Holes in Secularism?

An atheist says atheism has holes religion can fill

Alain de Botton:Atheism 2 (A TED presentation)

This video was sent to me by a good friend who asked me to comment on it. Here is what I replied to her.

The talk was very interesting (and entertaining). The Roman orator Cicero noticed that every nation has its gods. He took the consent of all peoples to be a fact or truth of nature: that some deity must exist. Romans 1:18-23; 2:12-16 indicates that the human heart has a knowledge of God and His law--a knowledge that men may suppress, distort and deny. So if secularism is admitted to be full of holes, and if religion provides material to plug those holes, what does that suggest? Here's a word picture for what I think is happening. Secularism has tried to put a hard brass dome over our heads, a dome that is designed to keep anything immaterial or supernatural out of our lives and thinking. However, the dome has holes and something from outside keeps poking through. Not only that, but the thing that keeps poking through turns out to be just what we need to be fully human. Why, therefore, should one assume that secularism presents a complete picture of reality and of human life? Is it not reasonable to ask if there is something more; something outside the brass dome of matter and energy; something that not only can, but must break through that dome? (I have used "secularism" instead of "atheism" because many secular people are practical atheists, even if they would not describe themselves that way.) 

Factors Influencing Our Choices

My friend has a son who hears voices in his head, sometimes several voices at once.  One of the voices speaks a constant string of numbers, and it will not shut up.

This tragedy admits of two very simple explanations.  The first is that the young man has a demon.  Case open; case shut.  The second is that his genetic code is scrambled, and as for demons—bah!  Humbug!

The problem, however, with simple solutions is that they are often simply wrong.  Human beings are very complex, and the Bible recognizes multiple factors at work in our lives.  There are at least five of them.

1.     Our birth.  “The wicked are estranged from the womb; These who speak lies go astray from birth” (Psalm 58:3).  There is something morally twisted or broken in all of us from the moment of our birth, but the fact that we have an inborn disposition toward one kind of sin or another does not render us guiltless before God.

2.     Our nurture.  “Train up a child in the way he should go, Even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).  The Bible recognizes that the things that are done to us in the formative years have a great effect on our actions.

3.     Our choices.   "If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD" (Joshua 24:15).  People who are capable of making choices (and that includes most of us) are responsible for the direction their lives take, no matter what other influences may bear upon them.

4.     The devil.  “Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).  The devil is real; the devil is dangerous, and the devil commands legions of demons.

5.     God.  The Lord works in many ways. Sometimes He gives rebels over to their own sinful choices (Romans 1:24, 26, 28), but whenever Christian people are seeking to serve God, we can say, “it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13).

The important thing to realize is that all of these factors may come into play at once.  The devil frequently tempts us in our areas of weakness, whether this weakness is inherited, is caused by childhood experiences or is a result of our previous decisions.  God gives substantial healing to all who come to Him through Christ, but He never completely heals the ravages of sin in this life.  Final healing waits for the resurrection at the last day.

A man who is born with a quick temper may struggle with that disposition all of his life.  The devil will constantly tempt him in that area, but when he receives Christ as Savior and begins to walk in fellowship with God, the Holy Spirit gives him new resources to fight against that particular sin.  In time his temper may even be tamed.

Now let us return to my friend’s son.  There is every reason to believe that he was born with a genetic defect that surfaced when he became a young adult.  The multi-track stereo in his head may have been triggered by unusual stresses when he entered the military, or it may have been hard-wired to turn on at a certain age.  Can the devil get into his head and add a sound-track of his own?  I don’t see why not.  He attacks others in their areas of weakness, so I suppose he can do the same here.

What should this young man do?  Is he helpless before forces that are too strong for him, or does he have some responsible choices to make?  Certainly the latter.

He can gratefully accept the measure of healing afforded by modern medications.  He can refuse to blame himself for the existence of the voices he hears.  He can latch on to God’s promise, “Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7), and fight against every suggestion to do evil that comes from the voice of Satan.  He can look with hope for a greater measure of healing through Christ than he would otherwise experience.

Will he ever be completely free of these multiple voices?  I do not know, but if he bravely struggles on, trusting as well as he can in the power and love of the risen Christ, then on the last day the Lord will say to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

The Gospel in the Stars

A few years ago, D. James Kennedy, a well-known television preacher promoted and popularized a nineteenth century book, The Gospel in the Stars, by Joseph Seiss. The thesis of the book is that God has left a testimony to the gospel of Christ in the names of the constellations and certain prominent stars. For example, Virgo is the Virgin Mary. Orion is Christ. According to some legends, Orion died when he stepped on a scorpion, which parallels the seed of the woman (Christ) stepping on the head of the serpent (Genesis 3:15). Every detail of the ancient myths is mined for symbols of gospel truths. This idea rests on bad theology, bad astronomy and bad history.

Bad theology
The gospel in its simplest form is that Jesus Christ, the God-man, died for our sins; that he rose again in the same body in which He died; that He is coming back again; and that all who put their trust in Him will be saved (1 Corinthians 15; Romans 10:8-13). The New Testament is quite clear that this message is only available in words—whether written or spoken (Romans 10:14-15). What do the heavens proclaim? Not the gospel, but the glory, beauty and power of God (Psalm 19:1; Romans 1:20). That is all.

Bad astronomy
The Gospel in the Stars assumes, without a shred of evidence, that the classical names of the constellations in western civilization accurately retain the names of those star groupings given by God to Adam and Eve. The tortured philological connections offered to support this thesis are a bunch of baloney. Furthermore, why should our constellation names be privileged over those of the Chinese or the American Indians. If the stars are supposed to make the gospel accessible to all peoples, why don’t all peoples recognize the same star groupings and have the same names for them.

Bad history
I can state this very simply. There is no historical evidence that anybody, anywhere, at any time ever figured out the gospel of Christ simply by looking up at the stars. Nor did anyone before the time of Christ figure out the gospel by pondering the classical myths associated with the constellations.

Anything good?
It is certainly possible to use the stars and the myths associated with them to illustrate spiritual truths. After all, the New Testament uses farming, athletic competitions and business transactions to illustrate spiritual principles. But that is very different from insisting that the constellations are a divinely appointed means for conveying gospel truth.

In Praise of Science Fiction

To judge books and movies by their covers, a great deal of current science fiction seems to rest on two stable pillars—boobs and blasters. This is cheap fodder for the gut, but it often lacks what science fiction is best suited to provide—that, is stimulating food for the mind.

One of the easiest ways to make this point is to compare Isaac Asimov’s I Robot with the movie of the same name. The book is a series of challenging intellectual puzzles based on Asimov’s famous “three laws of robotics.” The movie has more in common with Rambo or Terminator than it does with anything Asimov ever wrote.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a good action movie. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a classic that is hard to surpass. (Certainly, its sequels are not its equals.) But all action movies typically offer is a temporary escape from the ordinary business of living. There is nothing wrong with that from time to time, as long as we don’t start living for the next escape.

The better science fiction, however, raises the life’s big questions: What does it mean to be human? Are there other intelligent beings in the universe, and what forms might they take? How might human beings behave if placed in an alien environment? Can we change the present by visiting the past? Where are we headed, both as individuals and as a species?

Consider briefly science fiction’s concern for the future. The suggested scenarios vary widely, of course. Will evolution take a negative turn leading to The Planet of the Apes? Will we be dominated by a super-computer that becomes a virtual deity? Will aliens be our friends or our nemesis?

Asimov’s most enduring vision pictures a galactic civilization that is threatened by chaos. His Foundation Trilogy, its sequels and its prequel suggest that the distant future will be guided through the chaos by the force of mind rather than by technology. In these books, he brilliantly unifies his early I Robot with a later series of robot mysteries solved by the detective Lij Bailey.

From a Christian perspective, the important thing about good science fiction is not the specific future it envisions but the fact that it asks us to look ahead. The current furor over global warming and an increasing concern about a devastating collision with a huge chunk of space rock may have a similar effect.

Without something to draw our attention to the future, we easily develop a constricted view of life. We get up, eat breakfast, go to our jobs, fuss at our co-workers, go home, have supper, numb our minds with an hour or two of television, drop into bed and get up the next day to do it all over again.

If science fiction (or even fictional science, which one side or the other of the global warming debate must be) causes us to think about the future, it has done us a service. Certainly, most people think about the future in these ways without ever giving heed to the Bible’s infallible prediction of what is to come. But no one who is oblivious to the future can be saved. One of the essential doctrines of the New Testament is that Jesus, who died, came to life again and will return to judge the living and the dead.

Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead (Acts 17:30-31).

For after all it is only just for God to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to give relief to you who are afflicted and to us as well when the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power (2 Thessalonians 1:6-9).

Though this future alone is true, other imagined futures do not thereby become irrelevant. Just as the pagan myths of a dying, rising god found their ultimate fulfillment in Christ, so the hopes and fears embodied in the most provocative science fiction find their fulfillment in the twin destines of all human beings. Heaven is more exciting than the best of our dreams; hell is more dreadful than the worst of them.

Esse est percipi

Warning. This posting is more philosophical than most of mine. Feel free to skip it.

Esse est percipi—to be is to be perceived. If you can’t see it, hear it or touch it, either with your senses or with instruments, it doesn’t exist. That is not exactly what idealist philosopher George Berkley meant when he penned those words, but his aphorism has spawned plenty of whimsical offshoots. For example:

If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one around to hear it, is there any sound?

If a man is in the forest by himself, and there is no woman around, is he still wrong?

I don’t call myself an idealist (in the philosophical sense) for two very good reasons. First, there may be as many kinds of idealism as there are idealist philosophers. Second, many idealists deny that matter really exists. They say that spirit (or Spirit) is the only true substance. The first verse of the Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth; it doesn’t say He just imagined them.

Nevertheless, I am attracted to certain aspects of idealism. Everything that exists outside of God was first an idea in the mind of God, and He is the one who holds all creation together. If He stopped doing that, everything from stars to starfish, including ourselves would cease to exist.

For by Him [Christ] all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities-- all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:16-17).

How does Jesus Christ hold all things together? Well, by His power, of course, but because He is omniscient and omnipresent, He sees all things (Psalm 139). If it were possible for God to stop seeing His creation, it would no longer be here.

The all seeing eye of God may lie behind one of the greatest mysteries of modern science. According to quantum mechanics, two particles or photons born together out of the same subatomic event are entangled. No matter how far apart they may travel, what happens to one immediately affects the other. Einstein thought that this consequence of quantum mechanics demonstrated that the theory must have a serious flaw. However, the fact of entanglement has been demonstrated in the laboratory.

How can widely separated twins have instantaneous communication with each other? I am not a physicist, but I suspect two factors at work. First, I think it may be possible to devise a theory that provides a suitable explanation for entanglement. I hope so, because that would be very interesting. But second, I believe that God’s perception of all creation—the perception that allows the world to continue existing—is also the perception that enables this entanglement to work. He is always everywhere, so instantaneous communication between widely separated parts of His creation is no problem for Him.

Notice what I am not saying. I am not claiming that God fills in the gaps of our physical knowledge—thunder, for example, used to be God’s voice, now it is just the sound of a big spark passing through the air. No, the biblical picture of God is not that simple. Rather, in every event, certain natural and explicable causes are operating, but at the same time God is at work upholding and sustaining those processes and bringing about His will through them.

As Psalm 104:21 says, “The young lions roar after their prey And seek their food from God.” The lions have to hunt; that is nature. God feeds them; that is His secret work, of which the lions are totally unaware. So God speaks powerfully in the thunder, which is the sound made by a big spark. God sees entangled particles as one and upholds the physical process by which entanglement occurs.