On Time

I think a lot about time. You might say, I spend a lot of time thinking about time. 

And here are two core convictions: Time is a gift. And we spend time on what we love. I'll add to those, since it's the season of Advent, that when God comes to us in Christ in the Incarnation and inhabits time, God sanctifies time. This post then is what sanctified time looks like.

Speaking of the Incarnation, perhaps the most profound and counter-intuitive statement Jesus spoke was this: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:19). 

Without reflection, we might think he said the reverse: where our heart is, there our treasure will be. In this version of Jesus, we adjust our inner attitude, and then we do the right actions. 

But the order is different, and that fact is critical: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”Our hearts follow our treasures. I.e., what we spend our time is what we love, and the more time we spend the more our love grows. Invest your time in a church or nonprofit and see how you begin to care more about it. 

But why then do I often spend my time so poorly? Why do I not inhabit the present moment?

 

The problem is that we seem to live in every other time but the present. We throw away our time like it's dispensable. We don't treasure it. 

Blaise Pascal, the brilliant seventeenth-century scientist and theologian, offered a profound meditation on this topic: 

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so. (italics added)

Or as the brilliant writer, Anne Lamott puts it, God wants to give us the child’s experience of “big, round hours." 

This thought, like so many, takes me to St. Clive, aka C. S. Lewis, who puts the problem of human existence—or better the ongoing temptation of time—into the mouth of a devil, Screwtape in his fictional correspondence,The Screwtape Letters. 

Screwtape writes to his junior devil, Wormwood, that “we want a man hag-ridden by the Future” because in essence the future does not yet exist and it takes his eyes off the present moment. 

"We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present."

And now back to Pascal; this also comes from Pensées: 

"So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists.” 

Three More Trending Topics in Science and Religion

I'm back to my Top Eleven List of topics in science and religion, many of which are trending in importance. They are excerpted from my just-published book (!), Negotiating Science and Religion in America: Past, Present, and Future.

Genetics, medicine, and the specter of eugenics 

This is the first topic that I see trending; that is, entering into the conversation of  science and religion with a new prominence. Here I will note a specific discovery in genetic editing, CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat). Francis Collins remarked in 2019 that CRISPR “came out of nowhere  five years ago,” a technique that works via an “enzyme like what you have in a word processor that does search and replace,” which makes it relatively easy. And he added, “High school students can do this. And that should worry you.” CRISPR makes germline interventions, which affect future generations, unlike somatic cell interventions, which do not. This leads to the question of how to use this powerful and simple technology and whether to cure diseases or create “designer babies.” It also raises issues of what to do about undesirable traits. And who decides what or who needs to be edited out? The specter of eugenics is on the horizon. Finally, who will be given the power to decide? Will religious ideas play any part in these conversations? 

Psychology, neuroscience, and the cognitive science of religion 

Functional Magnetic Imaging Resonances (FMRIs) seem to show what’s happening inside our brains. Is God all in our head? And do the insights of neuroscience finally rid us of believing there’s a soul? Here Buddhist approaches to the non-self, or anatta, and some forms of cognitive science and neuroscience seem to have striking similarities. In addition there’s a growing interest in appropriating the Buddhist practice of mindfulness and its relationship to secular psychology, and especially positive psychology. Finally, the Cognitive Science of Religion, which powerfully brings together the cognitive sciences in the service of understanding religious belief and practice, has also provided fruitful insights for further discussion and research. 

Cosmology and astrobiology 

Key to many religious traditions is an emphasis on the nature of the world, or the  universe, and our place in it. Recent astronomical discoveries have highlighted the vast number of exoplanets (planets beyond our own solar system). In the seventeenth century the scientifically and theologically minded Blaise Pascal considered his “brief span of life” and 

“the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which knows nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed….” Blaise Pascal 

And there are medieval hints and certainly eighteenth-century antecedents. Still, some assert that exoplanets and the possible (or probable) existence of extraterrestrial life mean the sudden death of the Christian scheme of salvation since, according to the biblical texts, Jesus came to save this world (such as in John 3:16). The biblical cosmos was vanishingly small compared to our current understanding. Where is our place in the universe? Conversely, if this seems like a loss for Christianity, could it be a gain for other religions?

Some of these topics I've addressed in this blog, and I'll certainly tackle as many as I can in 2020. As always, feel free to let me know what you think.

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Living the Yes: Finding the Beauty of Life

I'm beginning to sketch out a book on Christian spirituality, very tentatively titled, Fully Alive. In that process, I've been drawn back to my book The Time for No and particularly its final chapter (or really, a meditation). In it, I begin with a quote from Søren Kierkegaard.

"The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived." Søren Kierkegaard

Beauty is found in doing what we are created to do. This suggests that we are created for

some activities (and not for some others). It implies that there’s a God who created us uniquely and purposely. As I mentioned from the start, saying yes is an affirmation of faith.

First of all, let me be clear: I don’t think this is about amassing more stuff.

If materialism could do it, we’d be fairly happy in this culture. It was the newscaster, Peter Jennings, who noted almost two decades ago, in 1997: 

“When I came back to my current job and began to wander around this country again, I was struck by how many Americans, in the midst of such plenty, were hungry for something more than our vaunted consumer society could provide for them.” 

Jennings pointed to religion, which is fine, as long as “religion” itself points to God our Creator.

Over a millennium and a half before Jennings, one of the greatest thinkers in western history, Augustine, began his autobiography with this prayer, a prayer of his own discovering that looking for fame and sex and even generalized spirituality left him unsatisfied. 

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Augustine of Hippo

Then again there’s the French 17^th century scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal, who realized in his famous “thoughts” (that’s what the French word means in its title, Pensées) that we all seek to be happy: “By nature, we all seek happiness.” But where do we seek it? “Some seek the good in authority, some in intellectual inquiry and knowledge, some in pleasure.” 

But Pascal observed that all these various potential sources for happiness, for a beautiful life, leave us craving for more. He pondered what that meant:

What else does this craving, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him… since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself. Pascal

C. S. Lewis echoed this conclusion about 300 years later with a simple, logically compelling phrase: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

In different yet complementary ways, these three realized that we are created to return to God. Our yeses find their satisfaction in the One who made us.

This journey then, of finding the time for yes, leads us back to God our Creator. We seek our yeses and really, we are seeking for God. When we get this right—when we say the right yeses in life and therefore the right nos—we find God right at the Center. That brings it all together. “In Him all things hold together” as the early Christian leader, Paul, wrote to the believers at Colossae (Colossians 1:17). God holds not only the universe, but our lives together.

That’s where I want my life to be found, centered in God. Because there is what’s best: joy, peace, power, happiness, excellence, success, and beauty. As one of my favorite bands, Future of Forestry, puts it: “I will go where beauty leads me home.”

And I have to admit, I like those things. I want to find my back to Beauty itself. 

So I’m saying yes.

Thankful for Two Reasons

As I enter this post, I'm thankful for two things--that we are created to know God and that a book, Connecting Faith and Science, which includes a chapter I wrote on the subject, was just published!

In the seventeenth century—right at the flowering of modern science—the mathematician Blaise Pascal offered another proof for God. He began, in a similar vein to Augustine with our existential search for rest: “By nature, we all seek happiness.” But where do we seek it? “Some seek the good in authority, some in intellectual inquiry and knowledge, some in pleasure.” Pascal continued by observing that all these various potential sources for happiness, for a beautiful life, leave us craving for more. He pondered what that meant:

"What else does this craving, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him… since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself." Blaise Pascal

C. S. Lewis echoed this conclusion about three hundred years after Pascal with a simple, logically compelling, phrase in his apologetics: 

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” C.S. Lewis

Lewis believed that this argument from desire constitute one of the strongest proofs for God’s existence.

            
It may surprise some in the Reformed tradition—at least those who have read Karl Barth’s cavils against “natural theology”—that the seminal voice of Reformed theology, John Calvin, wrote similarly of the “awareness of divinity.” Calvin was not out to prove God, but to state that inherent in human existence is a basic, vague, and powerful natural knowledge of God. Indeed, in Calvin’s vastly influential 1559 Institutes of the Christian Religion, he wrote, 

“There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity.” John Calvin

This awareness of divinity or sensus divinitatis is “beyond dispute” according to Calvin. It is the foundation of the natural knowledge of God.

Which indeed is cause for thanksgiving.

Our Awareness of Divinity

This is more or less my teaching from last Sunday. It will appear in a different form in a chapter of an upcoming book, Connecting Faith and Science: Philosophical andTheological Inquiries (Claremont Press, 2018). I'd be interested to know what you think.
 

One of the places I absolutely love is Lake Tahoe. I believe I’ve literally been there every year of my life. And so, in a way, it’s part of me. The beauty of its azure lake flanked mountain peaks is stunning. It’s also a place where I sense something deeply spiritual. My mother, who most of her life was not a particularly religious person—she was even anti-religious at times—told me once, as our family would be sitting along Tahoe’s shores: “Here’s where I can see God.” At the time, I let the remark stand without further comment, but it definitely stuck in my head.

      
That’s what I mean by the title “our awareness of divinity.”

      
The phrase “awareness of divinity” comes from John Calvin, for whom the appreciation of nature was a key part of his spiritual life. In his vastly influential 1559 Institutes of the Christian Religion (1.3.1) Calvin wrote this: 

“There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity.”

Reading beauty in the book of nature

This summer I’ve highlighted the idea of “Reading the Two Books,” that is, we read both the book of nature and the book of Scripture. Christians have noted that we read both books because they have one Author and therefore they don’t contradict, though their insights may enhance each other. One of the ways to read the book of nature, as I’ve mentioned before, is to see the beauty in creation.

      
This leads me to ask, What is beauty? If we were to Google beauty—especially for images—it’s almost entirely feminine physical beauty, along with products like cosmetics and shampoo, and events like beauty contests. Is that what I’m talking about?

      
I’m not denying that physical beauty is one form of beauty, but ancient thinkers talked about a broader transcendent beauty. Plato offers three markers for beauty: order, symmetry, and proportion; similarly, Thomas Aquinas, highlighted integrity, consonance, and clarity. Theologian Thomas Oden offers this: “Beauty is that quality or combination of qualities within a thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind of spirit.”

      
Ultimately, theologians see this beauty pointing back to God. So do many poets. As Gerald Manley Hopkins, the profound nineteenth century poet intones:

“Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Golden Echo”).

There is a similar experience of beauty as scientists read the book of nature. In Adventure of Ideas, the Harvard scientist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead pointed to this in scientific as well as artistic pursuits.

“Science and art are the consciously determined pursuit of Truth and of Beauty.”

It is beauty that lures us and that makes truth worth discovering.

      
And this brings us to the "awareness of divinity" because we see beauty around us, and we want to know the origin of this beauty. The Psalmist declares that he desires God’s beauty,

“One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple” (Psalm 27:4).

In the seventeenth century—right at the flowering of modern science—the mathematician Blaise Pascal offered a proof for God based on our inherent yearnings: “By nature, we all seek happiness.” But where do we seek it? Pascal wrote, “Some seek the good in authority, some in intellectual inquiry and knowledge, some in pleasure.” He continued by observing that all these various potential sources for happiness, for a beautiful life, leave us craving for more. He pondered what that meant:       

What else does this craving, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him… since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.

The twentieth century Oxford literary professor C. S. Lewis echoed this conclusion about three hundred years after Pascal with a simple, logically compelling, phrase: 

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” C. S. Lewis

And there are poets today in the world of rap music that are telling us the same thing, that no matter how hard the contemporary music scene tries, it can’t entirely let go of God. I start my Introduction to Religion class on Tuesday at Chico State with a reflection on God and spirituality in three of the most prominent rap artists today, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, and Chance the Rapper. They all talk about, and struggling with, faith in God. Chance, for example, appeared on The Tonight Show and produced a moving live rendition of his song “Blessings,” which includes the lyrics, “I speak to God in public," and "Are you ready for your blessing? Are you ready for a miracle?”
      
That is one way to express our natural awareness and yearning for God. A readings from the book of Scripture as most Protestants know it, as well as a text from the Catholic Bible--both from around the 1st century AD, offer similar insights. The context, by the way, is idolatry, the worship of creature rather than Creator. Both texts direct us back to the Source of all that is. Having said that, these verses seem clear enough to me. So I'll let them stand on their own without further comment.

Romans 1¹⁹ For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰ Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.  

Wisdom 13⁵ For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.

CSR and the awareness of divinity

This inherent “awareness of divinity” has also been studied by cognitive scientists, as they read the book of nature. What can evolutionary science teach us about this “awareness of divinity”? Justin Barrett, through his work in developing a Cognitive Science of Religion, uses the findings of the cognitive sciences to argue that evolution has developed human beings so that we implicitly see purposes in events, or are predisposed toward teleology.

“Evidence exists that people are prone to see the world as purposeful and intentionally ordered" (Justin Barrett), which naturally leads to belief in a Creator.

For example, preschoolers “are inclined to see the world as purposefully designed and tend to see an intelligent, intentional agent behind this natural design.” Some use this tendency to impugn belief in God—i.e., we cannot help but believe—instead I am arguing here that it is part of God’s creation. We are created through evolution with an openness to belief.      

Another area of research suggests that evolutionary pressures, particularly the human need toward cooperation as it leads to survival, produces a common stock of morality; “a recurring theme is that humans seem to naturally converge upon a common set of intuitions that structure moral thought,” such as “it is wrong to harm a nonconsenting member of one’s group.”

      
According the the Cognitive Science of Religion, we have then, deeply imprinted on the structures of our mind, an intuition of purpose and of morality. These together offer a sense of a moral Creator.

      
There are similarities with Calvin’s “awareness of divinity,” which points to a sense of the numinous, powerful and brooding. “Where can I go from Your presence? Where can I flee from Your spirit?” cries the psalmist in Psalm 139. It is the feeling of being out in a forest at night, knowing that no one is there, but feeling something. Often this experience can frighten us. And yet it also provides a witness to the natural knowledge of God. To be clear, God has used the process of evolution to implant this natural awareness.

Sense of the divine clarified by book of Scripture

There is a danger to this “awareness of divinity” if we only read the book of nature. It can leaves both Nazis and altruists unchanged, except with a veneer of belief and an assurance that what they already do now has divine endorsement. An “awareness of divinity” can be the basis of nature-worship, built on a sense of the mysteries of the natural world. It can be a brash, hedonistic worship of ourselves, embodied in the basest forms of contemporary spirituality. Even the Nazi’s propagated an appreciation for what “God is doing through the German Volk” and supported it with the powerful, but vague feeling of the Numinous working to renew the German civilization. (This also seems to be the case for today’s U.S. white supremacists and neo-Nazis.)

      
The book of Scripture offers clarity and directs this natural awareness of God. It describes Jesus as the one in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19). Science acts in some ways, in describing this “awareness of divinity” as general revelation, but those truths receive clarity through God’s special revelation in history, especially depicted in the pages of the Bible. For example, we can find the beauty of God’s design in the natural world through scientific work—and thus be led to conclude that God is an incomparable designer. We can, however, only know that God has created all humankind in the divine image and that God has redeemed all humanity in Jesus Christ through the book of Scripture.

      
I’ve always been taught to ask, So what? What do we do with this? We might simply enjoy reading the book of nature today and noting how it quite easily leads us to ponder the presence of God, something like my mother’s experience at Lake Tahoe’s shores, “Here’s where I can see God.” And in that we can thank our Creator that we are imprinted with this “awareness of divinity.” I hope that seems like a good start.