PLAYING WITH DYNAMITE

A QUITE HAIR RAISING TIME in my life came about when my family moved from the quiet town of Clare (in the mid-North of South Australia) down to the outskirts of Adelaide (the capital city of South Australia). I must have been around nine or ten years (a long time ago!). On a clear day, one could just see the 'tall' buildings of the city in the distance. The suburb was called 'Northfield'.

The first 'scary' thing was that I now had to go to the one-teacher school just across the road. Having attended convent school where only the nuns taught, this was very different and formidable. I feigned sick for three days until my mother took me across. It did not help that the teacher was called Mr. Basham (aka, Bash 'Em?). As with many things that initially frighten, this turned out to be an unexpectedly enriching experience.

What was really frightening was the local gang of boys, some of whom were already attending high-school and learning science. These local lads were fond of making knives, slingshots, and fireworks (having learned to make gunpowder) and loved to get into adventures around the local quarries. Some adventures were really hair raising. Had they know of them, our parents would have clamped down on our freedom; we, however, kept 'Mum'.

The leaders of our local lads had learned to pick the lock on the explosives store at the quarry. From this we occasional 'borrowed' sticks of gelignite, fuse, and detonators. What a time we had, blowing up rabbit warrens, fence posts, and impressing the girls, when we all went skinny-dipping down at a disused quarry filled with water, by throwing a quarter stick, fuse sizzling, into the deepest parts, enormous aquatic eruptions resulting. Ah, those were the days! I think it was then that I began to gain a respect for life and the wisdom of carefully graduating risk.

The Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel invented the Nobel patent detonator used with dynamite and nitroglycerin. Dynamite, or gelignite, consists of nitroglycerin mixed with clay which makes it safe to handle (a slight shock can set off nitroglycerin) which then needed a device to set it off reliably. As the dynamite king, he became very rich and remains famous and influential due to the Nobel Prize.

Can I hear you saying, "What has this to do with belief in 'God'?" A seemingly tenuous connection, I do admit. On the other hand, it makes for an attention getting beginning to this post. Perhaps toying with the notion of 'God' may appear a little like playing with dynamite. Our word, 'dynamite', comes directly from the Greek, 'dunamis', meaning power. Actually, 'elemental power'...the kind of power seen in the tempest, the whirlwind, tornado or hurricane, volcanic eruptions and earthquake, events that the ancients attributed to 'god'. Even today, we sometimes refer to these as 'acts of God'.

What I have been leading up to is that the ancients got it back to front. They concluded that 'god' or 'gods' were behind such events. As with the air they breathed so also the language they used. They came to speak of 'gods' and 'god' because they could speak.

Language has been with us for so long that we know little of how it became invented or even how, once created by man, it developed. But invented it was and is now so much a part of our nature that we are hardly aware of it and how profoundly this invention has influenced human development. It has been conjectured that language is coupled to increasingly efficiency of our evolutionary forebears as hunters. More dietary meat supported increased brain development (less gut needed, more brain possible within the range of possible energy intake). More brain supported more language capacity, while better communication through language led to better hunting and foraging, to a more versatile omnivorous diet, and so on. Efficient food gathering in turn mean more time for sitting around and just talking, and the invention of stories and so, the rise of culture and art, each an enormous expansion of the range of the individual mind.

Whatever...in reality, I conclude, man made god, through language, thinking, and wondering about the nature of things. We may say the 'God' made man (and the world), but this does not make it so. What does it mean to say, 'in reality'? I refer to the representation of the world that is in our heads, and in our culture, that has been painstakingly constructed over time and into which we have grown since birth.

It might well be extremely distressing to dismiss 'god' in this way. On the other hand it may also be abundantly creative. If the concept of 'god' is something within our control, maybe we can now do a proper job of work on it. There are pressing reasons why it would be of inestimable value to human kind to get on with this.

In his Large Catechism, Martin Luther defined 'god' as 'that to which we look for all good and where we resort in every time of need; to have a god is simply to trust and believe in one with our whole heart'. Here he is using the original notion of 'belief' which is to entrust oneself, or commit to a most highly valued course (as distinct from the modern use relating to assenting to a point of view).

As a former Augustinian monastic, and a leader of the Protestant Reformation, Luther was confident that a study of Holy Scripture would be the key to finding or fixing on the True God. Nowadays, it is possible to see that the Bible is a collection of stories of human origin, useful for guiding us in living but not conclusive when it comes to understanding the world. Moreover, I have suggested that it contains a view of reality, preserved by traditional Christianity, that is turning out to be dangerous to the world and our life on it.

An earlier monastic, a Franciscan, William of Ockam (try Googling 'Occam's Razor) proposed that the simplest explanation of anything should be preferred. Eventually this view, coupled with the overthrow of the authority of the Church, led to the scientific understanding of the world we now enjoy and the emergence of the modern secular world view. By holding onto the dualism implicit in traditional theological interpretations, broad Christianity has fallen behind, along with Islam and Judaism, in assisting human kind to find the faith needed for the challenges of the modern age.

If, instead, we turned to what we have come to know of the world, what manner of 'god' might we invent, to which we could entrust ourselves in our time of need?

A COFFEE MOMENT...

MY FAVORITE COFFEE SHOP, would you believe, is called 'Heavenly Cup'.  It is not far from where I used to live, at Gang Mills.  By the way, a ganged mill consists of several saws that, in tandem, cut, shape, and section a log horizontally and vertically, so that what enters as a log emerges as sawn timber.  The name reminds us that the Corning area  once had one of the largest forestry industries in the US. In passing, we could note that 'heavenly' cup refers to a quality and not a place.

The coffee at Heavenly Cup rivals that to be found anywhere.  There, last week, I was in conversation with one of the pastors of a church I occasionally attend...one of the modern versions with a youth band, lots of singing, and expositions a tad longer than those at Christ Church.  He wanted to know how it is that I came to my present view of faith and religion.  It was a clarifying moment; in cafe, veritas.  My mind flew back to that moment when I sacked God the second time.

Of course, I didn't really sack God;  I simply use this as a metaphor for the sudden, final collapse of the dualism implicit in modern Christianity and, for that matter, most western approaches to faith.  If there  is just one reality, the reality we have been attempting to incorporate and make sense of since birth, the physical world of which we are part and which scientific inquiry has been endeavoring to understand for the past two hundred years, then the traditional view of Christianity necessarily collapses.  If there is just one world, one universe, where in this world can the god of faith exist?  This is not to say that this 'god of faith' cannot exist, but not as a real being in some other realm of existence that we call 'heaven'.

We inherit the cosmology of traditional Christianity (Heaven up there somehow above the clouds, man being made of body and soul, Jesus both human and Divine, and so on) from an earlier time, the way the world was seen, conceptualized by the Greeks, Romans, and, to some extent, the Jews.  With two hundred years or so of scientific inquiry into the nature of things behind us, modern thinking about the foundations of faith should be able to do a lot better.

Talking with my friend over a heavenly cup also exemplified for me how a particular view of the Bible can stand in the way of achieving this.  This is the comparatively modern view that these writings are scientifically and historically accurate because divinely inspired.  Taking this view preserves the cosmology of the times of the various authors and disregards the immense amount of biblical scholars of all persuasions done over the last two hundred years on the nature and construction of these writings.

Unfortunately this also preserves the notion that man and nature are separate and that the earth is meant to be under the dominion of man, to be exploited however humans see fit.

Well, this is the story of my journey into faith and I am not asking you to agree with these views.  I am glad that I have lived to a time when a much clearer picture of Jesus has emerged, who he was, what he had to say, and his position in the stream of Jewish thought about the meaning of life.  This is the historical Jesus, not the Jesus of faith as worshiped by many Christians of today, the concept of The Christ I encounter when I attend at worship

But what about 'God'?   What might it mean to "believe in 'God'?"

CAN 'GOD' BE PUT BACK TO WORK?

I QUITE LIKE TO ATTEND CHURCH, which you might think a little weird, given my agnostic/atheist leanings.  I go the the local Episcopal services.  I am surprisingly regular, hardly missing a Sunday.  I love the hymns, which are more ancient than modern.  A small quip tucked away here, as the  Church of England, Anglican, Episcopal (depending on the country in which one is living) had an earlier hymnal called, 'Hymns, Ancient and Modern'.

Going into the local church building (Christ Church), with its tower and stained glass windows, is a like leaving the 21st Century and entering the Middle Ages.  This is certainly true of the cosmology inherent in almost every thing we say and do.  We pray to our Heavenly Father, at whose right hand is Jesus, the Son of God.  One day, Jesus will descend from heaven to judge the living and the dead.  The dead will be raised from Hades, below the earth, to face the judgement day.  We are joined with the hosts of heaven through the life of the Holy Spirit, making us one in Christ, forming the people of God or the body of Christ.  We ask for the forgiveness of sins and for help to live peaceful, good, and useful lives.  If anyone needs forgiveness for sins, that would be me, and I am grateful for any help to attain to the latter three.

It is greatly interesting to me that, had I not begun to attend this church, I might never have heard of the writings of Lloyd Geering.  A regular attender, at the fellowship hour after the worship service on my first attendance, having heard my confession of agnosticism, said, 'Have you read any of Lloyd Geering?', and strait-way mentioned a title, Christianity without God.

Professor Geering is a New Zealand theologian who was tried for heresy by the Presbyterian Church in 1968 (but not found guilty).  I recommend you read his work should you be interested in thinking 'out of the box' about the history of Christianity and its possible contribution to our modern secular age.  His writings have greatly assisted my own thinking.  He is erudite in many areas and familiar with the challenges modern science offers to Christian believers.  I had been completely unaware of his writings as his period of active writing roughly coincides with the period in which I was going about my second sacking of God.

Does this mean that, having sacked 'God' twice, I am about to reengage?  Not in the manner you might expect.

I have put forward, for your consideration, that talk about God is not talk about a being in the real world, or some other 'world' but rather is talk about a concept which, like all concepts, exists somehow 'in our heads'.  In other words, a concept that can only exist so long as there is language and culture to support it.  Many cultures we know of through  history have developed some notion of gods, or god.  This is often advanced as an argument for the existence of god as a real being instead of what it patently shows, that 'god as a concept' is vitally important to human kind.

Why is this concept, gods or god, so important to us?  I am persuaded that the major reason is human kind's passion for meaning, our desire to understand how things are connected and how things work.  Amongst other things, we want to know the answer to questions such as, 'Who am I?', and 'Why am I here?'...and, 'Did all the things that continue to be around us have a beginning?' and, if so, "What is the story of how things have gone since then to now?'

For many, the answers seem to cohere around the concept of god.

However, before I can re-employ 'God', I will have to do some considerable 're-working' of the concept itself.  Watch this space.

LETTING GOD GO

A SMALL CHILD WAS DRAWING AT SUNDAY SCHOOL, as a sweet story goes. 'What are you drawing?', says the teacher. 'I am drawing God' is the reply. 'But no one knows what God looks like.', the teacher remonstrates. 'When I am finished,' retorts the child proudly, 'every one will.'. So, sorry... no pictures.

I love that story. Almost as much as I love the story of the dyslectic chap who became an atheist exclaiming, 'There is no doG!'.

My last blog posting raised a little interest and I am looking forward to more replies.

Now to begin but but let me say at the outset, letting God go is not the end of being religious, if religion is what guides us and orders our choices.

Before I, and possibly you also, give God the sack, we could ask ourselves if God is, where might that be?

When I was growing up, God was in heaven but also, in some sense, everywhere. My illustrated Bible had pictures of God in the clouds. In many ways, the evolution of the idea of god in the life of the child who learns to think eventually as a adult mirrors the evolution or history of God, so far as we can surmise it, in the growing up of the human race. I came to believe that Heaven was 'up there' while 'down there' was an unpleasant place known as Hell. I also had the notion of Purgatory, where sinners might be purged of their sins before going on and up to Heaven.

I did not come to know this in the same sense of how I came to know the world around me. In my mother's womb, I knew very little, almost nothing, while my brain grew from just a few cells to the point where it was just big enough to permit, with a little squeezing, my head to pass through her birth canal. Even at that point, quite a bit of important cerebral machinery was missing. I refer to the fore-brain that begins to grow some eighteen months after birth and keeps on growing for several years more. With a full size brain we could never survive birth.

I went from knowing nothing about the world by dint of a lot of work done in my brain making sense of all the information I was getting through my ears, the sense of motion of my limbs, my eyes, and other senses. For the first two years or so, my knowledge of the world was very rudimentary and not much different from the knowledge of other mammalian young. In my head, I was making increasingly educated guesses about how the world worked and getting continual feedback about how good were those guesses. This is the stuff of the psychology of cognitive development, possibly one of the most fascinating realms of psychology (which I taught for five years when I was an academic).

When I began to use language, I entered another world entirely. I could ask my parents questions about the nature of the world. Older siblings were a great help too. From then on, knowledge of the world multiplied and grew exponentially. In my brain, the knowledge construction went on at a furious pace, old neural networks being broken down and new ones replacing them.

But this new knowledge came not from personal experience, as formerly, but in the context of language and culture. What others 'knew' was passed on to me.

Wait for it...

Here is where the concept of God occurs, this is where God is, in the world of story, history, myth, belief and opinion. This is a hard pill to swallow. We would like to have it that God is in the sense that we know a tree is, or a rock. With careful thought, we will see that we cannot maintain this view. It is quite possible to imagine a culture where the concept of God is completely absent. Would such a culture be barbaric and cruel, being so bereft of God? Not necessarily and certainly we can say that having a concept of God has not prevented us from lapsing in awful barbarisms.

I suppose that this is where you will get pretty mad at me. Already I have had one email saying I cannot sack God. Well, let's see.

God, or gods, as a concept has been around for a long time, perhaps as long as humans have had enough language to form abstract ideas. There is at least one book entitled, 'A History of God'.

There are living fossil cultures that tell us how humans first thought about God or gods. In the Australian Aboriginal Dream Time stories (these folk came to Australia between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago) there are stories of how super large creatures formed important geographical features. I love the one that tells how the Flinders Ranges, in the North of my home State of South Australia came to be. From the air, these look like impressions made in the earth by the fingers of one's hands. The totem for this land is the Snake ( a very large snake) who lived at the beginning of time. His snaking about formed the finger-like impressions. He also drank all the water (the country is very dry and arid); this gave him quite a belly ache and he took refuge beneath the land to get over it. The rumblings of his belly still shake the land occasionally (it is still somewhat volcanic). A great story, one that is passed on in much greater detail as part of the Aboriginal initiation rites. At this stage, such stories about the gods gave a sort of explanation of how things came to be as they are, like why it rains and thunders and how the seasons change.

Such stories predate writing but were in force still when the Greeks began to write stories. About three thousand years ago, some of them were included in the Old Testament. Notice that a child, growing up, could not derive such stories from the understanding that came through senses. Only when we learned language could we begin to receive this knowledge, slowly acquired as humanity grew and matured over hundreds of years.

It has been said that language is to the human mind as air to the birds and water to the fish and other denizens of the sea. We live and move in it, totally accepting it, but unaware to the huge, unfathomable extent that it has formed us. God is in the talk about God, in our thought about God. If he/she/it is somewhere else, we can never know of it.

THE SPRITUAL JOURNEY

I HAVE 'FIRED' GOD TWICE in my life.
The first time came at the end of the week in which my sister died. She was active, beautiful, talented, a great tennis player, an excellent pianist, she loved motor bikes, and she was a lot of fun. None of this stopped her catching the most virulent strain of poliomyelitis. I said goodbye to her as she was taken out to the ambulance and did not see again. I prayed all the week that she would get better but on the following Saturday we got word from the hospital that she had died. She was 19; I was four years younger. God got fired.

Motor bikes got me going to the local Methodist church. I was still too young to ride but lots of the church crowd had bikes. In a year or two, religious belief had its hold on me, this time it was 'you must be born again' Protestantism (vs. the nominal Catholicism of my younger days). Caught up in this enthusiasm, I think I became something of a pain in the neck (standing on street corners, giving my 'testimony', handing out tracts, asking if you had found Jesus, and the like). During my first year at Uni, I became convinced that God was calling me to become a minister. In 1958, at age 20, I entered into a four year theological course to become a Baptist minister. It was good work and I am very glad that I followed this course.

However, while studying theology, I also took courses in history and philosophy at Adelaide University. I was fortunate indeed to have excellent teachers in both disciplines. Theology is a form of history. My studies of the Lutheran reformation and the writings of Luther, for instance, were at a much greater depth and far more critical that similar courses at the theological college. On the other hand, my theology teachers guided me to a far more objective and critical appreciate of the scriptures than I had at the outset. These studies sowed seeds that took some while to germinate and grow, but grow they did.

As they did so, I had more and more difficulty maintaining the duality (body and spirit; heaven and earth, life and life-after-death) implicit in the Christian view of the world. I might also add that I had kept up my interest in physics, organic chemistry, and biology which I had studied at the undergraduate level.

Then, on Christmas Night of 1967, my father collapsed with a ruptured aortic aneurism and, despite a successful repair of the vessel, fell into a coma for several weeks. A few weeks after emerging from the coma, he suffered a pulmonary embolism and died. It was a Sunday morning but I preached no sermon that day.

I got to the hospital a little more than half an hour after he died. As I looked at his form in death, I quite clearly saw that all any of us have is just one life.

God got sacked a second time. This time not due to disappointment in his failure to answer prayer (I had never prayed for my father’s recovery, being content to do all I could for him and to see how it all would turn out). Rather, his death affirmed for me the correctness of the process of critical examination of faith and increasing skepticism I had been experiencing.

Now I am sacking God a third time. More of that next posting..