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?