religion

The hand of God

/ Minimalist Christian / 2 Comments

A few years ago I decided to dig deeper into the apparent conflict between science and religion.

Many people have the view that science can in theory explain everything, that even if we don’t know the answers yet then it is just a matter of time before we find them.  This view of Science has turned it into a faith.

I admit that I wondered if advances in science since I studied it might actually bring more powerful arguments than I was aware of. But I also wondered whether the extreme unlikeliness of life might be sufficient to prove that there must be a God and so I spent several years reviewing what science has discovered and assessing how that fits with Christianity. 

The first thing to say is that there are clearly things written in the Bible that are not to be taken literally.  And it causes problems when people do. When people hear both Christians and atheists claim that Christians believe that Genesis is the literal truth then they are unlikely to look any further.  It is that which put me off even considering God until I was forty, and so I feel that Creationists do God a disservice.

Putting Creationism aside, I have not found any serious conflict between science and faith.

I have found that when you try to calculate numbers, you find that the chances of us being here are extremely small – but we are here.  The chance of me winning the lottery if I buy one ticket is extremely small, but every week someone wins. If you try often enough then extremely unlikely events will happen. 

But how can I say that there isn’t any serious conflict between science and faith?  Isn’t there a conflict between science and miracles?  Hasn’t science shown that they are impossible?

To answer that we need to think about what we actually mean by science. It’s a term that is in such common use that we often don’t think about what it really is. A few years ago the Science Council realised that they didn’t have a definition of science, and so they came up with one.

“Science is the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.”

Let’s break that down a little:

“the pursuit of knowledge and understanding” – I’m sure we are happy with that, although it doesn’t say ALL knowledge and understanding.

“of the natural and social world” – that’s good, it defines the scope where it applies.  Science has nothing to do with what is not the natural and social world.

“following a systematic methodology based on evidence” We can expand on that a little.  The methodology includes steps of

  1. Observation of a phenomenon and experiment to find out what happens
  2. Trying to think of what the rules are that describe the phenomenon – the rules should be consistent with the accepted laws of science.
  3. Establishing new experiments or observations to test the theory
  4. Repeat the experiments
  5. Analyse and review the results, and publish.

Critical to this is repetition.  Science assumes that the “natural and social world” behaves in a manner that is repeatable.

Richard Feynman, a famous physicist was giving a talk about what is known as the ‘two slit experiment’ – you shoot electrons at a barrier which has two slits in it, and a screen behind it, and you observe where each electron hits the screen. He comments that

“A philosopher once said that: ‘It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results’. Well, they do not. You set up the circumstances, with the same conditions every time, and you cannot predict behind which hole you will see the electron.”

Through repetition, science has discovered that if you look at enough numbers of electrons then a predictable pattern emerges.  However,  the behaviour of an individual electron cannot be predicted.

And what is a miracle?  The Cambridge Dictionary definition of a miracle is:

“An unusual and mysterious event that is thought to have been caused by a god because it does not follow the usual laws of nature”

By definition, science and miracles are mutually exclusive.

  • Science defines the usual laws of nature
  • Miracles don’t follow the usual laws of nature

But this does NOT mean that science tells us that miracles cannot happen.

It’s like putting everything that behaves in a predictable manner into a box and calling that science.  I can learn all about what goes on inside the box.  But none of my knowledge about what goes on inside the box can tell me anything about what is outside the box.  

I might assume that nothing exists outside the box, but science can give me no evidence of whether my assumption is true.  Belief in that assumption is called materialism. The faith of materialism asserts that there cannot be miracles, but science itself can say nothing about whether miracles can happen. 

But what if there is evidence that the universe doesn’t always behave according to fixed materialistic laws? Does that disprove materialism?

What if I know that there are things outside the box?

It seems to us that we are able to make choices.  We can decide who to vote for in elections.  We can decide whether to come to a breakfast talk.  We can decide whether or not to kill our next door neighbour. 

It’s called free will.  We experience our free will every day.

But if the universe operates according to fixed laws of nature, where is there scope for free will? 

There are some who believe so completely in Materialsm that they think free will is an illusion.  Here’s an example from an on line discussion forum:

“. . . given our understanding of determinism and un-determinism there is nothing left that explains exactly what free will could be, in the traditional sense. It’s more a case of a challenge to those that assume free will to explain its mechanism.”

In other words, Materialists believe that free will cannot exist in a universe which operates according to fixed laws.  So if you or I believe that we have free will, then that is a strong hint that materialism is wrong – that there are things outside of our box. 

There is another definition of miracle in the Cambridge dictionary:

“a very lucky event that is surprising and unexpected”

Even within the laws of physics it is possible for miracles to happen. 

There is an account in the Bible of when Jesus told one of his followers to go and catch a fish, and that in the mouth of the fish he would find a gold coin, and then he was to use that coin to pay their tax.  That is such an extremely unlikely event that it becomes a miracle, but a miracle operating within the “laws of physics”.

I said earlier that I’d wondered whether the extreme unlikeliness of life might be sufficient to prove that there must be a God.  Whilst the origin of life may follow the laws of physics, is it so unlikely that it is classed as a miracle? Let’s explore that a little and try to get a feel for some numbers. 

It is difficult to define what life is, but one element that we are all aware of is the ability to reproduce, or replicate.

All life as we know it – plants and animals – contain long chain molecules.  Proteins are building blocks for much of the body, and DNA acts as a template for organising amino acids into the correct order to make proteins and to replicate itself.

DNA is made up of four nucleotides, called ‘bases’.  These are held in place on a sugar/phosphate backbone.  The order of the bases defines the order of amino acids that are assembled by machinery in the cell in order to form a protein.  The machinery in the cell includes other long chain molecules that are essential for the replication process.

Although human DNA has around 3 billion bases, scientists have estimated that the minimum length of a long chain molecule that would be able to replicate is around 40 bases.  Like DNA, those 40 bases would need to be in a precise order to be able to replicate.

The question is, where did this first long chain molecule come from?  It was not built by the mechanism in the cell, because there was no mechanism. 

Perhaps it might have self assembled by chance if we had a pot of molecules bubbling in a primordial soup.

Now, the number of different possible sequences of a chain of forty molecules of four different types is massive, and the chance of any particular one forming at random is on in a septillion!  That’s 1024  –  a million billion billion.

And if you needed two specific molecules to ensure replication then it would be the same as searching for a single molecule in the whole mass of the earth.

No wonder Richard Dawkins has said that

“Self-replicating molecules that made copies of themselves came into existence by sheer luck….. Nobody knows how it happened.”

We can agree I think that the origin of life is “a very lucky event that is surprising and unexpected” …. i.e. a miracle. 

Another extremely unlikely occurrence is the fine tuning of the universe.

We use equations to represent the laws of physics as we know them. The equations usually include a number of constants.   Some constants can be derived mathematically, such as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter which is known as Pi.

Other constants don’t appear to have their value for any particular reason – as far as I’m aware there is no particular reason why the speed of light is what it is.   These constants are only obtained by careful measurement.

Scientists can calculate what might have happened if the constants had been different. These calculations show us that the constants in this universe seem to be incredibly fine-tuned. 

John Lennox quotes that “If the ratio of the strong nuclear force to the electromagnetic force had been different by one part in 1016, no stars could have formed. If the ratio of electromagnetic force-constant to the gravitational force-constant was increased by only 1 part in 1040 then only small stars would exist; decrease it by the same amount and there will only be large stars. You must have both large and small stars in the universe; the large ones produce elements in their thermonuclear furnaces and it is only the small ones that burn long enough to sustain a planet with life. That is the kind of accuracy a marksman would need to hit a coin on the far side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away.

Many thinkers and Christian scientists pursue the idea that these levels of extreme improbability must ‘prove’ that the laws of nature are insufficient, and that ‘The hand of God’ is required at critical points in the history of the universe to explain where we are today. I find the idea attractive, but it is not unquestionable proof as there is always the counter argument that with enough attempts unlikely things happen. 

And for me, trying to find God in the unlikely concedes too much.  It is a false way of thinking that seems to accept that if we can explain something scientifically then we don’t need God – so we have to look for things that we can’t explain scientifically and voila: God. This is called ‘God of the Gaps’, and constrains God to those things that we can’t explain – the gaps. 

But it is actually applying the faith of the Materialist to God.  “I’m going to claim everything that is explainable as my materialist faith, and just leave you with the gaps to explain by God” 

It implies that:

  • God is confined to the gaps
  • God only ‘appears’ intermittently
  • God only does miracles

That is a misunderstanding of God.

What if we apply this sort of ‘improbability thinking’ to the development of a human being from a single cell?

DNA is often called the blueprint of the body, and is the template to build all the protein molecules in the body. Human DNA has just under 3 billion bases.  There are around 3.5million letters in the Bible, so it would need around 800 books the size of the Bible to write out human DNA. That sounds a big number (although our DNA only a tenth of the size of that of an amoeba), but let’s look at what the DNA has to do.

An adult has fifty trillion human cells.  That’s 17000 cells for each DNA base. And scientists have said that 97% of our DNA is actually ‘junk’ … not used for producing proteins. If that is right, then there are over half a million cells for each non-junk DNA base.

Our fifty trillion cells are organised into systems:

  • Circulatory system
  • Skeletal system
  • Immune system
  • Muscular system
  • Hearing
  • Sight
  • Nervous system
  • Brain
  • ….

Those systems change with time.  Components are built at different times in the development process.  Cells have to die off to make way for other cells.  We have to stop growing at some point.  We are programmed to die.

And our “short” string of DNA is supposed to define all of this. The orchestrated operation of the fifty trillion cells for over seventy years is not something that is learned as the body grows. And the coding of these systems was contained in the DNA of one single fertilised cell.

Using a ‘probability’ type of thinking, we might deduce that it is impossible for a human to grow from a single fertilised cell without the hand of God.

And yet we see it happen every day, 350,000  new babies born a day around the world. This miracle has being repeated by the hand of God billions of times, just in humans. The hand of God is very busy!

Now actually, this is a better understanding of God.  This is not a ‘God of the gaps’ but a ‘God of everything’. This is a God who sustains the operation of matter in a consistent manner that we can predict through the scientific method.  This is a God who provides the raw materials for science to study.

This is a God of whom the psalmist wrote:  “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

The behaviour of matter, as modelled by the laws of physics can be understood to be the hand of God. We no longer search for a God who lives outside the universe and occasionally pops in to correct it when it goes wrong, but we have a God who is intimately involved in the universe, sustaining not only the laws of physics but also our very being. Everything that science discovers is simply discovering more of the wonders of God. 

If we can grasp this it leads to two responses:

Wow! …. and…. Why?

To understand the Why, we can’t look to science – but we can look to Jesus. And when we understand the Why, and respond to it, the Wow becomes our worship.  The study of science returns to its origin, the search for a better understanding and knowledge of God.

Thank you for reading.

How can one God be Father, Son and Holy Spirit?

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Christian doctrine tells us that Jesus is God, that the Holy Spirit is God and that ‘the Father’ is God.  And that Jesus is not the Father, who is not the Holy Spirit, who is not Jesus.  And that there is only one God.

Doesn’t it defy common sense and logic? How might we think about this mystery? 

Consider an analogy:  what is War and Peace?  It is a novel by Leo Tolstoy of course.  And of course, we all know what a novel is.  Or do we? 

It is of course the book that you buy in a bookshop?  But is it the paper and ink? No, it’s more than that.  Is it the pattern made by the dark ink on the white paper? No, the same words can be written in different fonts?  And what about different translations? And what if the book is read out loud?

Is it the precise set of words that Tolstoy wrote? – were early drafts not War and Peace? 

Is it the precise story? – then what of screenplays, are they not War and Peace?

War and Peace is the book, it’s the film, it’s the spoken word, it’s all the translations.  The book is not the film, which is not the spoken word.  The Chinese translation is War and Peace, the English translation is War and Peace, but the English translation is not the Chinese translation – there is only one War and Peace.

Something which we think is simple is actually much more complex! 

And so it is with God.  We might think we know who or what God is, but most certainly we don’t.  They are far more complex!  But perhaps thinking about the analogy of War and Peace we will understand a little more.

And here’s a bonus question – did the story exist before Tolstoy wrote it?  Would it cease to exist if humanity was wiped out and there was nobody to remember it? (Isn’t memory just another medium for recording the story anyway).  If another civilisation emerged ten thousand years after humanity died out and were able to read the book, would War and Peace come into existence again?  Or did it continue to exist throughout that period.  Did the tale exist before it was written down, in the same way that 1 + 1 has always equalled 2 – even before there was intelligent life to discover it.  Has War and Peace always existed?  Does this help us understand how Jesus always existed, how ‘in the beginning was the word’?

Good news!

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Deep inside each of us we know that we ought to be good.  Perhaps it’s stronger than that, and we want to be good.  But we aren’t as good as we’d like to be, and we often disappoint ourselves and perhaps give up trying, and ignore our shortcomings – burying them in a busy and ‘important’ life.

Millions of years of ‘survival of the fittest’ evolution has honed our human nature to make sure that we thrive physically and materially, even if it is at the expense of others.  We want a better house, a better car, more money.  We want our country to be richer and have a better healthcare system than others.  We recognise that there are laws that we must obey, but we will find ways round them if we can if it improves our lot.  We might get angry about world situations; the dreadful behaviour of the Taliban, or Trump, or Putin, or global warming, or social injustice; demanding action from governments but perhaps being unwilling to actually do much, if anything ourselves.

In this environment, what is the relevance of and role of religion?  And what about God? And do They have anything to do with religion, or us?

Reliable historical texts describe that Jesus brought ‘good news’ to the people of Israel, and that he told his followers to take that good news to all nations.  The people he brought the good news to were probably not that different to us, although with less technology and material possessions; they had the same drives and motivations.  They felt the same disillusionments.  Yet many people were changed by the message he brought, transforming their lives and motivated to take his message to the world. 

So what was this ‘good news’ that Jesus brought, and why don’t we hear it today?

Basically, the good news was (and still is) that ‘You can be good, and this is what being good looks like.’

On top of that simple message, he brought us tools and techniques to help us, the primary one being the tool to free us from the ‘badness’ of our past.  Using his tools we can look forward to what we can become rather than being dragged back by our past mistakes. 

The tool that he offered was repentance; sincere regret and remorse.  But repentance alone is clearly not enough and might simply add a feeling of extreme guilt and worthlessness (who would want to subject themselves to that).  The ‘magic’ that Jesus brought was, and still is authoritative forgiveness.

Forgiveness only works if it is offered by someone with the authority to forgive; it doesn’t mean a thing if I forgive you for stealing, it needs a judge to do so.  In Jesus day the religious leaders recognised that ‘only God can forgive sins’ and so were angry that Jesus did so. 

Today, we don’t have the same understanding of God, and perhaps for us it is better to think of ‘infinite love’ or ‘infinite goodness’ instead of the God.  But how ever we look at it, the magic of Jesus clearly worked at the time and has continued to work ever since – if we repent and ask Jesus to forgive us then he does.

As I wrote in my book “Christianity – why bother?”:

“To live a rich and satisfying life in the future we have to accept that we made mistakes in the past.  We have to want to change for the better.  We have to want to wipe the slate clean and start again. And we do that by accepting God’s forgiveness.

It’s about accepting God’s unconditional love, and then working with Him to become who we are meant to be. And it starts with a decision to submit leadership of our life to Christ.

And this is freedom.

Freedom from the guilt of past sins.

Freedom to love God.

Freedom to love one another.

Freedom to stop sinning and to do what is right without worrying about the future.

Freedom to trust Jesus when he tells us that he has come to bring life in abundance.

Freedom from religious ritual.

In essence, that is the Good News of Christianity; that is the Gospel.”

And what is the role of religion?  Well religion should help us find this truth.  Religion should help us to understand who and what God is, and to help us see what ‘good’ looks like.  Unfortunately, much religion today seems to want to show what is good by living the opposite – a perverse sort of reverse psychology.  Nevertheless, there are many good and solid leaders and grass roots members of religions who are simply trying to tread a good path, trying to live graciously with one another.  Being part of such a community can be a great help and encouragement, and can bring companionship on our journey.  Spending an hour or two of ‘spiritual’ reflection once a week helps us maintain focus and direction.  So yes, there is still a role for religion.

Is there place for God and religion in today’s world?

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The first thing to realise is that we are all living in a computer generated world, and that we are living in the past.  Nothing exists in the form that we perceive it, and by the time we perceive it, it has already happened.

That steaming cup of coffee that you see is just the result of your eyes, optic nerves and brain processing photons that hit the back of your retina.  You are experiencing a brain (computer) generated model of what you now understand to be a cup of coffee.

Your brain’s processing inherently includes a delay to allow all of the bits of information to ‘catch up’.  It takes longer for visual stimuli to be processed than it does for sounds. When you experience the crash of your cup on the floor your brain has had to delay presenting the event to your consciousness until the signals from both your ears and your eyes have arrived.  Our reaction time is evidence of this, and the fact that we react faster to sounds than to lights.  If you start a sprint race with a gun then the sprinters set off faster than if you start it with a flash of light – although the speed of sound is much slower than the speed of light.

So we do not experience the world as it is, but we experience a three dimensional model created within our brain. 

As a child I used to wonder ‘does the colour green look the same to me as it does to you?’  Today I would answer almost certainly ‘no’.  First of all, we know that some people are colour-blind, and so all colours must be perceived differently by them.  And our eyes all have different sensitivities to shades of colours, and so the raw data that our brain has to process must be different between individuals.

But would we have the same ‘experience’ of the colour of our coffee cup if our brains received identical signals?  That is a hard one, because we can’t really explain what it means to ‘experience’ a colour. (Google ‘qualia’ to find out more).

So although our bodies live in real time, we ‘experience’ a computer generated world that has already happened.

Weird.

But weirder perhaps is to ask what we mean by ‘we’.  What is the ‘me’ that experiences this computer generated world?  Warning – science cannot answer this, it’s the meat and drink of philosophy; the discussion of abstract ideas by bright people who build arguments on certain basic assumptions that they continually disagree about.

My subjective view is that there is a ‘me’ that experiences things.  I interact with my brain (and hence body, and hence world) and can influence but not control what my brain and body does.  I can influence what my consciousness presents to me (ignoring distractions when focused on a task for instance), and I can influence how my body responds to things – but I am not really in control.  Just think of a tennis player returning a 140mph serve; there is no time for them to get directly involved in the process of selecting which direction to go, or what shot to play.  They have to leave the action up to their body. But they can influence what their body’s reaction will be by training, by giving it a strategy such as “don’t try to hit a winner off every shot”, and then they need to get out of the way!  Sportsmen know that consciousness gets in the way of winning; thinking too carefully about how to play a shot at best slows things down and at worst causes us to make a mess of it.

When we think about it we realise that ‘we’ have relatively little influence on what our minds and bodies do, and yet ‘we’ get to experience it all! 

And yet ‘we’ are unexplainable. To try to understand the unexplainable ‘we’, and much to the chagrin of materialistic scientists, we use terms like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ to define ‘us’. And we believe that other people have souls and spirit too.  And we spend a lot of time and money trying to find ways to interact with our brain/bodies that will lead to our soul’s wellbeing.  So much advertising money is spent on encouraging us to buy products to bring us ‘peace of mind’ or other palliatives for the soul.

It is natural, and not at all illogical, to imagine that in the same way that you and I are tiny individual souls (that happen to inhabit a bunch of chemicals that we had nothing to do with initiating) there is an overarching bigger ‘soul’ who initiated the material universe of space and time (God).  And if our individual soul ‘experiences’ interaction with this bigger soul then there is all the more reason to believe in its existence.  But of course, this can be frustrating to those souls who have not had similar experience…

So yes, there is a place for God in today’s world.  There is good intellectual reason to believe that there is a God, and this is reinforced by the experience and evidence of many witnesses who report interaction with and experience of God.  These interactions have been documented for millennia and continue today.  And there are many who feel that they have directly experienced such an ‘interaction’ yet believe that there is a larger ‘soul’, or God.   

In response to concluding that there is a God and recognising that our very existence is a gift, it is also natural to want to give thanks for that gift and to want to make best use of the gift.  Hence there is a place for religion too in today’s world.

How about you?  If you haven’t recognised them yet – why not start seeking God for yourself?

Have a blessed day.

On life, and death

/ Minimalist Christian / 7 Comments

Have you reached the point yet of wondering what happens when you die?  Perhaps the current pandemic will prompt more of us to think about this important question.  It is important because of the impact that the answer has on us whilst we are alive.

There is an unspoken assumption behind all the current fears and actions that death is a bad thing; that we must do whatever we can to extend life – even if the extended life comprises sitting in an armchair in a care home gazing out the window or watching daytime TV.  I use the term ‘extend’ deliberately instead of the more common term ‘save’ because we are all destined to die;  rescuing someone from drowning does not ‘save’ their life, it extends it.  But to what purpose?

Actually, it may be that rescuing someone from drowning does ‘save’ their life, in that the experience may cause them to turn from a previous pointless and self-centred existence to a life of love and purpose.  The fact that someone cared about them enough to rescue them may make them realise the importance of relationships, the importance of selflessness, the importance of love.

People who have gone through near death experiences often become dramatically changed, dedicating the rest of their lives to acts of loving kindness to others.  So it is indeed possible to save someone’s life. But it is the quality, value and purpose of the life that is saved rather than the biological state of being alive for ever.

We confuse the biological life with what I will call spiritual life.  An amoeba has biological life, a tree has biological life, and so does a virus.  But none of these have spiritual life.  They do not ‘experience’ life, they have not brain to sustain any form of consciousness and they simply live biologically.  There may be other forms of higher life (apes, dolphins) that can ‘experience’ life; I don’t know because I’m not one of them.  But I do know that I experience life.  When I eat a curry I ‘experience’ a taste, but even that is hard to pin down.

If you Google “The Qualia Problem” you will find a paper by Frank Jackson which states that:

“I think that there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes. Tell me everything physical there is to tell about what is going on in a living brain, the kind of states, their functional role, their relation to what goes on at other times and in other brains, and so on and so forth, and be I as clever as can be in fitting it all together, you won’t have told me about the hurtfulness of pains, the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy, or about the characteristic experience of tasting a lemon, smelling a rose, hearing a loud noise or seeing the sky.”

But whatever it means for me to experience the taste of the curry, I know that there is a ‘me’ to experience it.  It is that ‘me’, not the biological me which I long to preserve, whose ‘life’ I want to save.  And so the big question is, does that ‘me’, that spiritual me, cease to be when my physical body ceases to be?

If the spiritual ‘me’ will end when the biological me ends, there will be no ‘me’ to experience that I am dead.  Do not grieve for me, I will no longer exist.

Of course I will remain in your memory, and you will look back on your memories with joy and sadness – as with all memories.  They are not erased simply because I die; they are as real as they are today while I live.   But if extending my life gives me no ‘spiritual’ life at all, then any new memories will bring sadness in remembering my final days.  So what will be the value of extending my biological life when I have no spiritual life?  The preservation of my decaying body simply to avoid biological death will bring sadness to overshadow previous memories, and will in practice bring mourning forward before my death.

This may sound heartless, particularly if you have not yet lost your parents or other loved ones.  But before you condemn me, I have suffered loss.  I have lost a child, at birth.  I have lost both of my parents.  And I know the pain that the pointlessness of the latter days of their lives brought them.  My father knowing he had to suffer the pain of prostate cancer with no hope of end other than death; my mother wondering when the pointlessness would end, her daily routine seeing her sitting on her bed gazing out at the suburban street for hours.  I grieved over them all when they died, and the grief is still there of course, many years later, just less acute.

I am not heartless.  No.  I want to see people truly, spiritually ‘live’ whilst they have biological life.

But what if the spiritual ‘me’ continues to exist beyond death?  What if my purpose is indeed eternal?  And how can I know?

The crew of early sailing ships believed that there were other lands over the horizon.  Europeans believed that there must be a large land mass south of the equator before they found it.  And brave adventurous souls set off to find it.  Some came back and told others that it was true, and soon constant travel to and fro confirmed it.  That made it easy for those who had not been there to ‘know’ that Australia existed.

But it’s not quite the same with life beyond biological death.  Our bodies cease to function and eventually the flesh rots and we are left with a skeleton.  We don’t find dead people returning to re-inhabit their skeletons; there is no free travel between here and any ‘afterlife’.  At least, not that we are aware of.

Imagine for a moment a caterpillar.  It has a physical body, it eats and excretes, it moves around and (pretending for a moment that it has the capability) experiences the physical domain of the leaf.  And then, after it has grown and fattened up, it appears to die.  It becomes encased in a shell and the caterpillar’s physical form decays.  But it is still alive, rather than being dead, it is being transformed into something different.  The butterfly that emerges from the cocoon bears no resemblance to the caterpillar, and is not even constrained to living on the leaf.  A thing of beauty, it soars into the air and is a delight to see.  Yet it cannot return and tell the caterpillars who remain on the leaf that there is life beyond the cocoon.  Neither should we expect human spirits return to tell us what happens beyond biological death.

And yet… one did return.  No ordinary man, but a man who had turned the lives of those he met upside down;  A man who taught the secrets of true spiritual life to those who would listen – yet more than a great teacher;  A man who healed those who were physically ill by the touch of his hand, yet more than a great doctor;  A man who brought biological life back into a friend’s physical body after they had been buried in a tomb for three days;  A man who willingly surrendered his body to excruciating crucifixion and inevitable physical death and burial in a tomb.

Two days later, his tomb was empty.  Although his friends and more importantly his enemies searched everywhere for it, no body was to be found, just some folded grave clothes.  His enemies were desperate to find the body to disprove the claims of his closest friends that he was alive; that they had seen him, spoken with him, and touched him.

Madness we say – they must have imagined it.  And yet such a madness that they were willing to die rather than deny it.  Such a madness that they were filled with joy, and their lives were transformed;  freed from the greed and selfishness of their world – sharing all they had with one another, loving one another.  Such a madness that they began to understand the secrets their friend had taught them about what a true spiritual life looks like.  Such a madness that brought ‘life in abundance’, not just for them but for all who listened to their eye witness accounts and trusted and believed them.  A madness that has affected millions upon millions over the past 2000 years.

Our decision of what we believe happens when our bodies physically die has enormous impact on our lives whilst our physical bodies live. Do we trust in the eyewitness accounts of what happened to that man, and hope and expect  that spiritual life is not snuffed out with our decaying bodies?   Do we choose to believe that our spiritual selves will live on, no longer constrained to the two dimensional leaf of this world but soaring into the sky of eternity; that we will be transformed from caterpillars to butterflies.  Do we start putting into practice the words of wisdom that bring spiritual life today?

Madness?  Or the sanest decision that we ever make?  Do we trust or ignore the evidence?  Do we dare to find out?

Liberating repentance – Acts 10; 34-43

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I’m going to draw out from Acts 10; 34-43 what makes the Gospel transformational, and suggest how we can engage it more fully.

The short speech by Peter was made after he’d been summoned to meet a Roman centurion.  Peter willingly went to meet him after having had a vision where Peter was being told to eat food that Jews considered unclean.  In the vision he was told “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

Peter is describing what he learnt from the event, and it efficiently describes why  I am a Christian.

First of all Peter declares “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”  In short, God loves you and me equally to the Jews.  We are ALL allowed to share in the life giving message of the good news of Christ.

Peter then describes that he personally was witness to the facts that:

  • John baptised Jesus, at which point God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit
  • Jesus went around doing good and healing people
  • Jesus was crucified
  • Jesus was raised to life on the third day, and appeared to those selected to be his witnesses
  • Jesus told them to preach that He is the one who will judge the living and the dead
  • And finally that everyone who believes in Jesus will have their sins forgiven

The first four points bear witness to who Jesus was.  But I want to focus on the last two points. That Jesus will judge the living and the dead, and that everyone who believes will have their sins forgiven.

If we are honest, we’d rather not be judged at all.  Perhaps we are living quiet lives, keeping our head below the parapet.  We come to church on Sunday and we just want to be left alone until we die when we hope to go to heaven.

If we are to be judged, we don’t want our neighbours or friends judging us.  And when we see what the Tabloids say about people, we certainly don’t want society to judge us.

We probably get angry at anyone who dares to criticise us – “who are they to judge?  They’re no better than me! Hypocrites!”

What about Jesus judging us?

Jesus – the human incarnation of infinite goodness.

The one who gave every moment of his life to heal, teach and serve.

The one who allowed himself to be sacrificed by crucifixion, and still forgave those who nailed him to the cross.

Jesus.  We can’t be angry with Him – he’s certainly no hypocrite.  We can probably accept that he has the right to judge us, but maybe we are still not happy with the idea.

Deep down we know that if Jesus were to judge us he would see SUCH shortcomings in our lives.

  • Our petty grievances with our neighbours, with our fellow Christians
  • Our contentment to live in comfort whilst we know that there are others who have nothing
  • Our consumerism, looking for the cheapest product that then keeps the poorest in poverty and makes those in work put in more hours at lower pay than they can manage
  • Our readiness to get in our car to go anywhere, to take cheap overseas holidays, to travel on a whim, leading to overheating of our planet and the mass extinction of so many species

And that’s before we get to more obvious ‘sins’…

And yet we probably don’t ‘feel’ like sinners.

When I was on the cusp of becoming a Christian I had been told that I needed to ‘pray the sinner’s prayer’.  This is what I wrote in my journal:

I sit down – I’m not ready for kneeling yet – and start to read the prayer…

 “Dear lord I have sinned…”

 The trouble is…I don’t feel like a sinner.  Yes, I know that I could be a lot better than I am, but I just don’t feel it at the moment.  So I start to pray that God will help me to make the step from logic to feeling.  At least I try to do what I think praying is ….  I wonder if I’m doing it right.

I didn’t ‘feel’ like a sinner – but I recognised that I needed to.

If we don’t ‘feel’ our sin, then we need help.  We can pray, like I did, for God to help us make the step from logic to feeling.

A little later in my journal I wrote:

My daughter had organised her own birthday party, with half a dozen friends coming round for a ‘scary party’.  It was impressive to see them all dressed up as witches and devils (and a cat!?).  However, for some reason I was rather grumpy.  I didn’t get into the party spirit and got rather short with all the mess, and split drinks and so on.  I wasn’t very sympathetic when my daughter got upset that no-one was listening to her, and tried to explain that they couldn’t help it if they got distracted.  At the end of it I felt that I had let her down.  I don’t know if she noticed particularly, since it was rather a busy affair, but that was how I felt.  I felt like a sinner.  Was someone trying to tell me something?

But if we can ‘feel’ our sin, if we can let the Holy Spirit show us our shortcomings then we will surely fear his judgement.  That is in part what it means to fear God.

And recognising our sin is the start of healing.  When recognise what we are, when we see through our masks of self-justification, and we don’t like what we see!  We want to be different, we want to change.  That is what repentance is – honest assessment followed by determination to change.

I recently watched a TED talk by Eve Ensler, and activist for women.  She was talking on the profound power of an authentic apology.  She describes how her father abused her, but that he’d never apologised – never repented.  She describes the process of repentance.  In her words:

Apology is a sacred commitment. It requires complete honesty. It demands deep self-interrogation and time. It cannot be rushed. I discovered an apology has four steps, and, if you would, I’d like to take you through them. 

 The first is you have to say what, in detail, you did. Your accounting cannot be vague. “I’m sorry if I hurt you” or “I’m sorry if I sexually abused you” doesn’t cut it. You have to say what actually happened. “I came into the room in the middle of the night, and I pulled your underpants down.” “I belittled you because I was jealous of you and I wanted you to feel less.” The liberation is in the details. An apology is a remembering. It connects the past with the present. It says that what occurred actually did occur. 

 The second step is you have to ask yourself why. Survivors are haunted by the why. Why? Why would my father want to sexually abuse his eldest daughter? Why would he take my head and smash it against a wall? …..  My father had to live up to this impossible ideal, and so he was never allowed to be himself. He was never allowed to express tenderness or vulnerability, curiosity, doubt. He was never allowed to cry. And so he was forced to push all those feelings underground…

 Those suppressed feelings later became Shadowman, and he was out of control, and he eventually unleashed his torrent on me. 

 The third step is you have to open your heart and feel what your victim felt …. You have to let your heart break. You have to feel the horror and betrayal and the long-term impacts of your action on your victim. You have to sit with the suffering you have caused. 

 And, of course, the fourth step is taking responsibility for what you have done and making amends. 

 So, why would anyone want to go through such a gruelling and humbling process? Why would you want to rip yourself open? Because it is the only thing that will set yourself free.”

This is SO important.  This is what Jesus is talking about when he says “Repent of your sins and turn to God”

When we repent we still feel the guilt of our past mistakes.  I still feel angst thinking about that party.  And this is where the final point is Paul’s speech brings such freedom:

“Anyone who believes in Jesus will have their sins forgiven.”

Perhaps this seems a little unfair – what about someone who doesn’t ‘believe in Jesus’.  Are they not forgiven?  Well clearly they will not be able to believe that they are forgiven.  We have to believe that Jesus has the authority to forgive our sins in order to accept that forgiveness.

Maybe it’s actually more serious if we claim to believe in Jesus. We know the theory, but have we really repented?  Do we really know that freedom that we are forgiven?  How can we tell?

I actually found the TED talk above when I was looking for a quote about activism:

“An activist is someone who cannot help but fight for something.  That person is not usually motivated by the need for power, or money or fame.  But in fact is driven slightly mad by some injustice, some cruelty, some unfairness, so much so that he or she is compelled by some internal moral engine to make it better.”

So my question is, are we activists for Christ?  Have we repented and turned to God with such deep honesty that we “cannot help but fight for Him”, such that we are “compelled by some internal moral engine to make it better”

And if not, it’s time we did something about it.

Let’s pray that God shows us our sin, that we can understand why we do it, that we can feel what our ‘victims’ feel, that we take responsibility for it and that we commit to making amends.

That is the only thing that will set us free.

(Delivered as a sermon – January 2020)

Excerpt from The Big Picture: “Am I Open Minded?”

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As we start out ask yourself the question, “Am I open minded, ready to follow where evidence leads, with no preconceptions?”

Now I’m sure you’ve answered “yes” because none of us would like to admit otherwise, but actually, it may be impossible to start any investigation without preconceptions.   They are the motivation behind many investigations … the desire to obtain proof of what we already think about something.

Preconceptions are almost inherent in the scientific approach – we think of a theory, and then we investigate to test it.  If we are honest, we will admit that we like our theories and feel good when they are proved right.

Perhaps there is one preconception that I will allow at this stage; that each one of us matters. I matter. You matter.  Our friends and neighbours all matter.  If we don’t matter then there is no point in anything and it’s best not to think any deeper.  That road leads to despair.

If we are going to explore these questions fully we are going to have to consider questions of God, science, reason, history and more.  We are going to have to include objective data and subjective experience; objectivity keeps us from being deluded but it is the subjective that really matters to us.

Even if we try to think about an issue with an open mind, we nevertheless carry many assumptions that we don’t realise.  Speaking personally, my scientific education and engineering career have both instilled a basic assumption of materialism: the fabric of the universe is all there is.  When people talk about a spiritual dimension, is it just another material dimension that we can’t see?  And if there is a spiritual dimension, how can it interact with the physical universe?  Or if there isn’t a separate spiritual dimension then where does God exist?  These are not straightforward questions, but I’ve come to realise that they are valid.   I have had to challenge a lot of what I took simply as common sense and to open my mind to new possibilities.

It can be difficult to refresh our way of thinking, particularly if we are surrounded by others who have a similar outlook to ourselves.  In a recent discussion on European history with a university student he mentioned that such and such country was fascist.  It led me to ask what it is that makes the people there fascist.  Is it genetically programmed into each individual there?  If you took any one of them and brought them up elsewhere would they be fascist?  I think it likely that they wouldn’t.  They are fascist because everyone around them is fascist.  They are unconsciously trained to be fascists.

So what are we doing in our country?  What are we training ourselves to think like?  What assumptions do we hold, and are they valid?  Books such as The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake[i] challenge many of the assumptions of the day.  He asks us to challenge our scientific dogmas, our blind assumptions.  Even if we end up thinking the same as we did before, we have a more solid basis for our beliefs if we go through the process of challenging our assumptions.

Implications

Whenever anyone is presenting a case we might ask ourselves, “If I were to accept what is being presented and agree with the author, what would be the implications for me?  How willing would I be to accept those implications?  Do I need to understand the implications before I start?”

Many parents choose not to have their babies tested for Down’s syndrome because they would not be willing to accept a termination of the pregnancy and so feel that there is no point in knowing before the child is born.  Others might need to understand all the implications before deciding; how accurate is the test, and what are the options available if the child tests positive? Still others might insist that they must have the test because they are not prepared to risk having a child with Down’s syndrome and would terminate the pregnancy if that were shown to be likely by the test.

This is a book that deals with questions of God.  This may worry some people. If they were to be convinced that God is real they would have to become the sort of bigoted judgemental fanatic that represents the worst face of religion.  They may think that they would need to join a religion and accept all that they are told without thinking, and be associated with all the religious atrocities of the past. Or that they will have to give up their Sunday morning lie-in and trot off to church with a bunch of hypocrites. If these thoughts resonate with you, take courage – it doesn’t have to be like that.

Fear

People can be frightened by the prospect of change, but often change is beneficial.  For instance, when redundancies are announced, there is a lot of fear in the workforce.  Some may have been in the same job for thirty years, and they simply don’t know anything else – how will they cope if they have to find another job?  And yet being forced to change jobs can be a most liberating and life-changing experience.  I recall hearing a report that those who remain behind after a round of redundancies are likely to be more stressed than those who have been made redundant.  They are still in the same job, but with increased fear of losing it and still in fear of change, whereas those who have left are now busy rebuilding their new lives and careers.  That’s not to say it’s easy to change, but a change in a job or a worldview can be very liberating.

Peer Pressure

Perhaps we don’t want to change our views because of what others might think of us.  We’ve probably aired our opinions sufficiently to our friends that any major change would be an embarrassment.   Or perhaps we live or work in a culture where there is only one accepted way of thinking.  We might find that we have to live a double life, adopting one attitude at work and another in private.  For instance, to progress a career as a scientist it is necessary to publish papers and learned articles.  Such articles are subject to peer review.  This process is in place to ensure that sound scientific information is published and that mistakes do not get propagated.  But the process inherently risks that only those papers that conform to the present scientific way of thinking are published.  If a scientist becomes too free thinking, then the peer review process may prevent his papers being published and his career may come to a grinding halt.  Reputation is essential, and doing anything that might lose it is risky.

An ambitious scientist may be fearful of embracing religion.  Religion allows that God might interfere with the workings of the world.  That might mean that the universe is not completely predictable, which would seem to undermine the basis of all the work of science.  Allowing the existence of God might mean that it will be impossible to have a complete scientific theory that predicts everything – which is challenging to anyone who invests their life in seeking it.

Similarly, in religious circles it can be damaging not only to one’s career but also to one’s life to challenge the current way of thinking.  Men and women have been labelled heretics and have been burnt at the stake for holding different religious beliefs.

Religious people may have a deep fear of science.  Apart from the vocal assertions made by some atheists that science has done away with God, there can be fear that science might undermine or even disprove certain traditions or beliefs that the given religion may hold dear, or even sacred.  A religious man may have invested so much in his religion that he’s lost the desire, and maybe even the ability, to be open to learning that some of what he’s been taught is incorrect.  Yet surely a truly godly man would be desperate to be corrected if he were misunderstanding God?  In her book Awesome God, Sara Maitland encourages religious people to embrace what can be learned from science:

Start with “God exists” and everything we can learn will tell us more about God.[ii]

So returning to the question, “Am I open minded, ready to follow where evidence leads, with no preconceptions?” we can see that it is almost impossible not to have preconceptions or preconditions.  A first step in challenging them is to consider how we came to believe them in the first place. How did we come to really know what we know?

[i] Rupert Sheldrake: The Science Delusion ISBN 978-1444727944

[ii] Sara Maitland: Awesome God: Creation, Commitment and Joy ISBN: 978-0281054190

Foreword to The Big Picture

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Scientific discovery has brought material benefits and physical comfort to mankind.  The predictability of matter leads us to assume that it behaves according to fixed laws, and this belief has led engineers to develop tools and machinery to manipulate the environment, doctors to develop cures for many diseases, and farmers to grow crops with greatly increased yields.  Many of the scourges of previous times have been overcome leading, in the Western world at least, to longer lifetimes and better health.  However, this has also led to the belief that everything is predictable and controllable. If anything goes wrong (by which we mean it causes us distress or discomfort) then it must be fixable, and if it hasn’t been fixed it must be someone else’s fault.

Personal rights have grown, but personal responsibility has diminished.  Laws to protect the weak have bred the belief that it is the state’s job and not our individual duty to help out those less fortunate than ourselves.  Mechanisation that was supposed to give more leisure time has led to lost jobs and loss of purpose.  Competition and the shrinking of the geographical world has meant that there is someone, somewhere who will work harder or longer hours than we do, and the pressure grows to produce more for less.  The availability of loans means that goods can be obtained now if we promise to pay later.  To pay the loan we need a job.  Fear of job loss drives us to work longer hours and accept less pay. The purpose of life becomes to produce.  The mechanism which fuels demand and production is the economy.  The economy becomes the measure of the health of a nation.

Is that what it’s all about?

Is my value simply what I can produce?

Am I measured just by what I can earn?

If I retain the worldview that the economy is king then the implication is yes, but that doesn’t feel right.  I want to be valued and loved as a person.  I want a worldview that speaks to my heart and my mind and not just my wallet, and I want it to be based on sound thinking and evidence.

Science has brought great technological and medical benefits to mankind; cars, televisions, fridges, telephones, electricity and so on.  But science has also brought guns and bullets, pollution, global drug trafficking and job losses.  Science seems to dominate my life, telling me what I should or shouldn’t do to keep healthy, avoid risk and live longer, but it doesn’t tell me why I would want to live longer.  Science doesn’t give any purpose to my life.

Religion offers purpose, but it too seems to want to control me and dominate me.  Religion has been used as justification for many great atrocities: the Spanish Inquisition, child sacrifices, the Crusades.  Religious people seem to want to tell me how to behave, and to judge and criticise me, claiming to represent the will of God.

I want to know the truth.  I want to know what science can tell me about how the universe works, and perhaps where I came from.  I want the benefits that science can bring, but not at the cost of becoming a slave to its dictates.  I want to know why I am here, what my purpose in life is, or even if there is one.  If there is a God I want to know what He thinks. I want the benefit of knowing that I have a purpose, but not at the cost of becoming a slave to rules from another human being.

And so I investigate, weigh up evidence in all forms and seek a holistic worldview that works.  I have explored what we know from the physical and biological sciences, and I have researched historical evidence for God. I have tested what is actually known, and what is speculation, extrapolation or personal opinion and rhetoric.

This book presents my conclusions, and some of the evidence that brought me to draw them.  I offer what I believe is a consistent, healthy and constructive worldview based on sound evidence.  I’ve called it Minimalist Christianity.  Whether you agree with my conclusion or not, I hope that many of the myths that currently inhibit so many of us will have been weakened or dispelled.  I hope that a step can be taken towards finding purpose and experiencing life in abundance.

The trampled poppy

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It is 14th November 2018, just three days after the Remembrance Sunday where we promise not to forget the loss of lives in the 1914-18 and other wars.

I am woken by Radio 3:

“The headlines today …

  • Half of the nation of Yemen is on the verge of starvation due to war.
  • Melania Trump is upset at where she sat on an aircraft.

And now some Mozart.”

Unusually I have noticed the incongruity and am prompted to draw attention to it in a blog post.  Normally, like you, I would just get on with my day, not sparing another thought to the fact that half of a nation is on the verge of starvation.

It seems that the poppies have already been trampled in the dirt.

How can any of us claim to be without sin?  Isn’t the correct response to our  hard-heartedness that we humbly admit that we are grossly selfish and undeserving?

Yet despite this, we are still given the opportunity to live purposeful lives.  We believe there is some purpose in life, and in death; we have just remembered millions of deaths.  And if there is eternal life we want part of it.

On that day when we die and are asked whether we have led a good enough life to deserve heaven, none of us can say yes. None of us.  Yet heaven will be full.  It will be full because of the person who we celebrate on another day of remembrance – Christmas Day.

Jesus Christ, son of God, crucified.  A single act in history which allows anyone who in their hearts wishes for it to repent and receive forgiveness.  Our active and passive selfish, greedy, hard-hearted and unloving actions deserve death, but we are allowed eternal life because of that one great sacrifice made on our behalf.  It is our choice – death, or humble acceptance of the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross and life. To trample the cross, or to embrace it.

“Sorry Jesus, you got it wrong”

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Two children are in a fight, and when we separate them both point at the other and shout “well he started it”.  We might respond “well even if he did, you carried it on!”

But as we grow older we forget to apply Christ’s simple but profound wisdom to our own lives.

 “You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies!  Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that.

 But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

Of course, as we become adults our disputes are less likely to be over schoolboy issues.  We might have a ‘neighbour from hell’ who takes advantage of us and tramples over our ‘rights’.  And when we respond in kind, and when the conflict escalates we say ‘well he started it’.  And perhaps ‘who are you to criticise what I do?’.

When,  was a Christian,e find ourselves in this sort of situation, do we respond by justifying our actions? Do we argue that Jesus’ teaching is wrong and doesn’t apply to our case?  Or do we admit that we are in the wrong, perhaps too tired or weak to do what we should.  Do we accept that we are falling short of his instruction to be ‘perfect’ (i.e. do we repent) and humbly ask him to work with us to correct this flaw in our character?

If we look elsewhere at Jesus’ wisdom we find that he has already given guidance on how to love our enemy.  Again, we have a choice of arguing that he must have got it wrong, or we can choose to work with him to try to follow his words:

“You have heard the law that says the punishment must match the injury: ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say, do not resist an evil person! If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also. If you are sued in court and your shirt is taken from you, give your coat, too.  If a soldier demands that you carry his gear for a mile, carry it two miles. Give to those who ask, and don’t turn away from those who want to borrow.”

 “But I say, if you are even angry with someone, you are subject to judgment! If you call someone an idiot, you are in danger of being brought before the court. And if you curse someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell.  “So if you are presenting a sacrifice at the altar in the Temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God.”

None of us are yet perfect and we all fall short of Jesus standard.  But the critical question is, do we want to be perfect?  Do we want to change and allow Jesus sacrifice and grace wash us clean.

If we want to hold on to our hatred, anger and right to hit back at our neighbour then Jesus cannot help us.  A pastor often told me “Sin cannot get into heaven” … if we want to hold on to our sin, we can do – but we could not be allowed into heaven; we would spoil it for everyone else.  If we choose to hold on to our hatred then we are choosing to separate ourselves from the infinite goodness that is God.

To be clear, I am not judging or criticising anyone who finds themselves in a difficult situation with an enemy. None of us know how we would respond if we were in someone else’s shoes.  None of us can tell another to remove the speck from their eye!  Judgement is for God alone.  But hopefully this post points out simply and lovingly what Jesus tells us.

“the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”