Scripture that he has already set a time when all things will be renewed and every tear will be wiped dry (Revelation 21:1-4).
  2. God the Son (Jesus) has experienced terrible suffering, which he endured to pay the price for our sins. God therefore understands the suffering I experience.
  3. God the Holy Spirit inspires me to address suffering and injustice now, wherever I come across it.

On top of this, God promises to be with me in my suffering, giving me all I need to remain undefeated by it. (I’m currently battling cancer.)

The philosophical enemies of the Stoics were the Epicureans. (The Apostle Paul debated with both groups of philosophers when he was in Athens – see: Acts 17:16-18).

The Epicureans were impossible optimists. They dreamed of a utopian, egalitarian world – in which they didn’t need to acknowledge any god (or trouble themselves with thoughts of death and judgement), but only concern themselves with things rational – and making life as pleasurable as possible for everyone. However, their egalitarian dream was found to be unworkable because it lacked a foundation that guaranteed what ‘good’ was. In just a few years, it degenerated into unbridled hedonism (like it did again, much later in history in the 1960s). Marxism similarly (and inevitably) degenerates into bullying totalitarianism for the same reason – it has no ultimate foundation that determines what is truly true and good.

Charles Darwin allowed a Christian faith to flourished briefly in his life (whilst at Cambridge), but it died – primarily because he failed to understand the Christian answer to suffering. Please don’t be like him. Stoicism and Epicureanism don’t have much to offer as alternatives. Jesus, however, can lift you above your suffering so you are not crushed under it.

[1]       William Carrol, “Metaphysics and the Experience of God: The Meditations of David Bentley Hart”, January 17, 2014[1]Uploaded to “Public Discourse” (a journal of the Witherspoon Institute) 17th January, 2014, see: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/01/11916/William E. Carroll is Research Fellow in Theology and Science at the Aquinas Institute of Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford.

[2]       See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism

Don’t mess with the Christian gospel

Media opinion leaders would have us believe that atheism is for the elite, i.e. for those who are truly rational (intellectually superior). But if you must have a god, you must make sure that god is no more special than a human being. As such, your god must:

  • Not be born of a virgin
  • Not be able to perform miracles
  • Not be unique
  • Not be able to overcome death, i.e. be resurrected

“So, providing your god is not god-like, we will let you believe in him/her. No god must be bigger than ourselves.  We have said so.”

In reality, such thinking is both crass and illogical.

Either God is… (and is therefore somuch more than we can conceive), or God doesn’t exist. But the emasculated, watered down god of liberal theology neither satisfies the logic of the atheist, or the rationality of conventional Christian theists.

If God really did come to us in history – it would be entirely logical, even probable, that events such as those recorded in the gospels occurred. What else, other than the events recorded in the Bible, would convince us:

  • That God exists
  • That God is the final definition of love and goodness
  • That God is inviting us to know and love him
  • That God indentifies with us completely
  • That God came up with an idea to rid us of sin that would otherwise disbar us from his presence
  • That God will finally kill off injustice and suffering
  • That God’s end game is that we live with him in his eternal kingdom

So, wrap your desire for autonomy in simplistic, poorly thought-through atheistic clichés if you must, but don’t mess with the Christian gospel and turn it into a pale reflection of what it really is. To do that is to turn Christianity into a bland moralism that offers no hope.

Here’s a special aside to the Uniting Church in Australia, which, sadly, has charged well down the liberal rabbit hole:

In the last 25 years, the Uniting Church Assembly has invented legal ways to disenfranchise its people and foist on its congregations non-biblical morality most didn’t want. As a result, despite branding itself as the most socially progressive denomination, the UCA is the fastest dying denomination in Australia. Recent “National Church Life Survey” data shows that it is now only the fifth biggest denomination (in terms of church attendance) – and it would be a great deal smaller if it weren’t for some big evangelical/charismatic churches that have more in common with Hillsong than the UCA. Sadly, to date, there are no indications that the UCA Assembly has either the will or the capacity to repent and reform.

So, to return to my original thesis: Accept it, or reject it… but don’t mess with the Christian gospel.

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