Chance and choice

Reflections on the interplay of divine will, natural chance and human freedom.

Is everything that happens, everything we do, everything that exists completely fixed and determined; or is it utterly random and chaotic; or is it all up to us, a matter of will and decision? Do we live in a universe organised by divine command, blind chance or creaturely choice? Do we follow a set path to an inevitable destiny, or a random meandering to who knows where - or do we choose our own path and destination?

As usual, my irritatingly indecisive answer is 'a bit of all three'. I can't sign up either to total determinism, utter randomness or supreme creaturely free will, but rather to a complex interplay of all three elements.

Creator, cosmos and creatures

The three elements could be seen as standing respectively for the role of God, the universe/nature, and humans:

• God is arguably eternal and perfect and, in his own essence (though not necessarily in his relationship with his creation), unchanging.
  
  
• The universe (nature) seems at its most essential level to be random. The sub-atomic quantum world appears to be deeply and fundamentally chaotic, and randomness or chance - or else a pattern so complex it defies our deciphering - seems best to describe the behaviour of weather systems, radioactive decay, gene shuffling in sexual reproduction, and so many other natural phenomena.
  
  However, there is another side to this equation; everything in nature also obeys the natural laws and set processes of physics, chemistry and biology, so law and randomness walk hand in hand, randomness forever giving law something fresh to act on.
  
  
• Humans (and to an extent other creatures) seem to have at least a degree of genuine freedom and ability to make real and meaningful choices with significant consequences for themselves, other creatures and the world. Some would argue that every choice we make is completely predetermined by our genes, our nurture and our present circumstances, but I believe that there is always an element - however small - of free and uncoerced choice. 

Paradoxical sovereignty

God's sovereign rule is one of freedom not coercion

I find it fascinating that God, in his sovereignty and unchanging perfection, does not impose a set order on nature or on human life but gives the freedom of chance (randomness) to the one and the freedom of choice to the other. This suggests to me that God's sovereign rule is a rule of freedom not coercion, and that his unchanging perfection is simultaneously and paradoxically a dynamic diversity. (This perhaps ties in with Aquinas's comment on divine simplicity, that God's infinite simplicity would necessarily appear to finite minds as infinite complexity.)

Of course, randomness - 'chance' - does not necessarily equate to meaninglessness. A roll of the die can produce six different outcomes but each of those outcomes can have a valid meaning or significance. Similarly, complexity need not necessarily equate to chaos; even the most apparently chaotic arrangement can form a meaningful pattern to the infinite mind of God.

The impossible real

everything that happens is both mathematically impossible and inevitable

Looked at from one end of the telescope, everything that happens is mathematically impossible. The odds, viewed from the beginning of time, of my sitting here at this moment writing this or you sitting there reading it are incalculably infinitesimal - zero, in effect. The odds of your or my being here at all are infinitesimal. By any odds, we shouldn't exist. But we do; and viewed at this present moment from the other end of the telescope our being here and doing this is definite, actual, even (in a sense) inevitable - it simply is what is happening; its probability at this point is 1 (i.e. 100%).

And of course we don't know how wide the parameters of freedom are set - how many alternative pathways chance and choice have been allowed to get from the moment dot to this present moment; how many alternative endings and outcomes there could have been and could yet be; whether the final, ultimate outcomes and destinies are all set and it's only the paths to them that are free.

Nonetheless I believe very deeply in real and meaningful freedom to act and to choose within the framework of God's sovereignty and the universe's serendipity. Perhaps our choice, or our ability to choose, is meant to form the bridge between the fixedness of God and the fluidity of nature; the command of God and the chaos of the cosmos. Or perhaps the randomness of nature is what allows us the freedom to choose within the sovereignty of God.

Or perhaps I'm just talking rubbish about things that are far too big for me to have a clue about...

Related posts

• The Sovereignty of God
• Is God in the future?

The Sovereignty of God

What does God's sovereignty really mean and does it take precedence over his love? Does everything happen according to God's will?

The Sovereignty of God is a cornerstone doctrine for Conservative Evangelicals (CEs) like J.I. Packer and John Piper. In my view though, they both misinterpret God's sovereignty and over-emphasise it at the expense of other more important aspects of his divine nature and being.

Extreme Sovereignty

In very over-simplified terms, the conservative view of Sovereignty is roughly:

a) God, to be God, must be utterly Sovereign and in control of everything. (Omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence are implied by divine sovereignty; some would also add impassibility - that God cannot be changed or moved.)

b) God can - and does - do exactly whatever he wills and whatever pleases him.

c) God's Will and rule are ultimate, absolute, eternal, immutable, fixed, unfailing, inescapable. He does not repent or change his mind.

d) Everything that happens is God's will - whatever happens is according to or as a result of God's perfect Will and sovereign purpose. (If it is not his direct will, it is his indirect will; if it is not his active will, it is his passive or permissive will.)

e) God's ways, will and words are perfect and cannot be questioned by us.

Predestination and Inerrancy follow logically from the conservative view of Sovereignty

Also following directly and logically from this view of divine sovereignty are two further key CE doctrines:

i) Scriptural Inerrancy: God's Word is perfect, fixed and eternal.

ii) Predestination: God has chosen from before time those people who he will - and will not - save and redeem; those whose ultimate destiny is joy in the Kingdom of Heaven and those who will be eternally lost and punished in Hell. This choice is fixed and has nothing to do with the merit or faith of the people involved; it is purely a matter of God's unsearchable grace towards the undeserving.

Self-limited Sovereignty

To me, the CE view of sovereignty feels like a kind of spiritualised Determinism, more akin to the Islamic views of Allah and the Qu'ran than to the uniquely Christian view of God. It also seems to me to derive more from Hellenistic philosophy and logic than from Hebrew or New Testament thought and experience.

Taking the same points (a)-(e) as above, I would make the following definition of God's sovereignty:

God's sovereignty includes the right to limit the exercise and expression of his own omnipotence

a) God is Sovereign and in control; but to be in control is not the same as to be controlling. God's sovereignty includes the right and ability to limit the exercise and expression of his own omnipotence and omniscience under particular circumstances as his purposes require it. (For example, Jesus was neither omnipotent, omniscient or omnipresent during his life on Earth.) So instead of the absolute rule of a benign divine dictator, there is a complex interplay between God's sovereignty, creaturely freedom and - enabling these otherwise conflicting factors to mesh - divine grace.

b) Following on from this, God can of course do whatsoever he wills, but he may not. For example, if his will for a specific situation or person conflicts with the general laws he has laid down for how the world works, including creaturely choice and moral responsibility, he may choose to forego his primary will in that situation. In other words, God may choose (by his perfect will!) to self-limit his sovereignty, subjecting it to other principles or aspects of the divine nature such as love and mercy.

c) While God's overall will may remain fixed, his specific will in the current imperfect world is often provisional, flexible and dynamic. The created world and its inhabitants have the freedom not to obey God's will, and also sometimes his perfect will is not compatible with the constraints and imperfections of this world. In such cases, God's purposes are not defeated but have to go by longer and more circuitous routes. God is more than creative enough to have contingency plans for circumstances in which his primary and even secondary or tertiary will is not done.

Only in God's fully-realised Kingdom will God's will always be perfectly done

d) Again, far from all that happens in this world is what God wills, whether directly or indirectly, actively or passively. Much of what happens is in direct conflict with or opposition to God's will. Only in God's fully-realised Kingdom will God's will always be perfectly done. Why else does Jesus urge us to pray 'Your kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven'?

e) God's will is indeed perfect - whatever God wills must be good and right. Nonetheless, I believe God is usually very happy for us to question his will - if that means active engagement rather than submitting passively to whatever happens. And certainly we need to question whether particular events and circumstances are God's will simply to be accepted or instead something we need to battle against and overcome.

Secondary Sovereignty

God's sovereignty and omnipotence take second place to his love and goodness

I don't have any problem with God being Sovereign, only with the primacy of Sovereignty over other aspects of his nature and character. In my view his sovereignty and omnipotence take second place to some of his other qualities, primarily his love and goodness. Therefore where his sovereignty is in conflict with his love, it is his love that wins.

Related posts

• Is God in the future?
  

It's only natural (but it still sucks)

Death of a duckling | Rage against who? | Nature, good and bad

What does the death of a duckling have to say about the nature of the universe and God?

Death of a duckling

I even chose my secondary school partly on the basis of a brood of ducklings

I've always been tremendously fond of ducklings (I don't mean crispy fried). I even unwisely chose my secondary school partly on the basis that there was a brood of ducklings in the quad pond when I went for the open evening. And this year my 4-year-old son has been asking for daily report-backs on how many ducklings I've seen in Greenwich Park. For the past week I'd sadly had to report dwindling numbers - 9 down to 5, down to 4, down to 2... but then on Tuesday lunchtime to my delighted amazement I came upon 17 ducklings in the main wildfowl lake. I happily watched the antics of the little swimming fluff-balls for some time and was about to turn away when I noticed a Canada Goose treading on a duckling that was sitting on the concrete sloping down into the water. The goose then picked up the duckling in its beak, shook it and dropped it. It lay still.

Angry and upset, I stood wondering whether I should transgress the park boundaries, step over the fence and pick up the duckling, although I was sure that it was already dead. Then a crow flew down and snatched up the little body in its beak, but a mother duck flew at it and it dropped the dead duckling into the water where it floated with its head underwater. The saddest sight for me was the mother duck swimming up behind it and repeatedly nudging the little floating body with her beak as though she could coax it back to life. At the risk of being written off as pathetically sentimental, it brought tears to my eyes and an intense feeling of loss and grief.

Rage against - who?

suddenly that dead duckling represented all the injustice of the world

I know it's all perfectly natural and normal, and that only a few ducklings - and other young animals - survive to adolescence, let alone adulthood. But suddenly that small bedraggled floating bundle of dead duckling became for me the representative of all the injustice and wrong and cruelty of the world, and my heart just wanted to shout out abuse and rage against whatever it was that made things be this way.

The obvious thought is that it's God who made things this way, and against him that my anger should be directed. But I can't shake the feeling that the God I've seen in Jesus Christ was grieving every bit as much for that duckling as I was. In some ways the duckling was like Christ - the very symbol of innocent suffering at the hands of the cruelty and injustice in the universe. I felt that my anger must be directed at all the evil in the world, and at the corresponding evil in myself.

Nature, good and bad

Is the universe fundamentally benevolent or hostile?

Nature is so full of beauty and loveliness, and simultaneously so full of suffering and death. Is the one necessary for the other, or are death and cruelty alien and unnatural evils that have found their way into a good creation?

What about lust, greed, anger and violence - these things feel entirely natural; are they just natural in-built parts of our evolved survival package, or are they a corruption of good instincts and impulses?

Is the universe fundamentally benevolent or hostile, kind or cruel? Is it more truly natural to be compassionate and caring or to compete and kill?

I have no easy answers to these questions. All I know is that I have chosen to base my life on the reality and goodness of God, to believe in the beauty and grace despite the very real pain and injustice. This present world, this nature, is good but it is not perfect, is not how it is ultimately meant to be. Perhaps the pain is part of the process of becoming perfect - or perhaps it is an evil to be fought and overcome.

Related posts:

• Evolution, fall and morality
• Earthquakes and God - why does God allow natural disasters?

The paradise paradox paradigm

Now try saying that several times fast. I admit the paradise bit wasn't strictly necessary - I just got carried away. I'd like to have included 'paradiddle' but it didn't seem to fit somehow.

Paradox is the living heart of the Christian faith

Paradox for me is the living heart of the Christian faith. Rather than being the static, systematic set of set-in-stone doctrines and beliefs beloved of fundamentalists, Christianity as presented by Christ and the Bible is more like an infinitely-complex, ever-changing kaleidoscope centred around a set of fundamental, paradoxical truths. Because they are paradoxical, they can never fully be pinned down or put in a box; they are always throwing out fresh insights and ideas.

The very nature of God in Christianity is a paradox - God is a trinity, one being yet three persons. If you can explain this you're either a genius or mistaken, yet the Trinity is an idea which gives rise to incredible riches of thought and understanding (I'll try and tackle some of these another time perhaps). And God is infinite and transcendent yet also immanent (close, personal, present within/through creation). He is just and righteous yet loving and merciful. He is utterly holy yet approachable.

Then we have Jesus who is simultaneously fully human and yet fully divine (mirroring to an extent the Bible which is understood to be 'God-breathed' while being fully humanly-authored). We have the mystery of the incarnation, when the Lord of all the universe and time became a tiny clump of cells in a human mother - and a peasant girl at that, not some great Queen. And then we have the Lord and source of all life submitting to death, the sinless punished for the sinful in God's paradoxical act of ultimate mercy, justice and love so that his death becomes the source of life for all.

Jesus' teaching is saturated with paradox - the first shall be last, lose your life to gain it, give to receive, love your enemies... His actions were paradoxical too, confounding all the expectations of what a Messiah should look like and how he should behave. He touched the untouchable and welcomed the outcast while antagonising and criticising the powerful and 'righteous'. He did impossible things - turning water into wine, walking on water, raising the dead - not as a 'conjurer of cheap tricks' but because (among other reasons) he is the Lord of the impossible and the paradoxical.

God seems to enjoy working in a topsy-turvy, upside-down, skew-whiff way

Paul comments that God's foolishness is greater than man's wisdom, and that God chooses the weak and foolish things of the world to shame the strong and wise. God just does seem to enjoy working in a topsy-turvy, upside-down, skew-whiff, expectation-confounding and ultimately paradoxical way. And I for one am very glad about it.

Because of this, we can't second-guess God. We can't ever fully understand him. We can't say that because he did or said such-and-such once, he will do so again. We can't box him or predict him. I'd like to finish with a slightly tongue-in-cheek song I wrote a few years ago to the tune of 'Our God is an awesome God' by Rich Mullins:

Our God is a paradox
He heals, yet sends the pox
Can't put him in a box
Our God is a paradox

Our God is a paradox
He comforts and he shocks
His ways aren't orthodox
Our God is a paradox

Many ways to one God? (part 1)

A friend of mine has a saying, 'There are many mountains in the Himalayas and all of them point to God'. To a lot of Christians this just sounds like new-agey fluffiness - after all, didn't Jesus say 'I am the way... no-one comes to the Father except through me'? And some will understandably feel that if other ways did lead to God, then what on earth was the point of all the hassle of being a Christian - though this would perhaps miss the point somewhat.

While I can't perhaps go as far as my friend in believing that all roads lead ultimately to God, nor that all people will eventually be redeemed - though I do hope for that - I have moved quite a distance in that direction. I have reason to hope that many who do not know or consciously profess Christ will find themselves in God's Kingdom; and conversely I suspect that many who call themselves Christian will find their place among the chosen less guaranteed than they imagined.

Does this mean I'm becoming a wishy-washy anything-goes so-called liberal? Perhaps, but I don't believe so. Rather I'm trying to take Jesus' own words and character very seriously and not shoehorn them into watertight doctrines that don't actually hold water.

The Way, the Truth and the Life

In the next post I want to look at more of what the Bible has to say on the subject but let's start with 'I am the way, the truth and the life'. To my mind it's quite possible to interpret this verse in a way that's far from the standard 'only Christians go to heaven' version.

Yes, Jesus is the Way, but it is possible to follow a way without knowing its name or having been shown it on a map. All who, led by the Spirit, follow the true way are indeed following Jesus whether they know it or not. Similarly, Jesus is the Truth and the Truth is Jesus, so anyone who seeks the truth is surely seeking Jesus whether they realise it or not. And Jesus is the Life, but life whether spiritual or biological is a pretty mysterious thing, and those who have it may not exactly understand what it is or how they came by it.

So Jesus can truly say 'No-one comes to the Father except by me', for all who do come to the Father by whatever route will find - perhaps to their surprise - that they came in truth through Christ.

One of my favourite passages in C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories comes towards the end of The Last Battle. The young Calormene Emeth, a lifelong devotee of the pagan demon-god Tash, finds himself to his great surprise in the Narnian heaven. Aslan the Christ-Lion explains to him:

"Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me… For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him…

But I [Emeth] said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."

This to me is the crux. Those who seek truth, goodness, beauty, justice and mercy will find it, for they are truly seeking God.

Love

We in the modern western church make much of right belief in a correct creed, and of following particular steps that will guarantee us a place in God's kingdom. But authentic Christian faith is not mere intellectual assent to right theories about God and salvation, nor following a five-step programme to eternal life. True belief is about who we are in the deepest place, and about the actions and attitudes towards God and other people that flow from that.

So the greatest command is simply - and almost impossibly - to love: to love God with all our heart, mind and strength; to love our fellow humans as ourselves. Those who seek to follow this law are, as Jesus said, not far from the kingdom, whatever theologies they do or don't profess. And conversely those who have not love, though they perform great miracles, are not actually on the Way of Christ at all.

My own view then is that Christ's presence and activity are not limited to those within the Christian church, and that he is often present incognito in other faiths and none. For wherever there is goodness, truth, love, kindness, honesty, generosity, compassion, or mercy, there at least to some degree is Christ. Even if all paths do not lead to him, in his grace he often chooses to meet us on whatever path we happen to be on.

Is God in the future?

Yesterday I received a daily devotional email from the Purpose Driven Life (TM) with the following lines from Rick Warren:

"The Bible says, even before you were born, God knew all of your future. This means God sees your tomorrow, today. He already sees the things you'll face... God not only knows about the future, He's there in the future."

I realise I'm stepping incautiously out into major heresy here, but I really don't see how it's meaningfully possible for God to be in the future. I'm not convinced that the future has any fixed and objective reality of the sort that anyone - even God - can possibly inhabit, visit or even view.

I would now hastily make these provisos:

1. God can of course state for definite that certain chosen things will happen in the future, for if he has determined that they will happen then no-one has the power to prevent them - unless he should decide to allow them that power. So God could decide that the world will end tomorrow and no-one would be able to stop him.

2. God has all knowledge and all wisdom, and can project and predict all the possible paths and trajectories of every past and present event, action or choice - indeed the course of every sub-atomic particle - as well as their relative probabilities. So he does indeed know all the potential futures as far as they can be known.

3. Following from this, he can of course also steer, shape and influence events and their paths to achieve his purposes. However, I believe that as a general rule he does so in such as way as not to violate the free will and choice of his morally responsible creatures.

4. Finally, much of the future is merely a continuation or repetition of the past. We can all predict certain cyclical aspects of the future - day will follow night, spring will follow winter, adulthood will follow childhood. We can also use the law of cause and effect: current actions will have future consequences, many of which are predictable. And other things simply remain fixed and unchanged for what we term the 'foreseeable future' - e.g. the summit of Everest will almost definitely still be the highest point on the Earth's surface for many years to come.

Of course there are examples in the Bible where God does foretell future events - but these can usually be explained by one of the above provisos. Even Jesus knowing that Peter would deny him three times before the cock crowed could be God fully knowing the characters, behaviours and habits of all the players in the story (point 2 above) - or it could be something that God determined to happen for some reason (point 1 or 3).

I do not see that an inability to dwell in the future diminishes God's greatness or sovereignty any more than it does that he cannot make a square circle or cannot make 1 = 0. If the future genuinely does not exist except in potential until it ceases to be the future by becoming the present, I would say that it is neither possible nor meaningful for God to dwell in it, visit it or fully know it.

Theologians talk of God being 'outside time', which I accept to an extent (and he is also within time). But the time God is outside (and in) is real, actual time, not merely potential time. God can be in and around all real, existing times and spaces, but I do not believe the future fits in this category.

But as usual, I'm very likely to be wrong and God probably knows I'll change my mind in the future... ;-)

What can we say of God?

I've just finished a fantastic book, How (not) to Speak of God by Peter Rollins - one of the deepest, most thoughtful spiritual books I've read. Rollins' paradoxical central thesis is that 'That which we cannot speak of [i.e. God] is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking'.

If God is always beyond human language, human thought, human understanding - as he must be to be truly God - what can we ever say of him? Must we simply remain silent before the mystery?

I believe that, though we can never fully comprehend or conceptualise God, there are nonetheless a number of things we can truly say about him. (NB I'm using the masculine pronoun for simplicity, not to denote gender.) We can speak - always humbly, tentatively and provisionally - because God has spoken to us in a variety of ways, and ultimately because he has come to us - has made himself known to us - in Christ.

Firstly we can say that God IS; that he is Real, or the Real - the ultimate Reality, fount and foundation of all being, of all that is; and that he is without beginning or end or limit.

We can say that he is Good, that indeed he is Goodness itself and the source of all good; in him is no evil. Good is simply rightness - the natural, original, essential state of all being and all things. He is therefore also the source and essence of all Life, Light and Love, and all that flow from these - truth, joy, beauty, healing, mercy, freedom, hope, justice. We can say that there is no truly good thing that does not have its source in him and its place in his realm, his 'kingdom'.

We can say that he is immeasurably and infinitely greater, better, higher, more, than anything we could possibly conceptualise or imagine.

We can say that he is both personal and relational, the source of personality and relationship; for he is Love and love requires both of these things. In himself he represents and embodies the perfect communion, circle or dance of love, and that love shines out, reaches out endlessly and limitlessly to draw others into itself, into its circle of belonging and acceptance, of freedom and joy.

We can say that he is the God who communicates, who 'speaks', for relationship must involve communication (though not necessarily or primarily verbal). And he has indeed spoken, and continues to speak - through prophets, saints and even donkeys; through nature; through humans, who specially bear his (albeit dim and distorted) image; through the chequered history, songs and stories of the Hebrews in the Bible; through our own reason, conscience and experience. All these are cracked vessels, flawed messengers, presenting God's image 'through a glass darkly'.

But God has also spoken in one further way - through the life, character, words and works of Jesus Christ, who (his followers believe) is the perfect human representation and embodiment - incarnation - of God. In and through him we can see the God who is beyond sight, can know the God who is beyond knowledge.

God cannot be understood any more than light can be seen. Rather, light is what we see by, and God is what we understand by - he is the beginning and source of understanding, as well as its end and destination. To know God is both to love him and to be in awe of him; and this is the starting point and context for all other understanding.

Further thoughts on God and suffering

In earlier posts I've pondered on why God allows evil in the universe, and why he allows natural disasters and all the terrible suffering they bring. These are, I think, two very different questions. Suffering and evil are not the same things, nor are they even always part of the same problem.

Hurt versus harm

US psychologists Cloud and Townsend draw a useful distinction between 'hurt' and 'harm', or in other words suffering and evil. They use the example of eating sweets, which harms our teeth but doesn't initially hurt, compared to having a filling which hurts but doesn't harm. Suffering always hurts but it doesn't always harm - in fact, sometimes it's part of the healing process. Evil always harms but it doesn't always hurt.

Often pain and suffering are unavoidable though uncomfortable counterparts to liberation, maturation, transformation and healing. Indeed, it would be hard to envisage life outside of a padded cell that didn't involve them. Furthermore, all parents have to stand by and allow their children to experience some pain and difficulty without stepping in to fix it, otherwise those children would never become responsible adults. God too cannot merely bail us out and fix all our problems, and nor can he be held to blame for all the crap that happens in a universe full of free moral agents.

Nonetheless, the deliberate causing of pain and suffering, except in the context of healing, is generally sadistic and evil. So which category do natural disasters fall into?

Natural disasters and evil

An earthquake, hurricane or volcano, though terrible, is not inherently evil. But to deliberately cause or send one would surely be evil. The only time it might not be would be if it were to wipe out evil - say if a freak landslide had hit a Nazi rally in 1939. However, sending an earthquake that indiscriminately wipes out hundreds of thousands of average people, including children, would surely be an unspeakably evil act.

But what about allowing - rather than actively sending - natural disasters? This perhaps depends on the context and reason. If earthquakes and hurricanes are part of the vital systems and processes of the world's natural order, then to allow that order to run its course without intervention may not be evil. Especially if that natural order turns out to be the only means by which morally responsible, free and loving beings can evolve in the universe.

However, even if this is the case does the end justify the means? Another possibility, discussed in an earlier post, is that the natural order has been corrupted by evil which God allows to continue for the present while he ongoingly and painfully redeems the cosmos.

Suffering and redemption

It's important to note that in the Christian view, God both fully enters into and redeems our suffering - that is the central message of the cross and of Easter. Though suffering is not good in itself, it becomes the means of good. The enduring power of Christ's gospel is that it can transform evil into good, disaster into triumph, despair into hope.

Finally, you cannot have God without God's kingdom, the incoming realm in Christ in which wrongs are righted, harms healed, and love and justice made perfect. If this present order were all there is, then death and tragedy might be the strong arguments against belief in God that A.C. Grayling imagines. But if not, it is not only perfectly plausible to believe in God in the face of earthquakes and holocausts, it may actually be the only belief that has something better than nihilistic despair to offer.

Reality as Sacrament and Icon

No, I'm not turning Catholic or Orthodox (though I see much good in both). Rather I've recently been discovering a new (actually probably very old) set of ways of understanding and relating to God and the world - or rather to God in and through the world. These ways are best described in words like sacrament, icon, transcendent immanence, transluminence and super/naturalism. I'd sum it up as the idea of God as the Reality behind reality.

I'm tentatively starting to see each new moment, sight, experience and encounter - the whole world and all of life - as potentially sacramental. Each new sight, meeting or creature can become a sacrament, a physical vessel or conduit of the divine presence, mediating God's reality to us. So in and through the things of the natural world we can potentially encounter God, receive his love and grace, hear his inaudible voice.

Related to this is the idea of the world and all in it - all of physical reality - as icon. An icon is not an idol, an object of worship, but rather a channel of worship, a window through which we glimpse a little of the God whom no image can capture or truly represent (Christ alone is the perfect icon).

Anything can be an idol if put in place of God; almost anything (with the exception of that which is inherently evil) can be an icon or sacrament. Each place can become a sacred space; each moment can be a holy moment, every mundane activity can be worship. God is not contained in his creation, but (for those with eyes to see) he saturates it, pervades it, shines through it so that truly 'Earth's crammed with heaven / And every common bush aflame with God'. I'm calling this shining-through transluminence.

Closely linked to this is the idea of the extraordinary in the ordinary - the miraculous in the mundane, the eternal in the everyday. Sometimes you may see a familiar face or some perfectly ordinary thing but you see it afresh, as though for the first time. These epiphanies again reveal the ordinary stuff of life as sacraments and icons through which we glimpse the divine.

Transcendent immanence is the idea that God is at the same time both totally transcendent (beyond, above, over, outside, greater than) and also totally immanent (present, near, within, through, beneath). The Trinity is a potent symbol of this - God's Spirit makes the transcendent, timeless God present within/through each part and particle of created time and space, and perhaps the Son is the floodgate through which the Spirit enters the cosmos, the bridge-maker between the eternal and temporal realms. (NB when I say the Trinity is a symbol I don't mean that it isn't real.)

Alongside all these ideas is what I'm calling super/naturalism, aka supernatural theism. This sees the realms or dimensions of natural and supernatural, physical and spiritual, visible and invisible as integrated, intersecting at all points - not separate but part of a seamless unity. There is therefore no division between 'sacred' and 'profane' or physical and spiritual - each touches on the other and is a part of the other, just as body and soul co-inhere (if that's a word). This allows us to see God as intimately involved in the physical world, acting in it through natural events and circumstances.

We therefore don't need to make a distinction between miraculous 'God' events and normal, natural events that somehow operate apart from or without God. By the same token, a 'natural' or scientific account of some phenomenon need not deny or exclude God's presence or activity within and through it. We do not need, for example, to choose between Creation and Evolution - we can affirm the both/and as we can affirm that each baby is 'created' by God yet at the same time formed through normal, natural everyday biological processes. So belief in the supernatural is not 'gilding the lily' as some atheists suggest - it is merely seeing the lily in the fullness of its (sacramental) reality.

This does not of course mean that everything in nature is equally or fully good, God-filled or God-ordained. God's world is infected throughout and in every part with evil and corruption (see previous post on God and evil). Almost no object or experience is a pure sacrament or perfect icon; as yet we only ever glimpse God 'as through a glass darkly' (and writing this through a heavy cold on a grey January day, the glass does seems pretty dark). But the glimpses are genuine, and it is from the matter and spirit of this corrupted but originally good world that God is here and now invisibly building his new, redeemed and restored creation - his kingdom, in which his love will reign fully and his face be seen perfectly.

Finally, if all of reality is in some way sacramental, then I am - you are - as well. We each dimly, stumblingly, often unwittingly yet uniquely reflect and transmit glimpses of God to others.

Why does God allow evil?

'Rushing in where angels fear to tread' springs to mind, but in for a penny... ;-)

If God is perfect (and if he isn't, he's not God), why does evil exist and why does God allow it to continue?

A few quick provisos:

• A blog post can't do more than skim the surface of such enormous issues
  
• There are probably as many ways of answering the questions as there are thinkers about it
  
• People of faith have wrestled with these issues for millennia and the struggle has often enriched their faith without producing any simple answers
• A lot depends on our definitions/understanding of 'good' and 'evil', which there's not room for here. But for example, is all pain and even all suffering actually evil, or merely very unpleasant and difficult? Is death always and inherently bad? Can destruction sometimes be good (say of a cancer)?
  
• Ultimately, evil is not a riddle to be solved but a reality to be dealt with.
  

My own (tentative and provisional) view is that Evil is an unavoidable potential inherent in Good. Evil is not a separate entity from Good; it is merely Good corrupted, twisted, misused, misplaced or attenuated. It is the shadow side of Good: where there is freedom to bless, there must also be freedom to curse; where there is freedom to build, there must also be freedom to destroy, and so on. And as noted above, sometimes destruction (e.g. of a cancer) may be a right and necessary and thing. 

So God did not create or plan evil, but evil was inherent as a potentiality within the good.

Furthermore, Christian theology holds that God wanted morally free, responsible agents whose actions could have genuine significance; who could genuinely love and embrace the good out of free choice. Again, this implies freedom not to act this way; the potential for good inherently includes the potential for not-good, or less-than-good, or good twisted.

At some point then the potentiality for evil becomes the reality of evil, infecting and corrupting the goodness of the cosmos and perhaps even of all things in it. When this happens, one option would be for God to wipe everything out and start again - a bit like a writer ripping up a whole manuscript because of a flaw running through all of it. But this is not the action of one who truly, passionately loves. In all the corrupted things and creatures there is still so much of the original good, and God chooses the long, slow, painful path of redemption and restoration - ultimately even involving his own self-sacrifice and death - to heal the damaged creation. This is, more or less, the Christian story.

In Matthew 13:14-29 Jesus tells a story about a farmer who planted a field of wheat, but an enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat. Rather than trying to pull up the weeds and risk pulling up the good wheat too, the farmer let the two grow side by side until harvest time when they could be separated without damage. This is a picture not only of the cosmos but of everything in it, including our own hearts - good and evil are for the moment inextricably entwined, and God will not risk destroying the good by ripping out the evil. I for one am very grateful for this, as I know too well that many of my thoughts, attitudes, words and deeds do not put me unqualifiedly in the 'good' camp.

Anyway, these are all just my suggestions, not some definitive statement.

Earthquakes and God - why does God allow natural disasters?

As I said in a previous post, even if it's possible to explain why an all-powerful loving God allows natural disasters that wipe out millions, no explanation is likely to satisfy us emotionally.

The overall problem of evil and pain is difficult enough - and will have to wait for another occasion - but natural disasters come into an even harder category because they seem so random and so indiscriminate, and because they cannot easily be blamed on anyone apart from God.

There are many ways people have tried to understand natural disaster in the light of their faith in God.

1. God's wrath. It seems hideously insensitive even to mention in the light of the current tragedy, but some (rather scary) people have indeed interpreted such disasters as acts of God punishing the wickedness of humanity (citing the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah for example). I personally can't accept this. Yes, you only need to read the newspapers or look hard in the mirror to see that humans aren't shining examples on the whole, yet all of Jesus' teaching and example would seem to argue against the idea that God would indiscriminately wipe out whole populations - including many of his followers - for the sins of some, or even of all. And why does Robert Mugabe remain alive and well while children die in Haiti?

2. Evil. Some want to blame that other convenient scapegoat, Satan, or let's just say the great primal forces of evil and chaos loose in the universe. There's certainly a strand of Christian thinking that Satan was present and active from the outset in creation, well before humans ever came on the scene, and Charles Foster (mentioned in an earlier post) believes that Satan was responsible for selfishness-driven natural selection and predation. However, these are murky waters - and is evil really responsible for the plate tectonics which shape our planet and yet also lead to earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves? (The question of why God allows evil to remain present and active in the universe will have to wait for another time.)

3. Human responsibility. A third possible culprit is seen to be humanity - that somehow all the sins and selfishness of mankind disturb the natural order and balance of the planet, leading to natural calamities. Certainly we're all increasingly aware of the environmental damage we're doing to the planet and the disastrous ecological consequences this could unleash. And if Chaos theory is right and the flapping of a butterfly's wings could ever lead to a hurricane on the other side of the globe, who knows - perhaps my sin could lead to a natural disaster somewhere. All a bit imponderable and impenetrable though.

4. Natural order. A fourth and, to my mind, more likely option is that natural disasters - like pain and death - are simply a necessary part of the complex geological, biological and climatological systems of our planet, systems which allow life to exist and flourish at all.

We are fragile beings in an immense universe and our lifespan is short, whether cut off abruptly by a natural disaster, war, disease or violence, or allowed to play out to a full natural lifespan. I may not have died in this week's Haitian earthquake but I may be hit by a bus tomorrow or by cancer next year, and I will certainly die sometime within the next 70 years or so. Perhaps the real issue is whether we - whether I - can learn to live well here and now, ready to face death whenever and however it may come.

I realise this is a very partial and provisional response, and it costs me nothing to theorise from the comfort of my non-earthquake-damaged armchair (well, slightly human-damaged swivel chair to be precise - the back-rest keeps falling off). To my mind a far more important response is active compassion in the face of human suffering, anger at the evil in the universe and in ourselves, humility in the face of mystery, and prayer in the darkness.

Shades of Grayling - the dullness of philosophers

Woke up this morning (and this isn't the opening to a blues song) to the un-dulcet sound of humanist philosopher A.C. Grayling on Radio 4, dismissing belief in God as utterly illogical on the basis of the recent Haitian earthquake.

There's something about humanist philosophers that brings out the worst in me. They seem so smug, so utterly certain, and so unutterably dull; acknowledging no shades of grey, yet somehow sounding as grey as a November day. Grayling and his ilk are children of the enlightenment, modernists and positivists to the core and apparently unable to embrace the richer both/and insights of post-modernism; they mock at mystery and cannot live with paradox and untied ends.

Yes, it's hard to understand how there could be an all-loving, all-powerful God in the face of horrendous natural disasters - no-one's denying that. But for those of us who believe - who cannot but believe because of the whole experience and evidence of our lives and our hearts - these are problems we can live with, paradoxes we can embrace. There are of course many possible ways of trying to explain how God can be good and yet there can be natural disasters; maybe I'll explore them in another post but of course they are all partial and provisional, and personally I'm inclined not to bother too much over them. They may perhaps satisfy the intellect, but the heart has very different needs.

What makes me smile wryly is that for all Grayling's insistence on cold, hard logic, he then segues on without a blink to speak of how what really matters is responding to the disaster with compassion and kindness. I completely agree, but where's his logic in that? How on earth do kindness and compassion fit into his tight A+B=C conceptual framework? Nonetheless I'm very glad to find that his humanity is better than his philosophy. Love is greater than logic and maybe those who try to justify God but don't help their stricken fellow man are further from the kingdom than philosophers who reject God but feed their neighbour.

Unapologetics

Okay, so apologetics - which I've always thought was a duff name - is the attempt to defend or present the truth of God or Christianity by means of overwhelming evidence, either logical/rational or miraculous. Great Christian apologists of the last century included C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, both of whose work I've often attempted to emulate in the past.

But God is not a hypothesis to be tested, a proposition to be proved or a problem to be solved. God is a reality - The Reality - to be encountered, experienced, engaged with, entered into. I can never prove God either by logic or by display of supernatural power. Miracles can be doubted as hoaxes, and by definition they can never be scientifically tested. And logic and reason can only take you so far in demonstrating that which is completely beyond all language and all human ability to conceptualise. They can't even satisfactorily describe something as normal and natural as, say, my love for my wife - reason is a useful tool but it is not the only or even the best way of knowing, particularly when what you need to know is a person more than it is an idea.

God and Christianity are not less than reasonable or rational; they are more than. I believe Lewis's greatest works were not his apologetics - good though those are - but his mythopoeic fiction, which allow us imaginatively to encounter and experience something of the divine reality which his powerful logic could only weakly hint at.