How Not to Defend the Bible

The Bible is pretty central to the Christian faith. Without it, the Christian faith - as we know it at least - would not exist, because everything we know about Jesus and the early church and about the relationship the Jews had with God before this comes from its pages. It is perhaps not surprising then, that the Bible comes in for considerable attack from those who have a negative view of our faith, and who see it as their mission to discredit it.

Richard Dawkins famously declared in, "The God Delusion", that, "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Leaving aside for the moment, the controversial reference to "fiction", as you can see, Dawkins doesn't pull any punches! Dawkins has a very clear agenda here, which he at least has the decency to be honest about, and the resulting rant above is by no means a balanced or fair assessment of the Old Testament!

Having said this however, there are still elements of some of these things to be found in its pages, parts of the Old Testament have been used to justify some pretty terrible things, and many honest seekers have been put off the Christian faith by some of the stories found there. Marcion in the 2nd century famously concluded that the God of the Old Testament was a different God to the one that Jesus spoke about. This was a powerful idea which persisted for several centuries in opposition to mainstream church teaching.

How do we explain these apparent contradictions? How for example, do we explain why a supposed God of love, would order his people to engage in genocide? Various attempts have been made, including the following:

1. Morality was somehow different back then. I've never really totally understood this argument so I may not be doing it justice, but it has something to do with everything changing at the death and resurrection of Jesus. By atoning for sin, Jesus' death and resurrection made grace and mercy possible in a way that it hadn't been previously which is why the Old Testament portrayal of God often seems so harsh and uncompromising compared with the God of love that we're more familiar with today.
   
   I can see some sense in this, but to me it's an inadequate explanation. I still can't imagine the God I love and worship ever ordering his people to engage in the wholesale slaughter of men, women and children (however deserving the victims might have been!). Apart from the obvious damage inflicted on the victims, this has a massive de-humanising effect on the perpetrators and sets a horrendous precedent for future generations!
   
   
2. It is not the Bible, but our imperfect view of morality that is at fault. Yes, God appears to do some terrible things, but they only look terrible because we don't understand all His reasons. If we understood everything perfectly as He does, we would see that His actions as portrayed in the Bible were really all just and good after all.
   
   I am prepared to accept that in some cases this may be true. I cannot rule out the possibility (remote as it seems to me right now) that it could turn out to be true in every case and that all my discomfort with God's portrayal in scripture may eventually amount to nothing. In the mean time though, there is just too much there that seems too contrary to my own God-given moral compass, for me to just pass it all off in this way. We must always be willing to accept that our understanding - intellectual and moral - is limited, but if something flies in the face of everything that seems to be good or praiseworthy then in all good conscience we surely cannot and should not be trying to excuse it?! 

To me there seem to be 3 remaining possibilities:

1. God is not really good - at least not completely and consistently. 
2. There is no God, so nothing the Bible says about him is true anyway. 
3. The Bible is an imperfect witness to God's behaviour and character. 

1 & 2 are ruled out for me, for all sorts of reasons that I don't have room to discuss properly in this post, which only seems to leave me with number 3.

This is an extremely difficult and controversial conclusion for most evangelical Christians to accept (significantly less controversial than 1 or 2 however!). In fact I think many would claim that you cannot believe this and still call yourself an evangelical Christian. For me though, the Bible doesn't have to be 100% true and accurate in every detail in order to be God-inspired (see 2 Timothy 3 verse 16). I am prepared to accept that it is written by people, who weren't always in possession of all the facts. The Bible is about God speaking to and interacting with people, who are the product of their culture and circumstances. Their circumstances, lives and culture are shaped by this process and God's character, heart and purpose are revealed, but these events are recorded by imperfect people who remain - to a greater or lesser extent - the product of their times.

We must not forget however, that we are also the product of our time, and that our reactions to the text will be influenced by our own, non-universal values and assumptions, coupled with an imperfect understanding of the period in which it was written. For this reason, none of us are in a position to pass supreme judgement on it, but we must be continually weighing it, allowing it to speak to us, and allowing God to use it to challenge our own hearts and prejudices. This doesn't mean we have to agree with everything it says though, or to defend as perfect something which occasionally does seem at odds with so much that we claim to stand for.

The Fear of Science

A few days ago I caught part of this programme on Channel 4: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/genius-of-britain/episode-guide/series-1/episode-5

Near the end they showed a two-way interview between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking.  During the interview, Hawking asked Dawkins why he was “so obsessed with God”, which I found quite amusing! I was also interested though, to hear Dawkins’ response. Dawkins said (paraphrased – I can’t remember his exact words) that science was all about asking questions and trying to understand things and he felt that belief in God got in the way of this because it encouraged people to use God as an explanation for anything they couldn’t understand.

To be honest I think this is a bit weak as many Christians are also scientists and this doesn’t appear to stop them from doing what they do.  In fact, the belief in an ordered world, which stemmed from a belief in a God of order, underpinned much early scientific research.  I do often wonder though, whether for many people, religious belief does sometimes present a barrier to honest scientific enquiry. I certainly think this is the case for many Creationists (in the narrowest sense of that word). It seems to me that hard-line Creationists have a very strong pre-defined view of what the world should be like, so that any “science” they employ is bent entirely towards proving this picture, rather than towards investigating what’s actually out there with an open mind.

On the flip side however, I think Dawkins actually does something very similar with his hard-line approach towards natural selection. He’s been quoted many times for saying that Darwin made it possible for him to be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist”. Dawkins doesn’t like mystery – he doesn’t like the unexplainable – and he believes that natural selection is able to explain everything about how the biological world – including humans – came to be the way that it is. But although most scientists (excluding Creationists) now accept that evolution has happened, there is no universal agreement on whether natural selection is the sole cause. Many (if not most) scientists would be happy to accept that there is still a significant amount of “mystery” around our understanding of what exactly has taken place.

For some Christians though, there can be a significant amount of fear involved in uncovering this mystery. What if we do manage to understand everything? Where would this leave God? If God is in the gaps in our understanding, where does He go if the gaps disappear? What if the things we discover disprove everything we thought we knew about the world?

First of all I think it’s extremely arrogant to assume that we will ever know or understand everything. For every answer we find there are - and always will be - a lot more questions. And if God is real, as Christians believe, then the mind of God will always be beyond ordinary human investigation.

Secondly though, what if the things that we discover disprove what we thought we knew? Well then, we should take it like men (or women)! Christians should have nothing to fear from the truth – it’s the foundation of our religion! If the truth we discover isn’t quite what we thought it was then obviously we have some learning to do! If God is real then we have nothing to fear from discovering His Universe. We should always be prepared to be surprised by God – and also by the truth!

The Gaia Hypothesis

Watched this fascinating program a couple of days ago which my wife had recorded: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s04qp
Unfortunately it's no longer available on iPlayer.

It's all about James Lovelock, who first postulated the theory that our whole planet effectively functions as a single interdependent organism. For example, animals and plants do things that effect the climate, which in turn makes it possible for them and for other organisms to survive.

One of the things that interested me was Lovelock describing the reception his ideas received. He said he was very pleasantly surprised by the strong positive reaction he got from religious people.  He mentioned a certain bishop - who I think he said was the bishop of Birmingham at the time - who was then shown on camera talking about how Lovelock's ideas dovetailed with his own concept of a benevolent creator God. Lovelock said he didn't share those ideas, but for Christians he thought it gave them a useful way of thinking about his theories.

By contrast, the reception he got from the scientific community was a lot more mixed. Richard Dawkins in particularly was (and I think still is) extremely anti-Gaia, and as I watched Lovelock explaining the theory I could see why. It's very hard to see how such a complex interdependent system could have evolved all by itself by a process of natural selection - which is indeed Dawkins' primary objection to it.

In response to some of these criticisms, Lovelock developed his ideas to explain how he felt natural selection could in fact account for Gaia, although he hasn't managed to win over all of his opponents.

The thing that struck me most about Dawkins' reaction, was how strongly wedded he is to a particular point of view, which makes it impossible for him to consider anything that doesn't line up with that. There's an incredible arrogance in his approach - the assumption that science must be capable of explaining everything, which leads to the conclusion that if something isn't (or even doesn't appear to be) susceptible to that kind of explanation then it must not be a true thing!

Maybe though, this is to some extent true of anyone who has a strong emotional investment in a particular point of view? I can think of plenty of religious people this applies to!

What do you think?