Several threads that I have participated in lately have wound up in critiques of my beliefs from both atheists and fundamentalist Christians. In pretty much every case I think that I succeeded in taking the discussion a long way from the topic so I decided that I would attempt to lay out my beliefs and the rationale for them in a separate thread. I know that the idea of having a thread on my personal beliefs sounds just a tad egotistical so I’m hoping that it will be accepted in the light in which it is intended.
It is also going to be long and so I doubt that there will be many who will be want to make their way through it all but I want it to be complete. My apologies for my lack of brevity.
First off let me be clear that my Christian beliefs are a faith. They are not based on science but I do believe that my rationale for holding them is reasonable.
Firstly I believe in an intelligent first cause. I have been accused of arguing from a position of incredulity but I don’t regard that as a fair criticism. I can make the same argument to an atheist in that they can’t believe that there is a higher intelligence responsible for our existence. I believe that an intelligent first cause is far more plausible than a non-intelligent first cause.
When we look take a long look at our world and consider the complexity of a single cell then I find it very difficult to believe that that cell could be formed by the chance combination of particles that by chance came together to form atoms and molecules. It is my belief that my position is the more plausible of the two.
Secondly I am a theist. Once I accept the position that we are the result of an intelligent first cause I then have to ask myself, so what. Does it really matter whether we are or aren’t the result of an intelligent first cause? My first thought is that it would seem unlikely to me that this intelligence would create us without maintaining an ongoing interest in the project.
Also we are able to distinguish right from wrong. We have a sense of morality that IMHO goes beyond personal survival which indicates to me an on-going interest. As someone who believes in an intelligent first cause I have to believe that there was what would be called a miracle that got everything off and running. As it required involvement at that point I see no reason to think that in one way or another that this intelligence would not still be involved in what had been created.
With all that in mind I am a theist and not a deist.
Thirdly, I am a Christian. My Christianity essentially has one absolute, and without that one absolute I would not be a Christian. The Christian faith grew from the belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Paul tells us that if that isn’t true then our faith is in vain and we are, in his words, to be pitied. I think that he is correct. By resurrection I mean that Jesus died on the cross and was later resurrected into a new bodily form that was like, but at the same time different, than his pre-crucifixion body. It is my belief that God will at the end of time as we know it, resurrect all of creation in the renewal of all things, and (for lack of a better term), the resurrected Jesus was/is the prototype for our own resurrection.
I have read a number of books and listened to debates by Biblical scholars and others arguing both sides of the question of the truth of the resurrection. There are a lot of very bright and knowledgeable people on both sides of the issue but I find the argument for the resurrection far more compelling than the argument against. One of the simplest arguments is that if the resurrection story is either fabricated or mistaken there is no good reason for the movement to grow as strongly and quickly as it did. The argument against the resurrection is the almost solely the rejection of the possibility of it happening at all, as in every other case if someone died, other than for resuscitation, they have stayed dead. I find that position a little odd for anyone who believes in an intelligent first cause, they must believe that a miracle is possible as one would be required for God to get life started in the first place.
I should be clear though. I do not believe that the Bible is inerrant or that it has been dictated by God, which is not to say that God doesn’t use the Bible to impact our hearts and minds.
I agree that we are dependent on the Bible as the sole source for our information and that the gospels as we now have them were written decades after the event. However, the gospels are not the first written accounts of the life of Jesus. They are simply the first ones we have. Here is how Luke starts his gospel.
quote:
1 Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. 3 Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.
So Luke tells us that he has drawn on many previous accounts and has verified them.
The gospels are written in such a style that the authors obviously believed what they wrote. So either they got it right or they got it wrong. Yes, some of the details don’t line up but frankly I would be suspicious if they didn’t. We all come to our own conclusions about their accuracy.
The Bible is a series of books written by a series of authors. I believe that the authors were inspired to write down their histories, their beliefs about God, what they believed God wanted them to know and so on. In the end the Bible tells the epic narrative of a people searching for god, getting some of it right and some of it wrong with the climax of the narrative being Jesus who was the incarnation of the Word of God which had been there from the beginning. Through what we have of what Jesus said we can then go back to the Hebrew Scriptures and discern where they got it right and where they got it wrong.
To understand the Bible as inerrant, or as dictated by God, not only makes God very inconsistent and contradictory, but also a God capable of cruelty and injustice. IMHO to understand the Bible as inerrant requires us to say that Jesus can’t be the incarnate word of God because Jesus taught that much of what the OT says that God told them to do was wrong. The Genesis creation account was written with the science they had then and it would obviously be written very differently today. Having said all that I do believe that God has always spoken to us through our hearts minds and imaginations and so we should take seriously the words of the Bible to sort out just what God does have to say to us. If Jesus is the incarnate Word of God then Jesus is the lens that we use to understand all of the Bible. I realize that what we have of Jesus is in the Gospels but again, starting with truth of the resurrection I believe that the Gospel writers and the material from which the Gospels were taken would have been very carefully maintained. Certainly the writers would have had their own interpretations of some of what Jesus had to say but that is true of any historical account.
Paul also had considerable contact with the original followers of Jesus and was convinced to make a complete turnaround in his beliefs about Jesus so I contend that what he has to say should be taken very seriously as well.
In my view the Christian message as I understand it makes sense of the world as I experience it, but everything that I have just outlined is taken on faith and are my subjective beliefs, no matter how well founded I contend that they are.
If what I subjectively believe is true it seems pretty obvious to me that it will have to be consistent with what we can objectively determine about our world. In that regard we should look at how it fits with our current scientific beliefs and historical record.
We shouldn’t try and fit God into the box of a God dictated inerrant Bible, which there is no good reason to do. We are then free, using our God given ability to reason, to try to understand how God has done what He has done, and even look at what He continues to do.
Everything that I write after this is based on the assumption that my beliefs are accurate
I have no training in biology but from what I have read it appears to me that the evolutionary record is conclusive, although I’m sure many of the details will change as we continue to learn. From my perspective as a Christian I then conclude that God created life through an evolutionary process. I’m inclined to think that He may well have intervened but however most of the Christian evolutionists I have read seem to believe that the process was designed at the outset and didn’t require any intervention. Personally, it is a matter of interest to me but not consequential particularly as I will never get a definitive answer anyway.
I also look at our historical record and it appears to me that not only have we evolved physically but that we are evolving morally as well. I would agree that it isn’t a consistent advancement but if you are to compare the culture in the majority of the world today to the most civilized cultures of the world 2000 years ago, or even just a couple of centuries ago, we are making progress.
A couple of years ago I read a secular book called
The Evolution of God. In this book the author, (Robert Wright who describes himself as a materialistic agnostic), describes how over the years our view of god(s) has evolved, and that civilisation has become more compassionate. In the introduction Wright writes the following:
quote:
I guess materialist is a not-very-misleading term for me. In fact, in this book I talk about the history of religion, and its future from a materialist standpoint. I think the origin and development of religion can be explained by reference to concrete, observable things in human nature, political and economic factors, technological change, and so on.
But I don’t think a materialist account of religion’s origin, history, and future — like the one I’m giving here — precludes the validity of a religious worldview. In fact, I contend that the history of religion presented in this book, materialist though it is, actually affirms the validity of a religious worldview, not a traditionally religious worldview, but a worldview that is in some meaningful sense religious.
It sounds paradoxical. On the one hand, I think gods arose as illusions, and that the subsequent history of the idea of god is, in some sense, the evolution of an illusion. On the other hand: (1) the story of this evolution itself points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity; and (2) the illusion, in the course of evolving, has gotten streamlined in a way that moved it closer to plausibility. In both of these senses, the illusion has gotten less and less illusionary.
I found Wright’s book compelling and I found it confirming of the idea that we are teleological beings. Mankind seems to have purpose. If we are gradually becoming more compassionate then it follows that at some point the goal would be that all mankind would be truly compassionate. It is my view that God does influence us through our hearts, minds and imagination but also that He does use our socialization as a tool to spread the compassionate infection.
I also contend that this has been happening from the beginning. If we accept Jesus as the incarnate Word of God, and then we review the OT Scriptures we can see more of more of the message that Jesus espoused in the latter prophets particularly in Isaiah and Jeremiah as opposed to what we read in Leviticus and Numbers.
Although I look to the Bible and the wisdom of Biblical scholars to form my Christian beliefs, I look to our scientists, biologists etc in order to understand how God has done things, as in the case of evolution. More controversially I use it in an attempt to help me understand, even in a highly speculative way, how God fits into our physical universe.
This was not the primary thrust of Wright’s book but he also had this to say in the introduction:
quote:
The second aspect of the current world situation I’ll address is another kind of clash — the much-discussed clash between science and religion. Like the first kind of clash, this one has a long and instructive history. It can be traced at least as far back as ancient Babylon, where eclipses that had long been attributed to restless and malignant supernatural beings were suddenly found to occur at predictable intervals — predictable enough to make you wonder whether restless and malignant supernatural beings were really the problem.
There have been many unsettling (from religion’s point of view) discoveries since then, but always some notion of the divine has survived the encounter with science. The notion has to change, but that’s not an indictment of religion. After all, science has changed relentlessly, revising if not discarding old theories, and none of us think of that as an indictment of science. On the contrary, we think this ongoing adaptation is carrying science closer to the truth. Maybe the same thing is happening in religion. Maybe, in the end, a mercilessly scientific account of our predicament — such as the account that got me denounced from the pulpit of my mother’s church — is actually compatible with a truly religious worldview, and is part of the process that refines a religious worldview, moving us closer to the truth.
(if there are any errors in the quotes it is my fault as I had to copy it from the book directly.)
I think that Wright, even though we have come to different conclusions about God, has got it right. I think again, that just as we are evolving physically are minds are evolving as well. I contend that as we learn more about what God has created that we will learn more about God himself.
In the other threads I took some rather large leaps of a speculative nature in connecting some of my beliefs about God to modern science. One of the beliefs that I hold about God is that we are in some way connected to Him and his heavenly world. Various science theories hold to other universes and other dimensions that we are unable to perceive directly with our five senses. I have put those things together and speculated that God’s heaven exists in another co-existing universe or even in our own universe but that with different dimensions. When you consider that only 4.5% of the universe, (if our science is correct), is perceivable to us, it seems a little less far-fetched. Sure it is highly speculative but it does give us a new way of understanding the idea that God is with us but that we don’t directly perceive Him.
Part of what I believe as a Christian is that God is eternal. Both science and philosophers have speculated on having
more than one dimension of time. We move infinitely around in 3 spatial dimensions so it seems reasonable to me that if God’s heavenly dimension had 3 time dimensions then that would allow for an eternal existence. Once again it is highly speculative but it does give us one possible way of understanding an eternal existence.
I agree that I am shoehorning my beliefs into a science that is looking at it another way entirely but on the other hand we all have our pre-conceived ideas about reality and so I don’t think that I am really much different than anyone else in doing that.
I have probably provided more than enough already. If a mod is prepared to promote this I suppose it should be in Faith and Belief.
He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God.
Micah 6:8
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