Christian Faith in the Modern World

Grrr. Snow last night stopped me getting out to speak at the Partridge Group. They are a bunch of chaps loosely connected with the church in the Abington area south of Cambridge who start their evening by sampling the wares of the Three Tuns in Great Abington, slip over to the Village Institute with as many recruits as they can for an hour of talk and debate, and then slip back again (or home) to round off the night. I was given a very wide-ranging subject (as above) and was really looking forward to bouncing ideas off my companions. Instead, may I life a virtual pint for you, gentle readers, and invite you instead to share my thoughts. I hope to join the Partridges later in the year.

It’s a big mistake to assume that the Christian faith is particularly problematic in today’s ‘modern world’ – a mistake typical of a certain arrogance that has marked the late modern period and spilled over into the way we handle our post-modern loss of confidence. History and common sense tell us that there have always been issues that challenge faith, and issues that faith needs to challenge, which is obvious enough when you say it. So what are today’s?

I would like to offer you an interesting array of inter-linked themes, and take you on a journey that starts with evolution and Darwinian theory, then on to science in general and the issues of miracles and free will in particular, into the world of postmodernism and subjectivism, and so to a finale on multi-faith issues. So fasten your seat belts and I’ll begin.

Evolution has disproved the Bible; or Christianity; or faith; or all of them. Well, no. Evolution is a perfectly respectable scientific theory of how living organisms have developed over time, and most Christians that I know are very happy to work with it as the best explanation we have of how those developments have taken place. Serious evolutionary theorists such as our local Simon Conway Morris are also happy to be known as Christians. The fly in the ointment is the suggestion that a really serious Christianity must read Genesis so literally that any other account of life’s development disproves it. That, I’m afraid, is rubbish. Way back in the fourth century St Augustine faced down the same idea, writing like this in his treatise on ‘The Literal Meaning of Genesis’:

“It often happens that even a non-Christian knows a thing or two about the earth, the sky, the various elements of the world, about the movement and revolution of the stars and even their size and distance, about the nature of animals, shrubs, rocks, and the like, and maintains this knowledge with sure reason and experience. It is offensive and ruinous, something to be avoided at all cost, for a nonbeliever to hear a Christian talking about these things as though with Christian writings as his source, and yet so nonsensically and with such obvious error that the nonbeliever can hardly keep from laughing.

“The trouble is not so much that the erring fellow is laughed at but that our authors are believed by outsiders to have held those same opinions and so are despised and rejected as untutored men, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil…How are they going to believe our books concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven when they think they are filled with fallacious writing about things which they know from experience or sure calculation?”

The deeper point is that believing in the Bible is not at all the same as believing that every sentence of it is to be read as if it was an encyclopaedia. Some of it is poetry, some prophecy, some even theology – like the early chapters of Genesis for instance which are using narrative form to convey theological truth. The idea is to believe the truth, not the narrative. Present-day highly literalist readings of Genesis – leading to what is called Young Earth Creationism – go back in fact only as far as the Seventh Day Adventists of the 1920s.

Classically, science offers theories of how things happen; theology and faith offer theories of why things happen. Sometimes these two ‘magisteria’ as they are called overlap in practice, but in principle they are complementary not competitive. So in the particular case of evolution, science describes a process that is materially evidenced, theology describes how such a process exemplifies and is consistent with the character of a creator God who gives creation its own authenticity and freedom, while remaining in relationship with it. Conway Morris’s theory of convergence – pointing out how lines of evolution seem to converge towards certain outcomes which may the Creator’s purpose – and the so-called anthropic principle that points out how unlikely the state of affairs is that can give rise to our life are both examples of how the how and why can work together to create plausible meta-theories of creation that take both science and faith seriously today.

So I want to assert that science and faith in general are actually very good bed-fellows, unless either partner tries to take up the whole bed. Another flash point for fighting over the covers lies in the area of free will and determinism, which is again an ancient topic of debate. What some scientists of today suggest, and I am thinking of someone like Susan Greenfield, is that the physical processes of the brain are the truth and the whole truth about the mind and personal identity.

On the one hand we encounter God-spot theories, in which the fact that our conceptualisation of God or spiritual sensations can be located in specific areas of the brain are taken to ‘prove’ that God is just a brain-made phenomenon. This is about as true as a scientist asserting that you do not exist because he can identify the spot in his own brain where he holds his image of you. On the other hand we are told that our apparent ability to choose is in fact illusory: our neurons fire before we know it, and so our knowing and choosing are just after-the-event rationalisations. But we all know in practice that while we do respond to stimuli, the range of stimuli we are responding to is so great that the outcome is not determined by any of them, or even by all of them in a way that deterministic logic can capture. Helpful concepts here are complexity and emergence. Once systems reach a certain level of complexity, and in particular develop recursive features, they prove to be seedbeds out of which quite new things can grow, including what we call consciousness and free will and what we know as beauty and truth.

I do wonder whether those who shy away from these softer concepts and try to live only with what science can define out are really ready to inhabit the world they are creating. Take away free will and you take away moral responsibility, for instance, and in the end any sense of each self as having meaning or worth, which opens the door to moral irresponsibility on a terrible scale. I have always been struck at how the arch-priest of deterministic Darwinism himself, Richard Dawkins, rebels at his own creation. Here he is writing in The Selfish Gene:

It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for genuine, disinterested, true altruism. I hope so, but I am not going to argue the case one way or another, nor to speculate over its possible memic evolution. The point I am making now is that, even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight – our capacity to simulate the future in imagination – could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We can see the long-term benefits of participating in a ‘conspiracy of doves’, and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our own creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Quite so. A miraculous conversion one might think. Miracles are of course another flashpoint in the science – religion debate. The word miracle actually means ‘wonder’ and at that level there is no conflict at all – you can hear the wonder in David Attenborough’s voice, atheist though he is. What causes controversy is the thought that the laws of nature might not apply to a particular ‘miraculous’ occurrence. There was a time when biblical scholars seemed to compete to dream up inventive ways in which what looked like miracles did in fact have natural explanations. That is not so fashionable now. Rather, we have come to see that the natural world is itself often probabilistic, even chaotic, and sometimes extremely strange indeed, even seemingly self-contradictory.

Not all of this science can by any means just be read across to the world of everyday events, where Newtonian physics still gives a very fair account of what we are to expect, but a chink has been opened up the armour of the mechanistic world-view. We can then reflect that the scientific method by definition only deals with the normal, the regular, the repeatable. To take the extreme case, if once and only once God became man, or a man rose from the dead, no experiment could ever replicate it, and no scientific hypothesis about it would be well-formed, in the sense that it stood open to verification and falsification. So many of us would want to assert that are occurrences which may not be at all normal but which are still natural, and in the causation of which God plays a part. Miracles, for short.

In approaching the issue that way, I am taking quite a firm position that everything that occurs within the created order does have real natural components, if I can call them that. There are no gaps in creation where God lives. If someone is miraculously healed of a disease, the microbes that are causing it were still there and still have to be gone. This is a ‘realist’ position, and I would argue that the Christian faith is necessarily realist, as opposed to taking the subjectivist route that sees outward reality as in some sense the real illusion, and seeks a spiritual enlightenment that has no material correlate. We may wonder about the precise historicity of some of the events in the Bible, but it seems to me to be of the essence of our faith that, for instance, a real person called Jesus really lived, really died, and was really seen to rise from the dead, even if our language rather breaks down at that point. Similarly, I think it is of the essence of the Christian faith that while we all have our own viewpoints on things, that does not mean that things in themselves do not exist, that truth has an objective component to it, and that in the end even the why questions of life as well as the how ones have true answers.

So I part company with those post-modernists who always want to talk about your truth and my truth but never the truth. At the end of the day it is not your bus nor my bus but the bus that we have to watch out for when we are crossing the road. And it is the maniac who thinks that it is not the truth but his truth that matters who we have to watch out for in the corridors of power; because take away any sense of there being an objective morality, real rights and real wrongs, and all we are left with is your rights versus my rights, and the right with the bigger battalions will win.

That leads me on to the issue of the multi-faith world in which we live. To go back to where we began, this is far from a new problem. Here is Paul visiting Athens, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles:

^16 While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. ^17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the market-place day by day with those who happened to be there. ^18 A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. ^19 Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? ^20 You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.” ^21 (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)

^22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. ^23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

It is a simple fact that there are and always have been multiple faiths in the world. It also seems a fact of history that there is a sort of evolutionary process amongst them that moves from animism – seeing Gods in everything – towards monotheism, understanding God as One. That is the journey on which Paul hopes to take the Athenians. We do not, however, find ourself left with a single monotheistic faith holding the field. The attempts to create one, and I am thinking for instance of the Ba’hai, have a touch of the Esperanto about them. We seem to reach the point where deeply held, highly evolved faiths simply disagree. What are we to do then? Historically, the answer is that we slug it out; but that is not good enough. I want to finish by daring to assert that Christianity, if it can only live up to its own ideals and live by the Spirit that inhabits it, can offer an answer. Distinctively, and perhaps uniquely, it both claims to be the truth, yet at the same time lays down its life even for those who are its enemies. That is a faith, I maintain, for today – it is good for all of us, good for me, and even good, may I say, for Mr Dawkins too.

Filed under: Sermons and Talks