GOD – AND THE GREAT GOD CHANCE – Part IV

So let’s consider science and reason as authorities for our quest.

By the way, it is important to remember that the root of the word “question” is quest. Further, it is important to remember, as theologian Paul Tillich used to say, that doubt is not the opposite of faith, but part of faith. After all, does it not require faith to say, “I doubt that.”?

And to considerable degree it requires faith in human reason. And we see the power of human reason and our faith in it when we use it to examine religious traditions not our own. Is it, for example, always a sin to eat pork as in Judaism and Islam?

Reason goes on to ask: Do the gods require a virgin to be sacrificed to ensure rain as among ancient Mayans? Is God satisfied with the blood of bulls and goats and human beings in sacrifice? Does God demand that women be completely veiled, subjugated to men with the mutilation of their genitals? Are all cows sacred and forbidden as food? Should all people be vegetarian? Are all predestined, some for heaven, some for hell for the greater glory of God? Does God forbid blood transfusions or medical attention for disease and illness?

Is it true male Muslim martyrs enter directly into paradise and receive seventy-two virgins as a reward? Not true said some Grand Rapids Muslims at a recent lecture. The math is mixed up. What they receive is one seventy-two year old virgin!

We appeal to reason in a thousand ways, especially to question religious customs, cultures and convictions not our own. And the atheists appeal to scientific reason to question the Jewish-Christian-Muslim doctrines of creation. Says Christopher Hitchens, who always writes with dramatic entertaining flair, “Why do people keep saying, God is in the details? He isn’t in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure and incompetence.” (God Is Not Great, p. 85) Hitchens goes on to berate the imperfections in a universe and world supposedly created by a perfect Deity where 98 percent of all the species that ever lived on planet earth are now extinct. And we live on a climatic knife edge, says Hitchens, and the “sun” he says, “is getting ready to explode and devour its dependent planets like some jealous chief or tribal deity. Some design!” (ibid. p.80)

In short, the arguments of the contemporary atheists is that if God were perfect, would he not have created a perfect world? With all the randomness, waste, disease, tragedy, suffering and meaninglessness, the so-called perfect Creator God seems to have bungled it.

So that leads then to the grand deus ex machina, the god out of the machinery, of classical drama to intervene in a difficult situation or explain how things have come to be, or to untangle the plot in the story. And that deus ex machina is Darwin’s revolutionary book published in 1859, The Origin of Species. How did life come to be? It evolved from original cells or bacteria into more complex life forms through the process of natural selection.

Opposing the new science, Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford asked Aldous Huxley, Darwin’s defender, “I should like to ask Professor Huxley, is it on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side that the ape ancestry comes in?” Huxley replied he would be more proud of that than a Bishop as ancestor who was speaking of an area he knew nothing about. Or as Mark Twain put it, “The real question is not what a man descends from but what he descends to.”

We will not descend to debunking evolution in the name of Biblical literalism or scientific ignorance. Instead, we will say evolutionism leaves many important questions unanswered and often presumes to answer questions for which it has no real scientific evidence. Reason is finite and cannot comprehend the infinite And science has limits, has been wrong, sometimes grossly wrong, as well as right.

For example, even Hitchens agrees there are “many disputes between evolutionists as to how the complex process occurred, and indeed how it began.” (ibid. p.86) Sam Harris admits “how the process of evolution got started is still a mystery (then adds without any scientific evidence) but that does not in the least suggest that a deity is likely to be lurking at the bottom of it all.” (Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 71)

I like to say that atheistic evolutionism requires four “deities” as I call them: Energy, Matter, Chance and Time – lots and lots of time. It was atheist British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who made famous the phrase that “everything is a chance collocation of atoms.” But 400 years before Christ, Greek philosopher, Democritus, said it first, “everything is a chance collocation of atoms.”

Evolutionism builds on that notion, but fails to take note of the new science which suggests there may not be a basic particle such as a supposedly unsplitable atom. Physicists probing the sub-sub atomic world say at the bottom everything may not be matter, but energy. So it is quite presumptive to say science has the answers to the mysteries of reality, as it used to say, says leading scientist, Dr. Jacob Bronowski. (The Ascent of Man, chapter 11)

Irish Bishop, James Ussher, in the 1600’s, claimed the creation took place in 4004 B.C. based on his tracing back the generations of the Bible to Adam and Eve. Many Christians today would scoff at that notion and allow evolutionists the millions of years they need. Yet, we would continue to point out the mystery of time itself, the questions of absolute time and relative time as proposed by Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. In response to the query, “why would a Creator God take so much time?”, we could say, somewhat whimsically, because he has all the time in the world, or that God is timeless but acts in time on his schedule.

(to be continued)