Science and Religion - Changing the story from conflict to harmony

            I have recently been learning about the relationship between science and theology with Rev Prof David Wilkinson, and the thing that most struck me about what I have studied so far is the extent to which faith plays a fundamental part in the construct of science. I am not suggesting that you need to be a Christian to be a scientist or that all scientists are secretly religious, although many scientists do have a religious faith. No, the suggestion I am making is far more simple and far more specific than that. In order to study science you need to have an inherent belief that the world makes sense, that it is comprehensible, otherwise experiments wouldn't be repeatable and theories wouldn't be provable.

            It is the presumption of science that something which is true here is also true on a planet that spins around a distant star, even though none of us has ever been there to test out such a theory; and it is the presumption of science that something that is true today will also be true tomorrow. As none of us have yet been to tomorrow we cannot be certain that anything we know to be true today will still be true tomorrow. In many ways the assumption of science is not a wild one; yesterday we thought that the rules of physics would be the same today and so it is not unreasonable to assume that the same will still be true tomorrow, and if gravity and light can be observed doing the same things to a distant planet, as they do to our own then we can make a healthy guess that things work the same there as they do here.

            But there are two interesting points to be made here. The first is that this concept of the world being comprehensible comes historically from religious ideas that influenced the birth of science and so the idea that science and religion are at odds is really quite a modern story. The second is the interesting idea that although both Christian theology and Science have a concept of a comprehensible universe, both also have areas where mystery and incompatible realities take the fore. This can be seen in theological issues such as miracles and the nature of God's incarnation in Christ. Likewise with science there are strange incompatibilities between the way things function at the tiny quantum level and how they work at the cosmic level of astrophysics. There are mysteries in science like the question of whether light is a wave or a particle, and even whether uncertainty is an intrinsic part of the sub atomic world. But in both areas of study it is these mysteries that lead us to push forward in our exploration and seek to discover more.

            In the course of my studies I have found myself looking more deeply into the arguments of Richard Dawkins, and whilst he is a great biologist I realise that his arguments against religion come entirely from a prejudged view of religion as intrinsically bad, and he does this without ever requiring himself to produce the empirical data that he is expecting from others. At a basic level he never even reconciles that theology and religion are as different as scientists and people who use toasters. But I am realising more and more that the flawed nature of his arguments is not what worries me most; it is their divisiveness.

            I think the most useful thing that Dawkins offers this generation is that he highlights the way that many of those gullible enough to be convinced by poorly formulated forms of religion are just as easily convinced by his distracting mixture of science, pseudo science and scientism. The conclusion that the Church perhaps ought to take from this is that we should no longer sit back and politely accept ill-informed theologies and ecclesiologies, but rather seek to challenge them with a sense of maturity, diplomacy and grace. In short, we need to do religion better. We can only hope that inasmuch as he draws the gullible to accept his spurious arguments, he will also encourage the curious to ask deeper questions about his assertions. The worst thing that Dawkins has brought to this generation is yet another poorly formed religion and a descent into the kind of dogmatic conflict that he himself claims to abhor. 

            However, I have also found myself looking at the history of what we now call 'creationism'. And I have learned that the word was not used to describe people who believed in a seven day creation or those who oppose evolution until 1929 in a book called 'Back to Creationism' by Harold Clark, a little known biology teacher from California. What follows this book is a tale of divisive theological arguments, that were neither great theology, nor great science. They came from an ever expanding minority of fundamentalists that would eventually spread beyond America and even to some extent beyond Christianity, into Judaism and Islam.

            I find myself quite angered now by the way that fundamentalists on both sides of the science and religion argument have hijacked the concept and the language of creation and made it into a wedge to drive between groups of human beings who never should have been enemies. So perhaps we ought to spend more time together in harmony with scientists simply marvelling at the mysterious wonder of God's creation and sharing our stories with each other.

Jonah and some cows

Jonah is often seen as a story for children; particularly young children. But why do we consider this story of a defiant prophet with suicidal tendencies to be a good story for that age group? This morning I did a year 9 assembly at which I read a version of the story based on my own translation from the Hebrew. Perhaps even year 9 students are a little young for this story, but young people around the age of 13 are beginning to engage with some pretty complex emotions. So I endeavoured to adjust my translation for that age. I had already translated chapters 1, 3 and 4, but hadn't got round to translating the tricky poetry of chapter 2 (the bit with the fish) and I felt like I wanted to shift the emphasis away from whales and more towards the dark and sometimes surreal humour of the book. So I dealt with the fish chapter in one line and endeavoured to bring out some of the hidden humour of the rest of the text, I think it works. Anyway, here it is, see what you think...

 

Jonah

The Lord spoke Jonah son of Amitai, saying;

“Get up, go to Nineveh, the great city and call out to her (because the city was she), and because their evil has, how should I say, wafted up in front of me.”

So Jonah, obviously, decides to run away to Tarshish (the opposite direction from Nineveh) so that God wouldn’t be all up in his grill.  So he went down to Joppa and found a ship bound for Tarshish, Jonah hired her (for the boat was a she) and he went with her, and some sailors, to go to Tarshish to hide from the Lord and his big old face.
 

However, the Lord threw a great storm over the sea, and the ship, well she was working on a plan to get all smashed up on the rocks.

And the sailors were afraid and each man cried out to his own God and they threw the cargo from the ship to the sea to lighten the load. But Jonah went down to the belly of the ship and lay down and had a little sleep in her, like a little baby in the womb.
 

And the captain came down and visited him and said to him “what is with you sleepy head? Get up and call out to your God, then perhaps God will think of us and we won’t be destroyed”

And each sailor said to his friend, let’s roll some dice and each number will represent a someone on the boat, and whoever’s name comes up is the person who is to blame for this storm. So they rolled the dice and Jonah’s number came up. Not a good lottery to win.
 

So they said to him “explain how this evil has landed on us, Who do you work for? Where are you from? What land do your people come from?”

And Jonah said to them “I am a Hebrew and I fear the Lord God of the heavens, who made the soggy sea and the dry land.”

And the men feared with a fearsome fear and they said to him, “what have you done?” because they’d pretty much sussed out that he was running from God’s big old face,  and they’d sussed it out mainly because he’d told them that’s what he was doing.
 

So they said to him “what shall we do with you in order to make the sea hush his noisy face?” because the sea was a he, and because he was getting very stormy by now.

And Jonah said to them “Just chuck me in the sea, so that the sea will hush its face, I know this is all my fault, just chuck me in.”

Even so, the sailors tried to row the boat to safety, but they couldn’t because the storm was getting rougher all the time.
 

And so they cried out to the Lord, Jonah’s God this time, and they said please Lord do not let us perish with this man, and please don’t let his innocent blood be on our hands just because of what’s gone on between you and him.

So they picked up Jonah and threw him to the sea, and the sea… well he stood still from his raging.

And the men feared a great fear of the Lord, and they sacrificed a sacrifice to the Lord, and they vowed vows.

 

…So Jonah’s in the water, get’s swallowed by a fish, he sings a little sad song whilst he’s there about getting wrapped up in seaweed, and then the fish pukes him up on a beach.

 

Again the Lord spoke Jonah son of Amitai, saying;

“Get up and go to Nineveh, the great city and call out against her and call out the proclamation which I am speaking to you.

And Jonah got up and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord, and Nineveh was a big city, even to God, it would take you three days to walk around all its streets.
 

And so Jonah began to do a one day walk around the city, and he called out and said to them “yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”

And – massive surprise, the men of Nineveh actually trusted God, and they called a fast, and they all wore sackcloth to show they were very sorry, from the oldest to the youngest.

And the word reached the king of Nineveh, and he got up from his throne and he took off his fancy robe and put on sackcloth and he sat on some ashes to show how sorry he was.
 

And he had these words proclaimed across Nineveh “the man and the beast, the herd and the flock let them not eat anything let them not graze and let them not drink the waters. And the sackcloth will cover the man and the beast, and let them call out to God in strength and let each man turn from his way of evil, and from the violence which is in their hands. Who knows? God may turn and repent, he may turn from his burning anger and maybe we will not perish.”

And God did indeed notice that they had turned from their evil ways, and decided not to destroy them.
 

Which of course, to Jonah, was somehow a bad thing, a great evil, and he was full of anger. And he prayed to the Lord saying “please Lord, didn’t I say this would happen? That’s why I ran off to Tarshish; I knew that you’d be all kind and gracious and loyal to these people and not punish them for all the evil they’ve done. Why don’t you just take me now, I mean, what’s the point of my life? I’d be better off dead than alive.
 

And the Lord said “Ah, You’re angry are you? well good for you”

And Jonah went out of the city so that the city wouldn’t be all up in his grill, and he made a little shelter and he sat in her shade (for the shelter was a she) and he hid there so he couldn’t see what was going on in the city. 

And the Lord assigned a plant and to grow over Jonah to help shade his head from the hot sun and stop him being a miserable so and so. And Jonah rejoiced on account of the plant, with great rejoicing.
 

And then God assigned a worm in the rising dawn of the next day and she struck the plant, (for the worm was a she) and the plant withered.

And so it was with the rising of the sun that God assigned an easterly wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head and he felt cross and miserable. And again he said “I’d be better off dead than alive.”
 

And God said to Jonah “Good for you, you are angry because of the plant, And good for me, I am angry until I see justice. You had pity on that plant, even though you didn’t do anything to make it grow, it came in the night and it went in the night.
 

Did you think I wouldn’t have pity on Nineveh, the City that even I thought was big; the city which had a population of over 12,000 people, people that didn’t know their left from their right before you turned up and gave them my word? ...And they’ve got cows!"

Christians & Halloween - do we just prefer the darkness?

The night of 31st October, leading into 1st November, was once the celebration of the new year in this country. The celebration of Samhain (Pronounced 'Sowain') was a chance to rail against the darkness; to face off against our demons and ridicule evil; to light fires that blazed into the cold winter's night. When winter meant a reasonable chance of death due to starvation, freezing temperatures and sickness, the need to declare your defiance against the dying of the year was no small matter.

When Christians took over the festival and renamed it All Hallows Eve, the eve of All Saints Day, the connection with our desire to shine the light into the darkness, to think of death, resurrection and the casting out of evil was obvious; the parallels with the theology of baptism are easy to see. It also links with the concept of Sabbath and Jubilee in the old testament, Jubilee is like a Sabbath of Sabbaths where all debts are forgiven and debtors are given amnesty. On All Hallows Eve all of the darkness and evil could be brought out into the light and cleared away before the coming of the new year.

Today it is true that the festival has become over commercialised and few people celebrate it as either the ancient festival of Samhain or as the Christian festival of All Hallows Eve. There are questions about whether children should knock on strangers doors, and there are questions about how much sugar small people can reasonably contain without exploding, these are reasonable questions. But the failure of Halloween is not the fault of ordinary folk becoming beguiled by the ways of the Devil; it is not a day when the Devil runs around stealing the souls of our otherwise perfect children. The fault of the failure of Halloween lies firmly with us, the Church.

Centuries ago the Church saw and took this wonderful opportunity to show a seamless link between the indigenous way of life in this country, and the new incoming faith. Like Paul in Acts 17, Christians saw that the people of this nation were very religious, and they put a name to the unknown God. But many centuries later we became petty and pious like the Pharisees that Jesus constantly argued with, we forgot how we got to where we were and started complaining about the very advances that we had made. So we abandoned and demonised Halloween, and left it to others to decide what it would be, so that we could stand from a distance and pass judgement. And now we even have alternative 'light parties' as if we've suddenly thought about something new.

Samhain, was a Druidic fire festival and has always been a festival about shining light into the darkness. I have heard people complaining that Halloween celebrates witchcraft. The irony is that Halloween would never have had any connection to witchcraft if Christians hadn't considered it to be one of the evils that needed to be cast out on all Hallows Eve. Christians ought to be more worried when people dress as Bishops or the Pope on Halloween.

Halloween is, as it always was, an opportunity for Christians to engage on a level playing field with the spirituality of the people we meet. We need to stop complaining and get involved in the conversation, to light our own fires against the darkness, to declare the dying of the old life and the resurrection of the new life in Christ, to rail against the darkness, not against the people God has called us to serve.

There is so much genuine evil in the world, why do we Christians spend so much time and effort trying to look for extra evil that isn't there? Is it because after all this time we still prefer the darkness?