It is modern to think life can be lived to one side...
It is modern to think life can be lived to one side
of subjects, such as poetry or geology.
It might not be reasonable.
In "Reason, Faith, and Revolution," Terry Eagleton points out
"[Richard] Dawkins makes an error of genre...
about the kind of thing Christian belief is....
Life for Dawkins would seem to divide neatly down the middle
between things you can prove beyond all doubt, and blind faith.
He fails to see that all the most interesting stuff
goes on in neither of these places….
It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster
we can forget about Chekhov.”
I was doing something similarly odd.
When at 14 my love for nature crashed into the way I read the Bible,
Following young-earth creationists,
I found a way around the “materialist” rejection of the “supernatural”
but didn't question whether Genesis spoke in materialistic terms.
One need not conclude the first chapters of Genesis are symbolic
in the empty, modern sense
to question whether Moses meant to write a natural history
in the modern sense.
One can also read Genesis 1 as poetic cosmology
without denying some kind of historicity;
just like calling a tortoiseshell cat beautiful
without describing it's genetics
does not deny the cat's existence.
"It was not the tension between the inerrancy of scripture and the scientific evidence that first caused me to question Morris. It was discomfort with materialism."
ReplyDeleteThis may be my favorite quote on your whole blog. There is too much mystery which materialism has not satisfactorily explained (to which I would add positivism as well).
You write: "My wonder at existence made me uncomfortable with the idea that the tangible is all there is."
Which is an obvious crossroads.
One road is to conclude materialism and positivism will, given enough time, eventually explain everything.
Don't worry about the gaps now, have faith in science.
The other road is to conclude there is, like many other people claim, something more. Not a replacement reality, but a complete reality. Have faith in these people's testimony (of which the Bible is one).
"The Bible's argument is not that there are not false visions or even that the messengers are normal but that they witnessed something real."
The Bible isn't an argument at all. Very little of it is written to non-believers. Somewhat ironically, the Bible may be one of the earliest scientific books. Read side-by-side similar writings in Mesopotamia or Egypt at the same time, its hard stance against superstition is unmistakable. The sea isn't a god, nor did a god lose a battle to create the underworld, or the earth formed from the carcass of another. The sun and moon are not objects of worship, they were put their by the Author of all to serve a purpose (in this case the marking of time and the importance of memory). In fact, everything has been given a purpose, not so that humans can gather food to sacrifice to lazy gods who don't want to get it themselves anymore, but so humans can know and wonder about creation and its Author. Your "wondering" at existence is the same wonder the Bible describes. The Bible relates the reality and God Israel knew, and when we read it, or when we talk and share with other Christians, we confirm this is the same reality we participate in. Sure, one person's claims are subjective. A well-organized group, we might suspect conspiracy (though what anyone had to gain from such a conspiracy before AD 350 or so is debatable). But countless different people, completely unorganized, with little to gain, experiencing the same truth of reality, and confirming that the Bible captures that too...? Well, that degree of external verification starts to sound a lot like science. (Certainly similar to the science of love).