I, Dawkins (or not)

I found this rather clever invention on the Philosophy of Dawkins at Wry Mouth's blog.

Since I work(ed) with hypercomplex numbers (quaternions) I suspect Dawkins would have the same argument about my other "holy" trinity.

Mapping the Truth

Let’s start with Pilate.

What is Truth?

As far as I can ascertain, Truth is the correspondence between what really is and what is held in thought. It’s not the only definition of Truth but it seems the best definition that fits my thought and experience of mapping reality as accurately as possible. We look at the world around us and try to replicate what we experience in our heads. Why? Why do we need to make the correspondence? To be honest, I don’t know but it seems utterly programmed into our brains to ask that question – “Why?” We have what appears to be a natural and universal need to make this correspondence between object and its idea in order to make sense of our lives.

In mathematical parlance, Truth has the aspect of a manifold – a mathematical space of manifold dimensions (perhaps even infinitely many) which can be described by a collection of maps, charts and maximal atlases. (Be grateful, my other mathematical encounters with God have involved modelling the Truth as an operad or a quiver. I might explain those later.)

Each human being seems to have a way of mapping out the Truth – there is only one Truth as there is only on Reality – and that mapping will be faithful but only up to a point, and some mappings are more faithful than others. Some mappings will lack the true dimensionality of what is. One cannot make a map of the earth by charting every line of longitude. We just get an uncountable collection of lines with no idea as to how they fit together. Clearly the Earth’s surface is bigger, and that is why our charts have to be 2-dimensional to include longitude and latitude. If we need to take into account of the three dimensional aspect of the earth, then we need to build three dimensional models (quite why we would try and construct an accurate replica of the Earth is another matter). We reserve charts to mean maps of the right dimensionality. Charts of the Earth’s surface.

We get an accurate picture of the Earth by a collection of charts – an atlas. Each chart has the fullness of the aspect of the Earth, however it still has limits, and in order to get a better picture of the Earth we have to turn the page and note that the charts overlap at the edges so as we know how the previous chart relates to the new.

The question is, do there exist charts for the Truth? Well yes, for me, the Atlas is Christianity, the charts the fragments into which the Religion has fallen. Some aspects of Christianity are not full enough and fail to be proper charts. Others have certain fullness, but are too small in their scope – all charts get distorted towards the edges. Notice that it is mathematically impossible to get the whole of the Earth’s surface onto one chart. The chart always breaks down into a singularity or cannot extend beyond a certain point. Likewise, the charts of the Truth fail to encompass the whole Truth – singularities arise, boundaries are thrown up. But the Truth exists as an object.

Even as a mathematician, I believe that Truth is God and I believe in His Son, Jesus Christ when He said “I am the Truth” and that the Holy Ghost completes the Triune Godhead.

Why?

Because.

It’s complicated. I have no rational reason to be a Christian – indeed as a rational man (allegedly) I have every reason not to be a Christian. But belief in God is not irrational, I accept that there are things that exist and are unempirical – love, hatred, beauty, truth. The existence of God is an assumption that I have made in order to make sense of my life. One rather weak argument is that because the Universe is more complicated than human thought, either Truth does not exist or there exists a mind big enough to hold the idea of the Universe as it really is. It’s a weak argument because it assumes that Truth cannot be partial. However, if the Truth is partial, then scientists have no hope ever of finding a theory of everything!

The only way that I can prove that God does not exist is to assume that He does exist in show that this leads to a logical contradiction. However, I have subjective reasons to believe that He does, and that is enough to convince me that He exists and that He wants me to exist as well. For me this is enough to convince me that I am loved by God.

In wanting me to exist, God wants me also to know that He exists and in order to do that, He must reveal Himself to me, but also to all people, since He has decided that He wants other people to exist too. What is the nature of His revelation? How does He tell us about Himself?

Well, He tells us about Himself by talking to us. However, there’s a problem in that we have been given some freedom. If God loves us by wanting us to be in the first place, then He could just be in absolute control over us. We human beings are witness to activity within our species that some human beings do not want other human beings to be. Has God wanted some people to be only for them to have their existence taken away again? Well, yes, that is possible, but it does not seem consistent to me, and if I am to believe in God, then I must also believe that He is consistent. If God wants all humans that are to be, and some humans do not want other humans to be, then it must be that human beings are free to choose whether to follow God, or not to follow God.

So we then have a choice, to hear God or not to hear God. However, we now have the ability and propensity to be deceived by others. Even in our own selves do we have conflicting voices in our heads, to the extent that, ab initio, we cannot tell the voice of God from the other voices in our world.

So human beings need a reliable revelation that comes from God – a revelation that does not err or change in Time because God does not change in Time. Where is this revelation? We have the Holy Scriptures, but these Scriptures have been written at a particular point in the past. Nowhere in the Bible will we find explicit reference to the internet, to women priests, to the Holy Trinity (amendments to I John v notwithstanding). Thus there is a need for the Scriptures to be interpreted reliably. Also the revelation of God in Christ existed before the Scriptures were written down, so it is not enough to assume that all the revelation of God is contained in Holy Writ.

So here we are. We’ve arrived at the notion of Infallibility – the need for the revelation of God, His Truth and His teaching about Himself to humanity to be taught reliably, without error and without the possibility of error. If God wants all human beings to be, and we have this strange mysterious phenomenon call Time whereby human beings appear and disappear from sight in the space of a century or less, then there has to be a reliable transmission of that teaching from the beginning to the end, there has to be Infallibility.

Is it possible for human beings to be infallible? Well, Holy Scripture was written by human beings. We know that St Paul was a sinner, yet he wrote the letters which have been incorporated into Holy Scripture. What St Paul wrote must have been Infallible. Likewise St Peter, who was wrong in what he practised when he refused to sit down and eat with Gentiles, nonetheless wrote letters and preached sermons which have been preserved into Holy Writ. Despite the fact that he acted in error, and spoke in error, the teaching that he broadcast in Scripture is infallible, and this infallibility existed before the Scriptures were written down.

It is clear then that the teaching of the Church is infallible; it has to be, otherwise there is no revelation of God from the beginning. It is also clear that our own understanding of the Truth has developed in Time. The Holy Trinity has always existed, but our interaction with that Holy Trinity has not because we have not always existed. How is it that the strange mountain god of the Israelites develops into the more convoluted and transcendent Being of the Three-in-One? Well, He doesn’t develop, we do! This development cannot stop because the Truth is infinite in extent. The Church possesses the fullness of Truth. What does this mean?

It means that, although we never have the entirety of the Truth accessible to us at any one moment in Time, the Church will continue to teach the Truth as it is revealed to us in Time until that Truth is completed as predicted in I Corinthians xiii. This teaching is necessarily infallible even though individual human teachers do err. However, as we have seen, there are conditions in which human beings accurately and infallibly communicate the Truth. The Church has decided which books of the Bible are infallible and which are not, which contain true teaching and which do not. That decision itself must have been made infallibly otherwise humanity has no hope of knowing what the Truth is about God and His love for us.

If human understanding about God develops, how can we be sure that our development is correct? We do have the Vincentian Canon – quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus – i.e. that we are to believe whatever has been believed everywhere, always and by everyone. The trouble with the Vincentian Canon is that we cannot say what is the Truth about the humanity and divinity of Christ, because some folk in the past have held the teaching Creed of Nicaea a priori, and other have wandered into what we now understand as the heresies of Arianism, Apollinarianism, Nestorianism and Patripassionism to name but a few. Isn’t it a bit convenient to say that those who are heretics do not contribute to the Vincentian Canon?

However, the Truth has always been held infallibly by the Church. Thus, in Time we can be assured that the Truth will be apparent in times of doctrinal disorder. That Arianism, et c. have failed to prosper is an application of the testimony of Gamaliel to the Church. Thus in following the teaching of the Church from the Creeds, we can be absolutely certain that we follow the Christian Verity.

In this time of plurality of Christian Doctrine, and without the benefit of hindsight how can we be sure that the teaching to we hold now is not heretical? Considering that there were large numbers of powerful bishops and priests and even Popes who were Arian in their belief, the weight of numbers, nor the office of individuals is not sufficient to determine orthodoxy.

Looking at the Creeds, it is clear that, although not all the credal statements appear specifically in Scripture, they have their seeds in Scripture, and they have a clear development in Tradition from those seeds. This is precisely why I believe that women cannot be priests – there is no scriptural seed, and no traditional development. The doctrine of female orders has no basis in history. It is not a singularity of the chart, it is a discontinuity from the chart of Truth, and a chart fails to be a chart if it is discontinuous.

But still the question remains, to whom do I listen over a point of more complicated debate? The Roman Catholics would say that it is from the infallible statements of the Holy Father. But does the Holy Father possess infallibility ex officio?

The seed, we are told is, Matthew xvi:18b-19: Thou art Peter and upon this rock will I build my Church. The implication is that the Lord’s metaphorical rock implies that the teaching of St Peter cannot err. However, are we told that is a property that will be transferred to all of St Peter’s successors in the See of Rome? Nonetheless, this is just a tiny seed, and lo and behold it has indeed developed into the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility that we see defined formally at the first Vatican Council in 1870. The seed exist, and the organic growth exists with all the glitches, snags and underhand machinations that dogged the development of the Nicene Creed. One might recall the parable of the mustard seed and apply it to this tiny little piece of scriptural evidence. However the problem is that not all the Church affirms the doctrine.

The Roman Catholic Church has the fullness of truth meaning that as humanity grows and extends its relationship with God, the chart of Truth grows in its extent with the correct dimensionality – it does not lose its scope. However, it is limited by Time. Within its chart is Papal Infallibility which is true, but appears not to be true in Orthodoxy nor Prayer-book Anglicanism because these do not have that in the overlap between the charts. You can’t turn the page of Truth’s atlas from the Roman Catholic Chart to the Prayer-book Anglican Chart and find Papal Infallibility on both pages. You would fing more overlap with the Anglican Papalist pages, but again the charts distort at their edges. That doesn’t mean that they cease to be true but rather they give a false impression – like the North Pole in a stereographic projection.

I believe Papal Infallibility to be true. I believe that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ, the Supreme Head of the Church on Earth. I hold Anglicanism to be a valid and fully coherent expression of Christianity, though I do not subscribe to the full XXXIX articles because I do not see that they follow the Vincentian Canon and some are downright false (if they aren’t, then why are there Roman Catholic in England thus violating XXXVII?), nor do I believe that they define Anglicanism as it existed before they were written. However, others do and with good reason which does fit in with the Vincentian Canon. The same is true for the Orthodox, the Old Catholics (who have remained true to Catholicism).

The key issue is Time, and sometimes we act as if we should have all the answers to our disagreements here and now. If we keep pushing at the boundaries of the extent of our charts, may be they’ll move, and maybe they won’t but the act of trying means that we encounter a better view of the Truth as an objective reality. This growth can only come with God’s grace and our humility. We have to accept the limitations of the Temporal Church’s understanding of the Truth but hold to Our Faith and Hope that the Church does have the full Truth. We just have to submit to her teaching in the Chart in which we have found ourselves born and brought up.

Holy Herpetology and Loving the Lizard

It must be quite a shock to realise that each one of us has a lizard to look after. It's a large, scaly and quite ugly brute, but there is something inherently lovable about it. The main problem with it is that it is a danger to itself and others since it scuttles about uncontrollably, smashing into things, getting stuck in things, wedged in gaps and generally damaged by the harsh environment. For something so large, for its own good it needs to be confined carefully, and looked after well.

It needs somewhere with a good strong walls that it can't climb over or dig under; it needs regular meals and water. Every now and then it needs to be taken out of its cage and looked over carefully, noting its needs so that it can live and grow as God's creature should. Of course, when it's out of the cage, it does need to be kept under control.

You might think that it would be better for you to get rid of the lizard. After all, it's too much to handle, too cumbersome, too uncontrollable, too ugly. Why not find a good herpetologist to pass it onto? They'll look after it and keep it well. Alternatively, you might just let it run loose in the world. But then it damages everything and everyone around it. It's irresponsible to let the thing run wild, like those dreadful dog owners who let teir animals run loose and refuse to clear up after them and so pollute the common for everyone.

No. You have to look after your own lizard, and look after it well. It is, after all, a big part of you, a part that you cannot yet get rid of. If you mistreat, it then you are mistreating yourself. If you hate it, beat it, abuse the poor thing, or even try to kill it, then it is your very self that you hate, beat, abuse and seek to destroy.

St Paul tells us that we have to acknowledge the existence of the lizard but that we should not let the thing run riot. We are, after all, in the world, not of it. If we let our lizard loose, then we become of the world - creatures of stimulus-response, sensation-reaction, itch-scratch. However, we are created to be much more than that, that it is sometimes better for a delay between the stimulus and the response in order to ensure that another's life is taken into account and for love to grow. The lizard isn't capable of love, that's why it needs us. Yet its existence is a gift from God to us, because it is through the lizard that we encounter the physical reality of the world as a biological organism.

If we look very carefully at the lizard, then we really do become aware that we cannot be sure where it stops and we start: it is that much a part of us.

Why don't you take a look at your lizard now. It may not be pretty; you may regret that you have it; it may make living very difficult, but the poor brute does have your face, and it has been created to be loved.

Does Christianity disprove the MBTI?

I've been thinking about this MBTI and its tendencies to pigeonhole people. It might work heuristically, but from a Christian point of view it is an issue of concern, particularly with the ways that people (especially corporations) use it. Consider the following question:

What is the Lord's personality type?

After all, He is fully human. If He is fully human then He must have a personality type. If He has a personality type then there must be one personailty type that is better than others, that has a pre-eminence amongst personality types, that is the one that must be adhered to if we are to follow Him. Can we believe that (roughly) one sixteenth of the world's population has a head start in being closer to God because they all share the same personality attributes?

Okay, this may seem a little petty. Christ was male; one half of the world's population is male; does that make men preferable to women? Well, I might believe, being a member of the Catholic Church, that women cannot be ordained but that doesn't mean that I hold the idea that women are in anyway inferior in their humanity to men.

Christ was Jewish, but that doesn't mean that the Jewish people are in any way superior (or inferior for that matter) to others. Christ probably had a beard (unless the earliest Icons of a beardless Christ are accurate), so does that mean that the hirsute are preferred?

We are not saved by anything other than the love of God which is utterly disinterested in who we are. However, the question is interesting because we are to respond to God's love in order to open ourselves to become more like God. If Christ has a personality type according to Jung, then this shows monothelitism cannot be correct, since this would mean that God Himself has a specific personality type which is describable in Human terms.

So the MBTI, if correct, has its uses in refuting 7th century heresies. However, it still rankles with me that there should be a personality type more capable of perfection than another. Describing a personality is more defining of an individual than a specifying race/sex/hairiness. This begs the question, are we human beings defined as individuals by our personalities?

If we are then MBTI shows that there is a better personality to have because it is empirically capable of producing a perfect human personality. If there is no best MBTI, then we would need sixteen perfect humans to demonstrate to a recalcitrant humanity how each of us is to live.

MBTI exists by comparing one human being with another and measuring just a few aspects of how their personality interacts with the world around. However, Christ tells us to deny self, to deny the pursuit of self-discovery as a means to realise one's being in a transient and faddish world, but rather to seek our true being and self-knowledge in the service of God.

Kaluza-Klein theology

Okay, what I'm not going to put forward is an actual Kaluza-Klein theory. Kaluza-Klein theory properly done is an attempt to unify the forces occuring in nature by extending the gauge group of electromagnetism into a product of possibly non-commutative Lie groups. The necessity outcome of this is that we find ourselves finding more hidden symmetries of nature, and this points to the existence of higher dimensions.

Now higher dimensions ar rather interesting for me in several ways. Four dimensional space (and by space I mean an abstract space which requires four coordinates to describe it rather than the void between stars and planets) can be endowed with many interesting structures which are unavailable in higher dimensions.

It's when we consider Time as part of the fabric of the Universe that things become fascinating. If we step outside of Time, then we find ourselves investigating a static universe in which the common housefly has turned into a string which interweaves the universe. People turn into long ropes with human cross-section which grow and then shrink and then dissipate into frayed ends as our particles disperse to the dust. The Universe consists of Space and Time together mixed inseparably. It's like holding the reel of a movie. You can see each moment in space and time in one vantagepoint.

God has created the universe and we are powerless to see his existence. We cannot see Him act precisely because His creation involves Time. From His point of view, Creation is complete, He doesn't need to continually fiddle with it. It sits in His hand and from His indescribable Eternity, He gazes upon it. For those whose existence is contained within this Universe, the Maelstrom of complex forces and changes and chances of Time veil our perceptions.

Now this is not a "God of the gaps" argument for the existence of God, that God only acts where Science cannot see Him, but rather that He acts definitely where Science can see His actions, but attributes His acts to other causes because God gives it the freedom to do so. It's perfectly possible for the miracles of Christ to have a Scientific explanation. That doesn't stop them from being miraculous provided that we get away from the idea that a miracle is an occurrence which science cannot explain. The hand of God is still in the rising and setting of the Sun, because from our point of view the Universe is not yet fully created. This Creation is not yet perfected, but it will be! One needs to step out into the extra-temporal dimensions to look.

As a scientist I do look for explanations for why things happen. There are some wonderfully glorious sets of coincidences which people attribute to supernatural occurences. However, a miracle does not need that sense of dumbfounding science. A miracle is any occurrence that causes us to reflect on the presence of God, any event that has that numinous quality that touches our lives and brings us closer to Him.

The overreaching principle that God has had in creating Humanity is that Humanity should be free to choose, to have a will of its own. Only then can a gesture of true love be meant. Thus the atheistic scientist is free to interpret an occurrence in a rational way, and quite honestly, that occurrence is indeed rightly described rationally. It is the claim that a scientific explanation naturally rules out the direct influence of God that is questionable. Scientific explanation and Divine intervention are not mutually exclusive terms. Scientific theory is not absolutely correct but it does have a verisimilitude that makes its explanations compelling. Evidence is not proof, but it makes good sense. The Sun will rise tomorrow (barring Divine Intervention). However God, being bigger and existing outside the dimensions of the Universe, does not Himself create a Universe without order and sense. We can attribute every action to His Divine Intervention, but we cannot break down our observations into determining His Divine Will in any particular matter. A sparrow falls to the ground because it is tired and due to the force of gravity. This doesn't exclude the action of God in the matter.

At the Wedding in Cana, water was changed to wine. It caused people to reflect on the person of Christ, the God Who chose not to be remote but rather to make His presence known to mankind; the God Who chose to be seen to act and intervene but yet allows others the freedom to attribute His actions elsewhere. Whether the miracle was performed by a spectacular act of legerdemain, by a miscalculation and misdirection of the servants, or by the molecules of water suddenly finding themselves interspersed with molecules of fermented grapes isn't really the issue. It's the fact that Christians see in this act the first public act of a contraversial figure in history.

Of course the atheist question is then: how can we build a societal structure on the personal revelations to a few people of an unprovable God? Surely Society must be governed in such a way as reflects only that which can be observed and scientifically demonstrated.

Again, here I see the desire of God that mankind should be free to govern itself. At the moment the Church does not wield the power that it had in the past. Perhaps this is a good thing and prevents leaders of the church from becoming corrupt. (Well that's the theory!) Our society's moral and ethical code is, in the West, largely built up from the morals and ethics inherited from past theistic government. However, there is much evidence to show that the Church has, more often than not, been under the thumb of secular government.

As Christians, we do not (indeed cannot) coerce anyone into doing our bidding even if we believe that it is for their own good. Abortion will always remain despite the Church's protestations to the contrary. The Ten Commandments will be broken no matter who is in charge. The point is, that no matter which government runs the show, Christian ethics will remain and be kept by some and rejected by others.

Atheists believe that organised religion is dangerous because it causes people to separate and object to reason on the grounds of belief in an unprovable God. Religious symbols should be banned from public areas because they cause offence to too many.

What has this all got to do with the extra dimensions? Well, that's half the problem. Atheists cannot see that solutions are possible in a way that passes their understanding. They have a need to understand. Actually, I have a need to understand, but I accept while I struggle to understand that reality, morals, ethics and ultimately the questions of life and death have elements that point out perpendicular to the sense of the Universe. As an Anglo-Papalist, I live in a contradictory world full of confused jurisdiction and disjointed ecclesionlogy. However, I have the overriding promise of God that the Church is One, despite denomination. That gives me something to look for, pray for, live for and work for.

Contradictions exist in this Universe, the problem of evil, the reconciliation of an active God with a rational explanation, and their solutions may expressible in terms of this universe but I believe only partially so. It is only looking out in Hope beyond our understanding that I obtain the conviction to work at a solution within our understanding.

Up with the gauntlet!

So here it is, my somewhat inadequate ten minute defence of my faith. Next week speaks our resident atheist, and I'll try to blog something about that then.

Homily preached at Eltham college on 14th November 2007

How old were you
when you stopped believing in the tooth fairy?

What about Father Christmas?

Of course,
you realise how to prove that neither exist.

For the tooth fairy,
you just wrap up a lego brick in tissue,
and see how that is replaced at night
with a 50p piece.

It’s tried and tested!


To show that Father Christmas doesn’t exist
– sorry, he doesn’t except as an embellishment
of the character of St Nicholas of Myra
– just write two note to Santa.

In the first,
you are nice and polite
and ask for your Dr Who action figures
or new Bratz Skiing outfit
– this one you show to Mum and Dad.
In the other,
you call Santa a fat weirdie-beardie
who smells of dead reindeer
– this one you secretly post
to the North Pole.

You’ll know he doesn’t exist
if you still get presents this Christmas.

If he does, then you’ll have to be
very apologetic next year.

Are these really sufficient proofs of non-existence?

What about God?

Does He exist?

After all, you can’t see Him,
touch Him,
you can’t test for existence by sticking Him
in a test tube and holding Him
over a Bunsen burner.

If we cannot make
any observations about His existence,
then does that necessarily mean
He cannot possibly exist?

Well think about it!

Indeed, a thought is not material,
chemical,
biological,
atomic,
or a force.

There is much that is non-material and yet exists
- the number one,
for example.

We understand the number one is,
and yet it has no dimension.

No mass,
no height,
nothing measurable.

It cannot be tested,
touched tasted or smelt,
yet we know what it is.

It is just one.

The question “what is it made of?”
is utterly meaningless.

You can see one apple,
but if you take the apple away,
it’s just one.

So it is possible for things
to exist without having an observable presence.


It is the same with God.

His is an existence completely other than our own.

Like the number one,
to ask what He is made of is meaningless.

God is the Creator,
and by that we mean the being
who causes all other things to be.

He is the first cause
– how can He be made of anything
if there is nothing from which He can be made?

If He is the first being,
then He doesn’t change,
because there is no material for to change.


But matter changes.

Throw a lump of sodium hydroxide
into a vat of hydrochloric acid
and all you get,
by and large is salty water.

But how does the sodium hydroxide
know how to change into salty water?

How do we know that this always happens?

How do we know that one day,
your chemistry teacher is going to throw a lump
of sodium hydroxide
into hydrochloric acid and instead of salty water,
the result is a vat of Carlsberg?

After all we haven’t finished all our opportunities
for doing that experiment yet!


Mathematical and scientific theories
only describe what happens when
sodium hydroxide meets hydrochloric acid.

They have been honed by years and years of discovery
and improvement.

We now have models which can make
some very accurate predictions,
but there are always some gaps,
and the models don’t explain
how the chemicals know how to behave.

How does sodium hydroxide know that there are rules to obey
so that it makes brine rather than
a refreshing pint of ale?


The universe does seem to conform to rules,
and if modern cosmology is correct,
then these rules appear to be being made up
as the universe continues to be.

But where do these rules come from.

If God exists as the first cause,
then He made up the rules.

Perhaps these are the only rules
that would make this universe exist?

But why does this have to be the case?
– after all these are the only rules we know.

How can we even imagine things being different?

When theists say God created the Universe,
we don’t necessarily mean that He is like
some cosmic Design and Technology teacher
gleefully carving human beings
out of a lump of 2 x 4.

It’s a horrible thought
– what would the universe be like
if a certain Design and Technology teacher
created the Universe?

It wouldn’t be just the one Big Bang, would it?

When we say “God created…”,
we mean that He caused it to be.

It’s why many scientists can believe in God
and the Big Bang and Evolution.

If God created the Rules,
then He created our existence
through Evolution,
through a Big Bang,
if indeed that’s how things did begin!




Some Scientists in an attempt to get rid of God,
say that the universe was created when
two 10 dimensional membranes collided and formed this universe.

A necessary result of this collision
is the existence of parallel universes.

The trouble is,
because we cannot break out of our Universe,
the existence of parallel universes is just
as unprovable as the existence of God.

Superstring theorists have merely replaced
one debatable being with another,
and even then this doesn’t answer the question:
where did the parallel universes come from
in the first place
and what caused them to collide?


The fact that God has created the rules
shows that He has a will and an intention
for the existence of the Universe
- how He wants it to be.



However scientific we want to be,
because we have no way of
stepping outside the universe,
or of being present at the Big Bang
we have no scientific means
of proving or disproving
the existence of God.

Thus we have no way of knowing that God exists,
we can only believe.


If Science is not the tool to use
to talk about the existence of God,
then what about ethics?

If God exists and is good, why has He created evil?

Why create a world in which we have so much,
and yet others die a pitiful death
from starvation and disease,
uncared for,
unloved?

Why create a world
where your own followers and people
who believe in you tear each other
to pieces in ever more ingenious and pathetic ways?


This has more to do with free-will
– our ability to choose
to believe in God
or not to believe in Him,
the ability to make our own decision
for ourselves without being forced
to do something.


If God doesn’t exist,
then surely we have no free-will
and are merely clusters of atoms
obeying arcane laws of the universe.

In which case what meaning does life really have?

What hope for justice is there
for the Sudanese mother who loses her baby
in a military attack?

If God exists,
and, as Christians believe,
seeks to give justice to the oppressed
in a new life if not this one,
then doesn’t that offer us some hope
for our own existence?

No, it gives us no answers now,
and to others belief in God
seems like wishful-thinking
but then the existence of God
is not something that we should expect
to give easy answers
to the big questions of life.

God is absolutely unlike any other person
that we experience.

We still have to think,
argue, and wrestle with things
that we cannot understand
in the hope that our attempts
lead us perhaps a little closer to the Truth.


But what is the Truth of the matter?

Can you be so sure?

...and down comes the gauntlet!

I would very much appreciate your prayers. I have been asked by the powers that be in my school to give an address (reasonably light-hearted and yet a little challenging) to the sixth-form as part of a series of three addresses on belief in (or otherwise) God. It has fallen to me to begin the series with the address on Theism and I will be followed by an Atheist and an Agnostic.

It's a big ask to present an apology in front of young adults and, of course, out of my own steam I cannot do this but seek help from my Creator. Having your prayers supporting me would be a great fillip.

Thanks.

The Edge of Reason

The BBC do occasionally show some decent programmes. Last night BBC4 showed a rather interesting programme called Dangerous Knowledge, documenting the lives of four great scientists: three mathematicians and a physicist, namely Cantor, Boltzmann, Goedel and Turing.

I've mentioned before the incompleteness theorems of Goedel, that for any logical system based on a finite number of axioms there will always be statements that cannot be proved true or false from within that system. Indeed there are true statements that are unprovable, unreachable by the methods of reason and logic.

Now one might think "okay, let's just avoid those statements," but then there's another little problem which Turing developed. While working on Computers, Computation and Computability, he managed to show that we cannot know which statements are ultimately provable or will turn out to be unprovable. This is known as the Halting Problem.

What does this mean? It means that, rationally speaking, there exists truth which cannot be proved true by human reasoning and that we will not know what that truth is through direct reasoning. Reason has reasoned its own edges.

This means that reasoning looks like a little island in a sea of unknowing - integral and consistent in the centre, but ragged and tatty at its edges with islands of truth separate from the main body effectively an infinite distance away.

Turing himself sought to reach these islands of truth by intuition. However modern Science rejects intuition as unempirical and therefore unscientific. In so doing, it maroons human thought to an island which they call scientific truth.

So, if God is unempirical, and I am intuitively aware of God (for want of a better phrase) am I necessarily wrong?

A nice clean brain! - Do you want one?

Just how does brainwashing work? Essentially the idea is to reverse someone's thinking on a particular issue by some kind of careful persuasion and manipulation. You don't really need the techniques of Torquemada to get someone to recant and convert.

You can start off by getting the intended convert under the guise of "playing fair" to list the good things about your position and then, some time later the things that are bad with his position. This can be done with the free will of the subject and the process can be continued with minute increments until he is indeed truly converted.

Now this method has actually been used and to great effect specifically in the Korean War, in which Chinese captors managed to brainwash with this very technique (called hsi nao) their American PoWs. Americans were shocked to see their freed comrades (pardon the pun!) proclaim freely their support for the Communist manifesto.

The power of this technique lies in the fact that the subject has generated the new viewpoint by himself, and, because it comes naturally from within the subject, it is most convincing. That the subject is apparently making up his own mind imprints the desired belief system more deeply than a set of thumbscrews and a quarter turn on the rack.

So now this begs a lot of questions. Is organised religion of any kind a brainwashing outfit? Is brainwashing always undesirable? Can you tell if you're being brainwashed, and if so can you stop it? Can you think of any more?

These are not easy questions. It may seem that brainwashing could be sometimes desirable. Wouldn't it be great if all those terrorists who fight in what they believe to be the name of Islam were brainwashed into a more pacific demeanour? Wouldn't it be good to perform hsi nao in our prisons and gaols, so that the inmates are rehabilitated into society?

Again, we are faced with discerning whether the ends justify the means. To some extent this is the content of Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, the brainwashing of a convicted felon in order that they might conform to the Rule of Law. From a Christian viewpoint, the human soul must always be free to say 'yes' and 'no' to any invitation, even if saying 'yes' means saying 'yes' to sin and saying 'no' means saying 'no' to God and Salvation.

So here's the bind. As Christians are we meant to be converting people? Should we be gently persuading our families and friends to forsake whatever beliefs that they might have in order for them to embrace the Christian message and bring them Eternal Salvation? This is certainly a deep part of Christian history, and there is no church, community, denomination or sect that has not tried to convert people. We are certainly called to "make disciples of all nations", "to proclaim good news to the captives" but the history of Christianity shames us with its tales of coercion and crusade.

Yet as Christians, we know that we are right to believe in God as Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity. This is our faith, and to admit to any contradictory doctrine takes us out of the Christian faith and into heterodoxy. Surely then, because our belief is right, we have a duty to show everybody the Truth by any means possible!

Again, the end doesn not justify the means. At every level of Christian belief comes Love. No matter who the human being is and before any debate, any proclamation of the Message, any teaching of the Faith takes place, there must be Love. Crucially, as I Cor xiii tells us, Love does not insist on its own way, even if that way is right! The Beloved must always be free to walk away, to say no, to reject the teaching. This is the crucial difference when it comes to recognising brainwashing. Brainwashing requires a certain level of captivity. The American Soldiers were PoWs; they were not free to go back to their families, to the familiarity of their own lives. In their captivity they were unable to escape the gentle yet constant persuasion that Communism was best. If, by our preaching the Christian message we are in any way restricting the freedom of another, then we are in transgression of the Commandment to love our neighbour as ourself. Indeed, St Francis of Assisi tells us to preach the gospel continuously, using words if we have to!

Religion is being attacked by the likes of Richard Dawkins on the grounds that it brainwashes the people into naive unreasonable thinking, that it betrays the legacy of the Enlightenment. Essentially what he is saying is that Atheistic Rationalism is the truth and that we should all be following this gospel. Fair enough, that is precisely what every religion does. At this level, Dawkins is the prophet of Atheistic Rationalism, an High-Priest of Scientific Realism, and despite any objection he might make, this is what he is, because he is fulfilling precisely the same role in his religion as the Bishop Wright of Durham, Pope Benedict, or Archbishop Haverland are playing in Christianity.

However, Dawkins calls for religious schools to be closed, every religion to be scrapped, or shown up for the intellectual foolishness he claims it to be. He seeks to remove the freedom of people to believe and follow other forms of religion, denies them the idea of worship. This to me smacks of a desire to brainwash. I believe that Moslems are wrong and so does every Christian (take note Dr. Redding), however I cannot demand that they stop practising their religion on the grounds that I disagree with it. Only God can do that, and He will in His own good time.

It is Dawkins (and not necessarily the entirety of the Scientific community) who seeks to brainwash, and he, and Derren Brown do so by playing on the intellectual pride of their audience. They seek to put across the idea that it is beneath the dignity of a human being to believe in God, and that true intellectuals, like Pierre Simon de Laplace, have no need of that hypothesis. The idea is that the audience member thinks "well I am intelligent, so I had better discard my belief in God." This is why perhaps I was rattled by Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind because it played upon my intellectual pride and arrogance.

As a Christian, I trust St Paul. I don't have to trust St Paul, but it is consistent with my belief that I do trust him. He tells me that it is better to be a fool for Christ, than intelligent in the eyes of the World. If I am wrong, then I shall die a fool and be nothing for ever after. If I'm right, then who is truly foolish and eternally so?

We need freedom of thought in order to know that we are loved. This means being aware of our choices and how free we are to make them. Brainwashing can only occur if we give up our freedom to think. There is nothing wrong with asking questions of God. Doubt is not the opposite of faith, and God does not depise a Science which is asking honest questions. What we must be doing is ensuring that our belief is well-founded.

Is your belief well-founded? How can you demonstrate that you've not been brainwashed?

Science and Religion V: Derren Brown and Dawkins

I've been reading Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown. Brown is a very talented and indeed perspicacious individual who does make some very valid observations about how we use our minds. He is of course more famous for being (for want of a better phrase) a psychological conjuror, able to read people's minds, win at Russian Roulette, transfix pop musicians to walls with needles and spook people in faux-séances.

In his younger days, Brown used to be a rabidly enthusiastic Pentecostal Charismatic, and has since apologised for that, regrettably becoming a rabidly enthusiastic atheist along the lines of Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins. His main reason for his loss of faith he ascribes to discovering the non-historicity of the Bible, i.e. he believes that the Bible has been proved to be incapable of accurately describing historical events through editing of Gospels and key texts by various political factions within the Church.

The first thing that I consider is how illogical the "Once saved, always saved" doctrine is. One could argue that because Brown has lost his faith, he never was saved in the first place. But surely when he was a believer, he was convinced in himself that he was saved. If it is possible that one can believe honestly that one is saved and is loses the faith, then where is the certainty of our salvation? Answer: there can be no certainty in knowing that one is saved. One can certainly have hope in the Mercy and Loving-kindness of God that one is saved, but one needs to cooperate with this grace by cultivating the hope that we are given. One can only cultivate hope through the other two eternal remnants, i.e. Faith and Love. These three remain and feed each other.

That's the first aspect of Derren Brown I wanted to consider. The second, and larger aspect, I must confess rattled me. Brown contends that because I am clinging to a system of belief then I am not interacting with the world in its true reality, that I am forcing myself to see things in a particular way and to interpret happenings only in the framework of my belief system. With Dawkins he argues that I can only convince him of the presence of God if I show him some evidence that He exists, and clearly this evidence cannot be Biblical because of his problems with the Bible in its description of reality.

Why did this rattle me? Well, Brown is a very astute student of psychology and knows what to say in a way that will raise doubts in the mind. This I utterly applaud. It is good to have one's faith challenged and I am indeed grateful for the challenge that he provides. However, his main arguments against religion seem to involve attributing patterns to coincidences and not the miraculous.

He cites the behaviour of pigeons doomed to spend their lives in boxes, who end up performing "rituals" which make food appear, despite the fact that the food is administered according to the rules of the scientists studying them. Similarly, people too exhibit the same feature. I myself recognise that, as a schoolboy going to and from school, I used to try to change traffic lights with my mind, and it worked! Except it didn't because I associated the change in the traffic lights with my mental activity, rather than with the necessarily rigid timing system of the traffic lights, and the skilful driving of my father who modified his driving to take into account the myriad number of traffic lights between home and school. So I understand the phenomena that Brown is talking about.

The argument then is that ritual is nothing more than a primitive behaviour caused by the sporadic provision of resources - that the ritual some how provides the cause for an effect. Thus the atheist argument is that the effect that a given ritual is trying to achieve is largely coincidental.

It's true that you only need 23 people in a room for the chance of two of them to share a birthday to be greater than 0.5 (or 50%, but really, we shouldn't be expressing probabilities as percentages).

But consider the following ritual. Pick up a ball in your right hand, stretch out your right arm with the back of your right hand pointing upwards, open your right hand, and lo! the ball falls. (Note: I'm being deliberately precise here. Scientists require precision) Do this several times, and one notes that this always seems to happen, indeed with such a regularity that the fact that I am assuming that the ball falls seems a very reasonable assumption. However, how do I know that this will always happen? How do I know that this is merely a series of remarkable coincidences that have been observed by mankind ever since primitive man picked up a ball in his right hand and opened it? We would be foolish not to see a pattern there, wouldn't we?

My point is that all observed phenomena can be seen to be either the result of some scientific principle in action or as a collection of coincidences. It is how we make the decisions which phenomena are following rules and which are purely coincidental that shapes our understanding of the Universe around us. While Science may prescribe a systematic method for us to make those decisions based on observations, and follow logical reasoning, that very logical reasoning provides neither empirical evidence for a beginning and an end of the Reality it tries to describe. It is not even mathematical, since mathematics has a beginning, namely the objects for study and the axioms which tell us the rules. Science argues from the middle down into the microscopic and up into the macroscopic.

This does lead us onto the observability of God, and the actions that we attribute to His deity. Just how does God work in the world? If God exists, then why is there no conclusive evidence for His existence? Well, I hope that I've answered one idea that conclusive evidence for an omnipotent God would be evidence in the non-existence of an omnipotent God. But Brown does seem to have a point here. Something happens to us - perhaps we heal rather quickly from a serious illness. Now we have a choice, we can:

a) attribute this healing directly to God;
b) attribute this healing directly to the tendency of our bodies to heal itself;
c) attribute this healing to the ingenuity of science to provide a cure for this disease.

Brown rejects (a) because there is no proof that God exists, and thus any attribution of healing to God is speculative and that there is no evidence for the direct interaction of any deity, nor is there any method of testing this empirically. Thus, says Brown, it is foolish to take up proposition (a) since that means we can only be interpreting our healing intrinsically from our belief system rather than extrinsically from the fact that our bodies always make every effort to heal themselves (i.e. statement (b) ), and we have some understanding of various causes and effects that medicines provide (i.e. statement (c) ). However, God may well have effected the healing through (b) and (c) through millions of unobserved influences (i.e. they may have been observable but their significance was not deemed important enough for the time and trouble detailed study) in the universe which have accumulated to the effect that you are now free from illness. In this sense "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test" is not a commandment, but rather a statement of fact. God just doesn't fit into a test-tube!

But I do agree with Brown - there is no conclusive evidence for the existence of God, i.e. evidence which cannot be disputed. The existence and nature of the universe lead me to conclude that God exists, though I recognise myself and my understanding to be far too small to work out how He puts his plans to effect. I have no problem with the scientific explanation that there was a Big Bang, or that I owe my existence to ape-like beings. However, I attribute the responsibility of the cause of these events solely at the feet of God. Nor do I believe that having a religious belief imposes limits on our trying to understand our Reality. There are aspects of Science which are dangerous for humanity - research with human embryos, the race to build nuclear arms to name two - and Science must always be done in a way that holds nothing but the deepest respect for the Human Condition. But ultimately there will always be a mystery to Life which the human spirit is bound to explore and we should be attempting to make our further discoveries for they will always provide something to wonder at, and Christians like me will attribute them to the wonders of God (sorry Derren). God's presence will always remain a Mystery.

But then, this is still not all that Brown and Dawkins are saying! So far I agree with them - scientific evidence for the existence of God is non-existent. But the only conclusion we can draw from that is that we cannot draw any conclusions about the existence of God. That is not what Brown and Dawkins are saying, they are saying "there is no God." They are atheists, not agnostics.

And now we reach an interesting little problem. Scientists demand proof that there is a God. Fine! I can't supply that proof, indeed, that proof cannot exist. That's okay. However, scientists should also be demanding proof that there isn't a God. Now Brown and Dawkins will now have us believe that it is not their responsibility to provide a proof, that the burden of proof is on those who claim that there is a God. But that's not the problem. They have made a definite statement that requires evidence. If Science cannot find proof of God's existence, then that does not mean that they have proved that He doesn't exist.

This now puts Brown and Dawkins into the position of proving a negative.

As a mathematician, I have often proved negative statements. Here's one.

Proposition There is no largest prime number.

For the less mathematically inclined, a prime number is a number that has precisely two unequal factors - itself and 1. So, for example, 3 can only be expressed as 1 x 3.

Proof

Assume: that N is the largest prime number.

Now let

M = 2 x 3 x 5 x 7 x 11 x ... x N + 1. Notice that M is strictly bigger than N.

I.e. M is the number formed by multiplying all the prime numbers up to N together and then adding 1.

Now we notice that

- 2 does not divide into M exactly; it leaves remainder 1;
- 3 does not divide into M exactly; it leaves remainder 1;
- 5 does not divide into M exactly; it leaves remainder 1;

and so on until,

- N does not divide into M exactly; it leaves remainder 1.

thus we notice that any prime less than N does not divide N exactly, but leaves remainder 1.

So either M is prime, or is divisible by a prime that is none of 2, 3, 5, ... N.

Thus we have shown that either M is a prime strictly bigger than N, or is divisible by a prime that is strictly bigger than N.

But!

We assumed that N was the largest prime number and we have arrived at the existence of prime numbers strictly bigger than N. This is a contradiction and the only place where our error can have occurred is in making the assumption that there is a largest prime number. QED.

So we have shown that there is no largest prime number. We have proved a negative.

This technique is called reductio ad absurdam. It is a well-founded mathematical technique used to prove the non-existence of certain quantities.

The method works as follows:

1) assume the contrary;
2) using that assumption, make rational deductions until you reach an impossibility which can only have occurred because you made that assumption.

So to prove the non-existence of God, all we need to do is to start with the hypothesis that God exists and logically deduce that this results in a contradiction.

Professor Dawkins and Mr. Brown: there's the method, now off you go...

Making sense of beyond sense.

In some ways I'm at a bit of a disadvantage being a mathematician. It does mean that taking things on trust is not a natural thing to do. Of course there exists for each of us a level where we are forced to take something on trust, but some seem quicker to do this than others.

Unlike mathematics or science, Religion is not based on assumptions but certain inspirations and revelations, and it is upon these that the whole identity of the religion is based. Looking at the complexity of Catholic Doctrine, I can understand why some feel that it is restricting and stifles the spirit. Why is Christ's message of the love of God and the love of our fellow man not proclaimed as simply by the Church? Surely the doctrine of the Real Presence is unnecessary? Why do we ask the prayers of the dead? There does seem to be an inordinate complexity to all of these issues, but largely how does this complexity arise?

Complexity arises because of consistency. If we in the 21st Century are to find ourselves following the same religion as the Fathers, then we have to be consistent with their teaching. But why is consistency necessary? Is it necessary for our Faith to "make sense"?

It is necessary for us to understand what it means "to make sense". A religion exists to provide some meaning to our lives, to answer questions, to provide us with the means for a well-formed judgment, and a reliable direction for our lives' journeys. It also provides us with some comfortable cloud of unknowing in which, although not all of our questions have answers, our lives can go on regardless of not having those answers. One only has to read the works of the Cappadocian Fathers to see the edges of human understanding when they describe God as having a reality beyond all being, and that even the word "being" does not do justice to his existence because His reality transcends the idea of existence.

This makes our mind boggle and rightly so. Our understanding hits a wall and can proceed no further, but our relationship continues beyond our thoughts and into the darkness of Love.
However, in knowing that there are boundaries to our understanding there is a great temptation for us to be fearful or lazy about the limits of our thought that we feel that we can make statements which contradict our faith but need not be defended because their defense lies within the Cloud of Unknowing.

For example, Dr Ann Holmes Redding claims that it is perfectly consistent to be both a Moslem and a Christian. It may be consistent to live according to societal rules of both Islamic and Religious Cultures which are certainly consistent, but there is no Moslem that would subscribe to the Nicene-Creed as interpreted by the Catholic Church.

I am a Catholic because it is the most consistent expression of the Christian Religion. It eliminates personal interpretation of Revelation. Some may argue that this is a bad thing because it removes the possibility of God's personal relationship with the individual. But a submission to the Catholic Faith is a submission to a stable rock of Doctrine independent of the "winds of doctrine" produced by the winds of Zeitgeist. If the Christian Faith changes from century to century, how can we be sure that it is any way the Faith founded by Christ? If the Fathers held to the Real Presence - i.e. the physical presence of Christ in the Consecrated Eucharistic elements - then we must hold to the Real Presence. If not, then we have to answer the question: when the Presence suddenly cease to be Real? Was the Church so horribly mistaken? If it was mistaken, then how do we know it was right in everything else?
We could just cast the inconsistency into the Cloud of Unknowing and say "Oh well, it's a matter of faith", but if we investigate in honesty then we find that the inconsistency does not lie in the Transcendent nature of God, but rather the doctrine of men.

Of course, we can only make inroads into the unfathomable Cloud if we continue to talk and continue to treasure our beliefs almost simultaneously. God gave consistency to us so that we might have stability and order. It is a typical trait of our God to create order out of Chaos, and while our Church may be buffeted by strong winds at the moment, as long as we hold onto the order that the Church possesses by virtue of her espousal to God, then we shall pass cheerfully and boldly into that cloud validly and with humble boldness and eventually out into the knowledge of God.

I’m right, you’re wrong.

Well, that’s the inevitable content of the phrase “I believe”: unless you believe what I believe, then you are wrong. Of course, this begs many of those wonderful logical paradoxes such as “I believe I am always wrong.” However, our beliefs in whatever religion/spirituality & c, involve us making a statement of fact which contains some integral premise that we cannot justify with empirical or logical evidence.

Even science is founded upon belief, that what we encounter with our senses, or can make some measurement to determine quantities, or can infer through the use of reason is in someway an accurate impression of Reality. It is possible for a scientist to hold to a religious belief since this requires making statements about some quantity that has an unobservable aspect which may or may not affect the observable universe. A Christian who happens to be a scientist may conclude that the existence of an unobservable God whose empirically observable effects are beyond the scope of scientific exploration, such as the Beginning of the Universe, or in the keeping track of the behaviour of countless billions of fundamental particles pinging about the universe like a colossally frenetic game of table-tennis – if indeed we can understand particles in that manner. It is impossible to observe the beginning of the universe: it is impossible for us to keep track of each and every particle in the Universe. There is therefore the necessity of belief, even among scientists.

And then of course there are people who disagree with your beliefs. Now, either they can convince you that there is an error in your belief, or not. If they cannot convince you of error, then quite clearly their belief is either wrong or at best incomplete. So now it is your duty to convince them of an error in your belief. Can you do so? If you can, then nothing changes for you and everything changes for the other; if you can’t then there is some form of stalemate. Worse, if your belief is diametrically opposed to the other, then only one of you can be right. But of course, your belief is still intact, isn’t it? If you really believe what you believe then you must believe that you are right, otherwise your belief makes no sense. Thus your belief has to be right, and the other’s wrong.

So what do you do now? Keep trying to convince the other person of your rectitude, or give ’em up as a lost cause?

So here is the dilemma facing Christians. How far can we tolerate other’s beliefs?

Now the word tolerate seems to have gained some rather interesting baggage, particularly among the Liberal wing of the Church. “Tolerate” really means “to bear”, “to put up with”, “to carry something which you regard as wrong in respect of another”. However, this last statement seems to suggest some form of capitulation to that which you tolerate.

Do we allow Moslems into our pulpits? Well, what’s the pulpit for but to spread the truth about Jesus Christ? How does a Moslem preach about Jesus Christ? Well, he doesn’t because he doesn’t believe in Jesus Christ as being the Son of God. It is debatable that the prophet Isa in the Islamic religion is the same person as the Lord. Certainly He isn’t believed in in the same manner in which we Christians believe in Him. Yet some parishes permit an Islamic person to explain their faith from their pulpits? Why?

It is important to engage in dialogue with others; that’s how beliefs are explored, tested and probed. But should this dialogue occur in the pulpit? What if one sits in the congregation in a flurry of doubt and hears the Islamic faith being preached and thus renounces Christianity for Islam? What service has that parish afforded to that one weak in the faith? It’s all done for the sake of tolerance. I say that the Islamic religion is incorrect, and Islamic person would say that the Christian religion is incorrect. Where we will agree is that our beliefs cannot allow us to do anything but disagree about the veracity of the other’s religion.

Surely, if we wish to engage in dialogue with an Islamic person, then it must be done on neutral territory, not in one another’s place of worship.

This is our basis for tolerance. As Christians, we have a duty to engage people in the Gospel of Christ. Realistically, we will preach better if we say nothing and live our beliefs to the best of our abilities. However, we are called to dare to find that neutral ground, walk into its centre and invite others to come into dialogue with us with the utter assurance that our faith gives us that the Christian Faith is the true Faith. We need to dare to enter into conversation, utterly respectful for the other’s freedom to be wrong, utterly mindful of the presence of God within any human being whatever the belief, but utterly prepared for heated discussion (if there is no heat then the discussion will be palliative and platitudinous). Then, at each adjournment of the discussion, we bring all that we gain from this discussion back to our Church and offer it up to God.

This is what the Church is for. The ministry of the Laity is precisely to bring Christ to the coal face of life and to bring that coal-face to Christ. How can we offer this ministry if we accept other viewpoints as possibly being right? Other views may be valid –possible logical alternatives – but if we sincerely believe what we believe, those views are incorrect, inconsistent, or incomplete.

Either we believe, or we don’t. What do you believe? Am I right?

Science and Religion IV: What is Truth?

As a mathematician, the central and underlying concept at the basis of mathematical thought is the concept of truth. We build mechanisms to discern whether a given statement possesses the quality called truth. It's interesting that in a subject like mathematics where the concepts and constructions do not actually possess a concrete reality, there is nonetheless acceptable statement and method of proof. Even though Goedel says that there will be statements in any axiomatic system of logic which cannot be given the labels "true" or "not true", one can, in mathematics, easily disprove the existence of a quantity, something which many folks find hard to understand.

Now, I have never studied philosophy - at least not properly. My grasp of the tenets of philosophical veracity are undeveloped to say the least. I have never read Plato, or Socrates and have managed only a smidgin of Aristotle - I have never had the time - so I will disappoint anyone who has any more of a grounding in the noble subject. However, my brain does function on what I believe to be reasonably sound rational principles: I'm citing the success in my mathematical studies as evidence to support this.

The issue I've been contemplating is this. We can be dreadfully solipsist and disbelieve the existence of everything other than our own being or we can agree with another person on what is true. There thus exists a whole series of "truths" in the World each where two or more people have concurred, yet these are nothing more than subjective truths. The Big Bang is a truth, the Hebdominal Creation is another, and yet they contradict. Or do they not?

Well this is the crunch: surely the only way that we can be certain of the truth is for us to know everything, and I do mean everything - knowing what Reality really is, knowing both beyond the Planck length and above the scale of the the Great Attractor or the Cosmic String if such objects exist. Then we can say truly "the Sun will come up tomorrow".

So if we are not omniscient, then all truth is relative and subjective, there is no objective truth... unless there is a God.

Note of course that this is not a proof for the existence of God. God cannot be proved like a theorem from the reason of men. His existence as pure being means that He is the Truth as He always claimed, because only His existence is independent of that which He has created.

This surely means that His Truth exists beyond the philosophies of human beings. If God exists (and I believe He does) then Truth is an absolute, transcending all the fashionable thinking of any age. He doesn't change, and neither does the revelation that He shows us. Truth must be revealed or its existence as Truth is meaningless, and while God has the right not to reveal Himself, He does not wish human beings to live meaningless lives. Thus we have an utterly intransigent and hence reliable Revelation of an unchanging and Eternal God given to the Church. Now, we can look at that Revelation through various viewpoints, but the Truth remains the same, because the Truth is independent of viewpoint, otherwise there is something inherently wrong with the method of discerning the Truth.

So we are stuck with the same Scriptures, the same Liturgies, the same Collects, year in year out because they are our discoveries of communicating with the Truth, and we can ask where is the newness, the freshness, the change. And Truth tells us, "well, that is you."

Fire Extinguishers and Tea-Trays.

My first sermon at a church I've been familiar with for years.
It's amazing how each church has a natural rhythm for preaching, and I don't think this one really fitted that rhythm too well. Still, it made the point I hope.


Sermon preached at Holy Trinity Church, Dartford on the Feast of the Transfiguration, Sunday 6th August 2006 based on St Luke ix.28-36.

The phone rings.

Professor Pangnosis
of the University Theology faculty
answers it to a warm invitation
from the physics faculty
to see the new experiment
conducted by Professor Dold.

"We think you will find this rather interesting."

Accepting the invitation gracefully,
Professor Pangnosis moves
from his comfortable wood-panelled room
covered in bookshelves
to the plexi-glass and white-walled
surroundings of the physics department
and its vague odour
of burning rubber.

He is shown into a large room
with a complicated mechanism
occupying the far wall.

Professor Dold shakes him eagerly by the hand
and shows him a seat
- not the comfortable armchair
that he’s used to,
but a grimy metal-and-fabric chair.

"Okay, Clarissa, are you ready?"
Clarissa,
Professor Dold’s assistant,
gingerly climbs into the apparatus
and clings on to two handles.

Professor Dold
types something into the computer,
turns a dial and flips a switch,
and the machine suddenly comes to life.

As the Professors and other research folk watch,
the appearance of Clarissa’s face alters,
and her clothes become dazzling white.

Beside her,
two ghostly forms appear
in the same dazzling whiteness.

The whine of the machine changes pitch
and the motor starts to slow down.

The ghosts disappear
and Clarissa returns to normal.

[PAUSE]

"Well, Pangnosis,
you’ve seen that we’ve replicated
the Transfiguration of Christ in the Laboratory
and shown it to be a certain form
of St Elmo’s fire in which the subject
is reflected twice
producing those two ghosts,
rather like a bad
television picture.

I guess this explains it all away."

"Indeed," says Pangnosis,
"you have replicated
the transfiguration of a human being
in accordance with the description
in the Gospels.

The only things missing
are the cloud and the voice of God."

"Ah, well these are easily explained
as the low-lying thunderclouds
common to a mountain,
which would be necessary
to produce the St Elmo’s fire,"
says Dold,
"If you want,
we can easily replicate that
by setting off a couple of fire extinguishers,
and I’ll rattle a tea-tray for the thunder."

Professor Pangnosis sits silently a while.
"I have two questions,"
he says finally,
"My first is:
how do you know that the Transfiguration of
Christ happened exactly like this?

[PAUSE]

Professor Dold is irritated by Pangnosis' question.

"But don’t you see, Pangnosis?

We’ve explained that
the Transfiguration can occur quite naturally:
there is no longer any mystery
about how this was done."

"But it doesn’t answer my first question,
Professor Dold.

I certainly agree with you that,
according to St Luke,
you have replicated something extraordinary.

And St Luke is the perfect man
to use to build your device:
he is a scientist.

See how he writes the account scientifically
- all facts, no dressing up with drama
or unnecessary emotion.

Francis Ford Coppola would be throwing a fit
trying to direct this according to St Luke’s account.

But my question still stands.

How do you know that this is
precisely how the Transfiguration occurred?

Were you there when it happened?"

"I believe that it’s the most likely explanation," says Dold.

"Ah, then you don’t know for sure," says Pangnosis.

"This brings me on to my second question:
what’s the point of all this?

What have you got out of your experiment
that Peter, James and John haven’t?"

[PAUSE]

Professor Dold has missed
a vital part of the experiment.

Do you remember
that he did not fulfil all the elements
of the account of the Transfiguration?

If you remember,
he misses out the cloud
that descends and throws
Peter, James and John into a blind panic.

Although Professor Dold
dismisses the cloud,
he is actually dismissing
the big part of the situation.

What is the point of the Transfiguration?

[PAUSE]

Along with Peter and James and John,
we stand on the mountainside
and see something quite wonderful.

Jesus’ appearance changes,
Dazzling bright,
he’s met by Moses and Elijah.

The veil between this world,
the reality that we observe around us
and the universe that is usually
beyond our observation,
that veil becomes transparent
and both natures of Jesus,
the human and Divine
become visible at the same time.

Infinity breaks through into a finite world.

And then the cloud comes down
and takes it all away from us.

Does that bother you?

Most Modern Scientists look
to prove conclusively either way
whether God exists
without realising that getting close to God
necessarily means getting into the cloud.
Once in the cloud, we can see nothing.

Science is useless in the cloud
because all its instruments get fogged up
its RADAR snags
and its Infra-red gets clouded
and obscured
and so Science has to make guesses.


Of course,
in Science,
they are not called guesses,
they are called theories.

In America,
the Big Bang theory is in constant battle
with the idea that the world was created
on a dark October morning in 4004 BC.

Both are theories,
and indeed many of us believe
that the Big Bang theory is most plausible,
but unless we were standing next to God
when Creation began,
we cannot know for sure
whether either theory is true.

All that we Christians do know for sure
is that somehow
God created the heavens and the earth.

[PAUSE]
However,
as Christians,
we seek something more nourishing
than explanations.

We seek God,
and to gain God is to gain love
and to gain love is to gain God.

St Paul reminds us that
"knowledge puffs up, love builds up."

What does this say
to people with doctorates?

What Professor Dold has is a machine
that can change a person’s appearance,
only offering a partial explanation
for what could have happened.

Peter, James and John,
in experiencing the Transfiguration
are left without any understanding
of what has actually happened,
but they have met more deeply with God.

Who has gained more from the Transfiguration?

Professor Dold, or the disciples?

[PAUSE]


If we truly wish to come close to God,
then we must come into the cloud
where we can be sure that
we will know nothing
save that the Lord is present in love.

If we are to receive
Communion with God in this Mass then,
as we walk up to the altar,
we too must be enveloped in that
cloud of unknowing.

Any liturgy,
or sermon,
or prayer
which offers us an understanding
of what is going on
can only take us further away
from the cloud,
and from a deeper experience
of God in our Eucharist.

[PAUSE]

We live in a world in which facts are important,
and in which Science seeks
further understanding of the Universe around us.

But Christians
believe in an existence beyond science,
beyond test-tubes,
televisions
and tea-trays.

We believe in a God
whose existence is unprovable.

Indeed,
if it were provable
by human means,
He wouldn’t really be God.

How much do you really want
to understand about God, anyway?

Will building a machine help you?

Science and Religion III: Hoc est corpus meum

Oh dear. I'm in trouble.

XXVIII. Of the Lord's Supper.

THE Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves, one to another, but rather it is a sacrament of our redemption by Christ's death: insomuch that
to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith receive the same, the bread
which we break is a partaking of the body of Christ, and likewise the cup of blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ.

Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of bread and wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ, but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions. The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.

The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.

This does seem to put me at odds with the twenty-eighth Article of Religion. Why? Because I believe in Transubstantiation. That's not to say I insist that ev