What if I Can’t Believe?

28 05 2012

A few years ago, The Washington Post ran an interview with evangelical mega-church pastor Rick Warren where Warren was asked the following question: “How come some people ‘get’ to believe and others do not? ” Why does God “allow” some, like Rick Warren, to believe but not others? After all, many people would really like to believe—perhaps they would like the comfort provided by religion but for whatever reason just can’t bring themselves to do so.  What if we just can’t believe?

In response, Warren says a few things about how the Bible promises that who seek God will find him, but he doesn’t challenge the root assumption of the question: God’s primary interest is that we set aside our rational objections and “believe in him.”

I think that most people who are honest about their belief or disbelief in God would admit that they are pulled in both directions at different points in their lives (or even at different points of the day!). There are times when God’s existence seems self-evident and there are times when it seems utterly impossible.  Frederick Buechner has memorably stated that “there is doubt hard on the heels of every faith, fear hard on the heels of every hope”; I would say that the opposite is also true—that the persistence of hope hounds even the most hardened skeptic. Belief and unbelief are both plausible ways of “reading” the ambiguous world we live in.

So what do we do? Just passively accept whichever way we happen to be inclined and not give the matter another thought? Try to “force” ourselves to believe or attempt to perform the necessary exercises to convince God to gift us with this ability? Or might we perhaps use the ambiguity which makes the matter so difficult to consider a different understanding of what God might be after.

What if God’s primary interest wasn’t in getting us to “believe” certain facts about the cosmos? What if he was willing to take whatever faith we could muster and use it in the promotion of his intentions for the world? What if God has created the world in such a way that living authentically human lives involves things like trust, commitment, uncertainty, and risk; what if part of what God is after is a recognition of our dependent and creaturely status and a willingness to accept and live within the parameters (cognitive and otherwise) that this entails?

The seventeenth century mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal is mostly known for his famous “wager” where he tells the skeptic, in a sense, that he ought to “bet “on the existence of God because the potential gains far outweigh the potential losses of choosing incorrectly.  In the same passage from Pensées that contains “the wager,” Pascal addresses a variation of the question posed to Rick Warren above: “What if I just can’t believe?” Pascal’s answer (very loosely paraphrased) goes like this: live as if it were true and see what happens. Rather than thinking yourself into belief, try living yourself into it? If loving (or even believing in) God is difficult at the moment, start with loving your neighbour.

I don’t think that the ultimate standard by which God will judge us is the degree of certainty about his existence that we manage to conjure up before we die. I cannot imagine God asking, on judgment day, “did you manage to preserve your belief in me, despite living in a world where my existence wasn’t always obvious?” I can imagine him asking: “Did you act according to what light you were given? Did you seek me with your entire being? Did you refuse to let pride and fear overcome hope in the possibility of a future of justice and peace? Did you nourish and make the most of what faith you had or complain that it wasn’t stronger?”

Whatever might be said about these questions, they at least seem to avoid the implication that human beings are little more than proposition affirmers/deniers. At the end of the day, nobody really benefits from a bunch of people “believing” in God if “belief” is understood as something like “cognitive acceptance of the existence of a supernatural being.” It’s hard to imagine how God benefits from a bunch of people nodding their heads when asked “do you believe in God?” just as it’s hard to imagine how it changes much for human beings.

But if God has intentions for the world that go beyond individual human brains and what they find rationally plausible, and if the realization of these intentions depends, in part, on what we do not just what we think, then maybe we ought to expect a deep and indissoluble connection between beliefs and behaviour. Perhaps if we busy ourselves with doing what we’re reasonably sure God wants us to do, the “belief” in him that we struggle to maintain or discover may be closer than we think.

Ryan Dueck


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Universe from Nothing – a load of Krauss, part 3

25 05 2012

Professor Lawrence Krauss is presently a scientific materialist’s pin-up physicist. With Richard Dawkins’ lavish praise, Krauss has been thrust into the limelight, and he is determined to use his quantum theorizing to do away with the need for a Creator. His book A Universe from Nothing is a best seller, and his one hour technical youtube presentation has been watched a staggering 1.4 million times.

Across this three part post, I’ve considered the problematic philosophy of science underlying all previous quests for eternal and unified laws apart from a Creator (part 1), and offered arguably the central scientific defeater of Krauss’s crusade, deriving from the more certain laws of thermodynamics (part 2). What, then, is left to be said of such semantic equivocations?

Well, principally this: the mystery remains. Give it all the quantum spin you want, Krauss falls short of his claim to explain how our Universe popped into existence. As Professor Neil Ormerod notes, “Scientifically he may well be correct, but it clearly does not address the question of whether something can come from nothing, but tells us how some things can come from something else (empty space, which is not really empty at all).”[1]

Even if I grant that it is theoretically possible for quantum fields to change configuration and generate particles from no particles, this does not demonstrate that it is probable, let alone that it really happened. (Just as hundreds of intelligent scientists with billion dollar labs who may one day generate life from non-living organic chemicals does not demonstrate that this actually happened by chance in Earth’s distant history.)

Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, David Albert, concurs with Ormerod and offers his own stinging book review in the New York Times:

Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states—no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems—are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. … The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings—if you look at them aright—amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.[2]

I thought that Darwin made it possible to be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist.”[3] Apparently not. We still have those pesky problems of generating life from non-life, complex and real arrangements of matter from simple and virtual particles, and once again—despite Krauss’s name functioning as a materialistic mantra—how we can defy the laws of thermodynamics to get something from literally nothing.

I champion the efforts of scientists to study the material world and find solutions to problems. This legacy derives in large part from the Biblical belief in a law giver and the mandate to cultivate the world.[4] Yet supposing ‘science’ will find the answer in this case is yet another instance of naturalistic faith, and it’s more than this sceptic can bear.

I may not get all the science, and Krauss certainly is a genius, but I recognise a shell game when I see one. Theologians and philosophers have consistently defined ‘nothing’ as no-thing: nil, nada, not anything, it’s what stones dream of at night. And semantically this is clearly not what the brilliant Professor is considering. To pretend otherwise is misleading.

And it’s a good thing, too, that Krauss is wrong. Fine, dismiss the divine foot in the door to protect science’s certainty through an ongoing chain of material cause and effect. A materialist’s game as it may be, at least be consistent. If Universes can literally pop into and out of existence, how can one control for any variable? What certainty can one have of any conclusion? In what sense is this better for science than positing a stable God who providentially upholds the “regularities of nature”? I wonder, alongside C. S. Lewis, “Has it come to that?  Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice? Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God?”[5]

Creation is contingent, and as far as I can tell, a Universe from nothing is a total load of Krauss. But, if you’re willing to believe this, then visit the enterprising folks over at www.nothing.net and read the testimonials, and I’m sure they’d be happy for your business. As for me, my money is still on God.

Dave Benson

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/04/11/3474830.htm. Ormerod holds dual doctorates in pure mathematics and theology.

[2] “On the Origin of Everything”, 25 March 2012, BR20, available here.

[3] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), 6.

[4] This has been the consensus ever since M. B. Foster wrote “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science,” Mind 43 (1934): 447. That Christianity provided the soil in which science could truly and sustainably flourish has since been advanced by sociologists like Max Weber, and Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), and by numerous scientists and historians, which you can trace here and here.

[5] C.S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry”, pp. 116-140, in The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 1949 [1980]), 136.


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Universe from Nothing – a load of Krauss, part 2

23 05 2012

In part 1 of this post, I reviewed the near hysteria in materialist circles surrounding Lawrence Krauss. If you want to explain how 13.72 billion years ago we got a Universe from Nothing, then Lawrence is your man. He is the latest in a long line of contenders pursuing an entirely naturalistic account of nature. And if Richard Dawkins’ Afterword has it right, Krauss is to cosmology what Darwin is to biology: “The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.”[1]

No question, this guy is brilliant: a PhD from MIT, a Professor at Yale and more recently at Arizona State University, Krauss in his spare time directs the Origins Project, dismantles Intelligent Design arguments in Ohio, discovers dark energy in outer space, and writes science editorials for the New York Times. Here we explore his latest endeavour: Krauss has apparently solved an age old metaphysical problem of the contingency of creation. Forget the Creator, for now we have particles emerging ex nihilo.

What, then, is his argument? How does something come from nothing?

In essence—and as best as I can understand—Krauss argues that the laws of quantum mechanics are eternal, and that these laws can generate particles from empty space. Before the Big Bang there were relativistic quantum fields, the arrangement of which made possible different numbers of particles in the Universe, whether none, few, many, or theoretically an infinite number. A ‘vacuum state’ is where the arrangement of quantum fields generates no particles, thus termed ‘empty space’. As the theory goes, nature abhors a vacuum state, so this unstable structure which may have existed was potentially prone (or in Dawkins’ words “is almost bound …”) to reconfigure in another field arrangement in which particles do exist. Hey presto! You now have a Universe from ‘nothing’. Again, in Dawkins’ more quotable account, “Particles and antiparticles wink in and out of existence like subatomic fireflies, annihilating each other, and then re-creating themselves by the reverse process, out of nothingness” (189).

Let me skip over the assumption that these complex, necessary and beautifully symmetrical field laws existed without cause for all eternity and mysteriously conspire to make life—which may reflect the ‘mind’ of a Creator—and press into this ‘vacuum state’ and definitions of ‘nothing’.

Krauss tries to be clear: “By nothing I do not mean no-thing, but rather nothing—in this case, the nothingness we normally call empty space” (58).[2] (Has your hermeneutic of suspicion switched on yet?)

Space is assumed and space is ‘real’. And this space is jam-packed with virtual particles which can ‘pop’ into and out of existence as quantum fields shift (70, 146, 153f. 163f.). Granted, a century ago scientists would have referred to space without matter as ‘nothing’. Since that time, however, we’ve discovered that space itself is a ‘something’, as are the laws that dictate its dance. This ‘vacuum state’ possesses significant background energy even when the space is apparently ‘empty’. And from what I can gather, all of this quantum action still submits to the first and second laws of thermodynamics.[3] (Remember back to those happy high school science classes?) That’s right, “Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed” (Law I), and “In all energy exchanges in a closed system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state” (Law II).

Perhaps this didn’t strike you with sufficient force. My apologies. Let me try again. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington said that “if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” Similarly, Einstein said of classical thermodynamics that it is “the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown … .” More recently, Seth Lloyd quipped in Nature “Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics.”[4]  Let’s put the pieces together.

  1. Krauss’ conjectured quantum field theory is governed by the far more certain laws of thermodynamics.
  2. Our Universe conserves the total amount of energy, even as this system winds down with entropy.
  3. Prior to the Big Bang, Krauss’ initial postulated ‘empty space’ or ‘vacuum state’—call it what you will, and irrespective of the number of ‘real’ particles and field configuration—must therefore have possessed the same energy as our Universe today.
  4. Thus, this “empty space” is not NOTHING, but SOMETHING! And this something, constantly winding down, must have at one point been entirely wound up. Before this point we still find that science necessitates a definite beginning where something truly did come into being from absolutely nothing.

Some years ago I watched a documentary on quantum physics and spirituality entitled “What the bleep do we know anyway?” It seems to me they took about ten wrong turns in the mystical direction, but the title has stuck with me nevertheless. As the Universe looks weirder at every juncture, what the bleep do we know anyway? I’m entirely open to being corrected on all of this. Perhaps I’ve joined data points best left as outliers in a jumbled connect-the-dots, drawing pictures detached from reality? But as far as I can tell, it is wise to reason from the more certain to the more abstract.

It’s something we also do in theology: apocalyptic speculation is circumscribed by clear teaching from the words of Christ, and it all must fit the overall trajectory of the canonical story. My point: any quantum speculation is still bounded by the near-canonical laws of thermodynamics. One day this may change, if enough warrants accrue. But presently, the conservation and entropy of energy is arguably a central defeater to Krauss’s theorizing.[5] In his quest for a naturalistic explanation of everything, he’s taken at least one wrong turn in the reductionist direction. All that remains now, in part 3 of this post, is to consider the word-game Krauss is playing, and why in spite of it all, God is still a physicist’s friend.

Dave Benson

[1] Dawkins, “Afterword” in Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2012), 191. Any following in-text page numbers come from Krauss’s book.

[2] Also see pp. xiv and 143.

[4] “Concept Going into Reverse”, Nature 430, 971 (26 August 2004), doi:10.1038/430971a.

[5] Again, I may be mistaken, but I’m yet to be convinced. My more informed friend Bruce Blackshaw suggested that “most cosmologists would say the total net energy of the universe is zero, where gravitation is negative energy. So energy is always conserved” (personal email, 14 May 2012). To say gravitational energy is negative, however, sounds like a fudge—much like placing ‘virtual particles’ in a category of their own, knowing they obey the same laws as ‘real particles’. Krauss makes this ‘zero-energy’ assertion on youtube, citing Alexei V. Filippenko and Jay M. Pasachoff who ground the argument here. (See also here.) Still, even they admit that “all one needs is just a tiny bit of energy to get the whole thing started. … What produced the energy before inflation? This is perhaps the ultimate question.” From here they follow the same problematic definitions of ‘nothing’ as Krauss. Thus, at least as far as I can tell, their theory still runs into the laws of thermodynamics, that the total energy of the system remains constant. A “miniscule” violation of energy conservation is still a violation of the most certain laws we have, which seems to me like a case of special pleading.


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Universe from Nothing – a load of Krauss, part 1

21 05 2012

If I hear one more person cite Lawrence Krauss without meaningful explanation, I’m going to explode. It began with a bombshell. Dawkins was recently debating Australian cardinal George Pell on the television program Q&A, during which he was asked point blank, “How it is that something as enormous as the Universe came from nothing?” Dawkins acknowledged this as deeply mysterious. But then he then cited Arizona State University’s esteemed physicist, Lawrence Krauss, to the effect that this dilemma has dissolved:

When you have matter and antimatter and you put them together, they cancel each other out and give rise to nothing. … Krauss is now suggesting that if you start with nothing the process can go into reverse and produce matter and antimatter.

And there you have it. Millennia of philosophical and theological speculation on why there is something rather than nothing, solved in twenty seconds with the invocation of Krauss! Since that time, Krauss has become commonplace: top-billing at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, media interviews on international airwaves, and constant citation on campuses as secular students deflect talk of God with the chant of their guru’s name: Krauss, Krauss, Krauss.

Professor Krauss has even made a brief appearance on this blog! Hélder Favarin wondered out loud, If God does not exist, how could everything come from “absolutely nothing”? Thankfully  SciAwakening set him straight in response. The solution: yet another citation of the mysterious Krauss and his magnum opus A Universe from Nothing.[1]

Okay, I like a good hand-waving exercise as much as the next person: “hocus po-krauss – look, a Universe!” But what exactly is his explanation? My undergrad in applied science is stretched to the limit in grappling with these matters, so let me try and put it in simple though hopefully not simplistic terms. In part one of this post, I’ll trace some preliminary history to put Krauss in context. In part two, which arrives this Wednesday, I’ll briefly outline his proposal and suggest what I consider to be the central scientific defeater. Finally, in part three on Friday I’ll consider the semantics of ‘nothing’ and suggest why, despite Krauss’s best efforts, creation is contingent and we still need God.

First, then, some history. Once upon a time, most scientists believed—contrary to Biblical revelation—that the material Universe was eternal. Then came the discovery of cosmic background radiation in 1964, confirming suspicions that our Universe expanded out from (what was later termed) a ‘singularity’. 13.72 billion years is a long time ago, but such an event still counts as a start requiring an explanation. As Greg Koukl quips, “a big bang requires a big banger.”[2] Fred Hoyle’s Steady State theory was no match, and ‘God’ was potentially a physicist’s friend. (Do you know any other immaterial, eternal, powerful, uncaused and intelligent candidates for bringing something out of nothing?)

In a Universe where there is supposedly no free lunch, how can one get something from nothing without invoking the supernatural? Scientific materialists, as Richard Lewontin confessed, “cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door … [because] at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured [and] miracles may happen.”[3] Material phenomena require empirically verifiable and falsifiable material explanations.[4]

Thus began the race for a methodologically atheistic account of something coming from nothing—or, at the very least, downplaying an absolute beginning and undermining the anthropic fine-tuning written across the cosmological constants. Such proposals include Richard Tolman’s oscillating Universe, Alan Guth’s inflationary expansion, Paul Davies’ cosmic jackpot to solve The Goldilocks Enigma, Stephen Hawking’s “no-boundary proposal” (drawing on “imaginary time” and “imaginary numbers”, √-1 kind of stuff which seems ab-surd to me), or any one of cosmologist Max Tegmark’s multiverse hypotheses.

String theory, a recent contender, illustrates the problem. In our search for a TOE (Theory of Everything), the Universe seems increasingly bizarre, the proposals are either presently unverified or entirely unverifiable, and the scientific camps continue to fragment in dissent. (Krauss, for instance, dismisses string theory as untestable,[5] but seems fine with causally disconnected multiverses to explain equations beyond Einstein essential for life. Karl Popper would have kittens over these shenanigans, and Thomas Kuhn would say it’s time for a paradigm shift.) All of this should give us pause before enthroning any scientific explanation as “just the way it is.” Even our best models aren’t reality itself—they are powerful metaphors to help us understand the material Universe.[6] Science advances through dissension, so this I respect. Such naïveté concerning the philosophy of science is, however, reprehensible.[7] Humility and wonder, not bluster and arrogance, is an appropriate response of limited and biased humans before the mystery of it all.

As you can see, Krauss joins a long and brilliant procession of crusaders in search of physics’ Holy Grail: the quest for eternal and unified laws.  What, then, is his proposal? For that, read on to part 2 of “Universe from Nothing – a load of Krauss.”

Dave Benson

[1] Read the book OR join 1.4 million other groupies and watch youtube for the one hour low-down on Krauss’s theorizing.

[2] See here for Koukl, or for the underlying philosophical argument, see here for a brief video of William Lane Craig’s “Kalam Cosmological Argument”, and here for a 2012 debate between Krauss and Craig, later debriefed here.

[3] “Billions and billions of demons,” The New York Review, 9 January 1997, p31.

[4] Ever since Einstein birthed the atomic age with E=mc2, it’s been hard to know what ‘material’ materialists count as ‘real’.

[5] Universe from Nothing, pp. 130ff.

[6] Interestingly, this is not so different from theology, albeit starting with a different source for our hypotheses—revelation rather than nature—from which we reason abductively, seeking inference to the best explanation. See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), and Alister McGrath, “Religious and Scientific Faith: The Case of Charles Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’ (The 24th Eric Symes Abbott Memorial Lecture, King’s College London, Oxford, 2009), http://www.westminster-abbey.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/22494/ESA-lecture-2009-i.pdf. Also helpful is Alister McGrath, Science and Religion: A New Introduction, 2d ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), chapter 7 (pp. 51-58), “Science, Religion, and the Explanation of Things.”

[7] See Alan Chalmers, What Is This Thing Called Science? 3d ed. (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2007). Each chapter traces one stage in the historical development of the philosophy of science, beginning with older and less adequate conceptions of science, progressing toward more nuanced models such as proposed by Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, Feyerband and others, dealing with realist–non-realist debates. The kind of “naïve realism” exhibited by Dawkins and his ilk is dispatched within the first three chapters, a relic of enlightenment beliefs that science was simply objective reason playing upon the natural world.


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One True Religion?

16 05 2012

Q: There are lots of religions in the world. So how can a Christian presume that his religion is the only right one?

A: Short answer: A Christian shouldn’t presume that. His religion isn’t the only right one.

Slightly longer answer: If by “the only right one” a Christian is saying that everything his religion says is right and everything every other religion says is wrong, then he’s denying one of the fundamental claims of his own religion, namely, that Christianity is the fulfillment, not the negation, of the religion of Old Testament Israel. Furthermore, it’s just obvious that Christianity has a lot in common with both Judaism and Islam. And, in fact, Christianity has various teachings and practices in common with pretty much every other religion in the world: Christian missionaries have been building on those common features for centuries.

Even longer answer: First, let’s clear the ground a bit. Just because there are lots of opinions about an issue doesn’t mean that one opinion isn’t right and the others are wrong. A math teacher might receive a wide range of responses (= ”opinions”) on an exam, but she knows that only “x + 3” is the correct answer. You ask for directions in a strange town to the museum, and four locals give you four different answers, but the answers usually aren’t all equal in effectively getting you to your destination. So the mere presence of multiple opinions says nothing immediately about whether there is more than one correct answer—or even whether a correct answer is available at all.

Second, we can think of religions as maps and directions on how to best use the maps. They describe reality and tell us how best to negotiate reality. As such, religions that patently fail to describe reality accurately or to tell us how to negotiate it effectively fall out of use in favour of religions that do a better job.

We can also assume that religions that do work, at least somewhat, will make assertions about reality that overlap with assertions made on other maps. If we’re trying to walk from the western edge of Venice to the eastern, any decent map is going to include a description of the Grand Canal and of at least one of the very few bridges that cross it. So even the worst map that actually works—that anyone living in Venice will give you–will share at least some information with the best map possible.

So of course the world’s religions share various claims and practices with others. The world is what it is and living in it is done most effectively this way rather than that, so religions that approximate those realities are going to share a lot of the same claims.

Third, allowing then that more than one religion can be true in important respects doesn’t mean that all religions are equally good, nor that one religion isn’t the best of those available. If you actually had a map and a guidebook furnished by the founder, planner, builder, and ruler of the area–who also demonstrably has taken great pains to communicate with you as truthfully and helpfully as possible–then you’d be very glad to have such instructions and you would have good grounds to consider them the best available. You might even want to share them with people you care about.

That’s what Christians do when they preach the gospel. They say, “We are so thankful to have been given The Directions by The Maker. And they’re free! Come get them!”

Maybe there are better directions available elsewhere. If so, please tell us. We, like any other sensible people, want the best help we can get. But we hope you won’t be angry with us if we’re pretty enthusiastic about what we think is the best map and guidebook we’ve ever seen and we want to share it with you.

In fact, shouldn’t you be angry with us instead if we wouldn’t?

John Stackhouse, from his latest answer at Ask John. 


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Why Church Control must be Crucified

25 04 2012

The Church is about controlling people. The overbearing Pastor dominates the congregation, playing lead role and telling the others what to do. Some people avoid the Church like the plague, hoping they’ll be safer outside. Yet even there the Church interferes. One blogger commented on the decline of the Church in Australia. His solution was that the Church “stop sticking their noses into everyone else’s business: politics, child raising, court systems, sexual preference etc. etc.” With all our lobbying for political control, we’re known more for what we stand against than what we stand for. Our grab for authority and casting of judgment has obscured God’s grace and the call to life. … At least that’s how it’s perceived.[1]

Okay, is this what it should be? The Church isn’t an organisation; it’s an organism. It’s a bunch of people who when put together should look like Jesus. So how did Jesus wear his authority? Was he about control?

Well, first things first, there’s a big difference between legitimate, and illegitimate authority. I can’t walk into your workplace and start telling people what to do. Why? Well, I’m not the boss. But let’s say I was ….. So let’s try a thought experiment. If Jesus really is the Son of God, as he claimed to be, that changes everything. If it’s true, doesn’t he have legitimate authority? And can’t he extend this authority to whoever he wishes? Then the real question is, How did Jesus choose to use this authority? The bottom line is this: Jesus was no authoritarian dictator; he wielded his ultimate authority with absolute humility.

Have you ever seen that TV show “Undercover Boss”? The idea’s simple: the boss of a massive company dons the worker’s uniform and enters into their company as one of the team … scrubbing dishes, delivering mail, answering phones. The boss gets to know their staff on the ground, as an equal; and at the end of the week, everyone’s shocked as his or her true identity is revealed. Same with Jesus, the ultimate undercover boss. Take two incidents.

First, Easter. Everyone has abandoned Jesus. Peter backstabbed him three times. They feel like dirt, guilty as hell, as now that Jesus has been crucified, they’ve run in fear back to their old lives. Peter and the crew are out in the boat. But while they’re out fishing and serving themselves, who should be on the beach cooking them an awesome meal of fish over the fire, but the leader himself, Jesus. He beat death. He is the boss. Peter’s probably thinking, “I’m in deep trouble.” Now, there is stuff to talk through, and a relationship to mend. But there’s no lecture and no punishment. Just forgiveness and love. “For God didn’t send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to savethe world through Him” (John 3:17).

Second incident, John 8.[2] Know the story? A woman is caught in the act of having sex with someone else’s husband. Under the religious laws, she should be killed, stoned to death. They throw her in the dirt in front of Jesus. “Your call, Jesus.” But he turns the tables: “Whoever is without sin, you cast the first stone.” One by one they drop the rocks, and leave. But notice what Jesus says. “Woman, where are your accusers? Now, go and sin no more.” … “Sin no more.” He’s not there to judge. But nor is he saying to this lady and her male friend (who has conveniently escaped, “Guys, do what you want: keep wrecking families and doing damage.”

The Church is meant to look like Jesus. Our role is not to judge, or grasp for control.  But nor is it to ignore when stuff’s not right. If we truly love someone, we won’t watch silently on while they hurt themselves, or others. As a parent, if your four-year-old went to stick a fork into a live power socket, would you say something? To not is negligent. Worse, it’s unloving.

Jesus did call out sin, but it was out of love. And Jesus gave the Church, as his body, that same authority. It’s not to condemn. It’s so people will turn from death, from sin, and choose what leads to life and freedom.

Jesus was no control freak. When the disciples fought over who would be first, he donned a slave’s towel and washed their feet. “Whoever wants to be first must be last. Are you greater than your master? I came not to be served, but to serve, and to give my life as a ransom.” Jesus wore his authority with humility. He leveraged his power on behalf of the least. And as his body, the Church should too.

Jesus wasn’t about being the star of the show—he’s the undercover boss. And he gives equal authority to every Christian, not to one mega-leader to manipulate the rest.  It’s only when we’re all together, serving each other, that the Church looks like Jesus. The authority we have isn’t to control. Instead, our authority is to serve each other, and give up our life to help a hurting world. That’s why Church control must be crucified.

Harsh judgmentalism and control issues are often identified with the culture wars, especially in America. So before you go back to your everyday existence, to a society that prizes power, take a look at the cruciform Church’s authority expressed in an edgy city like San Francisco. Every week, dozens of followers of Jesus from different denominations gather together as one body, the Church, to serve the least of these under the Golden Gate Bridge.[3]

Dave Benson

[1] See, for instance, www.unchristian.com, the Australian Communities Report, Dan Kimball’s book They Like Jesus but Not the Church.

[2] Whilst this story’s location (John 7:53-8:11) jumps around John’s Gospel in the earliest manuscripts—it was clearly a later interpolation, though perhaps by John or another early editor—there are still solid arguments for its authenticity, and it resonates with both Jesus’ teaching and example. See here.

[3] From Dan Merchant’s DVD, “Lord, Save Us From Your Followers,” lordsaveusthemovie.com. Also, to further explore the question “Is the Church relevant,” see www.kbc.org.au/media/message-logos-is-the-church-relevant/  for a response to the perceived control, exclusivity and hypocrisy of the contemporary church.


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Categories : The Heart of Faith, Tough Questions

Can Faith Be Intelligent?

16 04 2012

No, it can’t. Actually, it  can only be dumb, only naïve, only irrational. If it were rational and intelligent it wouldn’t be faith, after all. By definition.

This conclusion is being voiced by a growing number of skeptical voices worldwide. In our polarized, fragmented societies, lines are drawing sharp, and sharper if you talk about faith. Here in Italy, where both widespread secularism and institutional religion coexist still, sometimes in sync, sometimes in paradox, both afraid of the other, one hears this line of thought often. An atheist with which I debated this month at the university, for example, said during the debate: “When I believe, I don’t function rationally, with arguments.”[1]

This understanding of all faith as unthinking, blind faith is not a local phenomenon, however. “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world,” defended  Richard Dawkins, an English professor. “The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”[2] A prominent Italian atheist, Piergiorgio Odifreddi, showed a similar antithetical definition of faith and thought when he claimed, in a recent article, that “no one can be, at the same time, a great philosopher and a great theologian… to say that someone is a terrible theologian is in fact to give him honor: more or less like saying that he is a terrible muddlehead, or a terrible barker.”[3]

So then, does faith think? Is faith the a-thinking, persistent belief in things contrary to the evidence? Actually, true faith is the opposite: the lucid trust in what has showed itself to be evident. It is the trust that accompanies thought, the personal assent of a person operating fully rationally. As C. S. Lewis has put it,

“… a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants to or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad… And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, what would be merely stupid.”[4]

There are of course people, believers and unbelievers, who contrast faith and thought, and who defend that we have to stop thinking to have faith. They may be credulous, but this is not the Christian understanding of faith: faith in the Jesus who, when encountering Thomas, did not blaster him for unbelief in the resurrection, but who showed him the evidence: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.” And in the face of the evidence, Thomas responded lucidly, not as someone closed to where evidence may lead him, if it involves faith, but as a fully thinking person: “My Lord and my God!”[5]

Complexity is hard. When doubt arrives to the believer, it is easier to brush it aside, and to believe blindly. Equally, when evidence for God presents itself to the unbeliever, it is also easier to brush it aside, and to believe blindly that faith cannot possibly be true. But integrity asks us to believe thoughtfully, and to think openly. If we consider faith dumb by definition, not only will our eyes close to the evidence for it,  but close also to the very rational inquiry we hoped to defend, and we may find ourselves as the ones blinded by a dumb kind of faith after all.

René Breuel

[1] Footage of this debate is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcGsVaOe9Is.

[2] Richard Dawkins, as quoted in the website of The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, http://richarddawkins.net/quotes?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search%5Bauthor_eq%5D=Richard+Dawkins

[4] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2005), 138.

[5] John 20:27-28.


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Categories : Tough Questions

Taking Offense

2 04 2012

 A major stumbling block for those who reject Christianity is those parts of the Bible which seem to justify actions that we consider to be culturally backward, confusing, and irrelevant or, even worse, immoral. And I think that most Christians, if they’re honest, will agree that there are parts of the Bible that they find baffling, frustrating, or, possibly, just plain offensive.

Interestingly, characters within the Bible exhibit similar sentiments with respect to the self-disclosure of God.  Moses, for example, boldly interceded to God on behalf of his people when God was on the verge of wiping them out for their idolatry. Moses repeatedly calls on God to remember what he promised, to consider what the other nations would think, to turn away from his anger and show mercy to his people (Ex. 32:9-14; 33:12-17).  Surprisingly, God relents. Moses’ courage and boldness appear to earn him God’s favour.  We see similar themes in the book of Job, where Job protests bluntly and bitterly to God about his suffering.  Although God has some harsh words for Job at the end of the book,  he also declares that Job and not his friends with their neat and tidy religious formulas explaining human suffering, had spoken rightly of him (Job 42:7-10).

In both cases, confusion, ambiguity, and outrage were presented to God honestly and unapologetically. In both cases, it seems that God was less interested in human beings pretending that God’s actions and intentions were perfectly obvious, transparent, and morally praiseworthy than he was in an honest acknowledgment of the confusion and even offense that walking with him can and does cause.

In The Reason for God, Timothy Keller has this to say about what to think when we come across a passage in Scripture that we find outrageous:

To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you…. Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? … Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination.

In other words, one skeptical assumption worth challenging is that if God exists and chooses to reveal himself to human beings, he is obliged to do so in a way that will simply confirm and validate our (profoundly historically and culturally conditioned) conceptions of what is good, admirable, and admissible.  If we take seriously the fact that human beings are finite and fallen creatures, whose only access to reality is profoundly shaped (in positive and negative ways) by a whole host of historical, cultural, and psychological factors, then it makes sense to say that our moral conceptions might not represent the last or best word on the question of what God is like.

In one of my university philosophy classes, a professor told the story of a friend of his who was a committed Christian and a celibate homosexual. When my professor asked his friend if he agreed with the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality, his friend said he did not. This, my professor found truly baffling. How could his friend possibly choose to commit to a religious tradition when he was in such obvious disagreement with it on a matter as important as his sexual identity?

His friend said that Christianity made sense of enough important elements of his experience, and that God had proven faithful enough over the years that he had learned to trust and yield to him when it came to matters that he disagreed with. His confusion and disagreement with God were preserved within the context of faith, and with the understanding that it is at least possible that human conceptions of what is right and wrong, permissible and impermissible might require modification or correction.

My professor obviously found this pretty difficult to stomach. What, after all, could be more important than being true to one’s own beliefs? If anything is sacred in our post-Christian Western culture it is the individual’s freedom to decide what is true and meaningful for themselves.

But perhaps facing the implications of the inherent limitation of the human condition—even when it comes to our moral intuitions—can be seen as liberating in a strange sort of way. We don’t have to pretend that we love everything in the Bible, nor do we have to pretend that God’s way of acting in the world always makes obvious sense and demands nothing but our reflexive and unthinking praise. Whatever else may be going on in the stories of how Moses and Job related to God, it seems that one important lesson is that God is not put off by human doubt, anger—even offense—in response to their understanding of his work in the world.

Ryan Dueck


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Categories : Tough Questions

An Evening of Questions

30 03 2012

Questions were coming from the right and left, thoughtful, poignant questions. What about suffering? The infinitude of religions? The dates established by Josephus? I and the atheist next to me were getting grilled, now by the audience. We had just debated about the existence of God, at a mix of café and literary meeting hub here in Rome, next to the university. I could see in people’s faces that they wanted to engage, that they welcomed a friendly forum where they could express their honest doubts, and honest they were.

I tried my best to answer their questions. One gal wanted to hear how can we believe in the Jesus story when we see similar stories of the sacrifice and resurrection of different gods in so many of the world’s myths, and I was glad that I had just written a Wondering Fair article just on that (thank you Lord!), and could share my thoughts with her. A guy wanted to me to name one example of a powerful person of faith which did not abuse his power for his own selfish gain. I tried going for the easy answer, Jesus, and he laughed with me, but then tried telling him a bit of William Wilbeforce, who used his wealth and influence as a member of the British Parliament to help abolish the slave trade. A student asked why would the Vatican have a subterraneous hidden library if it had nothing to hide – and this one I was glad I could by-pass, and said it would be best left for a Vatican official to respond. (Though he got me thinking, what lurks down there?)

But my favorite question came after the debate, while I was packing my things. A guy approached me with his girlfriend, both in their twenties. He was articulate but seemed afraid to voice his doubts, a bit ashamed even.

“I have a question, kind of. I know it is dumb, but still…”

“No please, go ahead,” I said, looking him in the eye, and his girlfriend nudged him too.

“I’m not into all this philosophy, I like being practical, and just wanted to know: why did Jesus turn water into wine?” I could not help but smile, and his girlfriend went on. “You know, people would get drunk with all that wine, and isn’t Jesus supposed to discourage that?” I kept on smiling, and he concluded. “Not just that, I just thought that, you know, he should be supposed to do important miracles, and this wine think is just, I don’t know, unimportant.”

I told them, “what a great question!”, and I could the see their faces relax, as if thinking, “Oh I’m glad, I thought it was going to sound stupid…” But I really meant it. It is a great question. I liked it not just because I could see the emotions bubbling in their eyes – a bit of fear, shame for asking a stupid-sounding question, courage to come forward and go talk with a stranger – but mostly because the issue behind their question is the most crucial existential question we have,  more pressing that “is there life after death?” or “what is the meaning of life?”, and the question is: Who is Jesus? Who is this man who still haunts us, thousands of years later, who still attracts us like he did back then, who still gets us thinking about wine and water and the large and small stuff of life?

Many people see Jesus as the answer, but I like it even more when they see him as the question. And what a question he is. Scholar John Meier writes, “What is beyond dispute …  is that Jesus of Nazareth is one of those perennial question marks in history with which mankind is never quite done. With a ministry of two or three years he attracted and infuriated his contemporaries, mesmerized and alienated the ancient world, unleashed a movement that has done the same ever since, and thus changed the course of history forever.” Answering who that man was is not small challenge.

I loved when people came to ask about hope and suffering and ethics and the origins of the universe. But those two were on to something. Who is this Jesus? The way we answer this question will change the way we answer every other existential question. Until we come to grips with it, a large piece of the puzzle of life and history will be unresolved, and of our lives too.

Ah, and if you want to know why did Jesus turn water into wine, Madi Simpson just wrote a fabulous article just about that…

René Breuel


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Categories : Tough Questions

“What if you’re wrong?”

19 03 2012

A girl asked atheist Richard Dawkins one day, “What if you’re wrong?” In typical deprecating  fashion, Dawkins turned the question back to the girl, “But what if you are wrong?” [i]

The argument in Dawkins’ response, if you think about it, is essentially relativism. The reason we believe what we believe – in flying spaghettis, Zeus, or the Christian God – is because we were brought in a particular culture and nurtured in those beliefs. Had we been brought up somewhere else, our religious outlook would be different. As Dawkins has expressed in writing, “No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.”[ii]

The assumption behind this assertion is significant: geographical determination. None of us can pretend to Truth, because our belief is socially determined. If we would believe in Thor had we been born a Viking, how can we pretend that our belief in God could be true? Atheists like Dawkins conclude that the diversity of human belief across history is the definite proof against God. If we see humans inventing objects of worship so creatively and so pervasively – sacred cows, the sun, Mother Earth, or God – surely the monotheistic God is just another invention, maybe more complex and civilized than the others, but a human creation nonetheless.

But let’s turn the table again: “Yes, sure, but what if you are wrong?” By the same logic, the only reason someone like Dawkins believes in relativism is because he was brought up in contemporary Britain. His belief is also socially determined, so how can he assert that his view is right and every other religious view is wrong? How come every other view is relativized but his relativism remains absolute? Relativism is not only arrogant toward others, but thoroughly inconsistent with itself.

Still, the argument of religious diversity is an eloquent one. Humans are intrinsically religious, and will find something to worship no matter how strange the god or goddess may be. On what basis can we assert that one specific belief is true while so many others are wrong? Doesn’t religious diversity lead us to conclude that religion is essentially a human creation?

For me the evidence points precisely in the opposite direction. Humans are intrinsically religious because there is a real God who created us, and who we are searching for. We have this innate hunger because there is true satisfaction for our divine longing out there, just like our physical hunger demonstrates that there is real food that meets our needs. The fact that people eat the most bizarre objects – serpents, leafs, eggs of fish – is not proof that our physical hunger is a projection, but a precise proof of our need for food. Similarly, the diversity of belief across history is not proof that our soul hunger is a projection, but a precise proof that we have a craving for the divine, and will search for God even in the most unlikely of places.

But the skeptic may still rightly ask, “Ok, but on what basis do you claim that people search for God while adoring nature, and not, let’s say, search for the true goddess Aphrodite while worshipping the monotheistic God?” This is a great question, and could be dealt adequately only with another article. Yet atheism gives us a telling hint: if there were no God there would be no God to deny. “If there were no God, there would be no Atheists,” quipped G. K. Chesterton. Has there ever been an articulated, sustained movement like atheism against sacred cows or Aphrodite? Our very denial – of an eternal, omnipotent Father – assumes the form of what exists objectively. Our doubt mirrors our faith: we would not have to deny the existence of God if there was really no God to deny.

Belief in God could still be wrong, of course. But the diversity of human belief does not discredit faith, but rather, shows how forcefully we crave to worship something. If people are ready to adore even built statues at times, this shows us how urgent and true our spiritual hunger is. Religious diversity does not discourage robust faith, but is actually a compelling motivation to lead us to search, and discern, and surrender to, what is it that pulls our spirits so strongly toward worship.

René Breuel

[i] This video clip is actually the most seen Dawkins video on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mmskXXetcg

[ii] Richard Dawkins, as quoted in his own website, http://richarddawkins.net/quotes/10.


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