Who Was This Guy Anyway?

I ran across a couple of articles written in 1987 and 1989 by some guy who thought not only that the world is ruled by a good God, but that he could prove it! How weird is that?

Lots of people believe that there is a good God, somewhere, but that this God does not do very much to help the world except maybe in some special once-in-a-while miracles, but that the universe pretty much operates as if there is no God. That is, they are not atheists. It’s just that God is pretty much irrelevant to the way the world works. But this guy saw the goodness of God operating all around him. I’ve got to hand it to him; he amassed a lot of disconnected information from his voluminous knowledge into a big steaming pile of assertions. He was apparently Piled higher and Deeper.

To his credit, this author spent his entire first article admitting that the natural world did not, in fact, reflect the God of love. Even the things that appear peaceful and beautiful actually resulted (by evolution) and continue to function (by ecology) by means of selfish processes. Pretty flowers, for example, are selfishly efficient at attracting pollinators, and singing birds are selfishly establishing territory and attracting mates. He admits, then, that the way for a Christian to look at what nature tells us about God is to look at it figuratively (as Jesus did in parables). The problem the author overlooks, however, is that the figure depends on the observer, resulting in circular reasoning about a God of love. This circular reasoning deliberately omits many important things. Jesus said, If God so feeds the birds of the air; but what about the ones God doesn’t feed, and they die?

Then, in his second article, the author describes a “pervasive theme” in the natural world and in human history, when viewed as one might view a piece of literature: Blessings emerge from adversity. I’m sure you can think of lots of examples; the author drew together a mixed grab-bag of them. An ape, or what the Bible calls “dust of the ground,” became capable of understanding the world. How’s that for a blessing from privation? He cites lots of Bible examples of God elevating the humble to positions of prominence, such as Joseph, David, the prophets, in fact the whole nation of Israel and the whole church. Our own spiritual development, he says, depends on our optimistic response to challenges.

Then he turns to the natural world for lots more examples. Some of the greatest evolutionary innovations occurred in response to natural disasters. Right from the start! Oxygen in the air was a primordial poison, but the cells that could not just tolerate it but use it became the ancestors of nearly all life forms now on the Earth. And on and on for billions of years. Mammals spent more millions of years skulking in the shadow of dinosaurs than as the dominant animal life forms as they are today, from our perspective. Altruism has evolved. Parasitism evolves into parasitism. He even points out that rates of extinction in the fossil record have been declining, a point he got from reading Stephen Jay Gould. Even the acclimatization of individual organisms to changes in their environments (which is not evolution), and ecological succession (which is not evolution either), are examples of life proliferating in adversity. He ends the second article with a quote from a largely-forgotten Scottish botanist who looked at the world the same way.

With all of these examples, how could the pattern not be true? But the author could not say that the pattern was miraculous. The best he could manage was to say that blessings out of adversity was God’s “activity” in nature. Like, how is that any different?

Of course blessings can arise from adversity. But we only hear about the successful ones. We hear the hero stories of people who confronted terrible suffering, and not only persisted but lived to tell about it. We do not hear from the ones that got killed because they are dead. We hear the story of Malala Yousafzai, shot by Islamic terrorists who attacked a girls’ school and who worked for peace, receiving a Nobel Prize (this happened after the articles were published); we do not hear the stories of the girls who died.

Of course blessings can arise from adversity. Adversity creates opportunity, and some organisms are able to capitalize on it. A forest fire releases nutrients from dead plant matter and allows an influx of sunlight. Too bad about those trees that died, but the wildflowers bloom like crazy. But that is what wildflowers do.

This author’s view is a beautiful artistic view of the world, but it tells us nothing, nothing at all, about God. The author was, and is, happy, even if this vision is a fantasy.

As you have figured out, the author was myself, back in my evangelical days. Though I can no longer assert the actual truth of these statements, I really enjoy thinking about the things about the natural and human world that I like, especially when I need some diversion from the things I don’t like.

The articles appeared in the September 1987 and March 1989 issues of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part eight

I will post, with minimal editing, what I wrote on 15 March 2005, during my trip to see desert wildflowers. This was, as close as it is possible to determine, the exact date on which I became an agnostic.

“How can I begin to describe the beauty of the spring desert I beheld yesterday? And the greatest blessings came when I took the time to look closely, to slow down and immerse myself in it, to open myself to the Spirit.” While most people do not look closely at nature, out of a nation of 300 million, there must be a few million who do. “I must keep this in mind to counterbalance my cynicism, even though it is realistic and true…For the moment, I feel good not just about nature but even about the species of which I am a part.” I was reading a book, Evil and the God of Love, by John Hick. Hick “openly admitted ‘the fact of evil [which] constitutes the most serious objection there is to the Christian belief in a God of love.’ He calls it a fact; it is not, as Buddhists might say, an illusion, nor is it merely a form of human behavior. It is evil…Hick rejects an ‘inoffensive but unhelpful agnosticism,’ which provides ‘a perpetual burden of doubt’ to all believers, and has always done so, even back in the so-called Age of Faith. And Job’s answer, to be tremblingly quiet before God’s incomprehensible majesty, is not a solution…If God is intentionally involved in the world (and this may be his entire action), then we cannot expect God to see or manipulate the world from a cosmic viewpoint. Perhaps—I am speculating now—the Spirit Himself struggles to understand this? If so, then the Spirit’s answer is not an explanation but a delicate desert spring wildflower.”

I can remember where I was when I wrote this. I was eating breakfast in a restaurant in Yuma, Arizona. The trip I took out into the desert was spiritual as well as scientific.

The next day I wrote the following. To explore the wildflowers “was like walking in heaven. I also relived the beautiful part of my childhood,” when I walked amidst the spring wildflowers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

But I continued reading and thinking about the problem of evil. The irrepressibly optimistic Harry Emerson Fosdick posed the opposite question to the problem of evil: “why is there so much inexplicable good in the world? Since the time of Fosdick, and of C. S. Lewis’s similar argument, altruism has been discovered. But it does not explain all of the goodness, greatness, our capacity for wisdom, love, science, and (what I now experience) biophilia.” This does not answer the problem of evil, “but what else can I do but stumble amidst flowers and rejoice while I can? I can rejoice in the flow of the Spirit, and say that this is the entirety of God’s work here and now. The Spirit also cleanses away the scabs of anger and the rot of selfishness.

“It does no good, Hick claims, to blame Satan, for now we just have to explain why God permitted Satan to exist, nor does it do any good to appeal to the finitude of creatureliness [only a theologian could come up with this], because even within our limits we could be good but are not. Sorry, John, but we will not reason out a solution. Our only response can be like a visitor to the desert spring, seeing a brief symphony of joy in a hard land, or a visitor to the desert summer, who can see nothing good but who must force himself to admit that life persists dormant.”

I continued to think about my deteriorating health. “There will be no miracles for me. But in the event that I survive, I will be an imperfect conduit of the Spirit, and enjoy it. God “allowed at least one species to evolve the intelligence to appreciate…that though most organisms simply decay, a few re-emerge as fossils, as objects of beauty…”

Sorry, But Your Son Deserved to Die

On January 3, I posted an essay about the woman whose son died in an automobile accident. She insisted that I believe in God along with her. Of course, I do not know whether there is a God, as she defines God, or not. But the time of her bereavement was not the right time to discuss it, so I wiggled my way through noncommittal statements.

What I most certainly could not tell her was that her son deserved to die. Not more than other people, but along with many other people who, like him, get drunk then drive their cars at outrageous speeds. He ended up running into a tree. The laws of nature eliminated him. Natural selection eliminated him. There are many other people who drink and drive at high speeds who get lucky and do not die, or who kill other people who are innocent. But this young man got what he deserved. Driving so irresponsibly, he might have killed someone besides himself.

I’m glad his mother did not ask me about this aspect of the events.