[Oe List ...] 4/29/2021, Brian D. McLaren:: Science, Reductionism, and Faith; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Apr 29 05:16:49 PDT 2021
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Science, Reductionism, and Faith
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| Essay by Brian D. McLaren
April 29, 2021
I was teaching a class recently and a student asked me a question about the boundary between the natural and supernatural. As I answered, I told the student, “I’m sorry. I understand your question, but I have to tell you that I’m incapable of answering it. That’s because I no longer see the world in those two categories of natural and supernatural.”
Like many, I grew up in a two-tier universe. The lower natural tier was physical, temporal, and ever-changing. The higher supernatural tier was spiritual, eternal, and changeless. God, the Holy Spirit, and human souls or spirits were in the higher tier. Human bodies, all nonhuman creatures, and all matter and energy were in the lower tier.
Without the higher tier, the lower tier was seen to be meaningless and of little real value. Meaning and value, we could say, resided in the upper tier.
This dualism applied to the physical body as well. The body was a physical machine; the soul or spirit was like a ghost that occupied it. At birth (or conception, or some other precise moment), the soul or spirit entered the body-machine and made it alive. At death, the supernatural element left it, and it was just lower-tier stuff again.
For centuries, this dualistic universe made sense to Christians like me. Politicians and businessmen worked in the lower tier. Priests and ministers worked in the upper tier. Scientists studied the mechanisms of the natural world; saints, theologians, and mystics explored the supernatural.
Many of our vexing moral issues were framed by this supernatural/natural dualism. Arguments about abortion, for example, often draw from assumptions about the precise moment when the supernatural spirit invades the fertilized egg. End-of-life arguments are similarly rooted in this dichotomy for many, as are many arguments about sexual orientation and identity.
I remember being in a graduate school classroom back in the 1970’s and for the first time feeling this two-tiered universe threatened. “If scientists explain consciousness and show that what we call person or mind or soul is a just a matter of chemistry and physics, the jig is up for Christianity,” I thought.
We’re still a long way from understanding consciousness. But with advances in brain science, it’s becoming clear that the old ghost-in-the-machine model is increasingly hard to maintain. Does that mean the jig is up for Christianity?
Perhaps, if Christianity remains committed to that dualistic model. But I’m convinced that Christianity does not need to be stuck in the old two-tier universe. In fact, like a chick breaking out of an egg, Christianity is breaking out of its old assumptions.
The fact is, the ancient Hebrews didn’t see the world this way, which explains why we don’t see it in the Hebrew Scriptures. At the time of Jesus, the Jewish people were divided. More “liberal” groups (the Hellenists, along with the Pharisees) were embracing assumptions from Greek philosophy and culture, and so they were re-articulating their theology in this two-tier framework. The more conservative Sadducees stayed with the older view.
By and large, Christians embraced the two-tiered universe of the Hellenists, and it became a pre-critical assumption of what we know as orthodoxy today. The natural-supernatural distinction became even more important after the Enlightenment, when rational and empirical thinkers like David Hume proposed that the only reality was physical. Science was coming to explain everything by physical and natural mechanisms, reducing the upper tier of supernatural to a mythological category, a realm of superstition, an embarrassment. That proposal made God an obsolete item in an obsolete category.
Christians responded to this challenge in three ways. First, some doubled-down on the natural-supernatural distinction. Miracles were real. God was real. They couldn’t be explained by natural means because they were in a separate category. That was the tradition in which I was raised.
Second, some gave up Christianity entirely and became atheistic naturalists: the universe is physics, plus nothing, leaving religion to be an obsolete field for the unlearned or dishonest, on the level of alchemy at best.
A third group largely capitulated to the collapse of the supernatural into the natural, but this traditional liberal approach said that God still existed. However, God created physical laws and mechanisms which ran creation. God was the designer and the moral authority, the divine watchmaker and moral judge. Emphasis for liberals shifted from defending miracles to defending ethics and aesthetics.
I am not comfortable with any of these alternatives, because I think the dualistic framing they begin with is itself flawed.
I find myself more in sync with two important theological movements, whose work I see as being deeply complementary. First, the non-reductive physicalists start with the physical universe, but they don’t stop there. They acknowledge the potential for emergent realities, realities like life itself, that emerge from lifeless physical processes but cannot be reduced to those processes. They are, in a sense, more than the sum of their parts. This “something more” is what Christians and others tried to capture metaphorically with words like spirit, which is itself a metaphor for a physical reality: breath. The physical, in other words, is fundamental, but reality cannot be flattened or reduced to physics and chemistry. Life, meaning, beauty, goodness, consciousness are emergent realities that arise from the physical world and can neither be separated from it nor can they be reduced to it.
An analogy can be made to a book. An old-fashioned book is physical. It is paper, ink, covers, and glue, nothing more. But then again, it is would be improper to say that a book is nothing more than these things. The book exists as a physical expression of meaning, of communication. It contains meaning that cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry. Its whole purpose is to communicate meaning.
Yet even in spite of this “something more-ness,” it can never be separated from physics and chemistry, because the living person who encoded the meaning in the book emerged in a brain and body whose life arises from physics and chemistry and depends on them. The same is true of the readers who engage with that encoded meaning.
This non-reductive physicalism is a natural conversation partner with various process theologies. Process theologies look at the physics and chemistry of bodies and things, and they add the rather obvious but oft-forgotten dimension of time. When time enters the equation, what we thought of as things start to look more like processes. Pick up a rock. It is a thing in a certain moment. But a million years ago, it might have been part of a layer of rock deep within a mountain. A million years before that, it may have been magma flowing out of a volcano. Several billion years earlier, it may have been dust loosely dispersed around the sun, about to congeal into the earth. Before that, atoms in that dust may have been part of five now-extinct stars that exploded in supernovae. And so on, going back to the singularity of the big bang, and so on, going forward to an unimagined future — the rock in your hand is an event, a process within other processes.
The same goes for me now, and you. Every atom in the body that is producing these words you are now reading was not associated with me before I was born, and the same is true for you. Some of the atoms that constitute us now once were, no doubt, floating in the sea. Others were in soil. Others were in any number of animals and plants. These physical atoms have been borrowed by the emergent phenomena known as you and me, and as our bodies, make you and me possible. We, in turn, are using symbols that have evolved among other human beings over millennia and we are engaged in a meaningful act of communication with one another. Although we’re using keyboards and screens rather than paper and pen, they too are physical objects which are being used for purposes that can’t be reduced to flattened physics and chemistry.
Meaning, in other words, is an emergent phenomenon in this universe, and it must be accounted for. And the very idea of God, in this understanding of the universe, must also be grappled with in new ways. Is God the larger presence or field in which this whole event of the universe is taking place? Is God the creative force and meaning expressing itself through the universe, as I am now expressing myself through symbols and words?
Faith in this sense, including Christian faith, need not be outdated superstitions, relics of ignorance. It can be part of the vitally important and ongoing human endeavor to de-flatten the universe, to take seriously the dimension of meaning, and to both find and make meaning in this amazing event in which we find ourselves, namely, our very lives in this very universe.
~ Brian D. McLaren
Read online here
About the Author
Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is an Auburn Senior Fellow and a leader in the Convergence Network, through which he is developing an innovative training/mentoring program for pastors, church planters, and lay leaders called Convergence Leadership Project. He works closely with the Center for Progressive Renewal/Convergence, the Wild Goose Festival and the Fair Food Program‘s Faith Working Group. He is the author of an illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story. Other recent books include: The Great Spiritual Migration, We Make the Road by Walking, and Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? (Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World).
Brian is a popular conference speaker and a frequent guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings – across the US and Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He has written for or contributed interviews to many periodicals, including Leadership, Sojourners, Tikkun, Worship Leader, and Conversations and is a frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs, he has appeared on All Things Considered, Larry King Live, Nightline, On Being, and Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. His work has also been covered in Time, New York Times, Christianity Today, Christian Century, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, CNN.com, and many other print and online media.
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Question & Answer
Q: By Gordon
I am a "seeker." I know what that means, but when people ask, "What is a seeker?" I can never find an accurate or concise way to explain it.
A: By Toni Anne Reynolds
Dear Gordon
There is so much to seek in this life we live. I wonder what gets lost when you attempt to make the response concise. As a seeker, there is so much that makes you one, and so much that you are asked to see. Your question reminds me of a quote that cannot accurately be attributed to any one figure, but is often credited to Gautama Buddha. The quote is something like “I am the finger pointing to the moon. Don’t look at me, look at the moon.” I wonder what good is accuracy when we have to rely on the thin medium of language to express such mystery? I think “what a seeker” is, is just as vast as the “thing” they are seeking. There’s a reason that the greatest mystics of the ages were artists, too. And, I don’t know that any of them told others that they were “seekers”, I think they just did what they did and shared what they saw as they did it. Because, what they sought, and no doubt found, was also not concisely conveyed. So, they relied on beauty to attempt the brevity. Music, paintings, even poems - though they are made of words - were ways to transcend the confines of grammar and logic in order to point to the boundlessness of That-Which-Is-Sought-After (think Hildegard von Bingen, Credo Mutwa, Rainer Maria Rilke, etc.).
Typically, I hear folks identify themselves as a seeker in order to convey their desire to draw closer to the Great Mystery and all of the way it shows up in our day to day lives; a title fit for folk who live beyond religious boundaries, dogmas, historical moments. Maybe it would be of better service to you if you invited the other person to ask you a different question. There’s no reason we have to accept these invitations from others. We can gently offer them to open a different door in our hearts. For example, maybe something like “what happens when you find what you seek?” or even, “have you found what you’ve been seeking?” They assume you haven’t found what it is you seek, so you’re still a seeker. But, is that totally true? I mean, maybe you haven’t found the entirety of what it is that you seek, but I have some confidence that you’ve at least found traces of it. If not, you’d be using your time and attention to do any other number of things. What are the whispers that keep you going? Are those things instead worth sharing when someone asks you the question “what is a seeker?” Because ultimately your path as a seeker is centered on what you seek, not you, the one who is seeking. To be a seeker, in my opinion, is to be the finger that points to the moon. The focus is on the moon.
I wonder what creative means you can tap into in order to give something of an answer to a version of that question “what is a seeker?” How can you tell people, even if it’s not with words, that “what a seeker is” is far less important than what the seeker is pursuing?
~ Toni Anne Reynolds
Read and share online here
About the Author
Minister Toni Anne Reynolds is committed to singing flesh onto the bones of the Christian tradition by incorporating recently found texts of the ancient world into liturgy, sermons, and poetry. Toni’s Christianity forms a holy trinity with the psychological medicine of Tibetan Buddhism and the eternal Life found in Yoruba traditions. Balanced in an eclectic faith and focused in theology, Toni’s ministry offers a unique perspective on life, theology, and spirituality.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Anti-Muslim America!
The Meaning of our Current Political Anger
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
September 30, 2010
Early in my career, I had a colleague, now deceased, named The Rev. Joseph Kellerman, known to his friends as “Jody.” This man served then as the rector of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Comforter, a suburban middle-class congregation on Park Road in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was also a well-trained specialist in the counseling and treatment of alcoholism. What was remarkable to me about Jody, however, was his understanding of human nature, which was best displayed in his ability to move his congregation effectively without alienating those rooted in yesterday’s value systems.
One way he did this was to provoke a major debate each fall in his congregation about the choice of curriculum materials to be used in the Church School. Jody favored an avant garde, experience-oriented curriculum known as the Seabury Series. Vocal members of his congregation leaned toward a more content-centered, Bible-based curriculum that would introduce the children to the “historic faith.”
Every fall this fight would be waged with the same results. Jody Kellerman always lost and the traditional members of his church always won. From the outside this annual rite looked very much like an ecclesiastical game, prompting me to ask him on one occasion why he insisted on fighting this battle every fall. In his answer he said, “Jack, a congregation can usually manage only one serious debate a year. So I focus the debate on a subject, the outcome of which I can tolerate either way. I fight, they win and then it’s over. They then don’t get upset about any other issue or anything else that I do.” That was a new insight for me. People are not emotionally capable, nor do they have sufficient internal energy to do battle on several fronts at the same time or to have more than one enemy at a time.
When I was an active bishop I took a leaf from Jody’s book. At the annual convention of the Diocese of Newark, to which about 800 people were in attendance, I made sure we had one major debate on the agenda, on a subject about which people had strong feelings. We advertised these issues widely prior to the convention and sometimes even got major media coverage because the media always seems to think a conflict within the church is newsworthy. Among the topics debated were: “Is physician-assisted suicide a moral option for Christians?”; “Why can women not serve as priests and bishops?” (They can now, but not in the seventies when I became bishop); “How can the Bible be called ‘The Word of God’ when it affirms slavery, justifies war discriminates against women and calls for the execution of homosexual people?”; “Is corporal punishment of children ever appropriate parental behavior?”; “Should the church offer a liturgical service to mark a divorce and the end of a marriage or make the sacrament of marriage available to its gay and lesbian members?”
What people never seemed to recognize was that the Diocese had no real power and that the purpose of these debates was not to settle this issue by majority vote. What mattered was the quality of the debate, for a moving debate is the process in which the consciousness of the people was raised. When these delegates returned to their local congregations they would in turn make the debate occur again in 130 different settings. It also meant that once great amounts of emotional energy got expended in this debate almost anything else that came before this gathered assembly would pass with little or no controversy. Jody Kellerman was correct; people do not have the ability to fight more than one major battle or have more than one enemy at a time.
I have thought about this principle a great deal as I have observed our nation’s political behavior in recent months. There is a sub-stratum of anger in our society today and a desire to blame someone for the perceived malaise as this nation climbs slowly out of the jaws of a very deep recession. Irresponsible political operatives, ever seeking that wedge issue which will propel them into power, have mined this anger in search of their own success. The symptoms of the problems facing this country are easy to attack. The national, state and local debt is high, brought on by two as yet unpaid for wars, the necessity of rescuing major banks, insurance companies and automobile makers from financial ruin, which would have plunged the entire world into a great depression. In addition to these traumas jobs are fragile, spendable income is down and the house valuations, in which the biggest percentage of most Americans' wealth is located, are today at rock bottom levels. With anxiety so high and tempers so short our politics, reflecting the national mood, have become frightening and insecurity is rampant. The national tendency is to look for victims to blame. George Bush, the target in the last election, worked for a while, but he has faded from sight. President Barack Obama is a new, convenient and available target.
As the first African-American president, he is a visible receptacle into whom we can pour our still repressed racism, hiding it under the camouflage of worrying about such things as “the expansion of government” or the national debt, topics which worried us not at all in the earlier and greedier years of this century as we lowered taxes, extended drug benefits and fought wars with no consideration of what these actions did to the nation’s economy. Today, however, anyone who is in power is destined to be the recipient of this anger, making it difficult for members of either party to run for office as incumbents. There is a great need to project that anger outward. Adolf Hitler once rose to power during the great depression by funneling German anger into a white hot hatred of the Jews. Arab states like Saudi Arabia maintain political power in the family of the House of Saud by focusing their schools, and thus the lives of their children, on fundamentalistic Islamic fury against “the godless infidels of the west.” Previous Republican administrations maintained power by hyping the color-coded alerts against “the terrorists” and when the terrorists began to fade, they began to attack “activist judges” and gay and lesbian people who were beginning to demand equality and justice. If it is true, however that one can only fight one major battle or have only one enemy at a time, these scattershot negativities were not emotionally satisfying so this nation’s anger began to look for a popular enemy who could be identified as the cause of our fear and distress, around which all could rally. That is exactly what I see happening in the United States at this moment.
Look with me at the evidence! Homosexuality and homosexual persons no longer have much appeal as a target for our anger. Our consciousness and sensitivity on this subject has grown, making attacks on the homosexual quest for equality seem like little more than primitive ignorance, making this battle look antiquated. In recent weeks the California vote in favor of Proposition 8 was struck down by the courts. The long and detailed opinion of Judge Vaughn Walker actually ridiculed the arguments of opponents as little more than undocumentable fear and irrationality. The court, for example, discovered no evidence that opening marriage to gay couples would weaken marriage, destroy family life or that children raised by gay couples would be somehow impaired. The fascinating thing was that there was little public reaction to this opinion. Conservative political voices were almost mute, rising only to the level of whimpering. Clearly the nation has moved on. Yes, that opinion will be appealed until it reaches the Supreme Court where it could even be reversed, given the conservative makeup of that court, but it almost doesn’t matter. All that reversal could do is to postpone the inevitable. That battle is over. Marriage will ultimately be declared to be a constitutional right, guaranteed to all citizens regardless of sexual orientation. Lost causes do not drain hostility!
The next revelatory moment came with the surprising announcement that Ken Mehlman, who ran the Bush campaign for the White House in 2004, was a gay man. Please remember that the 2004 Bush campaign, with Mehlman’s support, put gay marriage on the ballot in closely contested Ohio to maximize the evangelical vote and thus win a second term for Bush. Now this man has indicated that he is working for gay rights and equality in marriage for homosexual people! Once again, it was a one-day story, hardly commented on even by the 24-hour news channels that maximize ratings by hyping every story to “end of the world” proportions. Negative energy is still rampant in our country, but homosexual people are no longer its target.
Where has it gone? Look at the passion aroused by the plans to build a Muslim community center two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. This project has been called by one politician “a dagger aimed at the heart of every American mother.” Newt Gingrich began to campaign against “Sharia Law,” as if anyone was trying to impose it on this country. Then there was the story of the deluded preacher with a 50-member church in Florida, who was going to commemorate 9/11 by burning the Quran in a public ceremony. We no longer have the time to hate homosexuals because we are busy hating Muslims and Islam. Some even try to tie them to President Obama by hinting that he is himself a Muslim and an illegal alien.
It is a scary time in American history and I hope our sanity and equilibrium will return before we vote some of this crowd of crazy politicians into office. So long as we can hate an external enemy we do not have to face such things as our own corporate greed, our insensitivity to the poor and our suppressed racism. We can have only one major battle or enemy at a time. So it is now “hate Muslims” time in America. Someday maturity and wisdom will be restored to our national discourse. We wait for that day!
~ John Shelby Spong
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Announcements
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