Showing items filed under “The Rt. Rev. George Sumner”

How Far Can Reason Take Us?  Scien

Most of us have little to no direct contact with scientific research, but we live in a culture in which certain assumptions are made about science and its consequences.   For example, the memory of Christian groups which have resisted the theory of evolution has led some to think that the Church is naturally hostile to science. The question of its place is tantamount to the question whether Christianity is itself reasonable. Taking the strongest position, atheists claim that Christianity is superstition, equivalent to voodoo or the belief in witches.  We need to clear the ground so that a helpful weighing of the question can occur.

Belief in a contingent order of creation which is real and good, as Christians do, is friendly to, and historically conduced to, the scientific enterprise.  We need at the same time to read the Bible carefully. Genesis 1 is a source for such a belief, but it not itself a scientific theory of cosmology. A broader view would show that scientific views have changed over the centuries, and the Christian Gospel has adapted its expression to them.  There is an adage that in the first generation Christians have condemned the new theory, in the second declared it a thing indifferent, and in the third written hymn to the Creator borrowing from it.

At the same time science needs to maintain a certain humility.  Since it observes the empirical order, to does not claim to ask or answer questions outside of this boundary.  What was before the Big Bang, or what will be after the end of the universe, and as result to what purpose creation exists, are simply not in science’s remit.  The scientist who claims to have disproved the reality of God has forgotten what science is. 

Science and religion are different, covering as they do different domains with different questions. But they can have a conversation!  Science reminds theology what it is to be clear about assumptions, rigorous in their application, and open to correction. Religion can remind science that any such endeavor requires a community of inquiry and the risk involved in an hypothesis. As a kind of bonus, the sheer weirdness of some of modern science’s results (strings, black holes, etc.) reminds us that ‘there are stranger things in heaven and hell, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy…’ (‘Hamlet) 

John Polinghorne, Anglican physicist-theologian

Theology differs from science in many respects, because of its different subject matter, a personal God who cannot be put to the test in the way that the impersonal physical world can be subjected to experimental enquiry. Yet science and theology have this in common, that each can be, and should be defended as being investigations of what is, the search for increasing verisimilitude in our understanding of reality. 

John Collins of the Genome Project

So, some have asked, doesn't your brain explode? Can you both pursue an understanding of how life works using the tools of genetics and molecular biology, and worship a creator God? Aren't evolution and faith in God incompatible? Can a scientist believe in miracles like the resurrection?

Actually, I find no conflict here, and neither apparently do the 40 percent of working scientists who claim to be believers. Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.

But why couldn't this be God's plan for creation? True, this is incompatible with an ultra-literal interpretation of Genesis, but long before Darwin, there were many thoughtful interpreters like St. Augustine, who found it impossible to be exactly sure what the meaning of that amazing creation story was supposed to be. So attaching oneself to such literal interpretations in the face of compelling scientific evidence pointing to the ancient age of Earth and the relatedness of living things by evolution seems neither wise nor necessary for the believer.

I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God's majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.

 

The Problem of God

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We humans have the power to make tools, to speak, to plan for the future.  In our own ways we are the most skilled of animals.  We can ask questions about ourselves, about life and its purpose.  We can speak of our own death.  We can tell stories, including a conclusion of all things, and we can create things for the sake of their beauty alone.   We can ask about, and then pursue, the truth even when it, as with the tragic Oedipus, does not conduce to our favor. We can imagine the divine.  In so doing we experience wonder, dread, and hope.  We can think of that which exceeds our understanding.  And we can offer these generalizations even as we give space for the wide variations in these activities and ideas culturally.   The human is the sort of creature who can pose the question of God. 

This capacity to seek and ask what exceeds us will seem to some a built-in frustration.  “All this I have tested by wisdom. I said ‘I will be wise,’ but it was far from me.” (Ecclesiastes 7:23) Better to live life on its own terms and let questioning go!  Many today advocate just such an elimination of all that is not functional or material, as if that would remove our discontent.  The price is concluding that life is ‘vanity,’ wind, ‘sound and fury signifying nothing’ (MacBeth).    But it is harder than it might seem to ignore the ‘itch,’ the restlessness.  It is part of our make-up:   the human as question-asker asks why this is so too. 

Now if it is God we are speaking of, then we are speaking of that which we cannot understand, the One greater than we are.  If the answer could be reduced to human terms alone, then it would no longer be God we are speaking of.  We are now feeling our way in a darkened room.  What kind of creature has implanted the urge to do that?  The Christian faith claims that this capacity, with its accompanying incapacity, is an indispensable clue to the truth about ourselves and the world.

It is important to realize what Christianity isn’t saying. It is claiming that people can live with or without God.   But is not claiming that you can wrestle with the question of God or not, and it doesn’t really matter, whatever works for you, as if there were no consequence.  We believe that to live only in the day-to- day truncates what you as a human are.      

You might say that everyone is ‘religious’ insofar as they have some answer or other, around which we organize our lives (A theologian named Paul Tillich said something like this).  But Christianity is not saying that all the answers to the ‘big question’ are fine, so long as you have one.  There are people who say this (they might be called ‘pluralists’), but the Christian faith claims something more definite.  Answers that replace something created for the Creator, which sub-in something smaller and knowable, are called ‘idolatry’ in the Bible. They are rejected because at the end of the day we are thereby really worshipping ourselves. 

What to Read: CS Lewis, Surprised by Joy: Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse... withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased... In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else... The quality common to the three experiences... is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure.

Venerable Bede, Ecclesiastical History, II.13: The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.

Phiilippians 3:18  For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. 19 Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach,and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things. 20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

 

 

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Complete the Race (II Timothy 4:17)

At the end of our vacation we find ourselves in Chicago for its Marathon weekend (the fastest, I have read this morning, perhaps because it is cool and relatively level). Marathons offer many good things. You can see world-class athletes from places like Ethiopia and Kenya. There is a feel of fiesta with signs by family members, getups by some for-fun runners, and food for sale.

But as I looked out my hotel window at 7:30 a.m., I watched the race of competitors who have lost legs or their use. Wheeling vehicles by arm for 26 miles means serious fitness and determination.

Those competitors were to me, this morning, a symbol of the Church too. For each is wounded. The larger family cheers them on. Each by grace has risen up to run the race. Ahead is the goal, the prize, the welcome home. We find the companionship of Jesus the Lord, there, and along the route too.

Amen.

GRS