Binary Oasis

I’ve wondered recently why God didn’t give us a clearer view of Himself. That is, why is it that the revelation that we have is a revelation that seems to be clouded at times? Why couldn’t we have a more lucid account of God, and why couldn’t we be given a Bible that has complete uniformity, no matter what manuscripts are used? Why are some passages hard to understand, and why are some passages and some doctrines easy to warp into heresy?

I think that I may still struggle with these ideas for some time, but John Piper’s two sermons entitled “Why God Inspired Hard Texts” provide a plausible explanation. Transcripts and audio are available here and here, or google “Why God Inspired Hard Texts” if the link is broken.

We are constantly bombarded by news and messages, yet as a general rule we don’t employ the logic tools necessary to analyze these messages. Too often (and perhaps by necessity in response to information overload) we skip logical analysis and instead suscribe to the conclusions of “trusted” sources without careful analysis of their reasoning (if any) to get to the particular conclusions.

The podcast “LSAT Logic in Everyday Life” is a good primer for the tools that we should be employing. I’ve listened to just a few of these so far, but it seems that they are well-reasoned and well-produced.

I’m catching up on my Science Friday podcasts, and I found this one on pigeons to be very interesting. Ira Flatow interviews Andrew Blechman, author of “Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird.” Most of us are familiar with the reasons to not like pigeons, but this book gives us some reasons to like them (and perhaps be inspired by them?). Pretty interesting stuff.

With the release of Richard Dawkins new book “The God Delusion,” there is a lot of new discussion concerning the intersection of science and religion. Here are some recent developments.

Science Friday did a segment titled “Religion and Science” back in August 2006. In it, Ira Flatow interviewed two relatively prominent scientists. Francis Collins led the public effort to decode the human genome and is the author of the book “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” Owen Gingerich is a Professor Emeritus in Astronomy and History of Science at Harvard University and is the author of the book “God’s Universe.” Both scientists are “believers.” Here are some highlights of the podcast:

* Francis Collins: “You can’t reason yourself all the way to faith; you can get there to the sense of finding that faith is more plausible than atheim–and I would argue that atheism is the least rational of all choices because it assumes that you know enough to exclude the possibility of God–but ultimately one has to make a decision about whether to believe or not.”

* Francis Collins: “I fear Intelligent Design is a ‘God of the gaps’ theory which puts God in a box and makes, in fact, ultimately over the course of time, a theory that is likely to collapse before too many years go by and in the process does no damage to science, but actually may do damage to faith.”

* Owen Gingerich draws the distinction between “efficient” and “final” causes. He gives the example of the different ways to respond to the question “Why is the water in the teapot boiling?” Science can answer with an explanation about molecules becoming excited and accounting for the relationship of temperature, air pressure, etc. On the other hand, the person boiling the tea might instead explain the “final” cause with the answer “Because I want some tea.”

* Should Intelligent Design be included in science classes that discuss the origin of life? Owen Gingerich says “You can’t replace the teaching of evolution in biology classes with intelligent design, even though at some level, both may be true.”

* Francis Collins notes that “40% of working scientists believe in a personal God to whom one may pray in expectation of an answer.” That was a really surprising statistic to me, so I did a bit of research into that. Apparently it is based on a survey in the journal Nature in 1997 (restricted access).

More recently, Science Friday interviewed Richard Dawkins. Some highlights:

* Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe that Mother Teresa was a good person. I don’t have any real context as to his perspective, but I imagine that most or all of his objections are covered in the Mother Teresa entry on Wikipedia.

* Dawkins: “If there was [sic] [a God], it would be a tremendously important fact about life and the universe.”

* He discusses the generally accepted idea that we cannot explicitly prove the existence of God. He criticizes believers with the analogy of people who believe a small teapot is revolving around the sun, but it is too small for us to see with our current scientific methods. He says, “You cannot disprove the teapot, but that doesn’t mean that you should regard the likelihood of the teapot existing as equal to the likelihood that it doesn’t exist.”

* Joe Palca (the host of this particular segment) notes that a number of “miraculous things” happen in biology, including potassium ions that flow through a cell membrane wall when the sodium ions are excluded even though the sodium ions are smaller. Another example: an entire human being is created from a fertilized egg without so many mistakes that deformed humans are consistently produced. Dawkins rejects designating these things as “miraculous,” though he does have a very interesting response: “I have made the case that [the event in the primeval soup that led to the first self-replicating molecule] could have been a very, very, very improbable event, possibly the sort of event so improbable that it occurs on only, say, one in a billion planets, and there are so many billions of planets in the universe that it has to have happened on some of them, and here we are sitting on one of them, so it had to be ours.”

The debate rages on.

John Piper preached this sermon (entitled “Love One Another For Love Is Of God”) a couple of decades ago, though it provides perhaps the one of the best and simplest explanations of the apparent inconsistencies between God’s sovereignty and Man’s responsibility.

I’m probably quoting too much here, but here is a block of text from the transcript in which he develops a helpful illustration:

Consider an analogy: suppose that you were about to have a baby and God came to you and said, “This baby is a gift of mine and I promise that she will live to be 100 years old.”

So when the baby is born you take her home from the hospital, but you don’t feed her. Your husband says, “Why aren’t you feeding the baby?” And you say, “Because God promised me that the baby would live to be 100 years old. So if God is going to make sure that the baby will live 100 years, I don’t need to feed it.”

Well, this husband is perceptive and says, “How do you know that God didn’t mean that he would see to it that the baby gets taken care of till she is 100 years old? How do you know that God won’t let an irresponsible mother drop dead so that he can fulfill his promise through a mother who will feed this little girl?” No answer.

Now let’s apply the analogy. God comes to us in the Bible and says to us that knowing God always results in being a loving person (4:8). He promises in effect: I will see to it that those who know me, those who are born again, will be loving people. So somebody (in their merely human wisdom) suggests, “Well, we don’t need to feed these children anything to help them love. We don’t need to give them the commands and warnings and promises from the bread of God’s word, because God promised to make them loving.”

To which we should answer, “How do you know that God didn’t mean that he would see to it that all the necessary, love-producing food would be supplied to his children? How do you know that God didn’t mean that if I won’t feed them with what they need to be loving, then he will remove me and put someone in my place who will give them what they need? Why do you assume that God’s promise is meant to be fulfilled in the most unnatural way possible?

So the most natural Biblical answer to the question, Why command a person to love who can’t help but love? is that God intends to fulfill his promise through the use of commands. God has ordained to keep us alive in love by the regular feeding of his word. And the word of God contains warnings, promises, and commands. The commands are part of the food that the Spirit has provided for the nourishment of the saints, so that our love will thrive.

The Spirit of God fulfills the promise of God by use of the Word of God. And if I try to short-circuit the way God works, he will simply remove me if necessary for the sake of his children. He will fulfill his promise. And he will use his commands and warnings and promises to do it. So it is not inconsistent for John to teach in verse 8 that all who know God will definitely be loving people AND to command them in verse 7 to be loving people.

Text and audio are available here, or search http://www.desiringgodradio.com if the link breaks.