Navigating Uncertainty

[Richard_Wright1 (Richard Wright)]

Hi Nathan,

I’ve been praying consistently for you even though due to busyness have not kept up with this thread as consistently. Am under the weather today and have some free-time to respond to your response to me some days ago.

You: [quote]
It’s just that our own experience doesn’t always include the dramatic supernatural verification that one (me!) might hope would make faith easy.
[/quote]

the supernatural seems rare and ‘sneaky’ if verifiable at all (as opposed to its central necessity in the Acts church)

Jesus:

"blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

God wants us to have faith and faith is Christ is hard, it is supposed to be. Yet we are required to have this faith to have a relationship with God.

“And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6)

Consider yourself blessed, Nathan, because you believe and have not seen! Why were there supernatural occurrences in biblical days and seemingly not now? Maybe there was a need for them since God’s message not been written down in complete form and people needed their faiths reinforced. But for us, we have the bible, and as John said:

“But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)

I believe that this may be what Paul refers to in 1 Cor 13:10 -

but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.

About problems in the faith you wrote:

That there is massive disunity in the Church, that there is uneven experience of suffering and “goodness” in the lives of believers and unbelievers alike

This is going to sound simple, but of course there is disunity in the church, Satan attacks believers first and foremost, not wanting anyone to avoid his destiny. As far as some believers’ lives being better than others, don’t forget people had varying amounts of sin in their lives before coming to have faith and some as believers are still living under the consequences of their sins. Also, as Paul said, “No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God’s approval.” (1 Cor 11:19) Then there’s the bulk that we can’t explain because we’re not God.

A word on the multiverse(s), which seem to be a bit of hang-up for you. A multiverse could explain why we live in such a life-friendly universe. But that raises 2 issues. One, where did the multiverse come from? Two, and you never hear atheists mention this - there are different types of multiverses allowed by theoretical physics, and ones that produce different laws of physics and physical constants are from a multiverse with 9 dimensions, which would necessarily have an infinite number of possible variations. So the question arises, how did the multiverse become fine-tuned to produce universes with different laws and constants that would allow a life-friendly universe? The scriptures are neutral on the multiverse and for me if God wanted to use it to produce this universe I have to problem with it (theologically or otherwise). That said, I don’t think we are in a multiverse.

Some thoughts to chew on - suppose for an instant that God really did initiate the universe (or multiverse) to evolve man, including morality and conscience, with no direct interventions. Is that really so hard to accept? He obviously wants us ensconced in a world of natural causes. Doesn’t it make sense that we would be produced by them? Is it really that much of a difference if God, “created” directly the first DNA molecule or it evolved? For me there is literally no difference, since the were both created by God in the way we, “make” children - through natural processes. I don’t have a problem with the fall, God explained to an ancient people that evolved man eventually understood right from wrong then violated their consciences thus needed a saviour.

@DrebNay

I am 100% sold on the idea that following Jesus in faith is the best way to live life.

I’m not sure I agree with this. Yes, we can have a great life in Christ, but many have been killed and tortured for their faiths. Some in my family of churches in certain parts of the world have been killed by family members. I don’t think Christ came merely so we could have a better life.

I’ll share a bit of my life with you. In my church we study the bible with people so they can become Christians. Right now I’m leading 2 such studies and mentor a teen who has recently started studying on his decision. Both of the adults are middle-aged, one is from a Jewish background. I see lives and eternal destinies changing right in front of me. There is a lot of sacrifice of time and energy involved in doing this, but the rewards are easily worth it, for they and myself. So whether the spin of an up-quark gluon can be said to be determined by something or other, though of interest to me, doesn’t shake my faith. We have an active faith, not a totally intellectual one, and being active in it over the years and seeing results in changed lives has made a tangible difference in my faith. This is along with confessing sins, repenting, making life changes, etc. I’m not trying to compare my life with yours (or anyone else’s) but only giving my testimony as to how, as a natural skeptic and analytic type I’ve maintained my faith for almost 29 years as a bible-believing Christian. This I believe is the, “power of an indestructible life” (Hebrews 7:16).

I’ll concede that I don’t have any easy answers as to how God answers prayers.

Hope this helps!

Richard

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

@DrebNay

On the other hand, the Christian faith is one that makes bold truth claims, including the truthfulness of God - ‘I am the way, the truth, the life’. If a person cannot integrate what God has revealed of Himself through revelation with what can be known of the world through investigation, I don’t see how they can maintain a belief in both.

I heartily agree with your opening contentions here, Nathan. And your concern that a person’s faith be fully integrated with every aspect of their life is well-founded. I think you and probably most of us here seem to agree that we don’t want compartmentalization where the religious life is supposedly only concerned with “spiritual” matters while other things (i.e. --science) are in charge of “natural” phenomena. Where I would push back a bit would be to note that for many Christian thinkers through the ages, daily life and faith were never “dis-integrated” in the first place. So for those for whom those things have had an attempted wedge driven in, and who have suffered from this modern attempt at dissection, --figuring out how to re-integrate these two things is certainly a cause worth pursuing.

Thanks for looking up the Anscombe debate. I remember reading of that (probably from some of the same sources you may have found.) As I recall there was some debate as to whether Lewis’ switch later in his life ought to be characterized as a retreat. He did go on after that to write his Narnia series, which, while perhaps not being considered among his “heavy-hitting” apologetics would probably not exactly be a retreat from that either.

Thank you for your continued discussion. Hope to be outside with my telescope tonight enjoying some of God’s handiwork of the skies! To that end … gotta go.

[GJDS]

@DrebNay

If a person cannot integrate what God has revealed of Himself through revelation with what can be known of the world through investigation, I don’t see how they can maintain a belief in both.

Hi Nathan,
You cover a very large area of human experience and interests and were it not for your conflict, I would enjoy these discussions; I would prefer shorter responses as lengthy ones take some time to sink in – however it is difficult to provide anything meaningful in a brief manner, so I hope this lengthy response may be useful to you and others. I have decided to deal with science and then briefly see if the general and foundational areas of science are in harmony with the teachings of the Faith.

Philosophers of science have discussed certainty from science (and this is relevant within the science and faith context), and a number of schools of thought are current. Briefly, there is debate concerning reality, truth content of scientific laws and hypothesis, and how we obtain knowledge of the world of objects. The following quotes are non-controversial and represent a general outlook:

“In current philosophy of science, by contrast, the fallibilist epistemological program has the upper hand, which concedes that our understanding of reality is basically fallible, and our scientific knowledge can be more or less well confirmed, but it cannot be guaranteed to be free of error.”

“For the empiricists, sentences which may be justified a priori—that is, by pure reason and with rational certainty—are limited to so-called analytical sentences, i.e. sentences whose truth is based on logic and conceptual convention. Such sentences possess no realistic content, they say nothing about the real world—only synthetic sentences can do this, but they can only be justified a posteriori, that is, based on experience.”

“ …… radically formulated by Hume. He showed that the two central tenets of scientific method, the causality principle and the induction principle, are neither logically nor empirically justifiable. The causality principle says that all regular successions between events are produced by cause–effect relations; but Hume objected that all that one can observe are the successions of the events, while the idea that the earlier event or “cause” produces the later event as its “effect” is metaphysical fiction….”

The discussion centres on laws of science, and it is in this area that problems have abound regarding the theory (or theories) of evolution. Generally, knowledge of nature and includes outcomes to the human senses (and to reason) from nature’s activities, or phenomena - these responses may be quantified by observation and hypothesis, and thus considered explicable via the scientific method. The difficulty faced by us is that of differentiating between ourselves as reasoning beings, and the objects of our inquiry - since both appear to be in the world. This actualises into language activity, which leads to a differentiation between the world of phenomenon/dynamics and that of human reality.

Science attempts to provide explanations or descriptions believed to encompass the universe. It may appear, however, that ‘mega-knowledge’ is sought to enable a human being to attain to a complete understanding of the phenomena and its objects, and this may provide an intellectual perception, or inference, that objects behave according to some principle; or, objects are required to be as they are by a ‘something in their being-ness’.

A scientific law is an articulation, or combination, of words and symbols, to provide meaning of the world of objects to human beings. We may reason that the universe is ‘lawful’ because it continues to be what it is, or everything will finally be totally reasonable. The essential question in natural studies is therefore the intelligibility of nature – how is it that human reason and intellect can access natural phenomena and nature’s ultimate realities? One response to this question is the attribute often termed ‘image of God’ to humanity.

It has been suggested we may see the ‘mind of God’ in the universe, but the discussion on the meaning of the word God negates such a view. The impact of the vast universe on the human senses, however, may be overwhelming, as we seek to understand its beginning and end. The universe does ‘talk’ to us of God (in its silence). This is shown in Psalms 19:1-14. The writer of this psalm shows us that it is the law of God that he understands, and through the law of God, he hopes to be free from error and those that indulge in error. In this way we may understand beauty without feeling we have ‘invented’ it. In this silence, we do not listen to our own feverish mind constantly trying to explain to ourselves all that our senses may respond. Rather, the glory of God proclaimed by the silent beauty may lead us to wish we could share, and be a part of, such splendour. The Universe in all its splendour points to its Creator’s Glory, and similarly to the beauty that is found in the Law of God.

Currently astronomy and particle physics have been popularised and discussions have dealt with the origins of the Universe. The many difficulties faced by evolutionism are at times put to one side by the notion that the Universe is anthropomorphic – i.e. a Universe evolved that was conducive to the evolution of life and human beings on earth. The origins of the Universe appear to have crystallized into the big-bang theory, although others speculate alternate notions. Generally the view has been that God is the cause of causes, or the primal cause; since no-one witnessed the event, we cannot discuss this notion as a verifiable/testable theory– but people may feel this is sufficient, since the Faith teaches us that God can do anything. It is necessary, however, to consider the scientific view point as serious and believe that scientists are interested in obtaining a good understanding of the Universe. The scientific method requires theory to be tested – in this case, tests are performed using particle accelerators to obtain data on the particles that constitute the Universe. These tests rest on theory devised by theoretical physicists and are, generally speaking, mathematical expressions that encapsulate the thinking of the theoretical physicists and leading mathematicians. It appears appropriate, to my way of thinking, to consider the language of mathematics when examining these activities. We have examined the limitations of language when considering the meaning ‘God’ and concluded that all godly attributes were singular and human language was insufficient to give full meaning to these. The Universe, however, is accessible to human sense, and it appears reasonable to assume that a language such as mathematics would be sufficient when examining the Universe. Difficulties however, stem from a human assumption, in that the origin of the Universe may also be considered as a singular event; in this case physicists cannot dealt with such an event using the laws of physics; i.e. they contemplate notions in which the laws of physics may not apply. Indeed, notions such as “nothing existed” (nothingness!?) are difficult ones for science, and thus it may be inappropriate for science to think it can define a beginning per se.

The scientific method does enable us, however, to examine physical reality in the Universe and dispassionately draw conclusions from our observations. If physicists conclude the wave equation may be expressed as the sum of the forces in the Universe and these are measured in some way, then in theory such an activity conforms to the scientific method. If astronomers observe galaxies that provide light that has travelled for an enormous amount of time, than this too is reasonable. However, if scientists perform mathematical calculations and conclude that these observations lead to errors that are so large that under ordinary circumstances such results would be rejected as unacceptable according to the scientific method than such activities must be considered speculative. Otherwise, we have the situation found so repugnant to scientists, in that irrational dogma replaces reason. These scant remarks serve to indicate how we may regard the ‘laws of nature’ within the science and faith context.

[marvin (Christian Sceptic)]

you are doing very well with summarising it and quite good in cutting it short per person
.
I don’t know what makes you think out of my statement that you are a partial idiot. Once you understand the concept of evidence you are actually fine and you have free will to accept and reject evidence based on reason. You can however not reject proof, unless you can show that the proof is flawed in which case it was not proof. When it comes to being fools we all have the talent to be one and we all are once in a while and I am surely no exception.

Regarding my understanding of prayer I do not expect God to change reality for me but that he helps me and gives me the strength to “change” reality according to his wishes thus to be part of his plan. Regarding his plan I do not believe it to depend on micromanagement but that indeed the overall outcome is predetermined as bound by the law of existence. Runaway processes are self deleting. With regards to prayer there is a famous song from Taize called “oh Lord hear my prayer” suggesting he doesn’t. It goes
|:Oh Lord hear my prayer:| when I pray, answer me |:Oh Lord hear my prayer:| come and listen to me.
It is a beautiful tune based on a psalm about a plea for having a prayer answered. However my understanding is that he hears our prayer anyhow, the problem is on our side about not hearing the answer. Thus the correct text should be
|:Oh Lord here’s my prayer:| when I pray you answer me |:oh Lord here’s my prayer:| help me to listen to you.
e.g. prayer is not about God moving things for us but about helping us to get ourselves moving his way.

When it comes to miracles I am definitely an oddball as I do not believe in them. You can command the sun to rise or go down and it will happen - if you know when to command it to do so To those who do not understand how your gadgets work they are miracles but they all have rational explanations in the end. To me miracles are the things that are perfectly natural. Tell me why you would need God to impress you with a miracle. If he does need a miracle to convince you of being a loving God he can’t be a loving God. If reality doesn’t convince you, any display of magical - or absolute power is a fake way of pretending authority. A God that needs a miracle to show his authority hasn’t got authority. Thus miracles to me are logically incoherent but I llok forward to read bits about the Ancombe Lewis debate myself to get some more input on that. As far as the bible is the inspired word of God you can check your interpretation of the text for logical coherence. If for example one believes Jesus played with OH groups in the water Jars to make wine the logic coherent interpretation would make us having to accept that he teaches the value of wine to be higher than the value of living water used for ritual cleansing (and baptism) and that one would have to be embarrassed for not having plenty of wine for a wedding party. Why would one think him to teach that?

@DrebNay

I struggle hugely with trying to frame an understanding of the fall and the atonement without a historical Adam and Eve. And even if I can find a way to rationalize that, how much more of the Bible do I have to rationalize away. Did the exodus happen? Did Elijah face down the prophets of Baal? Was Jonah in the whale 3 days? How do these things make sense as pointers to Christ, if we can’t trust whether or not any of these things happened? I understand the concept of genre with scripture, but with such core concepts at stake and no time machines, how am I supposed to accept any kind of theology as authentic?

The bible is using poetic language as thousands of years ago its listeners were not as materialistic in their use of language as we are now thus far more versatile in its use. Some of the pictures have become more difficult for us to understand and require the holy spirit to understand e.g. to have the will to understand them for us to make sense. To dismiss them as primitive goat herder’s writings only shows the will of those who want to set themselves above others and that already shows who’s spirit is with them. If you look at the story of the fall and have children yourself it should become apparent to you that the story is a poetic description of puberty. You might recognise the cocky behaviour of Adam and Eve who in rejecting the will of the father not to eat from the tree of (self) realisation realise their self by going against the will of their father thus exercising their free will. If you notice, God does not say - if you eat from that tree I will kill you- but you will most certainly die, meaning that once you mainfest yourself in your material self you will experience mortality - unless you come back to God through Jesus and reconcile yourself with God’s eternal existence. Regarding atonement, consider that he did not die to make God happy by being a human sacrifice to God, something entirely rejected by the Jews from Abraham onwards, but he died to show us that there is more to life than our earthly existence and that we can live in him as he can live in us. If one teaches a physical resurrection as the magic of God one might as well proclaim materialism. Now this interpretation does not require an historical individual Adam and Eve to understand sin as putting your self in conflict with the overall self (God) and all other selfs.

As you can see, when you rationalise the bible there is no need to rationalise parts of it away but you can get a better understanding of God and his message. People may have to do away with some interpretation of the text for lack of rational coherence, and with the idea of God being a magic wish fulfiller aka Santa’s big brother if that is what they were lead to believe him to be, but that to me is a healthy bit that comes with growing up. We should avoid making people think that is what he ought to be in the first place. It possibly also might free parents from their feeling to be obliged to have to be the magic wish-fulfiller of their children and you see where this leads To love someone does not mean to fulfill their wishes but to help them to live in peace.

As you can see, there are many people here who want to help you to find that peace and that is perhaps worthwhile wondering about why that might be.

[DrebNay (Nathan)]

Stop. Just stop.

Honestly. I don’t think I can handle another post. It’s all crazy. None of this makes sense to me. I try to grasp something as true, and all that I touch is contradiction. I don’t understand God. I don’t understand life. I don’t know what to believe or how to believe it.

@Richard_Wright1 - I hope you feel better soon. Thank you for your prayers and your thoughts. I hope to believe again that what I am experiencing makes sense within the context of the Bible.
@Mervin_Bitikofer - I hope you had a great evening looking at the stars. Thank you for your participation.
@GJDS - Thank you for your thoughtful response. In time I hope that I can believe in a universe established by a Creator again.
@marvin - Thank you for caring enough to engage and put your thoughts out there. I hope that at some point something in the Bible makes sense to me. If the resurrection and everything else in the Bible is poetics, I don’t see how anything really matters anyway, including finding any answers.

Thank you to everyone. I’m sorry. I am going to take a break from the forum for now. It is getting increasingly hard to handle hope followed by disappointment. I hope to be back in a better frame of mind soon.

[BradKramer]

@DrebNay it sounds very much like you are going through a dark time, spiritually and personally, right now. Out of respect for that, I’m closing the thread until you would tell me otherwise. Thanks so much for sharing so personal a struggle with us. Know that you have our prayers and support.