"God's Action In The World"

I was recently challenged, "I don't think everyone's faith is a 100% emotional response to the world without any rationality in it. John Polkinghorne would be a prime example. Before you can make this claim, you need to object carefully to the various things which people claim are the rational basis for faith and show that they are all, in fact, emotional. I challenge you to do this with John Polkinghorne for starters."

So, I read his lecture, which he gave in 1990, called "God's Action In The World" which you can find on his website. This is my answer...

"I must say, although it is made to appear scientific, underneath the camouflage, it's just the same old "I believe and thats that".

The lecture contains contradictions, imagined ideas, inventions, pure speculation and uses the old trick of giving us limited choices to make us think we have to pick God or nothing.

Contradiction

“We are not talking about a God of the gaps, an agent acting among other agents in the process of the world, and just invoked to explain the currently scientifically inexplicable. Such a God is truly dead, and no one should lament his passing.”

“…there are aspects of the laws of physics which raise questions beyond physics' competence to answer, issues that almost inevitably raise in the mind the feeling that there is more going on here that has met the purely scientific eye.”

So he sets out to say this is not just filling in the gaps of our knowledge and then bases his ideas on the fact that we have gaps in our knowledge.

Invention

“the reason within and the reason without”

“I believe there is such a rationality, namely the reason of the Creator who is the ground of both our mental life and our physical life.”

He invents this idea that our mind is not physical and suggests that the connection between the two is evidence for a Mind at work.

The human mind IS physical. Our thoughts, miraculous though they may seem, have been shown by science to be created by physical activity in the brain. We may not know everything about the brain, but there is certainly no evidence that thought is anything other than a chemical and physical process.

Imagination/pure specualtion

“what I'm saying is that the physical world seems shot through with signs of mind and to me”

“It is a world in which we can act, and if we can act, I don't see why God can't act in it as well, within the hiddenness of flexible process.”

“We live in a world whose openness and hidden flexibility mean that it is a world in which God can be at work.”

“If it is true (and I believe it is true) that God was present in Christ in a way that he has not been present in any other person, then Jesus represented the presence of a new regime in the world.”

All this is PURE speculation, wrapped up in his interpretation of the things he sees in science.

Well, as I have said before, we can all interpret the world any way we want. I'm sure I could come up with ten different ideas which would explain the Universe in a week, let alone the years he's had to think about it.

Limits our choices

“You can either say, "Well, that's just the way it is; we're here because we're here."

Or, wait for it...

“I would say that for me the most satisfying insight is that the world is ... a creation whose given law and circumstance has been willed by its creator to be capable of fruitful process.”

Erm, sorry mate, but there's a whole load of other choices you forgot to mention. Why must I decide between his idea or nothing at all? Because a poor fool will think these really are the only choices available. Its the oldest (con) trick in the book."

I prefer, "I don't know why we're here. I've yet to read, or see for myself, any evidence that there is a reason why we're here. But if there is a reason, I definately want to know what it is."

But religious people don't want us to keep our minds open. They want us to fix them in the belief: "God is right and God is good and what he says is the way it is and always will be". They don't like ambiguity or not knowing. They want life to be based in a solid foundation of certainty. And who can blame them?

Besides, even if I did buy Polkinghorne's "evidence" for a creator, that still leaves a massive "gap" for who that creator could be - it could be anyone or anything. In fact, I could be the creator, or You - let Him prove we're not.

Does This Woman Eat Atheists?

Trading Spouses Clip

Christian Science

I was pointed in the direction of the website of John Polkinghorne who is "...one of the greatest living writers and thinkers on science and religion: a truly world-class scientist turned priest...", even if he does say so himself.

On his Q&A page, he attacks Richard Dorking 's anti-religion CH4 documentary, "The Root of All Evil", but his arguments fall well short of "world-class".

He says... "By far the biggest examples of intolerance, violence and destruction in human history are those wrought by the militant atheism, underpinned by bogus science, of the type that Dawkins espouses. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot."

Polkinghorne seems to have invented a new movement called "millitant atheism" to make his point. Yet, Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot have nothing in common, except they were murderous dictators. If he is suggesting that their horrific activities were somehow inspired about by their lack of belief in a God, why not suggest they were also motivated by all the other things they didn't believe in, like Father Christmas or faries?

By that logic, if only Hitler had believed in faries, there would have been no Holocaust. Absurd.

Polkinghorne seems to be suggesting that atheism is some kind of idealogical belief which would inspire people to act in its name. In fact, it is merely not believing something.

Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot were inspired to cruelty by their belief not their lack of belief. In Hitler's case, his belief was that the Germanic peoples belonged to a race which was superior to other races. He also saw himself as the God-figure of his people, leading them to glory and mastery of the planet.

He asks... "Does he [Stephen Weinberg] think all the Nazis who rounded up his relatives in concentration camps were religious?"

Nazism was a religious-like ideology, based on a fantasy the Nazis wanted to believe about themselves, just like Christians and Christianity. They may not have believed in a God in exactly the way Christians do, but they certainly viewed Hitler as a mythical, God-like figure-head of their ideology.

He claims... "Atheism turns people into animals, and the results are clear from the rivers of blood of the 20th Century."

What a sweeping statement, backed up by no evidence whatsoever. I doubt you'll find many historians (if any) who will place the blame for either world war on a lack of belief. Those conflicts were created by complicated political and idealogical reasons, which he might learn by picking up a history book.

Also, is he suggesting the First World War was conducted by atheists? This is clearly false. Britain, France, Russia, Austria and Germany were at that time Christian states, yet they led their people into one of the most inhumane, sickening, brutal and bloody conflicts of all time.

I am an atheist. I am also a pacifist. My family are all atheists. But there are no "rivers of blood" at my house. We love and care for each other deeply. His claims that non-believers beoome animals would be insulting if his ideas weren't so flimsy.

Good and Evil

A lot of people make assumptions about what is good and evil.

Some people in the Europe assume everyone knows drawing a cartoon of Muhammad is no big deal. Some Muslims assume everyone knows drawing a cartoon of their prophet is like spitting in their face (or worse).

You can see the frustration in the faces of angry Muslims - they just cannot comprehend how someone could be so ignorant as to not understand this.

"Enlightened" Europeans can be just as blinkered on certain subjects. If you say someone is a has sex with underage girls, that is likely to inspire a knee-jerk emotional response. It is assumed by most that everyone knows these types are evil and disgusting.

But when you explore the subject, things get murky. Say a 16 year old boy has sex with a consenting girl, the day before her 16th birthday. I think you'd find most would think there wasn't an awful lot wrong with this - its only a day and they're virtually the same age.

Yet he would be breaking the law and you might consider him a "sex offender".

OK, what if the man was a bit older - say 25 - and the girl is a day under 16? Some would tut. But many would consider this not too bad as she's virtually legal.

If she was just 15 and he was 25, now things start to heat up. But I still don't think many would consider him totally disgusting.

Make her 13 and a lot of people would be angry, but I can still imagine a few would not consider this man a sex offender.

Take the film Trainspotting. I remember the controversy was focused mainly on the liberal attitude to drug addiction. I don't remember anyone up in arms at the fact that the Ewan McGregor character was a dirty old man. Yet in one scene he wakes up to find the girl he went to bed with is a schoolgirl. We don't lose one bit of sympathy for him, for at least two reasons - the girl seems mature and is in control of the situation. In fact, we feel extra sympathy for him, as he's been tricked and finds himself in an embarrassing situation with the girl's parents.

Most of us wouldn't see either of those characters as evil, some might consider them as good (in a wicked way). 100 years ago, the girl would have been seen as pure evil and locked away.

My point is, it's not as clear-cut as our instinctive, knee-jerk, emotional reaction to "he's a paedo" would suggest. We all have our own muddy common-sense judgements about the world.

Magic

Until I grew up, my dad was a god-like figure to me. I compared myself to him and consistently failed to live up to his greatness. He was an idealist, which hurt, and a weaver of magic, which was brilliant.

He was an art teacher and was involved in the Hornsey College sit-in, in 1968. After which, he became convinced “men in grey coats” were following him and that our phone was tapped. In 1969 he saw Easy Rider and decided that was it; he was going to throw off the system and live life his own way.

I was four and my brother seven when my parents split. I was too young to realise what I was going to be missing for the rest of my life. My brother wasn’t so fortunate.

We left North London and Mum and went to live in Somerset, in a small cottage near (you guessed it) Glastonbury. The cottage became a craft centre called Dove Cottage (there’s supposed to be a Zodiac mapped out around Glastonbury and we were in the dove-shaped bit. I know there’s no dove in astrology. Don’t ask me.). When drop-outs from the rat race began to arrive from various parts of the country, my dad built bunk beds for them in the living room.

I guess this is when our house became what is commonly known as a “hippie commune”. I didn’t exactly welcome the new family members, and I absolutely hated nut rissoles, but I learnt to enamel copper, make jewellery and throw a pot (amongst other things). When no more hippies could be squeezed into the cottage, my dad bought an old run down farm round the corner. He had it rebuilt, with areas added for craft workshops – pottery, weaving, drawing and painting, etching, carpentry, jewellery – and named it The Dove Centre.

The place soon filled up with society’s disaffected. Entire families arrived and set up home. All the residents were to be called “Craftists” and The Dove Centre was to be made self-sustainable, teaching the locals art and crafts. The place soon became my dad’s third child, and a very demanding one it was too.

That was when it really hurt. Dad was so busy running this place, he didn’t really have time for me and my brother. I didn’t get on with my new mum much, either. And I missed my real mum desperately. When she was due a visit, I would sit at the top of the drive, watching the cars go past, hoping the next would be hers, speculating “It’ll be the fourth car counting the next one. One…”. I could sit there for hours.

One night, I sat in the pottery workshop, alone in the dark, crying tears of self-pity. One tear fell on my dad’s desk. I circled it with a pen and wrote “My tear”. Erm, I think I was trying to tell him something. My dad found it, but I didn’t get exactly the reaction I’d hoped for. The story of “my tear” became an amusing anecdote for all the hippies to chuckle about over their boiled cabbage and lentils.

Do I sound bitter? It’s OK, I’m coming to the good bit. See, my dad believed in magic. Still does. And for a young boy, how wonderful is that? At night, he would tell us mind-blowing “make up stories”, which were way better than anything you could read in a book. In the day, he made the world seem an amazing place, full of fairies, goblins, lay lines, ghosts, spaceships and adventures. I wasn’t badly treated, no, I was privileged. While my schoolmates lived in a relatively mundane world of practicalities; the world my dad created for me was one of endless possibilities and seductive mysteries, where magic beamed from every sunset, boomed with every thunder clap, hid in every shadow and sneaked through every forest. And for that, I celebrate him.