As we watch and wait for the end of time and the return of Jesus, Advent is a good season for pondering your beliefs about God, what you believe and why. Do you believe in the God who makes himself* known to us in seemingly mysterious ways? Or do you believe in the God of Hollywood and popular culture? Theology, science and philosophy provide useful ways to study God and creation as well as what we know and experience of them. Clarifying your beliefs is one way to help you form a deeper relationship with God.
The God of popular culture and some kinds of popular religion is a figure who has a magical power to conjure up miracles and answer wishful prayers. On the other hand, he also holds the hammer of Apocalypse over his creation, though his self-chosen followers expect to be spared. The opposite pole to these ideas is God brought down to human scale, though still possessing some degree of power. This God may be profane or humorous or nasty.
Popular culture’s God characters are designed to entertain, not to offer wisdom, but they do have an outsized impact on those who get most of what they know from that source. God as imagined for entertainment media can be any colour, any sex, and any type of person from silly to offensive. All these versions show human characteristics projected onto the God character. Insights derived from them say much about humans but nothing at all about God in himself.
Theology, science and philosophy are time-tested ways to study the one, true God, the God of Advent. They are complementary to each other and collectively they offer a body of recorded knowledge thousands of years old. Through ongoing study, research and experiment they bring us new insights and uphold or alter known doctrines and principles. Although we know that new discoveries can change them, these doctrines and principles are still helpful because we can measure our beliefs against them.
Theologians study God from a variety of perspectives, but faith plays a role in each of them. The finite human mind can’t begin to grasp the all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing source of the world in which we live or the cosmos revealed by science. Yet history records that down through the ages men, women and children have experienced his presence in direct and sometimes startling ways.
One of the constants of our encounters with the divine is the inadequacy of our language and our conceptual apparatus to describe the indescribable. We experience God as present, as personal, as mysterious, and as transformative. ~Theologian Christopher Lind from Longing for God
Theological principles differ by church and religion and a key one is an organization’s central teaching, sometimes called the material principle. As an Anglican, I belong to a church with a remarkably broad spectrum of beliefs. Generally, however, what defines an Anglican is adherence to a set of statements called The Lambeth Quadrilateral. One of these statements is the belief that “the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain all things necessary to salvation.” (This is very different from saying that every sentence of the Bible is literally true.)
When I question my own beliefs, I need to understand whether or not they contradict or affirm that part of the Quadrilateral. Since I read the Bible on a daily basis, it’s easy to affirm that the statement in and of itself is true, but I also need to ask philosophical questions like, “How do I know that the statement is true?” and “Is there anything else that “contains all things necessary to salvation?” Then I might consider a scientific question like, “Is there any way to prove that the statement is true?” or a philosophical question like, “How limited is my knowledge base and how does that affect my belief?”
Scientists don’t, by and large, treat God as a subject for scientific exploration. Science is thought to be systematic in a way that theology and philosophy are not because it deals with tangible things that can be studied by observation and investigated through experiments. But science can also be a purely intellectual activity. Thinking about God in a scientific way holds the potential for learning more not only about God but also about the more present reality of our material world.
Although I was away from any kind of organized religion for the larger part of my life, I thought about God a lot. He was often present in those thoughts and I wanted to know who and what this presence was. One day as I was driving somewhere, a question came into my mind. “If I were an all-knowing, all-powerful God, what kind of world would I create so that I could continue to interact with it?”
“Lossy” was the word that came into my mind. At the time I was also thinking a lot about computers, not how to program them, but what they were and how people came to invent them. I was reading a lot about the nature and history of computing and calculation. Lossy was one of the words I had learned in that context. It has to do with making electronic files smaller by removing some of the data from them.
The image that followed the word, however, had nothing to do with file compression. Instead, I saw the blue and white globe familiar from images of the earth taken from space. The globe in my mind was not crisp and clear, but vibrating and fuzzy. That was what lossy meant to me in answer to my question. “If I were an omniscient, omnipotent God, I would create a lossy world, one so full of change and motion there would be room for me to work in it.”
More than a decade later, after expanding my reading into science, I began to see that that was exactly the nature of creation. Then came the opportunity to go to university. There I was exposed to the works of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and other scientists, as well as many theologians and philosophers. Those works deepened my understanding of reality and the simple way God continues to shape the material universe. His incredible power is not that of the Hollywood superhero, but one that is more easily described as no power at all. Yet through it he brings about profound effects in both our physical and mental realities.
Philosophers think about ideas, about how people know, what it is they can actually know and how they think about things. The word philosophy means love of wisdom, but at its most basic philosophy could be called “thinking about life.” Time spent in this kind of thinking leads to more “Aha!” moments than time spent mindlessly consuming the products of popular culture, however amusing they may be.
Why is philosophy helpful when you are challenging your beliefs, especially those about God? In the early days of Christianity, church leaders were challenged to answer questions that the Bible didn’t address. Being learned men, they turned to the primary means of studying the world they knew, and that was Greek philosophy. The influence of the Greek philosophers permeates both theology and science down to the present day. Beyond that, it also affects the work of artists and writers as well as those exposed to their images and ideas, people like you and me.
A basic teaching from philosophy comes from the mediaeval period known as Scholasticism. It is that everything is known or received according to the mode of the receiver. You are limited as to what you can know by the extent of your knowledge when you are exposed to new information.
That’s why theological, scientific and philosophical thought enriches your life so much. Through these ways of thinking you continually expand not only what you know but your capacity for knowledge. If you learn to think in this way, you will never mistake the God of Hollywood for the God of Advent. You will never accept the flashy, popular “hero with a dark side” for the wondrous good and beauty of the one true God.
You don’t have to be a Theologian or a Scientist or a Philosopher to think like they do. At the root of all these disciplines is simple curiosity about living and reality. It’s a life-giving quality that keeps you moving forward in any quest you undertake. You aren’t at a standstill if you can’t find an answer for a question. It takes years to find a solution to some questions and others take years to answer. Some will never be answered in this lifetime. What matters is that you never stop asking.
What questions do you ask about God? Where do you find your answers? If you are unable to leave a comment at this time, I apologize. The theme change is proving to be more problematic than I expected.
Further reading:
*Your chosen pronoun for God is a personal decision. At the bottom of this page is an explanation for why I use the masculine one.
Some scientists do bring belief in God and a theological perspective to questions about him. Among them are priests who belong to the international religious order, the Society of Ordained Scientists (SOSc). You can learn more about them here or from Wikipedia.
If you are new to philosophy or theology, here is a book I have recommended before. It is easy to read and doesn’t use technical jargon.
Raeper, William; and Edwards, Linda. A Brief Guide to Ideas. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1997.
The late Arthur Peacocke was a member of the SOSc. Before he died he created a new proposal for “reconciling religious faith and the results of the sciences today” (or at least as they were at the time of his death in 2006). The following year, ten leading thinkers responded to this proposal in a book edited by Philip Clayton. Their ideas will definitely expand your knowledge base and should inspire a while new set of questions as you pursue your own quest.
Clayton, Philip, ed. All That Is: A Naturalistic Faith for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007
If you want to know why every thinker worthy of the term is humbly aware of “standing on the shoulders of giants,” read something by Aristotle. Some of his ideas seem silly today, but remember that everything he wrote came out of careful observation and mental exercise. He didn’t have more than two thousand years of progress in scientific thinking to draw on, or any of the tools like telescopes and computers that we take for granted.
Check out your library if it’s still in service during the pandemic. I recommend Physica (Physics), Historia Animalium (The History of Animals), or Metaphysica (Metaphysics) to start. Some of his other works are available quite cheaply from AbeBooks. On the other hand, for a reasonable price you can find a copy of most of his works in the volume below. Keep it on your bookshelf and delve into it from time to time, or binge read it if the pandemic has left you with a staycation.
Aristotle. McKeon, Richard, ed. The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.