Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between
Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high
school English, Latin, Greek and science, and served
as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve,
retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest
book, Don’t Throw Out Your Bible, from
which the essay below is excerpted, is now in print.
Referring
to J. B. Phillips’ book, Your God is Too Small,
I suggest that if we trade in our Sunday school image
of God for one that is up to the challenge of the universe
as we know it, the resurrection and other things supernatural
could cease to be intellectual obstacles. We can infer
the existence of such a God, or perhaps intuit it, but
we cannot empirically prove it. That’s because God
is not an item within this material universe. If God exists
at all, he must be, in Tennyson’s phrase, beyond
“our bourne of Time and Place.” So while some
knowledge of God is not beyond our reason, we cannot –
except for the fact that God has revealed himself in the
person of Jesus – attain that knowledge by anything
resembling the empirical method. Nor by faith, either,
for faith is an attitude, not a source of knowledge.
In
a little book entitled Logos and Logic: Essays on
Science, Religion, and Philosophy, the Baha’i
mathematician William
S. Hatcher adduces a mathematical proof for the
existence of God, that Dr Hatcher considered irrefutable.
Dr Hatcher’s concept of God, as he once assured
me, is not the Trinity of Christian theology; but since
Christians believe that the Trinity is also a Unity, the
proof deserves our attention.
Another mathematical approach, this one offering probability
rather than proof, comes from Stephen D. Unwin, theoretical
physicist, risk management specialist, and author of The
Probability of God. Using a statistical technique
called Bayesian analysis, Dr Unwin calculates the statistical
probability of God’s existence at 67%. Again, the
calculation does not specifically include the Christian
view of God as a Trinity. Even so, two-to-one odds ought
to be sufficient to raise some concern among skeptics.
But for those of us who aren’t much good at math,
there is an experiential approach.
In
1788 the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, hardly
one to fall prey to superstition, described such an experience:
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing
admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily
we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral
law within.” Those are the same themes that you
find in Psalm 19, written some 2500 years earlier and
half a world away: “The heavens declare the glory
of God . . . / The law of the LORD is perfect . . . ”
At first glance, those two awe-inspiring things seem to
be unrelated. But, in fact, they are both powerful manifestations
of order: the natural order around us, and the moral order
within. And both are universal. But each of us experiences
them in our own way, so perhaps you’ll indulge me
while I share a personal story.
It
was a dark and stormy night. Well, at least it was dark;
the storm had already passed, and the streets of Vancouver’s
East-End lay thick with snow, glistening in the moonlight.
As I slushed my way along Lakewood Drive and gazed up
into the night sky, I felt a peculiar panic as I observed
the orderly progress of the stars. Did they point to some
Heavenly Architect, or to random chance? Did the heavens
really declare the glory of God, as we learned in Sunday
school? (Psalm 19:1) Or did their clockwork regularity
prove only that blind matter always behaves according
to its properties? Would I one day become extinct, swallowed
up by eternal darkness? Or was my life part of some grand
design which, in due course, would reach its divinely
appointed fulfillment?
That
was back at a time before Vancouver’s night sky
was overwhelmed by the lights of the city. I had just
turned ten, so I felt the problem intuitively, but I had
no adequate words to express it. I found those words some
years later in a university English class—on the
last page of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and
Lovers:
Everywhere
[spread] the vastness and terror of the immense night
– which is roused and stirred for a brief while
by the day,
but
which returns, and will remain at last eternal, holding
everything in its silence and its living gloom . . . .
Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out,
beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains,
went spinning round for terror, and holding each other
in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all,
and left them tiny and daunted."
Perhaps
you have felt that awful gloom, that daunting silence,
that frightening sense of insignificance. Perhaps, gazing
up into the night sky, you have felt that ultimate ambiguity
in which you perceive cosmic order one minute, chaos the
next, so that in an instant your emotion swings from awe
to panic.
I
remember, too, how that ambiguity began to be resolved
in a Grade 7 science class. Mr. Ryniak was drawing phloem
and xylem on the blackboard, explaining how the nutrient
transport system works in trees. “God!” I
marveled, “I wish I’d designed that.”
Then looking up at the ceiling – and beyond –
I said sheepishly under my breath, “You beat me
to it, didn’t You!” Sunshine surged in through
the classroom windows and my heart felt strangely warmed,
for here, it seemed, was evidence of purposeful design,
and the purpose in that design seemed to include even
me.
As
I passed from high school to university, that sense of
purposeful design continued to haunt me, reasserting itself
during an introductory biology course. I can still see
Prof MacA. . . (I wish I could remember the rest of his
name) describing how our kidneys cleanse the blood of
waste, at great cost of energy, by compelling osmosis
to work in reverse. I was on the edge of my seat, ecstatic.
I turned to the student beside me and confided, “This
is the best RK course on campus!” (RK was campus
slang for Religious Knowledge.) He stared back blankly.
After
class, as I stood before that porcelain object in the
room down the hall, my own kidneys working very well indeed,
I felt an enormous rush of gratitude, and then of awe,
towards the Creator whose thoughtful design included,
for my relief, such a thing as reverse osmosis. I marveled,
too, at the divine sense of humor, for this was not a
normal place to be having a religious experience.
Mr.
Ryniak and Prof MacA. . . , I ought to add, were doing
only what they were supposed to be doing, which was teaching
science. My truant mind, on the other hand, was focused
on something outside science’s proper domain. That
something (I did not know its name back then) is called
“apologetics.” From the Greek words apó
(back) and légein (to speak), “apologetics”
means talking back or making a reply. In our everyday
use of the word, an “apology” is a reply in
which we say we’re sorry. But in ancient Greece,
apología referred to a defense in court.
And in religious studies it has come to mean the reasons
or arguments that we offer in defense of a particular
religion or religious doctrine. The Argument from Design,
which impressed itself on me during those science classes,
is an example of such an apologetic.
In
that sense of the word, Christian scholars (and scholars
of other religions, too) have been “apologizing”
for their Faith for centuries. In fact, the New Testament
encourages apologetics: “Always be ready to give
an apologia”, says St Peter, “to anyone who
asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you”
(1 Peter 3:15). Of course, the argument from design, and
other arguments of that sort, do not actually “prove”
the existence of God, if by proof you mean a watertight
case that admits of no other possible conclusion. But
the idea that the order of the universe should be read
as design, and that this design implies a purposeful Designer,
seemed so compelling to St Paul that he says it leaves
us no excuse for concluding otherwise (Romans 1:18ff).
Certainly, that was how I felt in those science classes,
and that is how it seems to people of many different religious
persuasions. But as powerfully as that argument –
or feeling – may affect us, we have to remember
that the path we take when we move logically from observable
facts, like the orderliness of the stars, to the conclusion
that a Designer-Creator exists, is not a proof (proofs
exist only in math and logic) but rather an inferential
leap. Many thoughtful people, having considered the same
evidence, leap in the opposite direction.
If
I have learnt anything about apologetics since that insightful
-- and briefly terrifying – look at the night sky,
it is this: When you have exhausted the Argument from
Design and all other arguments of that sort, you are still
left with the question “Does He or Doesn’t
He?” Even if you conclude that “He Probably
Does,” you cannot easily move from that generalization
to any confident statement about the truth of Christianity
– nor, indeed, of any other religion. As a Newfoundlander
I once knew used to say, “You can’t get there
from here.” Or as Edward Fitzgerald more elegantly
translates Omar Khayyam:
Myself
when young did eagerly frequént
Scholar and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went.
So
this inferential awareness of God the Designer-Creator,
compelling as it may be, cannot teach us which spiritual
path we ought to choose, if indeed any at all. Nevertheless,
that sense of design and purpose – whose force most
of us apprehend more as a gut feeling than as a reasoned
inference -- is so universally powerful that it continues
to inspire spiritualities around the world. What it gave
me back then – again, before I had the vocabulary
to express it – was a conviction that the world
made sense and that life was integrated and purposeful
rather than chaotic, despite any appearances to the contrary.
