Preamble
I was reminded the other day that at school, we would
have guest speakers brought in once a term to give a short address to a whole
school assembly. That school was Bristol Cathedral School and the full school
assembly took place in the Cathedral.
If I was asked to do this, I may say
something like this.
____________________________________________________________
Since the Age of Enlightenment started in the late 17th
century; [perhaps with hind-sight better called the Age of Making Science God],
the mistake has been to see the ‘old’ God, the religious God, as a person;
like us just with super-hero powers; a physical entity; an old man with white beard in the sky;
a ‘thing’.
And because
the new God, Science, can’t see, analyse or measure that ‘thing’, then de
facto, the ‘thing’ doesn’t exist.
The old God is dead; long live our new God.
[Shhh - we mustn't let the cat out of the bag by calling it that!]
But let’s consider one of the (supposedly) biggest arrows
in the ‘God and religion is nonsense’ quiver - evolution.
That’s not a physical entity; not a ‘thing’ either is it?
You don’t walk down the street and trip over evolution or spot it on the other
side of the road nipping to the shop for a pint of milk. You can't point a telescope at it or put it under a microscope, can you?
Evolution is a process within Creation.
It does not tell us how life began only what happened after it began. [Even our
most prominent professional atheist, Richard Dawkins, admits this – see his
interview on the Within Reason you tube channel].
God is a process within Creation.
The process doesn’t tell us precisely what God is but it can move us toward a better
understanding of our possibility; a better, wiser way of thinking and acting that makes us more-rounded,
thus more useful people.
‘Oh’, the atheist says, ‘but we can see the outcomes of evolution.
Some outcomes of evolution seem bad (e.g. creatures went extinct or lost
their ability to fly), others seem good, (they adapted and have thrived)’.
But it’s the same with God. There are many who say they can see the evidence of
God in the world both in an abstract way (beauty, love) and directly in their own
lives. Like evolution, some things that happen in life are bad and some are good.
We need to understand that ‘God’ is just a word; just a name;
just an inadequate label we use to try and describe something we cannot and can never wholly
understand.
Namely, the infinite transcendent. The Oneness of all creation; the origin and Being of Life,
the Universe and Everything.
We are only human; and just because we think of ourselves
as being the most marvellous cognitive beings in creation, doesn’t mean we are
anywhere near being able to understand the infinite transcendent; the Oneness
of all creation. That’s just our arrogance.
All holy writings, for example but not only, The Bible,
are attempts to describe & explain ways of seeing and moving toward that
Oneness.
Some of it is literally true and some is allegory, parable, symbolism.
We, to the essence we label 'God', are like ants are to us. Some ants are aware
of our existence and some, say they live in a desert or the Brazilian rainforest, are totally unaware of
our existence. But even the ones that are aware cannot possibly fathom our
Being; our greater cognitive ability; our greater knowledge and understanding of how creation
works; our different sense of time and place.
How can they?
Their only metric
of ‘knowing’, however much evolved from their starting point, will never be
able to match ours.
Similarly, if your ONLY metric of ‘knowing’ is human-derived
material science, you will never realise the existence of the Oneness, OR
you will mistake it merely for what we know via scientific materialism, and thus
will miss out on the benefits of embracing the whole essence of our possibility.
A little tale to make this point:
A scientist enters the laboratory one evening and finds a
single rose on her desk. She takes the rose and conducts all manner of
experiments on it to find out its biological & genetic properties. The
following morning, when her research assistant arrives, she thanks him for
leaving the test exhibit, saying she thoroughly enjoyed working all her
experiments on it. The research assistant is dismayed. It was St Valentine’s
Day yesterday, he reminds her. That rose had a totally different meaning and
purpose to the one you ascribed to it. The research assistant leaves the room,
clearly upset. The scientist is non-plussed by this turn of events. It had never
occurred to her that there was anything of any true worth outside the purely
scientific way of considering anything. She now had a choice: To shrug it off
and continue with her narrow focus or to embrace the things outside of that
focus and integrate them into her way of life for the betterment of both her
scientific work and her own Being.
Here’s another thought along the same lines.
Why did Sherlock Holmes move into 221B Baker Street?
One answer is that he was looking for somewhere to live and
wanted a room-mate to share the cost, bounce ideas off etc.
Another answer is, because the author, Conan Doyle, needed him to do that in
order to advance the plot of the story.
These answers are both true depending on the resolution of thought with which you
consider the question, and importantly, they do not compete against each other.
But to claim that only one of the two ways of considering
the question is valid, and the other invalid, is narrow-minded and thus
restricts your ability to properly consider all aspects of the question to your own detriment.
What’s my point?
Science and Theology are not in competition unless your
focus on either of them is too narrow, too up-close for you to see the wider,
bigger, far more important and far more exciting picture.
It’s BOTH / AND.
BOTH science AND theology or religion or spirituality, whatever inadequate descriptive word
you feel comfortable using.
But it’s NOT either/or.
I urge you to open you hearts and minds to do just that;
have the courage and wisdom to seek and find that bigger BOTH / AND experience.
As much as anything, it affords far greater personal growth
opportunities and very importantly, with those greater opportunities comes much more fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment