Great minds think (A previous experience)

Some years ago I attended a public lecture in the packed historic, Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford.  I do not doubt that the string of degrees, academic awards and degrees-to-be present would have put my meagre attainments to apparent shame.  Starting from that deserved humility I became increasingly incredulous as the evening wore on (wore having a special reference given the uncomfortable seating).  For this was a lecture postulating the Multiverse.

It is always good to reduce complex ideas to simpler ones and if I have a gift to offer the Great Minds of Oxford it is perhaps this as I seek each Sunday to convey deep truths to people coming off a week at the shop, office or rest home.  So the summary goes something like this.

1. The Universe exists, so it must be explicable.  
2. The existence of the Universe is proving inexplicable to natural science (too much complexity, not enough billions of years etc.).
3. There must therefore be ever so many other 'Universes' and we've happened in the one that works.  [As Uni = one we have to change it to Multi = many]

The minor hole in this wild speculation would be the existence of a Creator which easily explains the complexity.  What a laughable idea . . .

Or to put it another way: although this blog post appears to contain thoughts and words in the English language it has not been written by a Writer and is simply one of an infinite number of blog posts and you have simply happened upon the one that randomly looks as though it was written.

Great minds think, but thinking is never enough.

The 18 Billion Question

It was just another Quiz question. Daytime TV is full of them as best I can see (which is not very much)

 

'How Long ago was the Big Bang?'  Was it

 

a) 14 Billion Years

b) 32 Billion Years

c) 191 Billion Years

 

I have increasingly felt that quiz masters will need to move away from questions about the Bible.  Such is the common ignorance that a question like, Who in the Bible was put in a Lion's Den? is liable to get any answer - The Pope,Nelson Mandella, Robinson Crusoe.

 

In this brave new world of scriptural ignorance what better substitute than the Big Bang?  An absolutely verifiable, without doubt certainty that materialist science has given us.  And the answer is . . .

 

 

Well I knew the answer was 14 billion - perhaps because I am very sceptical that 14 billion really is the answer.  The man questioned was doing very well to this point.  He looked perplexed.  He guessed the middle one (a method for all multiple choice questions).  He was wrong.  He shrugged his shoulders at the answer - '"No idea" - and moved on to the lead singer of Bananarama or whatever.

 

This was interesting.  Not because he didn't know, but because he didn't care.  His answer was crazily wrong, the other answer bogglingly wrong but it made no difference.

 

You see, once you attribute the world to the god of Longevity it does not make any difference how many billions of years, trillions of years, you estimate it as.  However long ago the supposed Big Bang was, and whatever happened before it, the only question that gives Beginning any meaning is,

 

"Who was speaking at the time?"



Ex Nihilo

Only God is from everlasting to everlasting.

Consequently everything else has an origin.  God is that origin.

Everything, contrary to immediate instinct, does not therefore come from something.  Everything comes from nothing [ex nihilo].

Everything must necessarily come from nothing.  This is deep observation, that there was a First Cause that, well, wasn't.  Faith believes that Everything comes from nothing by the work of Someone.  The First Cause is God.

On Sunday evening I was explaining the way that this apparently philosophical truth is profound in understanding how God can do the impossible.  More than that - there is no real difference (I didn't venture to say this in a sermon though) - between what we call possible and the apparent impossible.

We define the possible by reference, for example, to a baby coming from a sperm and an egg.  The virgin birth therefore seems impossible.  Or we consider a dead body to be past life (more inevitable than merely possible).  Resurrection on the other hand is impossible.

But if all life - my life, your life - derives ultimately from nothing and if Someone has made that so? Well, then there can be no impossibilities for that Someone.  The things I think are possibilities are but the outer reaches of one great ex nihilo Impossibility.  In Him we live and move and have our being.

Charles Simeon, the great Cambridge divine, was wise enough to take this great truth and apply it to the most desperate pastoral moment of anyone's life. On his deathbed he informed his visitors:

"I find infinite consolation in the fact that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Why, if he can bring all the wonder of the worlds out of nothing, He may yet make something out of me!"

Alexander

The last of my Sabbatical books I want to comment on is this one. Alexander is an evolutionary biologist who is also a professing evangelical Christian and as you might imagine this book is an attempt to marry those possibly unweddable positions. Does he succeed?

Calamitously not, I'm afraid. I have little doubt that Dr Alexander is something special within the assumptions of his workaday discipline, but in mine - Biblical interpretation - he falls woefully short. His chosen method of interpreting Genesis 1-11 is to wonder whether anything actually means what it plainly says.

This is a legitimate academic approach. We call it liberalism. I can understand it, though I do not believe it it is right and I do not agree with it. I can also understand the Dawkinsian rejection of Genesis as myth or indeed gibberish. That, too, is consistent. The problem comes when a man says, "I believe in the Bible as much as anyone" (Alexander addresses his readers as evangelicals who are just like him faithwise but just not as knowledgable) and then sets about the Biblical text as though it is basically incomprehensible whilst the Theory of Evolution is received Truth.

No reader of the New Testament - I can include Richard Dawkins here I think - seriously doubts that Jesus and the apostle Paul regarded Adam and Eve as the first human beings and derived deep significance from that yet Alexander accepts the idea that not only were they not the first - they were in the later half of the years of the human race. (Of course while his dating of human origins makes sense in his biological framework it makes much less sense when compared to population growth or the development of language - his generations of early humans must have spent aeons of generations sitting watching the trees without reproducing or talking [Did they have souls? Does anyone, comes the question]). His problem is that he does not doubt scientific speculation, he doubts the Bible instead.

Should you read the book, I commend one of many demolitions of it at this link where David Anderson points out the problem I cited above, and, if you have time to read it, a lot more.

So what are we to do with a Genesis account that, even in its own terms, begs many questions (e.g. evening and morning with the Sun not created, creatures designed for a bloody, not paradisical world) when set against chains of leftover genes from our monkey years?

This is what we do.

We genuinely, completely, unequivically accept that the words of the Bible, including and comparing those in Job and the Psalms as well as Genesis, tell us what God wanted us to know for sure about origins, about His creating work. Another word for this material is the TRUTH. It is what God decided we need to know. It is accessible to the child and, by other means, even to the illiterate. We can know where we came from, something of how, and why there is two-gender marriage, a seven day week, clothes, different species and humans are special but not good. We learn why a last Adam was needed.

Then, wherever we learn anything for certain in the natural sciences we see how that relates to that truth, because it always will. Nothing is greater than truth.

But where there are speculations in cosmology, where (as with leftover gene sequences) there are reasonable guesses that might, like natural selection, prove eventually to be inadequate or wrong, we place them in a sidetray that might say 'Not Important'. They can never tell us more than we already know.

Of course by contrast it is a desperate quest on the part of atheists to explain origins; if they could prove the universe is a Mega Accident faith is dead. But they know they will never prove it; origins, creation, will always involve leaps of faith one way or another. They just hope that most people, especially in education, will leap their way.

Dr Alexander has simply leapt their way too.

Beginning

Genesis 1:1 in the original Hebrew reads;

(At/In the) beginning created/filled God[Elohim] the heavens/skies and the earth.

Like most Hebrew translations there is, as you can see a different order and several alternatives. Who'd be a translator!? My point however is the simplest and first word of all. Beginning.

For millennia this was taken as insignificant compared to the next two words 'created' and 'God'. However, it turns out to be as important a word as any in the Scriptures. Why? Because in ongoing scientific discovery it has finally become inevitable that the planet and indeed the universe had a beginning. Previously this could only be assumed (or revealed!).

The significance of this can be seen in observation of Professor Stephen Hawking,
Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.

John Maddox, former editor of Nature magazine bewailed the idea of a beginning because it gave creationists 'ample justification for their beliefs.'

But you do not need to be a supposedly clever person to know that if there once was nothing and now there is something, then the secret isn't a selection process but an intervention.

And the question then becomes, whodunnit?

Lennox

Without doubt two of my Sabbatical highlights were listening to a sermon and, on another day, a lecture by John Lennox. He is a Mathematics Professor at Oxford University and applies his knowledge of things like algorithmic incompressibility and other less-than-everyday categories to the Science and Religion issues raised by the likes of his fellow-Professor Dawkins.

He convincingly shows that DNA, by its very complexity and randomness, makes natural selection impossible as an explanation of humans (and a lot else). In a famous experiment monkeys were given the chance to produce a Shakespeare Play. The real monkeys were markedly and hilariously unsuccessful.

Some more imaginery monkeys were put to the task in the form of a computer programme, randomly producing letters and yet their infinite energy and concentration is also doomed to fail.

No, science shows what every believer knows; that there is more to us than natural selection. This extra to natural selection might, in the neutral sense, be described as 'information'. To be fair, Richard Dawkins concedes the need for this himself. In another blog, with John Lennox's help, we can deal with his unbelievable answer to the problem. Meanwhile, here's a clue to the right answer:

Davies

The first book of the Sabbatical (not including the Bible) has been Paul Davies' 'The Mind of God'. As if it were not enough that his way of thinking irritates Richard Dawkins, I have always enjoyed reading him though rarely without ending up with a headache! The Washington Post was in true journalistic overdrive when it described The Mind of God as

'The most powerful mind-bending experience you can have without violating the Controlled Substances Act'

For blog purposes here is a stellar (excuse the pun) quote that we can all understand;

Although many metaphysical and theistic theories seem contrived or childish, they are not obviously more absurd than the belief that the universe exists, and exists in the form it does, reasonlessly. ... I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate...

Quite.