Is Religion Really Separate from Everything Else, part 2

Yesterday I put up a post about a book titled ‘A God That Can Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of our Planet’ by Nancy Ellen Abrams. I wanted to add to what I wrote in that blog clarifying why I am grateful that she is writing on this subject. In the article that I read in Flipboard the author described her attempt to deal with a food addiction. After trying to overcome the addiction on her own, she joined an Alcoholics Anonymous-type group that relied on a ‘Higher Power’, i.e. God. To her surprise, by relying on God, even though she did not believe in God, she found the strength to overcome the addiction, or a least to minimize her craving for food. This began a journey for her toward an understanding of God and how she could fit God into her paradigm about the Cosmos. She was seeking.

My prayer is that she will find that trying to fit God into her understanding of the universe is not as enlightening or hopeful as learning how to let God’s plan of creation inform her understanding of the universe, who He is, and who she is in Him (and I do not mean that she should reject scientific knowledge. I want to know how science reveals part of God’s nature or how God reveals himself in science). The former is human-centric; the latter is God centric. To be a little more blunt, I would say the former is pride; the latter is humility. I define pride as placing ourselves on the throne of our lives; worshiping ourselves as the center of all that we are and know. Humility is placing God on the throne of our lives; worshiping God as the center and author of all creation. Humility also involves acknowledging that there is mystery that will only be known to God, that we will never penetrate to the heart of everything. But that should not stop us from continuing the quest for knowledge and wisdom, as long as we acknowledge that God is the author of everything.

There are scientists who profess a Christian faith. But many scientists believe in another way of understanding creation. That other way is physicalism. The heart of physicalism is the idea that only physical things exist. By definition then God cannot exist. Not because He does not exist, but because this philosophy has eliminated all non-physical reality.

In Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s book about her journey to find God  ‘Fingerprints of God: the Search for the Science of Spirituality’ she quotes the famous Harvard psychologist William James, who coined the phrase the unseen real or “the reality of the unseen”. She writes about a lecture James gave in 1901 at University of Edinburgh to a group of scientists, fully as skeptical as many are today, “Why, he asked, could scientists not envision the world as consisting of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which can have both scientific and spiritual explanations – just as today depression can be explained by both psychotherapy and altered brain chemistry”.  Then, quoting James again, she writes “The first thing to bear in mind, he warned the august crowd, is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves”.

The thing is, we can take part in the the phenomena of God and the release of God’s power. We can experience God in tangible ways, and when we do, the debates about the existence of God will end. Hagerty writes about her friend John “who was a slave to painkillers and scotch. Day in an day out, the cravings drove him from his wife and to bars and internet pharmacies. One day he felt the touch of something supernatural, and the cravings vanished. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, and while he never really bought into the tenets of the Catholic Church, he subscribed to the mysterious power that pulled him from the pit.” I would say John experienced God and will no longer doubt His existence. I daresay that thousands, perhaps millions of people around the world today understand what John experienced because God touched them as well with tangible, physical manifestations such as healing. Find a western missionary who has returned from Africa or India, for example, and ask them about supernatural miracles and in the name of Jesus.

Here is another quote from a Flipboard article, an article from the Guardian about why the world’s greatest minds cannot solve the mystery of consciousness. This is from one of these scientists. “I think the earliest desire that drove me to study consciousness was that I wanted, secretly, to show myself that it couldn’t be explained scientifically. I was raised Roman Catholic, and I wanted to find a place where I could say “OK, here God intervened. God created souls and put them in people.” Then this scientist assured the reporter who wrote the article “that he had long ago abandoned such improbable notions.” The article went on to point out that because some scientists had not been able to identify a physical cause of consciousness, they decided that consciousness did not exist.

The Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthian church about 2000 years ago “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The Spiritual man makes judgements about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgement: For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:14-16, NIV).

There really is nothing new under the sun.

Grace and peace,

John