Monday, July 28, 2008

CUT FROM A DIFFERENT CLOTH: Father Bill French, and why the Episcopal Church could use more like him

I like Father Bill French tremendously. As a student at Brookville High School in the early 1970s, I had him as a history teacher, and was always impressed with his passion for what he did. He seemed to awake to the world every morning with the desire to share his passionate beliefs, and as I recall, his history classes did contain a lot of history, but also a lot of teaching that would benefit me in other ways, and was often not related to anything in our course material.

Upon returning to church in 2005 after a 35-year drought, I learned that my former teacher had retired from teaching and become an Episcopalian priest. I was surprised, but shouldn’t have been. He simply continued doing what he did best...teaching.

I vividly recall a recent sermon of his in which he pulled an acorn from his pocket, tossed it in the air, and caught it. He turned it, looked at it, and started his sermon. He spoke of the dwindling congregations within the Anglican & Episcopalian churches, and then told us exactly why it was happening. Episcopalians, he said, weren’t taking part in the Great Commission. We, as members of that Church, had ceased to share the Good News. Our faith was not only personal, but had now become private as well. And that, he said, just wouldn’t do.

Our lives, he said, should be like an acorn. As we grow in Christ, we must touch the lives of others, who must then also touch the lives of others. The effect would be like the growth of a mighty oak tree from a single acorn. The acorn contains the potential, but to be realized it must be planted in fertile ground, and the Episcopal Church as a whole wasn’t providing fertile ground...and so its congregations continue to dwindle.

Just yesterday, he preached a simple homily. He wasn’t scheduled to be at our church that day, but just happened to stop by and saw that we had a morning prayer service planned. He popped in, and was immediately pressed into duty for a Eucharist service. He spoke once again about how the Episcopal Church as an organization seems not to be focused on what really matters, which is looking to Christ as our example of how to live. He commented that the Lambeth Convention, currently taking place in England, seemed to be heavily politicized, and not focused on leading people to Christ. But that, he said, should be the driving force behind every decision they make.

Bill French seems to be a bit of a rebel, and I like that. His rebellion against the status quo is consistent with the example he lives by, that of a particular Nazarene who lived over two thousand years ago, and still lives today.

He also hasn’t lost his sense of humor. My sister Katy—who also had William French as a teacher—was attending church with me yesterday, and I was the lay minister. Part of my responsibilities were to assist in the administering of the communion sacraments. I was holding the wine, and Father French was placing wafers in people’s mouths. My sister Katy came to the altar, and after Father French gave her the wafer, whispered, “I’ll bet you never thought you’d be taking communion from me.”

My sister Katy, who’d watched over the years as I transformed from a self-absorbed, hard-drinking, drug-using wild man into a lay Eucharistic minister, pointed at me and said, “Or him, either!” I didn’t hear any of this exchange, but looked over to see both Father French and Katy laughing during communion, which struck me as odd. It was only afterward, when Katy related the story, that I enjoyed the laugh as well.

I realize all leaders within a religious organization must deal with politics and logistics. But unlike many, Father Bill French refuses to let those things cloud his single-minded mission to share the love of Christ. I wish we had more like him.

Monday, July 14, 2008

IN THE LION'S DEN: Defending the Creator in a Scientific Debate

The previous post, in which I asked readers to offer proof that the natural worldview was the correct one, garnered some very interesting responses when I posted it on the religion forum at Amazon.com. As I expected, a few people simply couldn’t deal with it, and rather than answer my questions, simply attacked me personally and made mocking comments about my belief in magic dwarves and such. I didn’t pay much attention to those ones, but was surprised by the honesty and fairness of several others.

The line of questioning evolved over a few days. I started by asking how people could claim that naturalism was true if they could not establish “first cause” in the pre-Big Bang conditions. As noted in the piece, there is no science available to us to study those conditions, as the physical laws of science that we use to study the “natural” world didn’t come into play until after the event itself.

A few of the more angry respondents simply stated that the world can be studied and quantified as unfolding through “natural” means, and that was enough evidence for them. I pointed out that being able to study and quantify the natural world didn’t provide the slightest shred of evidence supporting the claim that it arose by natural means. Being able to study and explain natural processes doesn't establish how the highly-deterministic physical laws arose. This really made some folks angry, perhaps because it was such a valid point. Nobody likes having their worldview challenged.

I went on to point out that if they can insist that their observation and study of the natural world somehow proves naturalism, then they must know what a supernaturally-created world would look like. This really made them angry, and drew the response about my appeal to magic dwarves. None, however, provided any scientific proof to challenge my question.

If we don’t know the cause of the Universe, how can anyone claim that the naturalist worldview is correct? Do we know what a Universe created by a super-intellect would look like? Based upon the same scientific evidence used to "prove" naturalism, I happen to think that a supernaturally-created world would look like the one we live in. I accept the scientific discovery that the Universe came about from a blast of invisible sub-atomic particles that slowly formed into the visible matter we see today. Why? Because the Apostle Paul said so, stating “…we understand by faith that what is seen was made from what was invisible.” (Hebrews 11:3) He wasn’t a physicist, but he perfectly described what science has only discovered in the past century.

In the end, a few of the more intellectually-honest respondents conceded that naturalism cannot prove itself, as it cannot establish what gave rise to our Universe in the first place. It is a mystery that remains locked in secrecy on the other side of that singularity we call the Big Bang. As one wise respondent noted, the cause of our Universe is “an indefinable element in an undefined space,” and therefore not knowable. This person clearly grasped the issue, and didn't feel threatened by it.

I tried to be fair in my responses, noting that simply because the naturalist worldview could not provide proof of first cause, it didn’t somehow prove the existence of God. It simply left the door open for the possibility. As another respondent conceded, “It leaves room for God as a write-in candidate.” I liked that. It was nice to see someone with a sense of humor.

I have always subscribed to the notion that if you’re going to convince someone of something, you must do so using their worldview as a starting point. Simply arguing that “God did it” is pointless. To argue with a person whose worldview is grounded in the naturalist viewpoint, you must argue with logic based upon that viewpoint. In doing so, I learned a lot, and perhaps started some wheels turning in the heads of a few agnostics.

In the end, I learned that my belief in a supernaturally-created world is a defensible position in a scientific argument, but only because naturalism cannot prove itself in a scientific argument. I believe in a Creator who created a Universe that dances to physical and mathematical laws, and that He used those laws to create and maintain all that we see. I see evidence of this in the order and perfection of those laws, and the arising of such things as the startlingly complex code contained within the DNA molecule.

And ultimately, that’s the beauty of learning about science, and not avoiding it. It’s discovery such as this that makes the whole thing so rewarding. You may believe in a world that arose by unknown means and unfolded through "natural" processes. I choose a Creator who has revealed Himself to us through both Scripture and the revelation of His Creation. Either way you cut it, the science remains the same.

Sunday, July 06, 2008

THE NATURALIST WORLDVIEW: Can anyone offer proof of the driving force that started everything in motion?

I've been a huge fan of science since grade school, and have read science books all my life. A few things that keeps jumping out off all this scholarly literature is the fact that cosmologists cannot predict what caused the Big Bang...it's a singularity that isn't knowable in scientific terms. The scientific laws that we use to study our physical world simply break down as we back up in time, and are useless at predicting anything about the cause, or what existed, prior to the Big Bang event that brought our Universe into existence.

I also have read a ton of books on biology and evolution, such as Christian De Duve's "Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative" and Simon Conway Morris's "Life's Solutions: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe." Morris's book was wonderful, by the way, and I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in the appearance of life on this planet. But the one thing I noticed in both these books is that they openly deal with the problems of the origin of life and speciation. Both authors admit to the apparently overwhelming odds against life arising by chance, but tell us that there's no reason to believe it arose by anything other than natural causes. In the end, I simply see circular reasoning at work. They're agnostics, and because they only believe in natural origins, then no matter how difficult the problems appear, there simply must be a "natural" solution. Case closed.

I question why I should accept naturalism purely on the say-so of scientists who admit they don't know what started the Universe, or what gave rise to the very deterministic laws that govern it, or how life arose, or can show through scientific study how new species arise. After 35 years of reading books on the subject, I have yet to read anything other than suggestions about how these things may have happened.

For full disclosure, I am a Christian who believes in a 14 billion year old Universe, common descent by biological processes, and speciation through biological processes (in other words, I believe in some form of common descent, but not purely naturalistic neo-Darwinian processes, which are problematic when explaining speciation). I think the evidence for this old-Earth worldview is overwhelming, and I don't see current scientific discovery as incompatible with my faith, or incompatible with a fair reading of Genesis that allows for interpretation and doesn't demand strict literalism.

When I read about the kabbalist Nahmanides and his description of the birth of the cosmos from a speck the size of a mustard seed, and its subsequent expansion, it's pretty startling because he wrote it about a thousand years ago and had not an inkling about modern cosmology. The intellectuals of the day all insisted the Cosmos was eternal, although the Torah claimed otherwise. A thousand years later, science develops the Big Bang model for the creation of the Universe, and it matches the Judeo-Christian model that Nahmanides used as his starting point.

Over an over again, we see highly-ordered and finely-tuned laws that are balanced on a razor's edge. How did these laws come to be? What determined the initial conditions of the Universe, and why did it arrive in such an ordered "package?" Instead of randomness, why do we see non-random, convergent evolution, which, by the rules of neo-Darwinian theory, shouldn't be happening? No matter who I read, I can't help but come to the conclusion that the deck was stacked.

Even the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, an athiest, noted that the Universe appeared to be a "set-up job," as he called it, and said "A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

So here's my question: If you can't prove naturalism is true beyond a shadow of a doubt, how can scientists insist that it's a purely natural Universe? If the Universe is created, then by default all the processes have some form of intent and purpose behind them. Understanding every little step may be possible, but how does that disprove God? After years of reading, that's the one single point that comes through all this scientific literature...scientists don't have proof of origins, but we should all accept the consensus view that it's natural anyway.

I'd be curious to see if anyone can offer solid scientific proof of naturalism, when all I see is a created Universe with intent and purpose behind it. I should point out that I'm not looking to change that worldview, but simply hoping to get a fair and intellectually-honest response from anyone holding a naturalist worldview. To some extent, it was the lack of answers in naturalism that helped me to embrace my faith-based worldview, and I'm curious to read why people choose naturalism when I think the evidence points the other way, and quite convincingly so.

In closing, I'll leave you with this wonderful quote from C.S. Lewis: "If naturalism were true, then all thoughts whatsoever would be wholly the result of irrational causes...it cuts its own throat."