What We Talk About When We Talk About God (6 page)

But outside the lab,

in the course of our very real lives,

some experiences
act on us
.

We engage with them passively as they happen to us.

They seize us and capture us and woo us and abduct us.
We
don't stand over
them; they
jump
us
in a dark alley and pin us to the ground and won't let us go.

We are way too complex,

and so is the world—

too much surprise,

too many possibilities,

too much that defies our limited logical categories—to fit everything through the narrow filter of reason alone.

We're like fish, swimming in the rational waters of the Enlightenment, disconnected from a number of other ways we know and feel and experience. We've been swimming in this sea, enjoying it and benefiting from it, but slowly realizing that it hasn't been totally good for us. The intellect has a way of building a fence around the heart, cutting us off from what we know to be true in a way that is hard to prove
according to the categories in which proof matters
. In the Enlightenment sea we learned how to grasp, how to control, how to master whatever it is we're studying. We've stood behind the glass wall and made the appropriate observations.

But we've been around for only .0001 percent of Earth's history, 97 percent of Earth's species still haven't been discovered, and all of the bones we've dug up from our earliest ancestors could fit in the back of a pickup. We're simply not the masters we've been told we are.

In the words of Soren Solari, who has a PhD in integrative neuroscience, “It's fun to speculate about exactly what's going on in our brains when we surf, but the reality today is that we don't know.”

Second, from narrow filters, let's turn to a limit that's been working on us over the past several hundred years, this one about parts and wholes.

Imagine how Earth-shattering it was for people to learn that the sun does not revolve around Earth Or that volcanoes erupt for reasons other than divine anger Or that canyons were formed by natural causes rather than the work of really, really large hands Or that our planet is not resting on turtles all the way down. Mind-blowing. As more and more rational, logical explanations were given for how the natural world works, the previous supernatural, magical, and mythical explanations became more and more irrelevant. It turned out that lots of phenomena weren't as mysterious as everybody had assumed they were for thousands of years. This burgeoning scientific knowledge led to the growing question, If
this
can be explained in a very straightforward, logical way, can
that
? Or
that
? Or
that
? What's to say that, given enough time, we won't figure it
all
out?

These questions led to even bigger questions, which turned into assumptions, which eventually evolved into beliefs, all beginning with the question:

Can everything ultimately be explained without any supernatural, magical/mythical,
divine
causes?

As these questions and assumptions have worked on us and influenced us for several hundred years, they've led to the belief among lots and lots of educated, intelligent people that
given enough time, we'll arrive at explanations for everything.
Whatever it is that is a mystery to us now, given enough time we'll be able to reduce it to its parts and understand it through very straightforward, rational, logical explanations.

And that belief rests on an even deeper faith—a really, really significant one: if everything can be explained without any outside, supernatural, or divine factors, then the universe is ultimately the sum of its parts.

This belief system is based on
reduction,
and it holds tightly to the faith that given enough time we'll have all the answers, and mystery, like Elvis, will have left the building.

Get whatever it is down to its tiniest pieces,

and you'll get whatever answers you're looking for . . .

because, in the end,

things are what they are,

no more,

and no less.

Newton's work pointed to a rational, reductionistic world, one where there are causes that lead to predictable results. A world where matter is stable and consistent, all of the independent parts functioning together to form the whole.

A world where all there is is, in the end, all there is.

But when I'm talking about God, I'm talking about the divine being who can't be located tangibly with the kind of evidence that the rationalism of reductionism demands in the same way that you cannot be located in your eyelashes or spine or shoulder.

Which takes us back to faith, because when someone says that we don't understand something fully right now but we will given enough time, that is, of course, a belief. That's faith. We aren't at that point talking about people of faith versus people of science; we're talking about
all
people of faith, just faith in different things.

Once again, we're like fish, swimming in the sea of the Enlightenment, benefiting greatly from endless advancements and yet limited at times by the narrow filters of the intellect and the diminishing reductionism that insists this is all there is.

Speaking of fish, this leads us to another dimension of the God who is
grenzbegriff,
a dimension involving lots of bumper stickers.

Have you seen that sticker some Christians put on their cars, the one shaped like a fish? That comes from a first-century tradition of Christians carving or painting the faith symbol somewhere on their home or business to let others know that they were followers of Jesus. Great. But then others, in response to this sticker, put another sticker on their bumper, this one the same shape as the fish sticker, but with legs and a tail and (in the middle of the fish) the word “evolve.” Nice. This sticker is about evolution, which the owner of the car mistakenly sees as something that is
fundamentally against
the Jesus sticker. I've actually seen car bumpers with the
evolve
sticker upside down with the Jesus sticker on top of it—a sort of “Oh yeah, two can play that game” gesture.

And so the battle of the bumpers goes on,

all of it a massive exercise in missing the point.

The point being hierarchy and holism.

Fossil evidence and carbon dating and exploration and discovery are central to the endless human desire for answers. New theories arise; they're proven, tweaked, adjusted; and sometimes a better theory comes along to replace one that has proven holes in it—that's the scientific process. It's magnificent at lower levels of hierarchy, helping us understand neurons and rocks and oceans and species.

But it fails at higher levels of hierarchy when we encounter holism.

Science does an excellent job of telling me why I don't have a tail, but it can't explain why I find that interesting.

Science shines when dealing with parts and pieces, but it doesn't do all that well with
soul
.

It can do a brilliant job of explaining how we and other species have adapted and evolved, but it falls short when it comes to where the reverence humming within us comes from.

When I'm talking about God, I'm talking about the
grenzbegriff
kind of faith that sees science and faith as the dance partners they've always been, each guiding and informing the other, bringing much-needed information and insight to their respective levels of hierarchy. To see them at odds with each other is to confuse the levels of hierarchy, resulting in all sorts of needless debates, misunderstandings, and terrible bumper stickers.

I say all of this about science and faith because when I'm talking about God, I'm talking about the source of
all
truth, whatever labels it wears, whoever says it, and wherever it's found—from a lab to a cathedral to a pub to Mars.

This is important, because for many in our world,

somewhere along the way reality got divided up into the secular and the sacred,

the religious and the regular,

the holy and the common—

the understanding being that you're talking about
either

one

or

the other

but not
both

at the same time.

This dis-integrated understanding of reality—

the one that puts God on one side and not the other,

the one that divides the world up into two realms—

it's lethal, and it cuts us off from the depths and

separates us from the source.

Because sometimes you need a biologist,

and sometimes you need a poet.

Sometimes you need a scientist,

and sometimes you need a song.

 

So, there's a bit about you and the universe, and the God who is
grenzbegriff
. Now, to wrap this chapter up, let's go to Boston.

A few years ago I was speaking in that fine city, and afterward a woman told me about the time she had been in the hospital for ongoing cancer treatment, lying in bed thinking that she wasn't going to make it. She remembers being lower than she'd ever been before, filled with despair, wondering if she was going to die soon, when the night-shift nurse entered her room and began to lovingly care for her. Throughout the night the nurse returned repeatedly, checking on her and calming her and reassuring her and speaking to her in a way that lifted her entire being and gave her hope. In the morning, she woke up feeling like a different person. She then asked the morning nurse for the name of the woman who had been caring for her, giving a detailed description.

The nurse said that no one who fit that description worked on that floor of the hospital, not to mention the night before in this woman's room.

What do you do with that story?

As a pastor, I've heard countless stories like this one over the years. People sitting at their kitchen table, realizing that they don't have enough money to buy groceries, when the doorbell rings and they open the door to find their front porch filled with bags of food. Really strange, odd, surreal sorts of stories. Some of them can be attributed to basic coincidence, but over the years I've heard tons of them—and not just from really zealous religious people who carry large Bibles with their names engraved on the covers, but also from educated, somewhat cynical people with PhDs who own companies and have expertise in fields so technical I barely understand what it is they do all day.

Now some people hear a story about the woman in the hospital and immediately say, “Yes, of course! That was an angel taking care of her! They're all around us, watching over us and guiding us and protecting us,” and then they proceed to quote verses from the Bible while telling
their
angel stories.

Others hear people responding like this and roll their eyes, dismissing it all as crazy talk that belongs in the same category as talk of demons and spirits and blind people suddenly seeing. They are quick to point out that no one has any proof of such things and that it's superstitious ideas like these from earlier, mythological religion that, if left unchecked, lead to wars and ignorance and all sorts of really bad religious shows on cable television.

One says, “Of
course
she was an angel!”

The other says, equally emphatically, “Angels don't exist!”

I'll never forget the conversation I had with a brilliant, well-known woman about the resurrection of Jesus, which she dismissed as fantasy along with “all of those beliefs in things that don't happen.” She speaks for untold masses who check out as soon as the discussion turns to people being swallowed by fish and walking on water and, of course, rising from the dead.

There is, however, a problem with decisively dismissing all miracles out of hand, and that problem is subatomic particles, which, we've learned, disappear in one place and appear in another place
without traveling the distance in between
. Strange things
do happen,
things with no precedent and no explanation, every single day and every single moment, billions and billions of times a second, all around us, in our bodies. Time is bendy and curvy and not consistent, the universe is curved, and if Earth were slightly closer to the sun we'd all cook and if it were slightly farther away we'd all freeze.

It's all—let's use a very specific word here—
miraculous
. You, me, love, quarks, sex, chocolate, the speed of light—it's all miraculous, and it always has been.

When people argue for the existence of a supernatural God who is somewhere else and reaches in on occasion to do a miracle or two, they're skipping over the very world that surrounds us and courses through our veins and lights up the sky right here, right now.

We live in a very, very weird universe. One that is roughly 96 percent unknown.

I tell you this story about the woman in the hospital because when I talk about the God who is
grenzbegriff,
I'm talking about the kind of intellectually honest faith that is open-minded enough to admit that some phenomena have no rational explanation.

To be closed-minded to anything that does not fit within predetermined and agreed-upon categories is to deny our very real experiences of the world. We're here, this is real, subatomic particles travel all possible paths and then choose one when observed, and there is no precedent for such a thing. This is not avoiding important things like evidence and proof and logic; this is the tacit acknowledgment that some events, experiences, and truths simply exist outside of those particular categories.

Which leads to one last thought, one about being open-minded. In our world today, we often hear people talk about being open-minded and about how religion can be stifling because of how
closed-minded
it can be.