From the Sola Panel:
This is the third instalment of a five-part series (read parts 1 and 2.)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8 and have discovered that stargazing should make us wonder why God the creator should have anything to do with us.
At this point, if you were sceptical about the existence of the creator himself, I could point you to proofs of a designer in the universe. For example, I could use the ‘fine-tuning’ argument for the existence of God—the fact that there are over 20 fundamental physical constants in the universe that all work together to make the universe work as it does, and that can’t be explained as a coincidence—at least, not yet. If any one of these constants had been a tiny bit different, life couldn’t appear. For example, if the force of gravity was even slightly different by a colossally tiny factor (1 part in 1040), no life-supporting stars could exist. Or I could talk about the statistical improbability of life itself emerging—the fact that even a small protein has 1095 possible folding combinations, and the chances of a protein folding by accident into a functional life-conducive shape during the lifetime of the universe is something like 1 in 1065.
But then you might come back with an answer—the multiverse. Do you know about the multiverse? The multiverse is a philosophical theory, born out of reflection on cosmology and quantum theory. It’s the idea that we are just one out of a gigantic number of different possible universes. The multiverse is a way to solve the problem of the fine-tuning of the universe. Since there’s such a huge or infinite number of possible universes, it’s no problem that our universe just happens to exist by chance—a universe with impossibly fine-tuned life-supporting physical constants, where proteins folded in just the right way. The multiverse is an act of faith; it’s not a scientific hypothesis in the strict sense. There is no scientific evidence for the multiverse; in fact, there’s no experimental test that anyone has conceived that could possibly prove it or disprove it. It’s a philosophy that tries to solve the apparent design of the universe without resorting to a designer. The multiverse theory is complex, physically and philosophically, and it seems to me to be the last resort of the desperate. But if you’re philosophically committed to atheism, that’s what you’ve got at your disposal at the moment.
But actually there’s a bigger problem with my proofs for a designer. You see, even if my arguments for the existence of a cosmic designer were true and irrefutable, and even if you believed them, what does that actually prove? That there is a great designer—a purpose—to the universe doesn’t say anything about you and me.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that there is a great grand design to the existence of the 70 sextillion-plus stars out there. Say there is some grand 13-billion-year-old design to it all, and that God the creator is behind it all. So what? What on earth would that have to do with you, your life, your relationships, your joys, your sorrows, your acts of kindness, your feelings of guilt at those evil things you’ve said and thought and done, your goals, your children, your ethics, your conviction that it’s wrong to hurt and right to love, and your death as you dissolve back into the dust you came from? What is that to God? Why does that matter at all in this gigantic universe?
Yet this is the question of our poet, as the song continues:
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
(Ps 8:5-8)
This is actually a real puzzle—a problem—the crisis of the song—that this God, the one who made the heavens for some reason, deliberately and personally sees you and me as important. You and I are a key part of his creation. We (as the song says) are “crowned … with glory and honor”. We are rulers. We have dominion.
These words ‘rule’ and ‘dominion’ recall the words of Genesis 1-2. They are used to describe the reality that humans are put on the earth by God himself to care for it, not to exploit it for our own ends. It’s a statement of our glory and our responsibility, not a statement of our God-given right to use the world any way we want. Our poet in this biblical song recalls these words to express wonder at the fact that we specks of dust are somehow glorious in God’s eyes. The evidence of the stars suggests that we are nothing, but God himself, the creator of the stars, says we are something. We have been made by God for a purpose in this world: we have responsibility. We have responsibility to God to do what is right—to rule the works of God’s hands. And, as the rest of the Bible points out, we have a responsibility to live rightly in our relationships with each other—to honour God, to care for his world, to care for each other, to live under his loving rule.
But that’s the problem. That’s the puzzle. How is it that such a great creator—such a great and super-powerful supreme being—has given us specks of dust this responsibility?
Verse 9 gives us no answer:
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
The song ends where it began. It hasn’t solved the puzzle; it has just expressed it. God is great in the earth, and somehow, for some reason, we are important to him.
To be continued …
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From the Sola Panel
In the second instalment of a five-part series, I contemplate the extent of our significance in the universe. (Read Part 1.)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8, and we’ve discovered that stargazing helps us to see how insignificant we really are.
Just think about the size of space for a moment. Imagine you could get into the fastest jet on earth (last time I checked, this was the SR-71 Blackbird). Its official speed record is almost 2,500 miles per hour. Now imagine you could speed it up 100 times to 250,000 miles per hour. Then imagine that you could take it on a trip to space. It would take you an hour to get to the moon—that’s pretty reasonable! It would take you eight days to get to Mars, the closest planet to Earth. It would take you four months to get to the planet Saturn (remember, we’re travelling 100 times faster than the fastest jet ever built). It would take you a year and a half to get to the planet Pluto at the edge of our solar system. To get to the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, it would take you 12,000 years. To get to the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy, it would take you 80 million years. To the next closest galaxy, Andromeda, it would take you seven billion years. To get to the edge of the visible universe, it would take you 40 million million years. And they think that the size of the non-visible universe is vastly huger than this: that would take you a million million million million, etc. years.
I’ll quote another modern ‘poet’—this time, the late Douglas Adams, writing The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy:
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.1
The ancient biblical poet was ignorant about billions of parsecs or millisecond pulsars. He just knew that space was big, wonderful, majestic and beyond us. That’s the universe we live in.
So the Bible has a question for you: who are you?
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
(Ps 8:4)
What is man? Who am I in comparison to this world? Who are you? You are one of seven billion tiny organisms, living on an infinitesimally small pinprick of a dust ball, who are giving birth, breathing, eating, maybe reproducing and dying.
But that’s the Bible’s question: what is it to be human? What is your existence—your family, your career, your study, your relationships, your life—compared to this immense universe with its big bang, its nebulas and its millisecond pulsars?
But did you notice something? That’s not quite the way the song puts it, isn’t it. It’s not just the universe that’s big; this biblical song makes an even more profound point. It’s a point about God himself: God is big. See verse 1:
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
We’re not just talking here about how small we are compared to the universe; this is a song about our relationship to the majesty of the Lord—the God who created that universe.
Now it’s important to realize that this ‘God’ spoken about in the Bible has nothing to do with superstition and magical religion. The Bible’s view of God is the opposite of superstition. In fact, it’s the biblical view of God that enabled the early Christians to throw astrology away and promote astronomy instead. Astrology is the belief that the stars have something to do with our lives. Astrology happens when people look out at the stars, see how distant and high they are, and decide that somehow, in some magical way, these stars have a direct influence on their own personal lives.
But just listen for a moment to Augustine, a Christian theologian who was writing in about 425 AD—a man whose influence over western thought has been profound and continues to this day. This is what Augustine says about astronomy and astrology, and their relative value:
Astronomy … makes possible systematic predictions about the future, which are not speculative and conjectural but firm and certain; but we should not try to extract something of relevance to our own actions and experiences, like the maniacs who cast horoscopes, but confine our interest to the stars themselves.2
Augustine rejected astrology because he believed in the God of the Bible—the God we meet here in this very song—a God whose glory is above the heavens. See verse 3: this is the God who made the heavens, and set the moon and stars in place. This is the God who is majestic and great, and above and beyond those stars themselves. He is a God of order who set those heavenly bodies where they should be. But he’s done it for his glory, not for magical speculation about how your week is going to pan out.
So the question of verse 4 is a question about our place before this God:
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Why on earth would this God, who created the stars, be interested in you and me? There are more stars in the visible universe than grains of sand in all the beaches on the earth. According to an Australian estimate in 2003, there are 70 sextillion stars. This is 7 x 1022. Who are we in all of this? I can’t resist quoting Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy again:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.3
Even then, he’s talking about one galaxy amongst quadrillions. And that’s just the visible universe.
There is a God who made it all. So what on earth would he have to do with us? Who are you? What is man?
To be continued …
1 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Del Ray, 2005 (1979), p. 65.
2 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, II.113.
3 Adams, p. 3.
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Here’s a very useful pictorial guide to modern philosophy
Thanks to Tim Riley (MS Word format)
The problem in the debate between Christianity and evolution is not really scientific at all but rather philosophical. We need to distinguish between ‘science’, which is a discipline, and ‘scientism’, which is a philosophical stance. Christians too often try to attack some of the results of science, when what we really should be attacking is scientism.
Scientism is basically the belief that, for every phenomenon in the world, a scientific explanation is both necessary and sufficient. That is, if you can explain something by using science, then every other type of explanation is ruled out. This idea was taken up by the atheistic proponents of evolution in the nineteenth century, who proclaimed that, since Darwin’s theory could explain the origin of life, then all other explanations (especially the Bible’s creation account) were both unnecessary and also incorrect. Unfortunately, the majority of their Christian opponents (e.g. the American fundamentalists) didn’t challenge this assumption but rather took it on board and (unwittingly) assumed it themselves! So the task of the Christians became the disproving of evolution, because if evolution was right then God must not exist. This is nicely summed up in Douglas Adams’ satire on the science/religion debate which concludes with God saying ‘Oh dear, I hadn’t thought of that’ and promptly vanishing in a puff of logic. (from ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’).
But scientism really is quite flawed. For example, just because I could analyse and completely describe to you the chemical constituents of the ink and paper of the books in your bookshelf doesn’t mean that what’s actually WRITTEN in the books is meaningless! I can’t ultimately analyse what’s written in the books scientifically, by doing experiments on them. I have to analyse them by reading them! So the scientific explanation, while it may be helpful and true as far as it goes, is not the only explanation of things. It may not even be the most helpful explanation of certain things (e.g. books), and it certainly doesn’t rule out other explanations (e.g. literary, historical, theological). If evolutionary theory did happen to be right, or partially right, then this would not rule God out at all.
Christians should be challenging scientism rather than putting all of our eggs in the basket of disproving evolutionary theory. If we can show that a scientific explanation for something doesn’t necessarily remove a theological explanation, then the heat is off both sides. Christians don’t have to go to the stake against evolution, and atheists don’t have to go to the stake for it. There is room for more rational assessment of evolutionary theory. Opponents of evolution can point out some of its problems in the various evolutionary theories that exist today, while proponents can accept that these problems exist without it becoming a major issue.
However, scientism won’t go away so easily, because actually, the real problem is not even philosophical. The real problem is rebellion against God. Real people in the real world don’t disbelieve because of evolution. Rather they use evolution as an excuse for their unbelief, and unwittingly adopt the flawed assumptions of scientism in doing so. The solution isn’t to attack science, but to show that our rebellion is real but has been paid for by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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