Eyre Lines

In the first post in this series, I talked about how classical philosophical ideas didn’t cope well with modern science, and suggested that the same might hold with theology. In the second, I talked a bit about Process Theology and why I’d avoided it to date. In the third, I outlined some concepts in classical theology and three problems which that gives rise to.

The fourth problem rests in the mind (or spirit) versus body dualism of Greek thought. The thinking of the Hebrew Scriptures was not, by and large, influenced by this concept; Jewish thought did not see the spirit as being something which temporarily inhabited a material body, but saw people as material beings which were made alive by the divine spark, the breath of God, but only vivified by that, not “inhabited by” a separate spirit. Greek thought, and that of some of the very late Hebrew Scriptures, the Intertestamentals and the New Testament, did see the essence of the person as being something separable from the body. Isa. 26:19, Dan 12:2 and Hos. 6:2 are examples of this Jewish thinking.

[As an aside, I am reasonably convinced that the insistence in certain of the resurrection accounts that the resurrected Christ was tangible was a concession to this Jewish belief that a person was inherently material, and that there could be no resurrection without a body. Paul’s early account of resurrection appearances, which is the earliest, is fairly clear that he is not talking about a revivification of a dead body, but of an appearance, possibly but not definitely cloaked in a tangible form; I suspect that this was not acceptable to non-Hellenised Jews and there was therefore a need for something more like the conventional view of resurrection. It may be, however, that the expectations of certain of the disciples that there could not be an appearance of the resurrected Christ without his original body gave rise to the subjective experience of real substance. ]

This combines with an individualism which was not the dominant theme of the Hebrew Scriptures; these dominantly regard salvation as relating to a people rather than to individuals, and individual behaviour as being important to preserve ones place within an already to-be-saved people of Israel. This is a concept labelled by scholars in the “New Perspective on Paul” as “covenantal nomism” (these scholars include E.P. Sanders, James Dunn and N.T. Wright).

Of course, in terms of modern science, the concept of a separable spirit or soul is now generally regarded as untenable; although mind (or spirit) is given importance as a concept, it is as  an epiphenomenon of  consciousness, which is itself an epiphenomenon of life. That is to say that mind, spirit or soul arise from the fact that we have brains capable of conscious thought, and brains capable of conscious thought arise from the fact that we are fairly complex living beings. Granted, science fiction has frequently played with the concept of conscious thought in machines or other forms which would not be regarded as “living” by most, but to date in order for there to be conscious thought, it has been found to be necessary for there to be a brain. Similarly, it is extremely probable (by extension) that in order for there to be a mind, spirit or soul, there must be conscious thought. Mind (or spirit, or soul) is not separable from the material body.

In other words, I am suggesting here that in this respect first century Jewish thinking was more conducive to modern scientific and philosophical ideas than was first century Greek thinking, resting on the Greek philosophical tradition which continued in the West unchallenged until at least the early stages of the Enlightenment.

This is, of course, not to say that there cannot be some survival of mind or spirit; using the analogy of computer software and hardware, a computer program and its associated stored memory can be separated from the hardware on which it runs (and can run on other hardware), but it is not functional in the absence of the hardware. In much the same way, it seems extremely probable that mind or spirit cannot function in the absence of a material matrix, but could conceivably continue in a form of existence given some storage medium, and similarly could be “resurrected” into a new matrix.

This mind-body dualism links with two other potential problems, the first of which is that the unseen, immaterial, “spiritual” is seen as “higher” and more perfect than the material, and so what really matters is not the whole person or the material body but only the spirit, and secondly that the spiritual (and God) is seen as being of infinite duration, so the infinity of time to come after death matters far more than does our current life. The result is a focus on survival after death to the exclusion of living today. Of course, if my analogy of the computer program has any validity, an infinity of storage on a floppy disk is probably not preferable to actual functioning…

This leads me neatly to the fifth problem, which is that as the immaterial, mental and spiritual is seen as higher, better and more perfect than the material, it is also seen as more fundamental, more real. In other words, the immaterial creates the material, usually in a rather poor imitation of the immaterial ideal. Plato’s “cave” image is one way of putting this: the world as we see it is a series of distorted images of what is more real, more perfect and more fundamental but which we cannot see directly.

I am not here attacking Idealist philosophies generally; for a start, some idealist philosophies lend themselves to panentheism, and I experience God in a way which is for me massively best described by panentheism. There is no problem in terms of science in the concept that our concepts can only approximate to the reality beyond “the cave”, indeed this is very much the way philosophy of science tends to see things, and the state of modern physics tends to underline this in that there appears to be a substrate of reality which is irretrievably uncertain, where Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and chaos theory reign.

The problem comes when this couples itself with revealed religion and we think that our concepts are “higher, better, more real, more fundamental and more perfect” than what is actually experienced, because that is what has been revealed to us. I have to be very careful with this aspect myself, as the bones of panentheism represent to me something “revealed” directly to me, and there is an inevitable temptation to say that that is what must be so irrespective of any material evidence to the contrary. It would, of course, be a mistake for me, and it is a mistake for theology generally. Whatever else can be said about revelation, it has passed through at least one individual human consciousness before reaching us, and that must give the basis for error. Paul recognised this in 1 Cor. 13:12: “Now we see through a glass, darkly…”

Process recognises that things change, that things are interdependent, and as such is antagonistic to concepts such as perfection but very conducive to the idea of “better approximations” which develop with time.

Number 6 is giving me difficulties, so there may be a delay!

 

In the first post in this series, I talked about how classical philosophical ideas didn’t cope well with modern science, and suggested that the same might hold with theology. In the second, I talked a bit about Process Theology and why I’d avoided it to date. I’m now going to look at some concepts in classical theology and see how they might be problematic.

Classical theology stresses the transcendence of God; God is wholly other. This is linked with the concept of God as being “holy”, but is not equivalent to it.

It also stresses the perfections of God; in the classical mould, God is all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), not bound by time (eternal), creator of all things, perfectly just but also perfectly merciful and loving (omnibenevolent). It isn’t difficult to find proof texts for each of these statements about God in the Bible.

However, it is also not difficult to find texts which don’t read as if God possesses any one of these characteristics.

Thomas Aquinas (perhaps the most influential Christian theologian after St. Paul) also derived some further statements about God. He is the unmoved mover, the origin of motion; the uncaused first cause of all things; the fount and origin of all order. (These are three of the quinque viae, Aquinas’ “proofs of God”; the others are perfection and necessary existence).

Quoting the Wikipedia article, Aquinas determined there were five basic things which could be said of God:

1. God is simple, without composition of parts, such as body and soul, or matter and form.
2. God is perfect, lacking nothing. That is, God is distinguished from other beings on account of God’s complete actuality.Thomas defined God as the ‘Ipse Actus Essendi subsistens,’ subsisting act of being.
3. God is infinite. That is, God is not finite in the ways that created beings are physically, intellectually, and emotionally limited. This infinity is to be distinguished from infinity of size and infinity of number^.
4. God is immutable, incapable of change on the levels of God’s essence and character.
5. God is one, without diversification within God’s self. The unity of God is such that God’s essence is the same as God’s existence. In Thomas’s words, “in itself the proposition ‘God exists’ is necessarily true, for in it subject and predicate are the same.”

The first problem this raises for me is that it takes insufficient account of the immanence of God, his presence in all things (omnipresence). There are also plenty of proof texts for God’s omnipresence, such as Psalm 139:7-12. Yes, classical theology will stipulate the omnipresence of God, but in practice we will see time and again the suggestion that God is “other”, that there is a great gulf fixed between us and God, that being sinful we cannot be in the presence of or accepted by the holy and perfect God. This is probably the most vital problem for me, given that my experience is overwhelmingly of an immanent God, a God present in all things.

Classical theism will also say, however, that God is spirit, and that spirit can indeed permeate everything, but is something distinct from the material. Except insofar as we are acknowledged to be in part spirit ourselves, this also emphasises the “otherness” of God; we are material, God is spiritual and never the twain shall meet, with the exception of the incarnation and, possibly, the Holy Spirit. However, the presence of the Holy Spirit is something which is not always there; the presence of God is in effect rationed. There is, of course, also the sacrament of communion in which God is commonly thought to be particularly present – and passed out in very small bits by a gatekeeper, thus even more rationed. However, spirit-body dualism is a problem area in its own right, which I mention later.

This theology does not, frankly, lend itself well to the evangelical thinking of “relationship with Jesus” either; a tension is created with the distant, unapproachable God.

Process thinking does not draw rigid boundaries, and sees God as intimately involved with the world on every level and needing the participation of humanity in order to bring about his purposes.

The second problem, and the one which is perhaps most important for those who do not have a compelling consciousness of omnipresence, is that of theodicy, i.e. why bad things happen to good people. Put very simply, if you propose:-
1. God is all-powerful
2. God is all-knowing and
3. God is omnibenevolent (i.e. wishes the best for each and every one of us)
the mere observation of the world tells us that bad things are happening daily, hourly, minute by minute and second by second to millions of reasonably good people. Thus not all of these statements can be correct; either God is unable to correct these evils, he does not know of them (or does not know of them in advance so as to be able to prevent them) or he is not a good God.

A large number of “work-rounds” have been proposed for this problem. If there is a countervailing force of evil, God is not really all-powerful. If God withdraws (kenosis), God is not in practice all-powerful. If God witholds action in order to permit free will, God is not in practice all-powerful. Those are the common answers.

In fact, a prominent process theologian, Charles Hartshorne, wrote a book called “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes”, which argues very cogently that neither omnipotence nor omniscience can actually be the case as a matter of philosophy, and, of course, Process Theology holds that God’s power and knowledge are in fact both limited, albeit very great. However, God’s power is expressed cooperatively and relationally rather than unilaterally. Theodicy is not a major problem to a Process Theologian.

The third problem is that God is thought of as perfect and therefore unchangeable and unmoved by emotion (“impassible”). This is not easy to provide proof texts for, and is in fact a deduction drawn from Platonic and Aristotelean philosophy; indeed, the Hebrew Scriptures are full of instances in which God is seen to be wrathful, jealous, merciful, loving and downright emotional. There are also several instances of God changing his mind – the sparing of the Ninevites after their wholesale repentance in the story of Jonah springs to mind. A particularly good account of this is found in Jack Miles’ book “God, A Biography”, which treats the Hebrew Scriptures as a work of literature in which God is the main character (as far as I know an unique approach) and seeks to plot his character development.

The fact that unchangeability and impassibility is not well supported by scripture is only the start of it; if we are to talk about having a relationship with God, or indeed loving God, how is this possible in a situation where no emotion is returned? In fact, the God of the Greek philosophers is distant, unapproachable and indifferent, an attitude summed up by Shakespeare in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport”. It is unsurprising that development of this train of thinking led to the Enlightenment Deists, who were content with a God who set things in motion but was uninvolved thereafter, and was certainly nothing that one could love or have a relationship with, or, really, worship.

Process sees god not as the “unmoved mover”, as classical philosophy would have it, but as the “most moved mover”, intimately involved in every aspect of creation.

I’ll continue in the next post with some further problems.

 

I’ve been avoiding looking more closely at process theology for years, despite knowing that it dovetails well with panentheism – and I determined that I was a panentheist very early in my spiritual life – and also with modern science.

In my last post I mentioned that I’d been kicked into thinking of it again by a scad of blog posts around December and January, but I also was involved with editing a new short book “Process Theology” by Bruce Epperley last year, which I recommend, and which had already started me thinking in that direction. If there’s a major snag to that book, it’s that it’s too short – it’s part of Energion Publications’ “Topical Line Drives” series, which are designed to be very concise. Its shortness and directness is also its greatest advantage, mind you! Bruce Epperley is one of the three or four most prominent process theologians around, so despite its brevity, this is a serious book.

Why was I avoiding it? Well, I am not a philosopher by inclination or training (or, probably, natural ability – philosophy seems to require a certain mindset with which I tend to become impatient). My major interest is in articulating ways of talking about a mystical consciousness of God, and as anyone who has read (for instance) Meister Eckhart will appreciate, while the result may look fairly philosophical, it mainly shows up the inadequacy of human language and concepts to express an experience of something as awesome as God and his relationship with us (and the cosmos).

(Some of my friends use “awesome” a lot in talking of God. No, I have not “gone over to the other side”; I just think that “mind-boggling” and “ineffable” are aspects which need stressing here!)

My first contacts with Process were however through Whitehead’s writings and formulations, and this launches you straight into fairly heavyweight philosophy. I’ve also found Charles Hartshorne and John Cobb less than easy going when they start talking about process, though I like Hartshorne’s demolition of the “omni” concepts (and have blogged about this before). It seems to me that a lot of what is actually wrong with classical Theology comes from arriving at philosophical positions which are somewhat supported by scripture and then using those as guide to reinterpreting the rest of scripture. Perhaps naively, I tend to think that scripture should be allowed as much as is possible to speak from its own historic context without imposing systems on it, and it did rather appear to me that Process, in common with much philosophy of religion, was assisting in imposing systems.

Philosophical language is certainly one way of articulating ways of “talking about a mystical consciousness of God”, though. Indeed, as I’ve mentioned the problem of expressing mystical experience in human language, it might have some merit in expanding the vocabulary. The problem, to me, is when the philosophy overtakes the fact that we are talking about human experience of God, which has tended to be the case with the writings of Whitehead et al. I’m hoping in this series of posts to work out how Process may be of use to me in doing this, hopefully without philosophically dense language.

As I am at root a scientist, I take this mystical experience as being my primary data set. Data is data; you can’t say “I don’t like this data, it can’t be right, it doesn’t fit the theory” (provided you’ve eliminated things like deliberate falsification and accounted for any bias in your instrumentation – which I grant is no simple thing as your instrumentation here is individual human consciousnesses). No, if the data doesn’t fit the theory, the theory needs to be altered, as I suggested in my last post is the case with classical theology and will be expanding on later.

Mostly, of course, theories in science are adjusted very slightly; if a theory has worked reasonably well (and in order to last, it must have worked reasonably well) it must have been describing the situation fairly well; it gets changed to accommodate some data which just didn’t fit, and usually this can be achieved by a slight tweak to the theory. Very occasionally there is a revolution in thinking, and an entirely new way of conceiving of something comes along (relativity and quantum theory are two examples from my old scientific sphere), but even then they tend to allow the old theory to be a “special case”, as in the case of relativity; Newtonian mechanics still works well in non-relativistic cases.

Process is, however, a radical rethinking, not a slight adjustment, as I indicated in my last post; a “new operating system”. Bruce Epperley’s book makes a start on providing a way of doing the adjusting, to be sure, but can’t in that few pages really address all the implications of this way of thinking differently about God. In addition, it is probably foolish to talk of “Process Theology” as if it were an uniform thing – it isn’t; Process Theologians share some major basic ideas, but there are many slightly differing Process Theologies, and Dr. Epperley’s is one of those; slightly different from (for example) Whitehead’s rarified philosophical version and different again from John B. Cobb’s worked through thinking.

So what I’m proposing is to take Process thinking and see if it expands my ability to talk about mystical consciousness of God without getting overly philosophically technical or letting the philosophy take over the – er – process.

The most fundamental novel aspect of process theology is that in it, God is capable of changing, and indeed does change. Dr. Epperley comments that philosophically, Process stresses movement, change, relationship, possibility, creativity, freedom, and open-endedness. It follows that Process does not regard God as being unchanging, or impassible (that is to say emotionally unmoved), or in principle separated from humanity. It doesn’t stress the concept of perfection, though perfection could be incorporated as long as it isn’t regarded as something static; certainly it doesn’t start by positing the perfection of God and then deducing multiple other things from that.

It also doesn’t regard God as being either omnipotent or omniscient in anything remotely like the classical sense. Charles Hartshorne, a process theologian, has to my mind exposed the impossibility of both of these characterstics in “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes”. They both, of course, tend to spring from consideration of God as unchangeably perfect.

Process is also fundamentally unitive rather than divisive. It sees connection and interdependence rather than separation and independence, it sees the unity of all things in God rather than a vast gulf placed between the Creator and the created, and finally it doesn’t rest on a duality of spirit and matter or of ideals and the concrete.

In my next post, I will look at some of the ways in which I think classical Theology has failed us, to underline why it is worth looking at Process as a way forward.

 

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Jai McConnell left “The Voice” this year in the knockout rounds. A shame, I felt, as she has an instantly recognisable, unique voice; just the kind of thing “The Voice” looks for, in my eyes. But I mention her here because of her chest – and I have in mind her startling ink, not (for instance) her lung capacity. Just in case you thought I meant something else…

In case you can’t get that from the link, it reads “Nothing endures but change”.

There was a time when this would have been a much more controversial statement than it is today. Science, in particular, has come to terms with the fact that what we used to perceive as solid and unchanging is, in fact, changing – mountains are ground down over years, continents move, stars are born, grow and die, even the universe itself appears to have a defined beginning and the prospect of a long-away heat death. Solid matter is not only not solid, being mostly empty space, but even the particles of which it is composed are at their most fundamental level something more like vibrations, and even their positions are ultimately uncertain thanks to Werner Heisenberg.

We have had to move beyond the philosophical basis we once had, which was for most of the history of Western Civilisation fundamentally Platonic. The observable world was, to Platonism, a corrupted and degraded echo of an intangible world of ideals; the ideal was fixed and unchanging and perfect, and the more untouched by outside influences something was, the nearer perfection it was viewed as being – hence (in part) the value placed on gold, which was for a long time the most unreactive metal known.

Platonism went hand in hand with atomism, the idea that everything could eventually be broken down into indivisible (a-tomos from “no cutting”) particles which were then combined like building blocks, and which were in a way “perfect”, as they didn’t change. But the atom was split, and the result is a host of subatomic particles which at some level appear and disappear and are defined by probability densities rather than locations and sizes, and even those are as much waves as particles.

Of course, all these concepts actually allow us to describe how things work far better than did the old concepts; technologies derived from this thinking allow, for instance, the writing of this blog and its transmission to its readers, as well as countless other applications throughout the lives of most people in the developed world. The 21st century Physicist largely regards the Platonic philosophical basis as useless, pointless, a distraction from how things actually are.

Not so, however, much 21st century Theology, including those parts of theology labelled “conservative”, “orthodox” or “evangelical”, not to mention “fundamentalist”.  This is hardly surprising; the New Testament is, in one way of looking at it, the point where Jewish monotheism got translated into Greek language and, in the process, into Greek philosophical concepts, notably Platonism. A new set of philosophical concepts gave rise to a new way of conceiving of God and of God’s relationship with mankind. I will grant that that is not by any means all that happened in the process, but it is most definitely one of the things which happened.

Towards the end of last year and stretching into the early part of this year, a lot of blog posts were talking about concepts such as process theology and open theism. Partly these seem to stem from a piece by Roger Olson (some are linked to at Homebrewed Christianity), but some posts seem to have been independent of the line of discussion which was set off by that post, such as this one from James McGrath. This led me to start thinking about the general area of God-concepts, and I’ll write a bit more about my historical position there later.

It has, I think, to be said that ditching a God-concept in favour of a new one is a really major upheaval. Tony Jones I think touches on this, saying “This is: By almost every measure, process theology is a radical rejection of what the church has believed for 1600 years, so what voice do you think the historic church and classical theism [has] in our present situation?” This is a very fair point. One commentator (who I cannot now find a link to) said, in effect, that adopting process theology was rather like installing a completely new operating system on your computer; you don’t do that unless you have to, as there’s a significant possibility that all of your programmes will need to change or at least be updated.

I’m going to suggest that we have to, and, in fact, that we should have done this years ago. Part of the reason is that given above; science has moved beyond Platonic thinking and the philosophical structure which we now think best reflects the way things actually are is very non-Platonic indeed; to try to impose Platonic ideas on modern science would be to warp and distort it so that it was of much less utility in describing things and predicting events (though those two may best be thought of as the same – it may be that we should think only of events and not of things at all). Assuming for a moment that theology actually relates to how things actually are, should we not bring theology into line with science here?

There are other more detailled reasons, however, which I’ll go on to in the next post.

Yesterday was the ten month anniversary of me waking up not depressed after over six years of serious clinical depression and 11 years before that sliding gently downward. I am still not depressed, and it’s worth noting that I am wonderfully grateful.

I should note this more, if for no other reason that there’s a strong positive correlation between feeling grateful and feeling happy. I find I rather like feeling happy, having had six and a half years of not only not feeling happy but having forgotten what it was like to feel happy and being unable to recall occasions when I had been (serious depression ruins emotional memory as well, and can prevent recall of other circumstances where there’s been a strong positive emotion involved). Not being depressed does not equate to “happy”, of course; I can still manage low moods, but nothing like the crippling depths of two-and-a-bit years ago.

So I’m particularly grateful for The Gregory Brothers major-to-minor version of Pharrell’s “Happy” which I listened to this morning. It’s remarkable that such an upbeat song can be made into music to slit wrists by by dint of changing the key from major to minor and slowing it down, but the result wonderfully captures the feeling of (say) a year and a half ago when I heard (for instance) the Twelve-Step “Just for Today” lines which read “Just for today I will be happy; most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be”.

I couldn’t do it. The harder I tried, the more I concentrated on “being happy” the more miserable it made me. And those “just for today” lines (which run along the same lines as quite a few well-intentioned “snap out of it” comments) made it feel worse, as it was clearly all my fault. I mustn’t want to be happy, I must be doing it to myself in some perverse self-flagellating way.

Not so, of course; depression is an illness from which I suffered, and I was the victim, not the perpetrator.

It’s nice to see that now.

There still seems to be a reluctance among Christians to consider the gospels as being myth. There was a certain amount of scandal following the publication of John Dominic Crossan’s “The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus became Fiction about Jesus” a little while ago. The thesis of the book (which is fascinating, and which I strongly recommend without necessarily endorsing its contents) is that Jesus told parables, and then the gospel writers told what are in effect extended parables about Jesus through the medium of apparent biographies.

I don’t see that this should be a problem, myself. Myth is story, and conveys a message independently of whether it is factually correct or not (just as do parables or jokes). I’m reminded of the meta-joke “A Rabbi, a Priest and a Pastor walk into a bar; the barman says ‘This is a joke, isn’t it?’ “ which I think was coined by Neil Gaiman. It is funny whether or not it ever happened; the parables convey important and true messages even if the actual events didn’t happen. So why do we ask more of the gospels?

Well, because they look like biography, obviously. They may very well be biography – I tend to the position of historical-critical scholarship myself, which tends to the conclusion that there is a core of factual material but that it is submerged in a mass of non-historical additions, but would be quite happy if, perchance, all of the material which is not actually mutually contradictory between the four accounts were factually correct. However, in talking with other Christians, if we can get beyond that point, almost all of the lessons learned from reading these accounts are “spiritual”, by which I mean not evident in material form.

They are equally capable of carrying that spiritual meaning whether they are “true” or “false” – and so I prefer to use the term “myth”.

“Myth” does not mean “falsehood”, despite everything you may hear from the “new atheists” such as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. It means something which is independent of, which is above truth and falsehood. There can be no untrue myths, merely myths to which we relate well and myths to which we do not relate well. It is a story we tell about the world which carries a message…

Terry Pratchett is a master story-teller, chiefly in the field of fantasy. His “Diskworld” books have sold many millions, and appear on best seller lists immediately they are published – and some of them are about science and philosophy (the “Science of Diskworld” series). Actually, rather more of them are actually about science and philosophy than that; those themes run through almost all the books which involve any of the wizards of Unseen University, but it is made explicit in the “Science of…” set. They also tell some very true stories about such things as economics, media, politics, sociology and literary criticism… but I digress.

Personally, I think Pratchett is undervalued as a post-modern philosopher. Yes, honestly.

One of the things which he suggests (and which I take on board unreservedly) is that science consists of a “set of stories we tell about the world which carry a message” as well. They are not however quite the same thing as myth.

Austin Roberts wrote a post a few years ago, “What is Truth”, which engaged some postmodern thinking about the limits of what we can legitimately say is “truth”. In it he has a set of criteria (about 2/3 of the way through the article). Science uses noncontradiction and adequacy to the facts a lot, and in particular (as the stories science tells are supposed to relate to events in the external world rather than in what I might describe as “concept-space”) it predicts what will happen in circumstances we maybe haven’t seen so far. If the prediction is then seen in those circumstances, the adequacy to the facts of the “story” is improved, if it isn’t then the adequacy to the facts of the story is damaged, sometimes to the extent that the story has to be discarded (which can never happen with myth).

We’ve just seen an example of looking at circumstances not previously seen in the results of a set of scientists in Antarctica working with very sophisticated telescopes. The result (assuming that it’s confirmed by other scientists) is that one “story” about how the universe behaved just after the Big Bang will be scrapped, and several variants on another will be scrapped as well. We will have more confidence in the remaining story (which will still have a few variations possible, and no doubt will acquire more variations). What we are never going to be able to say is that this has one-to-one correspondence with the “external world”, which we regard as “reality”.

So why are these scientific stories different from the stories we tell as myths? That’s because the myths deal with human behaviour and feelings and what happens in our own concept-spaces, our internal worlds. If we relate to a myth, it becomes part of our concept-space quite irrespective of whether it actually relates to something evident in material form. Human behaviour and feelings are massively influenced by what happens in our own concept spaces, and myths therefore have huge power – and they don’t have to be “true” (and they don’t have to be “false” either) in order to do that.

Some of my readers are going to be feeling somewhat upset at this point. They’re likely to say that I’m attacking theology and its attendant doctrines as being nothing more than fiction. That isn’t the case at all – what I’m saying is that the practical importance of scripture is as story, as something which, if we relate to it and incorporate it into our concept spaces, has a transformative effect on us; the practical importance is not that it tells us the truth about the world, and particularly not that it tells us the truth about the material world.

In much the same way, the practical importance of scientific stories is that they enable us to predict what will happen in the material world better, and to find ways of manipulating it to our advantage, it isn’t that they tell us the truth about the world, and particularly not that they tell us the truth about the spiritual world.

This is fairly close to producing the result proposed by Stephen Jay Gould, of “non-overlapping magisteria”. Not quite, however. Richard Dawkins has criticised the concept on the basis (broadly put) that religion couldn’t keep itself out of science, as it claimed complete control by its own nature; I’d put it differently, that anything which deals with the way you organise your concept space inevitably has the likelihood of affecting that part of our concept space which deals with the external world (only the likelihood, as many people are able to erect internal divisions between different ways of looking at things, particularly if they incorporate the concept of non-overlapping magisteria into their concept space).

It has also been criticised on the basis that science excludes the supernatural, and inasmuch as the supernatural affects the material world, so science is going to exclude religion. This is fair to some extent, although I would point out that religion traditionally regards supernatural effects in the material world as miracles, and miracles as being by their nature rare; the overlap shouldn’t therefore be very large, and therefore the conflict also shouldn’t be very large.

I arrived at this way of thinking to a considerable extent due to discussing the Bible (on The Religion Forum) over the last 15 years or so with Christians who were substantially more conservative than me. I will grant you it isn’t difficult to find Christians who are more conservative than me, although I actually score higher for postmodern or emergent Christianity than I do for liberal Christianity in a recent questionnaire. I found consistently that if we were able to get beyond matters such as whether scripture was inerrant and non-contradictory between passages or not, and whether scripture was historical or not, we could focus on the “spiritual meaning” of passages and have constructive discussions in which we didn’t disagree to a radical extent and often could find a meeting of minds.

There is a significant other consequence of this viewpoint for me, and that’s the way in which I see interfaith dialogues. I’ve read with interest books such as Brian McLaren’s “Why did Jesus, Moses, Mohammed and the Buddha Cross the Road: Christian Identity in a Multifaith World”, and note with pleasure moves towards positions which allow interfaith dialogue without issues of “my faith is better than your faith”, but have tended to find that they all (as McLaren does) try to preserve a sense of why actually Christianity IS better than [insert the name of a faith of choice]. I don’t think I need to do that in the slightest. Christianity is best for me, as I have assimilated a great deal of specifically Christian thinking into my concept space, and far more (and on a deeper level) than I have of any other faith system. It’s perfectly possible for a panentheist mystic to operate within a Christian paradigm, as many examples of Christian mystics have had at least a broadly similar set of “stories” in the relevant bit of their concept spaces, and it’s increasingly respectable to do so, as (for instance) Marcus Borg has testified to panentheist mystic thinking recently.

I very much like the metaphor of multiple roads leading to the top of the mountain (many paths, one summit), but this has taken something of a knock recently, for instance in Stephen Prothero’s “God is not One”, which sets out from the point of view of comparative religion to demonstrate that eight major world religions are irreducibly unique. I’ll ignore his suggestion that techniques differ between religions, as although this is correct, I know so many people who combine techniques from two or more religions that I can consider this non-foundational.

Austin Roberts, commenting on Prothero, writes “As Prothero points out, the religions do not share a finish line but they do share a starting point: “Where they begin is with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world.” But after this point of contact, the religions diverge sharply when they attempt to diagnose the problem and prescribe a solution. For Christians, sin is the problem while salvation from sin is the solution. For Buddhists, suffering is the problem while liberation from suffering (nirvana) is the goal. For Muslims, self-sufficiency is the problem and the solution is submission and paradise”.

Actually, I think the way of looking at religions as incorporating a set of stories into your concept space allows us to recognise and respect what Prothero is expressing while still maintaining the unity of the finish line (God). Of course, mixing elements of one story with another produces a confused and contradictory result (I could argue that that already happens within Christianity between different scriptures, as I don’t think Christianity can be boiled down to sin and salvation). I include within “story” concepts such as sin, salvation, suffering, nirvana, self-sufficiency and paradise, each of which is in its own way a story, and note that each religion actually has a family of stories which work more or less well with each other and, by and large, less well with stories out of other religions.

However, to me they are stories told about the same underlying relationship. Rather than the metaphor of different roads up a mountain, I prefer the story of the blind men investigating an elephant. One feels a tusk, and says “It’s like a spear”, one feels a leg, and says “It’s like a tree”, one feels the trunk, and says “It’s like a snake”, one feels the tail, and says “It’s like a rope”. All are telling a reasonable story about their experience of the elephant, and none has the complete picture.

One last thing. I talk often about mystical experience, and how this is foundational to me. Where does this fit in the distinction between story about the external world and story about the internal world? The answer is, I don’t know, but I suspect it’s based on a phenomenon in the external world, albeit probably confined to my own skull; there have been events in my neurophysiology which have given rise to my perceptions. If you like, the original peak experience was a “new hardware detected” event rather than a “software upgrades are available for download” event.

I now need to go away and think about whether the need to install a “driver” on connecting new hardware fits into this scheme or not. Any answers?

In a number of previous posts, I’ve used the term “disindividuation”, which seems to have produced some confusion in readers. I always contrast this with “deindividuation”, which is a reasonably well known but contentious social-psychological phenomenon in the psychology of groups, and particularly mobs.

In deindividuation, the identity of the individual becomes subsumed by the identity of a group, and the group is then treated as having its own consciousness. It leads to the dissolving of inhibitions and concern for the self, the only concern being the group.

There is a distinct linkage with disindividuation, for which I cannot find a link to a satisfactory internet article. Disindividuation similarly involves a weakening (sometimes near to the point of disappearance) of the sense of self in relation to the other, but the “other” in this case is commonly a much wider category than a group or mob, and is commonly identified by the one experiencing disindividuation as “God”. It is a common feature of peak mystical experiences, but has also been stimulated by researchers interfering with electrical activity in the brain in experimental circumstances, who have identified brain areas involved.

It is by far the most peculiar aspect of my own peak mystical experiences, which have not uncommonly involved a paradoxical sense that the self has at the same time been extinguished, and that it has expanded to include all that is, and possibly more than that. It can fluctuate, with the sense of self including anything from a small nugget within the body, through the body to the body and its immediate surroundings, the immediate neighbourhood, the world and the cosmos. The most persistent identifications (probably because they are limit situations) are with nothingness and with the All which is not less than the cosmos and which is God.

Meister Eckhart wrote “Thou shalt know him without image, without semblance and without means. – ‘But for me to know God thus, with nothing between, I must be all but he, he all but me.’ – I say, God must be very I, very God, so consummately one that this he and this I are one is, in this is-ness working one work eternally; but so long as this he and this I. to wit God and the soul, are not one single here, one single now, the I cannot work with nor be one with that he.” (Sermon XCIX, from Happold, “Mysticism”). I think this captures some of the sense of the disindividuation which I am talking about.

One consequence is that from the point of my first peak experience, I have been unable to see anyone else as being entirely “other” to me, and indeed I had some early problems with an excess of empathy, in which the feelings of other people (which I was noticing to an extent previously inconceivable) tended to overwhelm me. I didn’t have difficulty “loving my neighbour as myself”, I had difficulty not being slave to every strongly felt wish around me to the occasional serious detriment of my narrower self-interest; my narrow self-interest was at times difficult to identify as my focus, my sense of self was so often wider than that. Another consequence, of course, was an inability to see humanity as in any absolute sense more valuable than, say, the animal kingdom, life generally or the cosmos at large; a concern for ecology is mandated as a small subset of this.

I had to develop some barriers against this lack of individuation overwhelming me in order to function sensibly in the world, in fact. It is all very well “dying to self”, but this opens up a confusion of competing influences unless one has the luxury of being able to settle into a life of more or less solitary contemplation and focus entirely on the All (God) and relationship with that All.

In a blog post about the theology of Paul Tillich, Austin Roberts writes:- “Tillich defines the “Protestant principle” as the rejection of anything finite as appropriate objects of ultimate concern. Furthermore, faith is not merely a cognitive activity because it involves the whole person. Faith is directed toward the unconditional but also grounded in something concrete: “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The content matters infinitely for the life of the believer, but it does not matter for the formal definition of faith.” Faith as ultimate concern about the unconditional is distorted and idolatrous if one is ultimately concerned about something conditioned and finite.
Faith as ultimate concern involves total surrender of the self to either that which is truly ultimate or something less than ultimate (e.g., a nation, career, money, etc.) and the expectation of fulfillment through it.”

In terms of Tillich’s theology, therefore, the experience, repeated several times in greater or lesser extent (and the attendant disindividuation), produced a shift in the “focus of ultimate concern” for me. Nothing less could really be that ultimate focus for me, though the focus itself is paradoxical, being (in a way) at the same time nothingness and the All – and everything in between. I don’t know whether I would characterise focus on something less than the All as being “idolatrous”, but it is certainly an inappropriate direction for any ultimate concern. The mystical experience has in my experience a self-verifying character; it demands that alteration in focus in verifying that the perception is true.

I also don’t know that I would label it “not merely a cognitive activity”; while yes, it involves the consciousness of the whole person as a part of the All and not by any means a predominant part of the All, this is still a conscious (and unconscious) orientation, a feature of neuropsychology and as such inescapably cognitive. However this ultimate concern either amounts to, engenders, or includes as a constitutive part love and trust. As love and trust are overwhelmingly emotional issues, it is dominantly affective rather than cognitive, and so perhaps deserves to be regarded as more than merely cognitive, at least in the narrowest sense of “cognitive”.

Another aspect lies in the words “rejects anything finite”. The concept of an infinite and transcendent God leads, philosophically, to the problem of “ontological separation”; God is so different and so separated from man that there is no way of crossing the divide short of divine intervention, leading (for instance) Karl Barth to talk of humans as being “utterly incapable of discovering the infinite God in whom they place their faith as Christians”. The experience of disindividuation is one of radical immanence; the All, that which is God, is not and cannot be separated from the self; there can be no problem of ontological separation as all that is is part of the substance of that which is God.

[I don’t myself think that the problem of ontological separation is a real problem; to me it is analagous to Zeno’s tortoise paradox, resting on a misconception about infinities, and therefore a feature of philosophy and mathematics rather than of reality.]

That said, my own experience was that I needed an intervention of dramatic proportions in order to move from where I was to something like where I am now. I grant that it took me many years of practice to recapitulate that experience sufficiently that it became (in a much watered down form) fairly readily accessible via an effort of my own, but the initial experience was unmerited, un-worked for and might have led me to believe that an ontological separation had been crossed from the other side were it not for the contents of the experience. If at any point I should seem to be boasting about lack of self-centredness or wider concern, the reader should understand that this was at least initially given, and due to no merit or work of my own.

It is, I think, worth pointing out two other facets of the mystical experience which may or may not be linked in some way to disindividuation. One is that the experience is self-verifying; it comes with an inbuilt conviction that it is true perception, that this is the way things actually are. This is pertinent to my linking of it to faith above; it is massively convicting, and while I have aimed all my resources of scepticism and rationality at it and still from time to time entertain the idea that it results from a peculiarity of brain chemistry and is not provably more than that, at the end of the day I cannot do other than have faith. It is not, to me, an issue of “belief”; I believe or disbelieve things on the basis of evidence and probabilities, it is a matter of hard self-verifying evidence, of fact.

Secondly, the experience as I’ve known it is of timelessness. It is not merely physical boundaries which become meaningless, but also temporal ones. Aldous Huxley wrote of the “timeless moment”; I think of it as entering, however briefly, into atemporality. Past and future are both in some way “now”, and “now” is all that there is. God is frequently conceived of as eternal, which is normally thought of as having no temporal beginning or end, existing for an infinite amount of time. I have reservations about infinities being real at the best of times, but the concept of God as being not, as some put it “outside of time” but independent of although involved with time resonates well with me.

Sadly, unless I am in the course of having a peak mystical experience, thinking about time too deeply is inclined to scramble my brain. I recall the quote ” I know what time is, but when I think about it, I don’t” (which my memory tells me was Augustine); that pretty much sums it up.

This probably has a lot to do with my impatience with boundaries, in which I include doctrinal statements. That which is God may not, for me, be infinite in several ways in which conventional theology wishes (such as power and knowledge) but is unbounded in most (if perhaps not all) aspects – and in particular is not bounded by a gulf of separation between God and man. That just doesn’t make sense to me.

 

 

I have a few friends who often talk of “Christ’s work upon the cross”. This, frankly, jars with me.

Let’s face it, what happened to Jesus on the cross was that he died, fairly slowly (but not as slowly as might have been expected from the method of execution, by some reports) and extremely painfully. Everyone agrees on “extremely painfully”. I don’t talk about my late father’s “work” on a bed in York District Hospital, I talk about his death. Death is something which happens to us, not something we “do” (unless we commit suicide, perhaps), although the Fourth Gospel goes some way towards portraying Jesus as a willing participant. Even then, it isn’t really portrayed as “work”, more as something necessary to which Jesus submits with good grace.

The interpretation as “work” comes partly from other parts of the Fourth Gospel but mostly from Paul. Paul clearly saw Jesus’ death as effecting a massive change in the relationship of God with man;  what exactly the nature of that change was is the subject of various atonement theories, about which I’ve written before – Paul is not necessarily completely clear as to what he believed in terms of systematic theology, so there’s been plenty of room for theologians to construct different interpretations over the years. Paul’s gospel was “Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2); he was not nearly so forthcoming about Jesus’ lifetime ministry, which leads some scholars to believe that he knew relatively little about what Jesus had actually said (and others to conclude that Paul merely thought the death, and presumably resurrection, to be more important).

The writer of the Fourth Gospel saw Jesus as effecting a massive change in that relationship as well, but saw that change as being from Jesus’ birth; “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Granted, he also considered it vital that Jesus be “lifted up” (John 3:14).

The writers of the synoptics are far more concerned with Jesus’ lifetime ministry, about which they write extensively, and less so about his death; Matthew and Luke are also concerned about the resurrection, about which Mark hardly writes at all (the best versions of Mark end with the empty tomb).

So, do I think that Jesus effected a massive change in God’s relationship with man?

Most of the atonement theories rest on the premise that at the point of Jesus life, death and resurrection, God’s plan for humanity was broken and needed a radical divine intervention to restore it to proper functioning. There was obvious scriptural precedent for this, not least in the story of Noah’s flood, in which humanity had become so depraved that the only solution was to wipe them out and start again, but preserving the family of Noah as the seeds of a new beginning (and, of course, a rather minimal breeding stock of wildlife).

This, of course, rests on the idea that Judaism was incapable of being the vehicle for man’s proper relationship with God. Paul goes into some detail in both Romans and Galatians as to how this might be the case (with the proviso that Judaism is not completely without merit – Rom. 11:1-11). I find this deeply problematic, given that God appeared to go into very considerable detail as to how Israel (at least) should interact with God in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, with a large number of additional insights from the Prophets. Did he really get things so wrong? Is this the action of an all-powerful, all-knowing and benevolent God, to lay down detailed instructions for his people to follow knowing that they were actually completely ineffective?

I think not. We have, I think, to read Paul differently – and in recent years, the New Perspective on Paul has been doing just this, through (for instance) E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, Douglas Campbell and most recently N.T. Wright. In particular, we should note that Paul was extending the conception of relationship with God from just Israel to the world in general. and in the process explaining why conversion to Judaism was not actually a prerequisite (I would add “rather than explaining why Judaism was deficient”). It’s interesting to note that in Judaism the Rabbis conducted the same exercise, creating by exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures the “Noachide Laws”. (Noah gets a second mention!). Would that these had been available to Paul, but my best dating of the concept is early to mid second century.

So, Judaism wasn’t broken, it just needed universality. But was creation broken; was there a need for a reconciliation with God through an atoning sacrifice? Well, if you remember my “And God saw that it was good” posts last year, you’ll know that I don’t interpret Genesis in terms of a fall from a perfect state (which needed rectifying) at all. No original sin, no overriding need to fix that.

And yet, in the course of his rather convoluted reasoning in Romans, Paul maybe has a clue to a different understanding, and one where there was a need for a radical divine intervention. Paul wrote in Romans 3:24-26 “they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.” Note the wording in the middle and at the end there: “He did this to show his righteousness”, and “it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous”. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s forget the references to atonement and justification for a moment and concentrate on why Paul saw this as happening: it was to demonstrate God’s righteousness. Not to make it possible for mankind to be acceptable to God, but to make it possible for God to be acceptable to man.

There was a fault, but it wasn’t a fault in God’s creation or in God’s covenant with Israel, it was in mankind’s perceptions of God. They needed to be extended. In particular, for Paul, Gentiles needed to feel they could be accepted by the Hebrew God (who was the only God) without the need to enter into the Covenant; that they could be justified in his sight, and that he was and would be just towards them.

The writer of the Fourth Gospel had another point of view. He wasn’t talking about a feeling of justification, he was talking about a mystical participation in the phenomenon of the resurrected Christ (which was the Word, which was God), a participation which would cause a complete change in the individual. He considered that all that was needed was complete faith – and by that I am confident he meant a complete surrender to God-in-Christ, an identification way beyond what would be entailed in viewing Christ/Jesus as an exemplar, a teacher, a leader. A complete giving of the self in love and trust for the living God-in-Christ who was the mystical experience of the writer. John Spong has recently written persuasively of this view of the Fourth Gospel in “The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic”.

In fact, Paul also writes in this mode when he talks of us being in Christ and Christ being in us (Eph. 2:10 inter alia). It is a mystical understanding of the relationship of man with God (in Christ), as one would expect from someone who also talks of being caught up into the third heaven (2 Cor. 12:2).

So, are we looking at the beginning of a mystical understanding of God (God-in-Christ in this case) as a major development in the history of the relationship of God with men? Probably not this either; there are at least hints at mystical understandings of God (albeit not God-in-Christ, though sometimes God-in-Wisdom or God-in-Logos) scattered through the Hebrew scriptures, with concentrations in the Psalms, Proverbs and some of the Prophets.

The New Testament writers, however, are more unified in the concept that “in Jesus, in Christ, God had done something remarkable and different” than in any other non-concrete thing. Am I saying that no, actually he had not, this was merely another point on a continuum? It might appear so. There was a continuum of moral and practical teaching from Pharisaic Judaism into the Synoptics and Paul, there was a continuum of mystical conception from the Psalms and Prophets, the Wisdom tradition and Philo into Paul and the Fourth Gospel. There is also in the Synoptics and Thomas what I consider conclusive evidence that Jesus was himself a God-mystic, and there were God-mystics before him and have been God-mystics since, both in Judaism and Christianity and in many other world religions.

However, I share with some of the New Testament writers the conviction that Jesus was particularly the paradigmatic God-mystic, and that the Christ-mysticism of Paul and the Fourth Gospel takes that to a new level. In this, God was indeed doing something new, albeit not as dramatically new as might have seemed the case. I confess here that this view is coloured by my personal devotion to the figure of Jesus; just as do the New Testament writers, I love and trust the Jesus they talk of and the Christ which they make of him, and I am not able to be objective about this.

There is one more thing, however, and that is that with the brief ministry of Jesus and the explosion of followers after his death, world history changed radically. Only Mohammed might come close as an individual so pivotal in change, whether in the history of ideas or the history of nations. It may be that the depth of belief of the followers was the thing which precipitated this; what they felt, that Jesus was pivotal, they proceeded to impose on world history as a fact.

But I still don’t consider it was the cross which is central to that. The life, teaching, death, resurrection and continuing presence in the lives of millions cannot be separated. His work was his life and legacy more than it was the brief event of his passion and death.

 

The topic du jour today in the blogosphere seems to be Hell. This blog post covers most of my feelings on the subject, but I’ve also recently read an analysis which goes through the Biblical references distinguishing between Sheol, Tartarus, Hades and Gehenna (which I can’t now remember the location of) and laments them all being translated as “Hell”, whereas they are radically different places.

Mark 9:44-8 bears some of the responsibility; “where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched” seems fairly terrible until you appreciate that it refers to the rubbish dump of Ger Hinnom (“Gehenna”)  just outside the city walls of Jerusalem, and specifically to a place where bodies were sometimes dumped. It’s an ignominious resting place for your mortal remains, but not, Biblically, a place of torture. The worms and the fire were regarded as eternal (though I gather the place is remarkably free of rubbish, corpse-worms and fire these days), not the fact of being cast there – after all, the worms and fires would do their job fairly rapidly, and you’d be dead anyhow. Not so wonderful in a culture where there was a belief in resurrection as something closer to physical resuscitation, of course.

As I most definitely don’t expect anything remotely like a physical resuscitation, what happens to my body after it’s stopped maintaining consciousness is a topic of supreme irrelevance to me…

However, all of these treatments, correct as they are in saying that this concept of Hell is severely lacking (by which, in my polite English way, I mean just plain wrong and damaging to boot), do not address one of the standard arguments, that of the holiness of God. In this argument, God cannot permit anything sinful and unholy to join with him in heaven because of his nature as holy and perfect, because however loving and just he may be, it would be contrary to his nature to allow this. This does not have the difficulty of postulating a power greater than God, nor does it attack his omnibenevolence, his mercy, in the same drastic way.

Granted, annihilation would be more merciful than would be an eternity of punishment, and actually annihilation fits far better with the majority of the Biblical texts than does an eternity of suffering. But actually, I do not anticipate complete annihilation, and I do not anticipate it on the basis of my mystical peak experiences of union (or near-union) with the divine.

A component of this is the feeling of being a little like a moth drawn to a candle, which if it flies a little too close will be burned to dust – but what is in danger of extinction is those aspects of the self which are not in complete conformity with God’s will, with God’s mercy and yes, with God’s holiness. I think of this as the “refiner’s fire” of Malachi 3:2 (NLT) “But who will be able to endure it when he comes? Who will be able to stand and face him when he appears? For he will be like a blazing fire that refines metal, or like a strong soap that bleaches clothes.”

I am entirely willing to be refined, or bleached, in the fullness of time – indeed, I am trying so to live life that the minimum amount needs to be refined or bleached away. I am, in the words of Step 5 (of the Twelve Steps), entirely ready to have God remove all my defects of character. It may hurt – it is entirely likely to, as some of my defects of character are things I am very attached to, but I look forward to it and pray for it (which is Step 6…).

I agree there is no Hell as it has been popularly conceived, but the Catholic concept of purgatory? That’s a different matter.

(For those who aren’t aware of it, the title refers to “From Hell and Hull and Halifax, good Lord deliver us”. There’s nowt wrong wi’ Hull or Halifax…)

Following on from the last post, I found this piece from Christian Piatt today.
“What if I’m not sure what I believe” is the question he talks about, and I’m entirely happy with the direction he goes in, of remaining open to new ideas, new ways of looking at theology. The snag is that in a very large slice of Christianity, being undecided about something is being lukewarm (perish the thought that Paul would disapprove of me!), and being undecided about many things is being a doubter – and as I was informed in an Alpha talk recently, doubt is a principal weapon of Satan.

The thing is, I am fundamentally a scientific rationalist, and so a very large amount of the concepts I work with are working hypotheses rather than things I “believe in” in the sense that churches tend to mean the word. I’m used to juggling a number of possible working hypotheses, and I’m used to situations like wave-particle duality in Physics where there are two mutually inconsistent ways of looking at something each of which “works” in certain circumstances but neither of which “works” in all.

I also have a fair number of years practicing law behind me, and am horribly familiar with the perils of being certain of a situation before all of the evidence has been examined, or in spite of some of the evidence which doesn’t quite fit the desired answer. Law, of course, always ends up with someone delivering a verdict. That’s an imposed certainty rather than an actual one, in most cases. Some years ago I considered a sample of cases of people who had been convicted of offences, and came to the conclusion that rather more than 25% of convictions were actually wrong – granted, most were convictions for the wrong offence, or convictions of someone who had committed this kind of crime on other occasions but was actually not guilty on this occasion.

Some years ago I read a terrible book called “Evidence which Demands a Verdict” by one Josh McDowell. This is a work of Christian apologetics, and where it promises to advance evidence, actually is a one-sided making of a case. The only way you’d be likely to get the verdict the writer wanted in a real adversarial tribunal would for there to be no argument against, whether based on the faulty or unreliable evidence, faulty reasoning or ignoring contradictory evidence, and for the Judge to be no lawyer. With any reasonably competent opposition, I think the only verdict which could actually be reasonably delivered would be “not proven”.

But why demand a verdict at all? Generally speaking, you only demand a verdict when you want certainty about something, and if it’s a shaky certainty because the evidence is not conclusive, you’re losing something by forcing the point. It frankly makes little difference to me whether about 90% of the creed in my church is correct or not, and my church is fairly light on the amount of theological assertion which is actually demanded openly (though there’s a stack of other stuff which is understood). I’m not going to love God more or less, love my neighbour more or less or follow Jesus more or less because of most of these statements, not least the labyrinthine complexities of trinitarian understandings. Or whether there was a virgin birth, or a physical resurrection.

Largely, therefore, my answer is that if I’m not sure what I believe, I’m avoiding false certainties, I’m trying to achieve some humility about my own viewpoints.

I wonder if Josh has read “The Cloud of Unknowing”? It could be that with belief, less is more.