Sitting in the sharing of the feeling

Last night we were talking about prayer - how it works, whether God changes his mind, how we can influence God, how prayer changes God, when to stop praying for a situation, how to pray well.  We came up with lots and lots of questions and very few answers, but I remembered one thing in particular.
One friend said it can be hard to know what words to pray for a situation, and that sometimes all you can do is be with the situation before God, sharing the knowledge of the situation with him.  She was relating this particularly to praying for another person who was suffering.

My friend described this as 'sitting in the sharing of the feeling'.  I love that phrase.  Sitting before God, sharing in yourself what the other person is feeling, being with them, and with God, in the suffering.

Sitting in the sharing of the feeling.

Bruce Almighty

I’ve seen Bruce Almighty several times, and at last have got round to what I’ve wanted to do since first seeing it: writing down all the different things it covers with respect to religion, faith, God etc.  I think it is quite remarkable how much is crammed into this 90-minute film.  Here is a list of the themes and ideas that crop up (no particular order or structure to this list).

The contrast between the first and last scene in Bruce’s attitude to his job and life in general

A reference to Chariots of Fire– a film about conflict between faith and profession

Bruce’s wife’s name is Grace, and she embodies that to him

Bruce’s initial view of God as either ignoring him completely or as a mean kid with a magnifying glass burning ants

God sending signals/signs/messages through mundane things such as pagers or road signs

Tongue in cheek jokes e.g. omni-presents, ‘smite me o mighty smiter’, many references to the number 7

God saying that his light is bright for most people who live their lives trying to hide from him

God’s complete knowledge of Bruce

The big questions of the film are how to handle ultimate power and how to make someone love you without affecting free will

Other themes include abuse of power and how and why God does or doesn’t answer prayers

Biblical references such as walking on water, parting red sea

The futility of using power for one’s own life and petty gain

The problem of God just saying ‘yes’ to all prayers

Everyone wins the lottery (classic prayer) one cause of the mass riot

Music includes ‘God-shaped hole’, ‘You’re a God’, ‘What if God was one of us?’

Even God can’t force love – Bruce tries

‘No matter how filthy something gets, you can always clean it right up’

‘Since when does anyone have a clue about what they want?’

Promotes everyday miracles e.g. ‘a teenager saying no to drugs and yes to an education’

Bruce’s life changes as he starts ‘being the miracle’ (helping people rather than just himself)

Reconciliation with arch-rival Evan

Honesty of Grace’s prayer vs token flippancy of Bruce’s, then Bruce’s true prayer

Bruce’s surrender to God’s will finalises the change in him, even via a road accident

The only time Bruce asks what God wants him to do, God says he wants Bruce to pray – about whatever he really cares about

Bruce understands what it means to see people through God’s eyes

God's action in the world

Note: this is a very early, initial, not-entirely-thought-through post on something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and something that, for me, is the biggest theological question. So it might not make complete sense. As always, please comment.

The other night I was driving to cell and was running late. I hit a red light, and a friend in the car joked that maybe God changed the light to red at that moment to slow me down and keep us safe.

This got me thinking, not for the first time, about how God acts in the world. It seems that there are two ways of thinking about this:
1. God intervenes at certain points in the world – to change a traffic light, to deflect a bullet, to heal an illness etc. God sometimes points his finger, says ‘zap’, and something happens. I call this the zap model.
2. God is continually doing stuff in the world, most of which we don’t notice. This is the continual model.

Biblically, there are many cases of God intervening by the zap model – mostly miracles (see here for a more detailed discussion of miracles). The main problem with the zap model is that it suggests that a lot of the time, God isn’t involved in the world. This contradicts the idea that God is constantly involved in the world, sustaining creation (e.g. Colossians 1.17).

The continual model makes more sense in my head, because it includes the assertion that God is always, without fail, involved in the world, never sitting back or ignoring it. Unusual events like the parting of the red sea can cause a bit of a problem to the continual model, but could possibly be explained by an argument along the lines of “God knew it would be needed so he set things in motion well beforehand so that, when Moses needed the sea to part, the ‘natural’ (bad word, sorry!) storm that caused the parting occurred at exactly the right time”.
Personally, it impresses me more that God could have to foresight and genius to know things that will be needed and set up millions of ‘coincidences’ a day to provide people with what they need. As has been argued before (can’t remember where), the real miracle is in the timing.

I definitely subscribe to the continual model, because of its consistency and its emphasis on God’s constant involvement. But I think it has one massive weakness – it makes prayer very difficult. The zap model makes prayer easy – you just pray for something, and hopefully God zaps. In the continual model, God is already doing loads of stuff, so it’s harder to get a clear picture of how and what to pray, and how it will make a difference, especially if God has already set lots of things in motion.

(This also touches on the question of why we pray – is it primarily to change God’s mind/plans about something, or is it primarily because we need to, to acknowledge his power and our dependence on him?)

Maybe the best model is some sort of hybrid of the zap and continual models. Anyone got any thoughts on all this?

International God

We currently have a French guy called Fabien staying with us. He’s over here to work with our church for a couple of months. One of the most exciting things about this is hearing him pray in French. It’s a great reminder that God isn’t English and that he understands other languages, even if we don’t.
It reminds me of when I went on a mission to Norway to work with a church out there for a couple of weeks. I particularly remember singing Ancient of Days, with the Norwegians singing in Norwegian and the Brits singing in English. It sounded amazing. Spine-tingling. I love it when Christians from different countries unite together.

God of the Gaps/Problems with Miracles

I have recently started reading Dan Brown’s ‘Angels and Demons’. The content of this and Brown’s other books are the subject of different blog, but something on page 43 prompted me to write this blog, which has been brewing in various forms for a couple of years.
Here’s the quote from page 43:
“…all questions were once spiritual. Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion have been called on to fill in the gaps that science did not understand. The rising and setting of the sun was once attributed to Helios and a flaming chariot. Earthquake and tidal waves were the work of Poseidon. Science has now proven those gods to be false idols. Soon all gods will be proven to be false idols.”
Dan Brown is spot on here, that science is steadily proving all gods to be false idols that do not really exist. The problem is that Dan Brown is countering a doctrine that isn’t true. It’s known as the God of the Gaps.

Taking the Christian God, the God of the Gaps theory says exactly what Dan Brown implies: there are some things that science can explain, and there are some things it can’t explain. The things we can’t explain rationally – the ‘gaps’ in our understanding – that’s where God comes in.
For example, we can’t explain how Jesus turned water into wine, so it must be ‘a God thing’.
Going back further, as Dan Brown describes, we couldn’t understand earthquakes, so people supposed they must be the gods at work. And there is the problem with the God of the Gaps theory – we can now explain earthquakes, so we are left with one less thing to attribute to God. What if we discover a mechanism by which water and wine can interchange? That ticks another phenomenon off the God list and adds it to the science list. Eventually, the God list will be empty. Error.

There are a few things to say here:
What is a better theology than God of the Gaps?
What are miracles, and do they really happen?
What should Christians do when science explains miracles like the river of blood in Exodus?

God of the Gaps
There are many problems with the God of the Gaps theory – I’ve already explained that as the gaps shrink, so does God. But more fundamentally, the God of the Gaps theory assumes that there are two explanations for phenomena – science and God – and it plays the two against each other, as if a phenomenon can only have one explanation.
Here is an example, stolen from John Polkinghorne – “why is the kettle boiling?” There are two explanations. The first explanation is “because the electrical energy in the element is being converted to heat energy in the water, which causes its temperature to rise to boiling point”. This is completely true. The second explanation is “because I want a cup of tea”. Also completely true. The first explanation provides the how of why the kettle is boiling, and the second explanation provides the why. While slightly simplistic, I find this a useful distinction of the complementarity of science and theology. Science explains how, theology explains why. Both are needed, and each complements the other.

What is a better theology than the God of the Gaps? Colossians 1: 17 is. Colossians 1:17 is one verse that refers to a better theology. It says “in him (God) all things hold together”. It’s saying that God holds everything together. He created everything, and continually maintains it. Without God, the universe would simply cease. He is continually involved in it.

God of the Gaps: God is responsible for anything that science cannot explain.
Colossians 1:17: God is responsible for everything, science explains how it works.

God is the creator, but he hasn’t finished creating – he creates new organisms every day! He doesn’t do with in a genie-esqe zap, but he is nonetheless creating things. Science explores and explains how he does this.
The God of the Gaps is a silly theory. But unfortunately many Christians seem to hold to it, especially when it comes to evolution (you should have known I would mention the E word soon!).

Obviously some Christians completely reject evolution – this isn’t about them. Some Christians, such as myself, fully accept evolution, including human evolution. But it seems to me that most Christians are somewhere in the middle – many seem to accept evolution to an extent, but not fully. Comments like this abound: “yeah, I believe in evolution, but I don’t think humans evolved like other animals – I think God made us specially”, or “I believe in most of evolution, but there are some gaps that just seem to big – God must have been involved there” (see what I did there?!), or “I’m happy with evolution, but how did life actually start in the first place – God must have given it a kick-start”, or “evolution is great, but what about the big bang – something must have started the big bang, surely – isn’t that God?”.

Do you see what’s going on here? People are accepting bits of evolution, but pointing out gaps in the scientific understanding, and putting God in there! This is God of the Gaps! What happens when science explains the origin of life (it has already dealt with human evolution and many other evolutionary ‘gaps’ such as the evolution of the eye)? That’s right – God gets squeezed out.

God doesn’t just fill in the gaps, like some sort of divine polyfiller! God is the bricks, the cement, the plaster, the polyfiller, everything!

Miracles
I hate that word. Miracle. It’s caused me problems for at least two years. It’s one of those rubbish words that has a very loose definition and no-one really knows what it means. Here’s dictionary.com’s definition:

“an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause”

In other words, it’s something that we can’t explain, so we attribute it to God. Or, in shorthand, a Gap. A miracle is anything that happens in one of those Gaps. This is clearly not a good definition, because as the Gaps close with increased scientific understanding, events cease to be defined as miracles.

A brief scan of the bible seems to reveal that the word ‘miracle’ doesn’t appear much as a noun – it’s usually an adjective, for example ‘miraculous signs’. A sign that is miraculous. As opposed to a sign that isn’t miraculous.

A sign points to something, and it makes sense that a miraculous sign would point to God. The thing that makes it miraculous is that it inspires awe or wonder because of its unusualness, and that it points to God. Many disastrous things are unusual, but don’t inspire wonder or point to God. Miraculous signs, or miracles, do. Whether we can explain how the event occurs doesn’t matter, and shouldn’t come into the definition of a miracle. A ‘miracle’ is no less amazing and glorifying to God just because we can explain how it happens.

A brief side note on miraculous healing – sometimes amazing healings are said to be miracles. If the healing is unusual, inspires awe and wonder, and points to God, I would say it is a ‘miracle’. But remember Colossians 1:17 – God is continually involved in creation. The real miracle of healing is that the human body can heal itself. Usually this happens gradually, but sometimes it happens in an instant and we call it a miracle. The fact that the body can heal itself anyway should maybe be called a miracle.

The Colossians 1:17 thing is very important. We shouldn’t think of these miraculous signs as a Genie-God going ‘zap!’ to change something. God is already continually involved in his creation, sustaining and maintaining it.

The purpose of science is to study the natural world. Science has produced ‘theories’ and ‘laws’ to describe how the natural world works. Science describes God’s creation. Sometimes things happen that don’t fit the normal pattern – such as water turning into wine.

This raises big questions, such as:
If God is constantly maintaining creation, why are there things like earthquakes at all?
Would God really set up the natural world to follow laws and patterns and then just change things sometimes?
If God doesn’t ‘zap’ the world to change things, but is already in control of stuff, then why and how should we pray for miracles?

Question 1: Why are there natural disasters?
Answer 1: This is really a separate topic, but essentially: just because God is in control of everything doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen. Even using the Zap model, where God sometimes intervenes before sitting back for a rest, doesn’t answer this question – we could ask of the Zap model “why doesn’t God Zap to stop earthquakes happening?” The reality is that even though God is sustaining creation, creation is still broken, so natural disasters happen. This does not mean God causes natural disasters. It means that, for the moment, he allows them to happen. He could Zap them away, but then where would he stop? Should he Zap all murderers too? Thieves? Liars? It would, of course, remove free will (another debate for another time!).
Creation is broken. God still does amazing things through his creation (we’ve already mentioned healing), but the creation isn’t perfect. But one day he has promised it will be, so this isn’t a permanent state of affairs.

Question 2: Miracles break God’s neat creation ‘pattern’ – sounds like a random God, not the God of order from Genesis 1 – where’s his consistency?
Answer 2: Remember that scientific laws and theories are descriptions of how creation works. Creation is there and science describes it rather than science makes the rules and creation has to follow. Some (such as John Polkinghorne) comment on the intrinsic unpredictabilities in nature – scientific laws we use to describe the world are not infallible, and sometimes, very unusual things happen. Miracles are not a question of science, like ‘is it possible’. This is God – it’s possible! It’s a question of God’s consistency. But God is consistent as a person, not as a rule like gravity. God is not constrained by scientific laws, and even scientific laws allow room for unusual events. God continually sustains nature, mostly in a way that we can describe using science. But sometimes, more remarkable things happen.

Question 3: If God’s sustaining it all, where does that leave prayer, for example for healing?
Answer 3: Again, this is really another topic, and I’m not yet ready to write properly about prayer, but a few points can be made. Firstly, the bible clearly indicates that prayer is good and prayer works. Secondly, it is also clear that God isn’t the only power in the world, and some (NOT all) illnesses are caused by other spiritual powers (demons), so we should pray against these. Third, with healing, I’ve mentioned that the body heals itself – sometimes we just need God to speed it up a bit. Fourth, we shouldn’t pray against the facts. For example, if we see a fire engine, we shouldn’t pray ‘please don’t let the fire be at my house’, because the fire has already started (somewhere) and nothing can change that. It is better to pray for safety and lack of damage etc. The topic of prayer, including why God sometimes says no, is for another time.

Explaining miracles
I watched a TV programme a few years ago about the plagues of Egypt, explaining how each could have been caused by ‘natural’ causes. This article from The Times says a similar thing. How should Christians respond when events we think are ‘miracles’ turn out to have a normal, natural explanation.
Well firstly, we should point out the error of implying a nature vs God battle. Colossians 1: 17! God sustains it all. Whether science can explain something or not doesn’t change the fact that God is always present. ‘Miracle’ should not be defined by its lack of explainability, but by the facts that it is unusual, inspires awe and wonder, and points to God.

A few points to end with
There is no causal explanation of miracles in the bible. There is no formula, only the power of God.
In the New Testament, in addition to ‘sign’, the words ‘power’ and ‘wonder’ are used. Power – focuses on the cause (God). Wonder – focuses on the effect. Sign – focuses on the purpose.

The Shack

If you haven’t come across it yet, The Shack is a novel by William P Young, which has been top of the NY Times bestseller list for about 6 months and is well within the Amazon top 100.

It’s a story about Mack, a father of four, set about 3 years after his fifth child, Missy, was brutally murdered and her body left in a shack in the wilderness.
Mack receives a note from ‘Papa’ (his wife’s favourite name for God), inviting him back to the shack for a meeting. Although not particularly religious, Mack decides to return to the centre of his Great Sadness. There he meets God, in all three of his/her forms. Most of the book is about Mack’s conversations with Papa, Jesus and Sarayu (the Spirit) and his process of healing and forgiveness.

The book covers a huge range of theological topics but probably centres on the problem of suffering – Mack finds that he cannot trust a God who allowed his 4-year-old daughter to be killed.

The reaction this book has received reminds me of that received by Steve Chalke’s The Lost Message of Jesus a few years ago. Some people have been revolutionised by it, and Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, says it’s as good and important as The Pilgrim’s Progress. Other people slate it completely and hold Young as a heretic.

My reaction?

Well, I think it’s quite good. It certainly says a lot of good stuff in very clever ways, and it made me view certain aspects of God’s character and my faith in new ways. If you haven’t come across some of its teaching before, it could probably change you completely. I had come across a lot of it before, but there was still new stuff there which interested and challenged me. I would definitely recommend it because it will almost certainly broaden your thinking about God, teach you new things about him and feed your relationship with him.

Having said that, of course he is a heretic. Yes, the book is good, but yes, there’s also heresy in there. But so what? I doubt there’s ever been a book written (Bible excepted) that doesn’t contain some heresy. People, chill out a bit! Books are written by humans, they’re going to have errors in them! But that doesn’t mean all books are worthless! This book (and Chalke’s) are really good and well worth reading. Neither book is perfect, so you have to read them carefully, take the good stuff, and dismiss the misleading bits.

The problem is, it’s harder to do this with a novel than with a normal theology book, because a novel such as this can be very subtly misleading. But I guess that’s part of the fun.

Seriously – The Shack is a good book, and I’d definitely recommend it. Not everything in it is spot on, but most of it is safe. Enjoy!

Some things God didn't create

People often say God created time, and was there before time. But isn't that an illogical statement? The concept of something being before time is a paradox. The idea of 'before' is to do with time, so it is not possible to be before time, it is only possible to have always been.

I don't think God created time. I think that God and time have always existed.
Other things that have always existed would include love, existence, and goodness.
God created every creature, but some concepts, such as these, can't have been created. Existence has been there for as long as God has existed, he can't have created existence because he would have had be exist to do that! Equally, God has always been good and loving (and just and faithful and merciful and holy etc.), so these things cannot have been created by him. Instead, they have always been, just like God has always been.

Rob Bell – Sex God

In case you’re wondering, Sex God refers to a book by Rob Bell. It’s about 2 things: sex and God (and spirituality and marriage etc.). Most of it is quite good, but there was one thing I thought was crazy and one thing that was brilliant.

The crazy thing.
He bases the book on his idea that sexuality is our awareness of our disconnection (from God, each other, the world) and all the ways we go about trying to reconnect. Therefore, according to Bell, all human interaction and relationship is sexuality. I just don’t buy that. He say it comes from the fact that sex is from the Latin secare, meaning to sever or disconnect. Maybe the word does have this etymology, but to infer fro this that all relationships are about sexuality is going a bit far I think.
I would be happy to say that our sexuality is one way we try to go about reconnecting with people, but not all our interactions are sexual. I am a Sally, not a Harry.

The brilliant thing.
Bell describes the covenant between God and Israel and parallels it with the covenant between a husband and wife. He covers intimacy, commitment, rules, celebration and exclusivity. It is easily the best writing I have ever read on marriage and sex. This chapter (chapter 7) alone makes the book worth the price. It’s just awesome, and it’s probably the one bit of the book I’ll re-read again and again.

The rest of the book was good. Not earth-shattering, but well worth the read. Amazon has it for £5.24, or you can borrow it from me for free.

Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins eh? Who doesn’t have an opinion on him? Christians can’t stand him, because he attacks them, theologians can’t stand him, because he’s a lame theologian (being a biologist and all), scientists can’t stand him, because he twists scientific theories to try to disprove the existence of God and discredit any form of religion.

Actually, what I just said was a gross generalisation. It’s true that Christians do generally despise Dawkins, as do many theologians. However, while some scientists think he’s a complete idiot, others don’t have a problem with him. But the generalisation I just made is exactly the sort of think Dawkins does in his latest book, The God Delusion. This is the first of his books that, by his own admission, actively sets out to convert people from religion. And it is full of sweeping rhetoric, backed up by incomplete and often simply incorrect facts and logic. He seizes on any piece of evidence that supports his doctrine, and ignores anything else. Not a great scientific method really. A large proportion of the book is Dawkins citing various problems with certain religious beliefs or practices, which leads him to conclude that all religion is completely evil. Classic.

I could write for hours on the errors in the book, but it’ll be more interesting to highlight some of the things Dawkins does well. By the way, I’ll assume that if you’re religious, you’re not creationist. That’s a whole different blog, one I’m not inclined to write at the moment. So I’ll assume you might believe in God, but you are also happy with evolution is some form. So, the three things Dawkins does well in the book…

After the introduction, Dawkins spends a chapter critiquing the respect that society gives to religion. This is something that I think has been nudging away at my subconscious for a while, but it wasn’t till I read The God Delusion that my thoughts were clarified. Dawkins points out that religious faith is treated as if it is ‘especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect’. We feel happy to argue and debate heatedly about Labour vs Conservative, war in Iraq vs no war, Chelsea vs United, Windows vs Macinthosh, but as soon as we talk about religion or faith or even the origins of the universe, people seem very concerned to give a huge amount of ‘respect’ to others and are much less inclined to engage in intellectual debate.
You can’t defend uttering public statements such as ‘homosexuals will burn in hell’ by claiming freedom of speech (because that doesn’t include hate speech), or freedom of prejudice, but you could claim ‘freedom of religion’. Religion trumps all!
The bottom line is that religions, like any other theories, philosophies or schools of thought, should be (but generally aren’t) critiqueable and open to debate, and should, frankly, be able to defend themselves without whining ‘but you’re insulting my beliefs’. Can you imagine such a phrase carrying any weight in any other argument? But where religion is concerned, people seem to think we have to give beliefs an extra-wide berth, no matter how ludicrous or even evil they may be. Religion and faith must accept that they, like everything else, must be open to scrutiny.
This is Dawkins’ first point, and I wholeheartedly agree with him.

The second of Dawkins’ ideas with which I agree is that many classic arguments for God’s existence are rubbish. Dawkins easily dismantles Aquinas’ five proofs, the argument from beauty, the argument from personal experience, and Pascal’s Wager. None of these hold water.
Unfortunately he also tries to tackle the argument from scripture, claiming that the New Testament is in all likelihood historically very inaccurate. Big error there. He doesn’t give any sources, so I couldn’t follow it up, but various pieces of evidence, summarised here, indicate that they are in fact accurate.
Because he skims over this issue, he manages to completely ignore the argument from Jesus, which is possibly the only argument that he could not defeat (more on this later).

The third, and last, thing Dawkins does well is the science. He is a very good evolutionary biologist, and in chapter 4 (idiotically titled ‘Why there is almost certainly no God’), he explains how the argument of irreducible complexity is flawed. Irreducible complexity is the idea that certain biological structures, such as the eye, could not have evolved bit by bit, because they require all their many parts to function – to remove just one would stop it working, i.e., it is irreducibly complex. Dawkins brilliantly explains the flaws in this argument, from an evolution point of view. It’s clear that when he’s talking about what he actually knows about, he is very, very good. By the way, he also explains that evolution is not based on ‘chance’, as is commonly thought, but is actually a highly systematic process. For this argument alone everyone should read this book. It will make you understand how evolution, a concept that in the scientific world carries as much weight as the existence of the atom, really works.
Incidentally, for anyone who goes on about how the theory of evolution is ‘only a theory – it hasn’t been proved’, I would like to point out that, in science, a theory is ‘a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena’ (Dictionary.com). This does not mean it hasn’t been proved. It’s just the way scientists talk. It’s like the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity, particle theory, the theory of evolution. Just different bits of science.

Now we come to the central theme of the book. Dawkins’ writing goes something like this:

Anything that has been created is less complex than its creator. A creator cannot make something more complex than itself.

So far so good. As Dawkins says, the horseshoe doesn’t make the blacksmith. Next…

The universe is incredibly complex. Some people try to explain its existence in terms of a creator (God). But this God would have to have been created by something even more complex. And this God-creator would have had to be created by something even more complex. Where does it end? The problem of complex existence just escalates and is never answered.

Yep, that’s it. Dawkins’ proof that God doesn’t exist is the classic seven-year-old playground line ‘so who made God then?’
I have to admit that my flabber what slightly ghasted. The might of one of England’s greatest scientific minds can come up with nothing better that ‘so who made God?’
Of course, the problem is that Dawkins approaches the problem from a completely scientific point of view, and doesn’t allow for the idea that there could be things that are not physical and material. He makes no allowances for the supernatural or for an eternal God. The discourse continues…

Darwinian evolution by natural selection, however, provides a mechanism whereby more complex things evolve from less complex things. Evolution, not God, is the explanation for the universe.

This is very interesting. As a sincere scientist and a sincere Christian, I completely agree with Dawkins that evolution explains the diversity of life in the universe. I agree with him that, even though physics has not yet produced evidence of how the universe itself started, and chemistry has not yet produced evidence of how the first lifeform came about, this does not discredit the fact that the production of the universe and everything in it could one day be explained by scientific theory.
However, this does not prevent the possibility of a supernatural world, angels, demons, or God. The best evidence for the existence of God is not that the world exists. The best evidence is Jesus (I told you we’d come back to him – now we’re here).

It has been said that the historical figure of Jesus as recounted in the (historically accurate) gospels and other ancient sources, could either truly be God, or else insane or a con man. Not strictly true. He could also be genuinely mistaken (though this might come under a mild form of insane). But he certainly wasn’t just a good man or a wise teacher. He certainly was both those things, but not just them.
The sheer volume of crazy miracles that happened around him, the revolutionaryness of his teaching, the number of prophecies, over which he had no control, that were fulfilled in him, the fairly weighty evidence pointing towards his resurrection, the way he treated both his friends and enemies, all add up to a lot of evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed God on earth.
This can’t be scientifically proven, like the fact that there is a sun, but I reckon it’s a lot of evidence. Enough to stop anyone conclusively saying ‘there is no God’. Jesus provided enough evidence to at least make a question of it.

In the end, when Dawkins sticks to what he knows about, he’s great. But he really doesn’t know enough about religion, or maybe he just ignores vast amounts of it. If you’re not religious, The God Delusion is worth reading for the science, but not for the attacks on religion. I’m sure you can some up with better evidence against God if you wanted to. If you are religious, it’s worth reading, again for the science, but don’t get too frustrated or offended by the rest of it. It’s better to laugh at Dawkins than take him too seriously.

"Get the gospel in there"

A week or so ago I was talking to a Christian friend about my job and he asked me “what do you say when people say ‘so you’re science teacher and a Christian?’ ”. I said that I hadn’t faced that situation yet, but that I’d probably throw it back in their face with something like ‘yeah, aren’t you?’ or ‘yes, it makes more sense to me than anything else’. My point was that I’d try to make them explain why they thought the two might be inconsistent and then try to answer their queries.

My friend then made some sort of comment along the lines of “and then you’d swing it round to get the gospel in there”. What he meant was that he’d expect me, as a Christian, to manoeuvre the conversation to a point where I can hit my colleague with “God-loves-you-so-much-he-sent-Jesus-to-die-for-you”. At the time I let it pass, but it really grated with me. I have a problem with the idea that the aim of every conversation should be to talk about Jesus’ death on the cross.

Why can I not have an intellectual discussion about science and religion without trying to turn it into a preach? And who is to say that my colleague would not encounter God through that conversation, without any mention of Jesus?

The standard ‘four-point gospel’ or ‘two ways to live’ seem like very narrow views of the gospel. What about the good news of God’s love expressed through his creating and maintaining of the world, something that would flow far more naturally from a discussion of science and religion? Or what about bringing my views on abortion to a prep-room discussion, without discussing Jesus? Or trying to explain God’s love in the midst of reports of another natural disaster? There may be times to explain what I believe about Jesus, and what his crucifixion and resurrection were all about, but I don’t think I should be trying to bring that into every conversation.

I can think of little that would put me off God more than some Christian who tried to twist every conversation into a preach about my sin and Jesus death.

This approach also has overtones of seeing colleagues as projects to be worked on rather than people to be loved. The main command of God is to love, not to preach or convert. Sometimes (rarely) loving someone will involve telling them about what Jesus was all about (e.g. four-point gospel, though personally I’m not fan of that). More often it will be nothing like that. It will be helping them out with a task, giving them a gift, listening to their concerns. “Love is a verb”.

When it does come to ‘converting’, it’s about helping people move closer to God. We’re not called to make converts, but disciples – and disciples keep learning. They don’t just step across a line and stop, they charge right across the line and keep running. Therefore Christians should be focused on where they and others are going rather than where they are now. It’s not about getting a confession of faith, or repeating a prayer. It’s just about helping people understand what God is like and what he’s done (and that is not limited to the cross, though it includes it).

The central point of a person’s walk with God may not be the point when they say they believe (I didn’t even have this moment!), but the point they first experienced someone giving them something for nothing, or when they stood on top of a mountain and saw the beauty of creation, or the time they went to church at Christmas and were challenged with a different thought about baby Jesus, or even when they lie on their death-bed and look back on God’s faithfulness.

So if I’m asked how I can be a Christian and a scientist, I probably won’t mention Jesus, and I might not even mention my God. I might just explain how I see no contradiction between science and religion, or I might describe my worldview of the natural and the supernatural. But that might be exactly what my colleague needs. They may have been preached Jesus at dozens of times and know all the theory but have hit a stumbling block with science. Then surely helping them past that would be much more appropriate than hitting them with two ways to live again. Our conversations should be natural and our lives focused on expressing God’s love in all sorts of ways. And we shouldn’t narrow down God’s work to a three day period 2000 years ago.

God's will is a playground

Plagiarised from Ruth Perrin, June 2008

Some people think of God's will, the plan God has for them, as a tightrope. You have to be really careful to stay on, otherwise it's a disaster.
I think God's will is like a playground. It has a fence, and there are limits. Outside the fence it's dangerous as you could get hit by a car. Inside, there's slides, roundabouts, see-saws, swings - you can play on what you want. Sometimes God might say 'that's enough sliding for now, have a go on the swings'. You might enjoy some bits more than others, but you can have a go at different things. As long as you stay inside the fence, you're safe. But you don't have to walk a tightrope.