The Questioning Christian

The Trinity is an impediment to evangelism

For many nonbelievers and doubters (‘NBDs’), the church’s mulish insistence on the doctrine of the Trinity is one of the major stumbling blocks to faith.* 

The orthodox proclaim: If you don’t accept that God is three Persons in One, then you simply cannot be a true Christian. Granted, we can’t point you to any objective reason to believe this, but you still must accept it, purely on our say-so — some of our early founders imagined it to be true, which is good enough for us, and it should be good enough for you.

Many thoughtful NBDs are put off by this approach. They know, from education and experience, that such unsubstantiated appeals to authority are typically bootless.

The orthodox seem not to care. (Nor do they evidence much interest in the most obvious of the questions that can be raised about the Trinity:  Why three Persons?  Why not two, or four, or four million?) 

Instead, they blithely continue doing their evangelism rain dances, oblivious to whether they’re actually making it rain.

(* FOOTNOTE:  I use ‘faith’ here in a minimalist sense, namely (i) accepting that a Creator exists and (ii) trusting that, in the end, all will be well. It seems to me that this is precisely the kind of faith that the New Testament shows Jesus as exemplifying and urging others to seek.)

Brain scans suggest maybe Jesus isn't the only way to God after all

From part 3 of an NPR series on religion and the brain, by Barbara Bradley Hagerty:

When Baime [a Buddhist monk] meditated in Newberg's brain scanner, his brain mirrored those feelings [of timelessness and oneness with the universe]. As expected, his frontal lobes lit up on the screen: Meditation is sheer concentration, after all. But what fascinated Newberg was that Baime's parietal lobes went dark.

"This is an area that normally takes our sensory information, tries to create for us a sense of ourselves and orient that self in the world," he explains. "When people lose their sense of self, feel a sense of oneness, a blurring of the boundary between self and other, we have found decreases in activity in that area."

Newberg found that result not only with Baime, but also with other monks he scanned. It was the same when he imaged the brains of Franciscan nuns praying and Sikhs chanting. They all felt the same oneness with the universe. When it comes to the brain, Newberg says, spiritual experience is spiritual experience.

"There is no Christian, there is no Jewish, there is no Muslim, it's just all one," Newberg says.

A little theological dynamite there — but, remember, the research is just beginning.

(Emphasis added.)

A gene may make you ‘look on the bright side’ – or not; might that affect one’s faith?

“[A] genetic variation is linked with the tendency to look on the bright side of life. This is a key mechanism underlying resilience to general life stress. The absence of this protection in the other forms of this genotype is linked with heightened susceptibility to anxiety and depression.”

So says University of Essex professor Elaine Fox, lead author of a paper published Feb. 25 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “Looking on the bright side: biased attention and the human serotonin transporter gene.”  (HT: Scientific American, May 2009, “Half Empty or Half Full,” Briefs, p. 28.)

I wonder whether people having this genetic predisposition toward optimism are any more inclined to trust that in the end, all will be well.

I’m also curious whether people having such trust are more inclined to believe in the existence of a Creator resembling, at least somewhat, the God of the great monotheistic religions.

Five physicists on God

At the BBC Magazine Web site, Mark Vernon asks five renowned physicists for their takes on ‘God.’  The physicists include Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg; the Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees; Cambridge physicist Roger Penrose; the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne; and cosmologist Brian Swimme. 

It’s definitely worth a read — and don't miss the comments.

(Hat tip: the Rev. Nick Knisely, dean of the cathedral in Phoenix and himself an astrophysicist.)

Norman Mailer: God as artist, not lawgiver

From John M. Buchanan, Writers and words, The Christian Century, March 10, 2009, at 3:

Not long before he died [, author Norman Mailer] granted a series of interviews, which are published in the book On God. Mailer said that he was an atheist for 30 years before coming to acknowledge that he did believe in God.

He tried reading theology and was repelled. Theologians, Mailer concluded, "were undernourished in their appetite for inquiry." I wish he could have had a conversation with the theologian Joseph Sittler, for one.

Mailer came to believe in God, he said, because of his intense lifelong "exploration of human reality."

He envisioned God as "an artist, not a lawgiver, a mighty source of creative energy," and human beings as God's "most developed artwork."

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

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Related post:

• The Continuing Creation: Not Carpentry, But Bonsai

Evolutionary explanations for religious beliefs?

From a Scientific American posting, Is Religion Adaptive? It's Complicated - A group of Darwinian theorists discuss religion in Edinburgh, Scotland, by Jesse Bering of Queens University, Belfast (links are in original):

... [T]he past decade has seen tremendous and quite rapid developments in the naturalistic study of religion. Topics such as God, souls and sin are no longer being treated as “outside science” but rather as biologically based emanations of the evolved human mind, subject to psychological scrutiny like any other aspect of human nature.  ...

Here is the fly-on-the-wall’s view of just a few of the topics discussed last weekend: [¶¶]

Political scientist and evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson from the University of Edinburgh presented his argument that the idea of omniscient supernatural agents served an adaptive social policing function in the ancestral past. Johnson reasons that this would have encouraged individuals in groups to conform to group sanctions out of the fear of divine punishment, thus lessening the chances of social fission. This phenomenon would have been biologically adaptive since larger groups meant better chances of survival and reproductive success for individual members. It’s a bit like Santa Claus knowing whether we’re bad or good (but Santa doesn’t cause you to suffer renal failure, kill your crops, or sentence you to everlasting torment).

Anthropologist Richard Sosis summarized his “costly signaling” hypothesis of religious behavior. The gist of Sosis’s clever theory is that people engage in all sorts of costly religious behaviors—wasting time on rituals, wearing uncomfortable clothes, spending their hard-earned money—because, in doing so, they are advertising their commitment to the religious in-group. In other words, if you’re willing to do things such as cut off your child’s foreskin, pay a regular alms tax of 2.5 percent of your net worth or sit twiddling your thumbs for two hours every Sunday morning on a hard church pew, then your fellow believers will assume that you’re really one of them and can therefore be trusted.

Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers from Rutgers University, meanwhile, discussed the possible role of psychological self-deception in the realm of religion and reviewed the impossible to ignore evidence that religiosity positively effects human health. ...

Goyim for God: A reformed Judaism, open to gentiles, like Paul wanted in the first place

A few weeks ago, the preacher at our church explained how some churches focus on God the Father, others on Jesus, and still others on the Holy Spirit. It's been impossible not to notice that in the past 10 years or so, our parish has become almost totally Jesus-centered.

I'm not thrilled with this development. I don't claim to be a professional theologian, but my study of Scripture, informed in part by my professional training and experience, has persuaded me that Jesus likely was 'just' a good Jew and a uniquely-gifted prophet, who might or might not have aspired to rescue the Jewish people from oppression and usher in God's reign.

A church of theists, not focused on Jesus' person, but grounded in his teachings — especially his emphasis on the Summary of the Law — might be pretty appealing. (I rule out the Unitarian Universalists here; from what I understand, the UUs are generally nice people but many of them look down their noses at theists.)

That kind of theistic church wouldn't be nearly enough for most Christians, of course. But Christian-church membership seems to have been dropping among educated people; more and more of them simply don't buy traditional orthodox dogmas.  Where Christian churches are thriving, there's reason to believe it's not entirely due to their orthodoxy. Look at the success of the prosperity-gospel megachurches, such as Lakewood here in Houston: Every time I've heard Joel Osteen preach, he's barely even mentioned Jesus; he certainly doesn't seem to anchor his message to any kind of christological foundation.

Church-wise, what might hit the sweet spot is some version of Reform Judaism that's open to gentiles, and that doesn't require a commitment to The Law (Torah) or 'naturalized' membership in the Jewish people; Goyim for God, if you will. 

But hold on — a reformed Judaism for gentiles?  That sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it? 

Of course: it's approximately what St. Paul seems to have had in mind (go re-read, for example, his letters to the Galatians and to the Romans), before the church transformed his and Jesus' teachings into worship of the Teacher as God incarnate.

That's what the church needs, I submit: A return to putting God first, and not getting so wrapped up in Jesus.

Evidence of multiple universes? And if so, just what does that say about the existence of God?

It's possible that our universe wasn't specifically designed to support life as we know it, but is merely one of many possible universes, and ours happens to 'work.'  This, according to some atheists, is supposedly a rebuttal to the claim of scientist-theologians that the fine-tuning of our universe suggests the hand of a Designer.

(The atheists generally brush under the rug the question posed by the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne: If in fact there are multiple universes, that's all well and good, but then where did they come from?)

Hacker News points us to Dark flow: Proof of another universe? by Amanda Gefter, New Scientist, Jan. 22, 2009.  Here's an excerpt:

Kashlinsky, a senior staff scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, .... and colleagues have clocked galaxy clusters racing at up to 1000 kilometres per second - far faster than our best understanding of cosmology allows. Stranger still, every cluster seems to be rushing toward a small patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.

Kashlinsky and his team claim that their observation represents the first clues to what lies beyond the cosmic horizon. Finding out could tell us how the universe looked immediately after the big bang or if our universe is one of many. Others aren't so sure. One rival interpretation is that it is nothing to do with alien universes but the result of a flaw in one of the cornerstones of cosmology, the idea that the universe should look the same in all directions. That is, if the observations withstand close scrutiny.

(Emphasis added.)

Related posts:

• The Big Story: We're Helping to Build a Universe
• Creation: A Titanic Set of Processes That Continues Today
• Stardust Memories
• Some Reasons to Think There's a Creator
• The Continuing Creation: Not Carpentry, But Bonsai

Multiple universes might still need a Creator

"Our universe is perfectly tailored for life. That may be the work of God or the result of our universe being one of many." (Emphasis mine.) So says the slug of a very readable article by Tim Folger published yesterday in the on-line version of Discover magazine:  Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory.

The slug is wrong about one thing:  It's not an either-or proposition. Even if multiple universes have been created, and ours is the one we happen to live in, we're still left with the question: How did that come to pass?  (So says the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, quoted in the Folger article, in one of his books.)

There's no reason to think a Creator would not create multiple universes instead of just one. That would be roughly parallel with the way we think evolution works in our particular universe:  Lots of 'experiments,' with the ones that work, continuing on.

Or as Paul says in 1 Thess. 5.20: Don't scorn people who come up with novel ideas; instead, test everything, and keep that which seems good.

The Good Shepherd, isn't?

From Christopher Hitchens, quoted in the New York Times:

Shepherds don’t look after sheep because they love them — although I do think some shepherds like their sheep too much. They look after their sheep so they can, first, fleece them and second, turn them into meat. That’s much more like the priesthood as I know it.

The quotation is from an account of a debate between Hitchens and Rabbi David Wolpe on the subject, "Is religion good for the world?"  It's worth a read.