Peter Taylor is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Astrophysics and Relativity at Dublin City University. When he is not geeking over black holes, he is a husband, and a father to three beautiful girls. I sent Peter a rambling email about my intellectual forks that are rooted in my doubts and insecurities. As someone with a scientific background, I am preoccupied with reconciling my faith with my science; the way I think and solve problems is owed to both. Peter kindly and mindfully responded to my email and I would like to share the response. He touches on linguistic inflation (the devaluation in meaning of our spiritual experience as a result of spiritual exaggeration in our speech), objective assessment vs subjective conjecture, and intellectual idolatry. Personally, the responses charged and enlightened me. One of my thorns of doubt in my faith is when Christians (including myself) invoke God to explain things that are not yet understood. I cringe at statements such as "it was definitely God" or "God said to me" or any similar flippant God-invoking statement. I too can find these statements unpalatable. It has, unfortunately, become customary to be "loose" with our language when referring to spiritual encounters in particular. I call this linguistic inflation. It is rampant. I am as guilty as anyone else. I do, however, consciously try to use language that is accurate. For me, this is not a matter of skepticism about another's encounter, nor is it a merely academic matter, I believe language matters. For example, if we continue to innocently exaggerate spiritual experience by linguistic inflation, then we will settle in our unconscious minds that we are satisfied spiritually and ultimately stop hungering for deeper relationship. I cringe because, on my part, I don't feel I am being careful enough and I am guilty of spiritualizing my conversations. I feel that in our little minds as we try to understand God, we can innocently invoke this "god of the gaps" in conversations for issues we haven't carefully considered. I think this feeling is owed to the fact that I believe that our belief and God-things can also be derived from an objective assessment, and the invocation of God I previously spoke of, can be grossly based on subjective conjecture. You are raising an interesting point here about the nature of knowing anything. My first teaching on apologetics would always be to address this subject, part of it is understanding that all knowledge stands on unprovable assumptions. In essence, the only logically satisfactory objectivity must come from without not within. This already introduces a coupling between what you call objective assessment and something transcendental. But there are aspects of the world we live in that are more amenable to what you refer to as objective assessment than others. The scientific method, for example, is an attempt to gain an understanding of our world that is (in some sense) objective. It is successful (in explanatory and predictive power) at this for certain types of systems. It is less reliable for explaining and predicting relational interactions. Or more fundamental questions about purpose, meaning, love etc. So if we believe that Jesus' claims about who He is are true and that this requires a relational response, then there will inevitably be a complicated interaction between how we frame this interaction intellectually and how we respond emotionally/spiritually etc. And depending on any individual's make-up, we will all react differently. It may seem that things are hopelessly subjective then, and we are all making it up, but the point of the Scriptures is to not only reveal God, but also to place constraints on what we can claim is representative of Him. So there are objective constraints that bound this subjective freedom. You can think of this like a consistency condition. BUT, this skepticism can be rooted in unbelief (call me out if you will), or rooted in my scientific background - where the invocation of the god of the gaps is an unforgivable act and where unanswered questions are a discomfort. I feel this insecurity can sometimes lead me to value objective assessments and shrug off the supernatural. I can be deceived into thinking scriptures can thrive through brain power or a well-formed argument, especially when I want to relay the gospel to my unbelieving friends. Hence the intellectual idolatry. This may be rooted in many things. Unbelief, intellectual idolatry, intellectual snobbery (arrogance), misunderstanding of the nature of scientific/objective knowledge. I have no doubt at various levels indulged in all of these. I think in developing our apologetics, calling out the dangers in conjecture and justifying our belief in God with our minds, we should also address the danger of falling into intellectual idolatry and therefore, missing the whole point. Agreed. I like to think of Truth, Power and Grace as being essentially coupled for a healthy faith. Divorce Truth from Power and you get a religion based on intellectual idolatry, as you point out. Divorce Truth from Grace and you get a religion based on self-righteousness (or idolatry of self). Either way, you got yourself a form of ugly idolatry. I pray I don't fall short on this. One final note. I don't necessarily think that apologetics (in this intellectual sense) is primarily an offensive tool, though it may be. But it may be primarily a defensive tool. Keep in mind that the word apologia means "reasoned defense". It may be that the real value is that we are a body who understands the implications of our faith in various arenas of life and that we are able to articulate these implications to those who challenge our perspective. Those who have no intellectual framework for understanding their faith may be rocked to unbelief when challenged with purported evidence to the contrary. This happens all the time by the way, an estimated 51% of US undergraduate students who claimed to be Christians in Freshman year have denounced their faith by the time they graduate.
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Rea Zwane"I am just trying to live it up with a big God" Archives
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