Which has me asking the question, why does new scientific knowledge and discovery demand a response to the world from Christianity? Why would any nugget of knowledge in the finite, observable universe have any impact upon our theology? Sadly, I think the problem is that Christian leaders have done a really poor job in helping believers understand the true and awesome power of the infinite (or as Paul Tillich might say "the ultimate concern").
If God is infinite and we are finite, it's not that there is a large number of things we don't know, there are an infinite number of things we don't know about the creator. If we were to learn ten trillion new and groundshaking new things, guess what? There is still an infinite number of things we don't know. Such is the nature of infinity.
For too long, people have mistakenly taken past temporal symbolic understandings of the infinite and have placed them as equivalent to an actual understanding of the infinite. While in reality, all they have done is relegated past understanding to a false importance. In doing so, they miss the whole point. There is no way that a finite creature can have an actual, true, factual, and complete understanding of the infinite. Not in the past, not in the present, and not in the future. I pray for the day when the false idolatry of Christian Fundamentalism will fall and people will be free to reach out using a dynamic faith and seek the presence of God in their lives unfettered by the false hope of complete understanding but satiated by the never ending blessings of the desire for relationship with the Divine.
Maybe then, people will stop being confused at how I can have both a scientific, rational mind and a strong, deeply personal Christian faith. Maybe then, people will stop assuming that because I am a Christian I reject scientific fact and inquiry.
I don't hold out much hope that this will happen anytime soon. However, I believe in an infinite God. There's no rush.
3 comments:
Nice blog post Guff'.
You need to be careful or someone might accuse you of "feel good Christianity." ;-)
Most of the difficulty with Science is the "integration" of new knowledge with the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. If something new conflicts with letters written by early Christians (or scrolls from early Jews) then it must be explained - otherwise the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
What's scary is that modern life depends on a basic understanding of how the world operates (medicine, engineering, chemistry, computational sciences, etc.) I suppose we could all become Mennonites, but I don't think that's realistic.
--Calvin
Hi James,
I'm the owner of the blog, "Disciples Institute for Scientific and Cosmological Inquiry" or DISCI for short. Thank you for your very thoughtful comments on my post. It's always great to get someone else's take on what you write.
I created DISCI for two reasons. First, I had long dreamed of having a blog that was focused on the issue of science and religion from the perspective that it is a false hermeneutic that the two are intrinsically at war with one another. It is what I informally call the "clever God" perspective. The discovery and exploration of a very large and very old universe is "evidence" of a God who is infinitely clever, and that the two creation stories in Genesis are God's gift to us so we will understand that God intended we humans to be in a personal relationship with him, which is completely counter-intuitive to what one would expect from a large and old universe. Hence, an infinitely clever Creator.
The second reason, was to create a group in the social media group, The Intersection (www.faithmeetslife.org), created by DisciplesWorld Magazine, which, unfortunately was unable to continue publishing, but The Intersection is continuing to operate as a stand alone site, with just over 800 members as of mid-March. So I have generally posted discussions on both the DISCI Blog and the Intersection DISCI group site, as different topics have arisen.
I would add just one comment to the quote you featured. As a student of the history of science, and particularly astronomy, the Church has not done a good job of creating the language and theology necessary to describe our beliefs in the context of a big and old universe. We've had 500 years to work at it (roughly beginning with Copernicus) and have come up short. The confirmation of life as an exoplanetary reality will be a new Copernican Revolution in the sense that our perspective of the Gospels, Christ's life, death and resurrection, and that geocentric cosmology must then be reexamined in ways never dreamed by the authors of the New Testament Canon. But we will have no choice.
I also write a personal blog titled, "Extreme Thinkover." It can be found at www.extremethinkover.com.
My best wishes to you,
Rev. David C. Waggoner, PhD
Thanks Rev. Waggoner.
btw, if I wasn't clear or if there is a chance I might be misunderstood, I want to state clearly and plainly that I really appreciate your blog and the work you do.
James
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