Things I Believe Inspite of Professor Hawking

Here is a list of things that are presently bothering me:

1.  I have Katy Perry's "Hot 'n Cold" song playing in a loop inside my brain.  That by itself would probably be enough to drive anyone to drink.

2.  There is nothing in my house to drink except for mini Pepsi cans.  Now normally, mini Pepsi cans = <3, but I devoured two fruit tarts for dessert and am now plagued with dietary guilt.  While I understand that diets are mostly made of evil and that society's urging of women to conform to a narrow and, in many cases, unrealistic standard of beauty is oppressive and unjust, that somehow doesn't stop me from becoming overly self-critical and body conscious.  Sometimes I am a truly terrible feminist.  Which is why I'm sitting on my couch feeling more sinful for indulging in pastries than I ever do for gossiping (aside: how bad a sin is gluttony, btw?  Is there a consensus on that one?) and wishing I had a Smart Water--the only type of water, I am convinced, worth drinking.  Yes, I am also a truly terrible environmentalist.  Don't let the Prius fool you.  Oh!  And speaking of my car, it just occurred to me that I may have extra water stashed in there.  BRB.

3.  And...the mission was a success!  So I guess we can nix the last complaint.  I have my water, and I have also done a rare thing by pouring it into a glass because the bottle was open, and I'm not certain who its last owner was.  Our friends and family tend to drink from bottles and leave them everywhere, and I am a bit cautious of germs.   It's not that I think the glass will save me from a lovely case of oral herpes, but I feel better drinking water tainted with what could be foreign saliva from a nice cup.

At least it's dripping conveniently into the sink.

But that doesn't count as my third annoyance.  That one's a freebie.  My third annoyance is that the light fixture above my sink is inexplicably leaking.  The steady tattoo is driving me bonkers.  Plus, it's just weird.  There's nobody living above us and there aren't any pipes up there and it hasn't been raining, so I'm not sure where the water's coming from.  Hopefully, our landlord will be able to fix it tomorrow morning, and I won't have to get rained on inside my kitchen.

If you squint you can see the water beading from the blue wire.

Anyway, now that that's all out of my system I can concentrate on the task at hand.  In my last post I chronicled some of my doubts about orthodox Christian belief.  Having the Bible's authority thrown into question meant I had to reevaluate almost every aspect of my faith.  Without the Bible, what could I know about God or the world or myself?  Without the Bible was it even possible to be a Christian?  I wrestled with these issues, and I'm still wrestling.  But for now, I'm going to enumerate the things that I've decided I do believe and can believe intellectually even without the backing of Scripture.  Here goes:

1.  There is a God.

My husband, Brian, has a friend and one-time debate partner (let's call him Drew) who was once an avowed agnostic (and probably a would-be atheist).  After the two spent some time debating the existence of God for the fun of it (because debaters apparently like nothing more than a three hour argument) Drew walked away from the discussion a Deist.  His reasoning was that he couldn't get around the need for a primary mover.  God, or at least some kind of eternal force, was a logical necessity.  To my mind, Drew had this much exactly right.  The universe, as we understand it, demands an Uncaused Cause--the ultimate, first source of mass and energy, the spark that set off the Big Bang.

This necessity always seemed to me very obvious, and in my mind it rendered the atheist position untenable.  As Drew pondered, how does one get around primary mover?  The ever-popular atheist response to that question--"we don't know yet"--has never seemed very convincing to me.  However, I should mention that this week news broke that one of the world's most famous scientists, Stephen Hawking, has declared God to be unnecessary to generate the universe.  You can read up on the story here.  Disclaimer: I would make quite a hopeless scientist.  Abstractions confound me, and I am allergic to all kinds of higher math (higher = anything beyond algebra).  That said, from the little that is related in the article, Hawking's charge sounds more than a little spurious to my untrained mind, and the science-y people I've consulted about this topic agree with my assessment (which is a sort of minor miracle.)

According to the article (and this may or may not be an accurate portrayal of Hawking's actual argument), Hawking believes the spontaneous generation of the universe was made possible through gravity.  And, um...yeah.  I don't so much get that.  Let's say gravity is capable of generating stuff like atoms and energy and...whatever else the universe is made up of.  The question is, if in the beginning there was nothing, how was there gravity?  If I'm recalling my elementary science correctly, gravity can't assert itself in a vacuum.  Gravity acts on mass.  The more mass something has, the more force gravity exerts.  Where there is no mass, there is no gravity or at least gravity is rendered meaningless.  Therefore, gravity requires stuff.  I think.  Maybe I'm wrong.  But if I'm not, then the idea that gravity spontaneously generated all of the universe's matter from nothing seems a little ridiculous--a chicken or egg kind of conundrum.  So ridiculous, in fact, I find it hard to believe that this is actually Hawking's hypothesis.  He is probably working from some quantum theory of gravity that I'll never be able to wrap my mind around, and his special gravity probably has the properties of being able to tell the future, reanimate corpses and turn plantar warts into fluffy kittens.

All that's to say I'm not yet even nearly convinced by Hawking's theories, such as they have been related to me so far.  Once his book comes out and he expands upon his ideas, I might change my mind.  I'm not exactly counting on it, though, because his theory of imaginary time (a construct Hawking uses to avoid the Big Bang singularity, and honestly the name tells you just about everything you need to know) remains one of the most mystifying and outlandish ideas I've ever considered.  And that's saying a lot.

2.  God cares about people.

The existence of God was as far as our Deist friend, Drew's, logic was able to take him.  As he saw it, the need for some force to get the ball rolling was inescapable.  That this force should be personal or loving wasn't necessary, and so on this point, he remains an agnostic.  For my part, once I had accepted the necessity for God as creator, I saw plenty of evidence that justified the view that God cares about humanity.  The anthropic principle, for instance, points out the many ways the universe and earth in particular seem finely tuned for human life.  The strength of gravity, the tilt of earth's axis, the position of our solar system, and a thousand other details make life ideal for mankind on earth, and had any one of these details been off by even a fraction, humanity could have never survived.  (Hugh Ross also postulates that the position of earth in a darker part of the universe is what makes it possible for us to obtain knowledge of the universe.  If we were situated somewhere nearer to a bright star, the light would obstruct our view of the universe and impede our inquiry into the universe's origin.)

Is this an airtight case for intelligent and deliberate design?  Of course not.  It could be sheer, stupendous luck that accounts for it.  Or maybe the luck was just inevitable if multiverse theorists are correct and there are billions upon billions of galaxies just like ours sprinkled through various universes (although why it is perfectly rational to believe in a million universes nobody has ever seen and yet irrational to believe in an intelligent Designer is beyond me.)  One was probably bound to produce life, right?  And maybe even in our own universe there are other forms of intelligent life that were able to evolve under conditions different from earth's but every bit as specific to those species' needs.  It's at least possible.

But keeping in mind that I'm more given to art than science, I can't help but feel intuitively, when I contemplate nature, that humanity has been lavished with love.  It's not just that earth provides what is sufficient for our survival but that it provides it so beautifully.  Nature, it seems to me, is more breathtaking than it needs to be.  That we should have such a range of colors even in places where few eyes could ever see them, or that certain elements should sparkle when the sun hits them, that there should be great mountains and deep oceans and towering trees and vast deserts--surely all of this is more than just necessity.  It's a masterpiece and an astonishing gift.  I cannot doubt that a God who would craft the cosmos with such exquisite loveliness and ensure that our senses could perceive the beauty and that our souls could be inspired by what we perceive is a God of love.  My reasoning might not convince a strict logician, but I don't see how anyone who has every been moved by a poem like "Tintern Abbey" could help but feel the truth in it.

Maria got it.

3.  Jesus Christ is God

This belief is probably the toughest one to justify to a skeptic.  I'm the first to admit that it sounds a little crazy.  Can I, in all seriousness, believe that a God-man died and literally rose up from his grave, thereby proving his deity?  Yes, I think I can.  Now, my reason for believing in the existence of God is scientific.  My reason for believing in a personal God is more or less intuitive.  My reason for believing that Jesus is God is both historical and psychological.  That a man named Jesus existed and was crucified somewhere around 30 A.D. is generally accepted by religious and secular scholars.  That his grave was found empty is probably likewise not in very much doubt.  I should think news of a risen Jesus wouldn't carry much weight if detractors could bring out his rotting corpse for public viewing.  Where opinion starts to split is when it comes to what happened to Jesus's body.  Most secularists accept the explanation that it was stolen or misplaced.  Christians believe it walked out of the tomb and eventually ascended into heaven.  Surprisingly, when I consider the history of early Christianity, I find the second option the most believable.

The story of early Christianity is one of intense persecution.  Christians were hunted, imprisoned, tortured, fed to lions and executed in sundry terrifying ways.  Being a Christian was not a glamorous thing.  The people at the forefront of this movement were Jesus's disciples--the people who were in the best position to ascertain the truth of Christ's godly status.  They claimed to have seen Jesus's risen body for themselves.  They claimed to know that Jesus was in fact God's son.  And then they died for this belief.  This is something I can't ignore.  Most of us aren't willing to die for things we're sure are true--I'd probably swear up and down that 2 + 2= 7 if it would spare my life--and we certainly wouldn't die for something we knew to be a lie.  That would take a rare kind of fanatic narcissism or lunacy.  Sure, one man in a million might be deranged enough to hold on to his lie even if it meant his destruction, but nearly all of Jesus's disciples were martyred for their Christianity.  They couldn't all be villains, could they?  Villains who urged people to love their enemies and take care of widows and orphans?  Seems unlikely.  And the same defense will answer the charge that they were all crazy.  Really?  All of them?  Crazy enough and convinced enough to die?  Highly improbable.

So what am I left with?  History and human experience suggests to me that the disciples believed what they told the world about Jesus being God's son.  Unlike founders of other religions, the disciples did not have a whole lot to gain by leaving their lives behind and spreading Christianity.  It did not offer them wealth, political clout, comfort, power or even a harem of nubile teenage wives.  It offered death, and death is what they got.  The disciples believed that Jesus was God, that He died and rose again, and they, of all people, were in a position to know.  Their lives were their testimony, and I can't dismiss the strength of it.  If they weren't liars and they weren't all madmen then they must have been telling the truth (thank you, C. S. Lewis).  It's not so strong an argument that you can't find a way around it if you want to, but for me it's convincing.  So in the end, even taking the Bible out of the equation, I find Jesus inescapable and Christianity the most intelligible answer to my most profound questions.

At What Price Inerrancy?

Two years ago when I wrote my first blog, despite the confusion and questions my church situation stirred up, I was sure of an awful lot of things.  Between then and now I've lost my grasp of many of the principles I thought I knew and in which I once (seemingly at least) unequivocally believed. 

I was raised up in a very conservative faith--biblical inerrancy, complementarianism, creationism...you get the idea.  And I was pretty much a hardcore proponent of all of these principles at one time or another (with the exception of unilateral female submission to male authority because I came out of the womb a feminist).  Yet, as I got older and learned myself some education, one by one the bastions of fundamentalism have come under scrutiny and failed to assert themselves as capital T Truth.

Biblical inerrancy has probably been the toughest struggle.  Growing up I was taught to believe in the deity of Christ/seven day creation/salvation by grace through faith, etc. because the Bible told me so.  As long as I believed that the Bible was God's inerrant Word, faith was relatively simple.  The hard part was trusting Scripture, the rest was gravy.  Nevertheless, eventually even trusting Scripture became too great a leap for me.  Doubts began to niggle (and I hate when things niggle--it's terribly uncomfortable), and I started to question the existence of Satan as anymore than a literary construct (realistically, how could God ever haven an opponent?  It would be a farce.  And why would an angel who had been in the Presence of the Most High be that stupid?) and from there I went on to question Adam and Eve and the Tower of Babel--the stories that sound as mythical as any pagan account of origins I've ever read.  Until finally, I realized that if I were asked to stake my life on my belief in these things, I wouldn't be able to do it.  I didn't literally believe that magical trees and a talking snake converged to help damn humanity.  I just didn't.  And this was a problem.

Now I realize that there is nothing logically impossible about Eve being deceived by a Satan-infused serpent and thereby getting barred from the Tree of Life by flame-wielding Cherubim who have since disappeared from the planet or been interdimensionally transported elsewhere.  That this all actually took place is within the very large realm of possibility, I know.  It's just that on a personal level I find it tough to swallow.  But my issues with Genesis, even if my suspicions are accurate, do not render the Bible meaningless or even error-filled.  I certainly can, as C. S. Lewis did, believe that God used myth in the Old Testament to teach true principles even if the stories themselves did not literally play out.  It just makes it harder to trust what I read or to trust that it's possible to interpret Scripture accurately with any degree of confidence.  Perhaps that kind of discernment takes more wisdom than I have.

So my faith has undergone a pretty radical transformation.  I won't call it a regression because I'm not sure it is one.  It could be that in all my doubt I am closer to the truth than I ever was when I had an answer for everything.  But the loss of my spiritual touchstones has been a painful journey and a lonely one.  I haven't been able to find a guide book for the fundamental revision of my view of Scripture, which, let's face it, is the lynchpin of Christian theology.  The Christians I know read the Bible literally.  The atheists I know of read it ironically.  Neither one of those options really works for me at the moment.  I guess I could try to read the Bible symbolically, incarnationally or haphazardly, but I don't know how to do any of that.  I'm sort of on my own, and that's a scary state to be in.  I'd be pretty darn hopeless but for God.  With God, though?  Anything is possible (yes, even talking snakes and magic fruit).  With God maybe even an overthinking, underperforming wretch like me could find the ubiquitous happy ending told of in legend and song.  And believe me, ubiquity has never sounded so good.