What We Are Given
October 10, 2010
Galatians 5:22-23; Isaiah 11:2-3
I saw Sam Harris interviewed last week by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Harris, one of the leading lights of the so-called “new atheists,” has just published a new book called The Moral Landscape. I’ll confess that I don’t pay much attention to the “new” atheists because, frankly, they bore me. There is really nothing new about them, and the god they so strongly disbelieve in is not a god that much interests me either.
But several of you have asked me several times to speak to the issues raised by Harris and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and others like them, so I paid particular attention to the Harris interview. What struck me this time in listening to Harris, who is a perfectly reasonable, albeit somewhat humorless man except when he is making fun of Christians, is his abiding faith in reasonableness. And, yes, I choose the word “faith” with care and intention here, for while Harris would no doubt dismiss the word it sure seems to me that he trusts the story of science in the same way that I trust the story of Jesus. On the other hand, while I welcome the expanding knowledge of science, Mr. Harris has nothing but contempt for the wisdom of faith and for those of us who find wisdom there.
That, after all, is what faith means: having faith is having trust, and religion, properly understood, is binding one’s self in trust to a story about that which is worthy of trust. That is to say, the God revealed in the story of the life, death and living again of Jesus the Christ, is worthy of my trust.
Harris, and others like him, completely lose me when they insist that faith is about belief in a set of improvable assertions, and that religion consists in giving one’s intellectual assent to those assertions in a systemic fashion. In other words, they insist that Christianity is reducible to accepting as facts the virgin birth, the literal bodily resurrection of the man Jesus, the literal story of the flood, and the notion that a guy named Jonah spent three days in the belly of a big fish and lived to tell one of the great fish tales of all time. Frankly, if that is what I believed we were about in this place I’d be out of here, too.
Oh, to be sure, the church, broadly speaking, has often and regularly fallen into that trap, and Harris rightly excoriates the church, mosque, and synagogue for the violence each has perpetrated in propping up systems to propagate such assertions. One imagines him regaling children with bedtime stories about the crusades and the burning of heretics or the stoning of women.
On the other hand, he remains strangely silent on science’s own history. I can’t quite imagine him telling bedtime stories about the great scientific discoveries deployed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the recently reported medical experiments on unknowing Guatemalans, to choose just two stories from a long catalog of science nonfiction that ought at the very least to give us pause.
I am reasonably sure that Harris would condemn them all, but I’m not sure on what basis he would make the moral judgment. Harris argues that science – and science alone – can discover the facts upon which to base the values that lead to the well being of conscious beings. That seems to be the ethical or moral bottom line for him, but, as a bottom line, it raises almost as many questions as it answers and, on its own, it really doesn’t answer the questions raised by, for example, nuclear weapons or even medical testing on unknowing subjects.
After all, plenty of Americans still argue that using weapons of mass destruction to kill a few hundred thousand Japanese men, women and children hastened the end of a war. And, if scientific tests lead to great scientific advancements that lead to the well being of millions or even billions of conscious beings what’s the harm if a few hundred Guatemalans get sick? You can base just such moral arguments on sound, and even scientific reasoning. But I don’t think Jesus would drop the bomb or infect the unsuspecting.
Don’t get me wrong here. I am far from dismissing the gifts of scientific discovery for all of us – for the well being of conscious beings, as it were. Our medicines and machines make our lives longer and richer, to be sure. Our understanding of the unfolding story of biology and the origins of species certainly deepens our understanding of our own place in creation. I’m simply suggesting that there are gifts, important gifts, for the well being of conscious beings that science at its very best simply does not offer or adequately explain. As Einstein put it, not everything that counts can be counted.
That’s why we began this morning with gifts, and why I chose the scripture passages that we read. We shared these gifts: Wisdom, understanding, right judgment, courage, knowledge, reverence, awe and wonder, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Scripture calls these, variously, gifts of the spirit or fruits of the spirit, and while some of them are also, surely, gifts that the best of scientific exploration and discovery offer – knowledge, to be sure – most of them fall into that category of “hard to count” or “hard to account for.”
Yet most of us would agree that a life absent these gifts, fruits, characteristics, or whatever you want to call them would not be one worth living.
This is a sermon – a brief one at that – not a book or even an essay. I don’t want to chase down every rabbit trail or debating point with Mr. Harris or his friends. Frankly, at the end of the day, my faith, my trust in the God whose story is told for me best in the stories of Jesus, rests mostly in reverence, in awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of creation.
Science has revealed and will continue to reveal ever more layers of that creation whether in the details of the brain or the vastness of the universe. But the reverence I feel in the face of it comes in a relationship that science can observe but can only explain away by reducing it to firing neurons. Rather than reduce it to firing neurons, I prefer to expand it to the fire of the Holy Spirit. I freely acknowledge that it is my preference, at the end of the day, merely a choice and one among many. Nevertheless, I prefer to ground my experience of awe and wonder in an expansive spirit.
For it is that spirit which gives us the gifts that we share in this community. As you have reflected on the gift you received this morning, what comes to mind in terms of the ways that this gift has been important in your own life?
Galatians 5:22-23; Isaiah 11:2-3
I saw Sam Harris interviewed last week by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Harris, one of the leading lights of the so-called “new atheists,” has just published a new book called The Moral Landscape. I’ll confess that I don’t pay much attention to the “new” atheists because, frankly, they bore me. There is really nothing new about them, and the god they so strongly disbelieve in is not a god that much interests me either.
But several of you have asked me several times to speak to the issues raised by Harris and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and others like them, so I paid particular attention to the Harris interview. What struck me this time in listening to Harris, who is a perfectly reasonable, albeit somewhat humorless man except when he is making fun of Christians, is his abiding faith in reasonableness. And, yes, I choose the word “faith” with care and intention here, for while Harris would no doubt dismiss the word it sure seems to me that he trusts the story of science in the same way that I trust the story of Jesus. On the other hand, while I welcome the expanding knowledge of science, Mr. Harris has nothing but contempt for the wisdom of faith and for those of us who find wisdom there.
That, after all, is what faith means: having faith is having trust, and religion, properly understood, is binding one’s self in trust to a story about that which is worthy of trust. That is to say, the God revealed in the story of the life, death and living again of Jesus the Christ, is worthy of my trust.
Harris, and others like him, completely lose me when they insist that faith is about belief in a set of improvable assertions, and that religion consists in giving one’s intellectual assent to those assertions in a systemic fashion. In other words, they insist that Christianity is reducible to accepting as facts the virgin birth, the literal bodily resurrection of the man Jesus, the literal story of the flood, and the notion that a guy named Jonah spent three days in the belly of a big fish and lived to tell one of the great fish tales of all time. Frankly, if that is what I believed we were about in this place I’d be out of here, too.
Oh, to be sure, the church, broadly speaking, has often and regularly fallen into that trap, and Harris rightly excoriates the church, mosque, and synagogue for the violence each has perpetrated in propping up systems to propagate such assertions. One imagines him regaling children with bedtime stories about the crusades and the burning of heretics or the stoning of women.
On the other hand, he remains strangely silent on science’s own history. I can’t quite imagine him telling bedtime stories about the great scientific discoveries deployed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the recently reported medical experiments on unknowing Guatemalans, to choose just two stories from a long catalog of science nonfiction that ought at the very least to give us pause.
I am reasonably sure that Harris would condemn them all, but I’m not sure on what basis he would make the moral judgment. Harris argues that science – and science alone – can discover the facts upon which to base the values that lead to the well being of conscious beings. That seems to be the ethical or moral bottom line for him, but, as a bottom line, it raises almost as many questions as it answers and, on its own, it really doesn’t answer the questions raised by, for example, nuclear weapons or even medical testing on unknowing subjects.
After all, plenty of Americans still argue that using weapons of mass destruction to kill a few hundred thousand Japanese men, women and children hastened the end of a war. And, if scientific tests lead to great scientific advancements that lead to the well being of millions or even billions of conscious beings what’s the harm if a few hundred Guatemalans get sick? You can base just such moral arguments on sound, and even scientific reasoning. But I don’t think Jesus would drop the bomb or infect the unsuspecting.
Don’t get me wrong here. I am far from dismissing the gifts of scientific discovery for all of us – for the well being of conscious beings, as it were. Our medicines and machines make our lives longer and richer, to be sure. Our understanding of the unfolding story of biology and the origins of species certainly deepens our understanding of our own place in creation. I’m simply suggesting that there are gifts, important gifts, for the well being of conscious beings that science at its very best simply does not offer or adequately explain. As Einstein put it, not everything that counts can be counted.
That’s why we began this morning with gifts, and why I chose the scripture passages that we read. We shared these gifts: Wisdom, understanding, right judgment, courage, knowledge, reverence, awe and wonder, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Scripture calls these, variously, gifts of the spirit or fruits of the spirit, and while some of them are also, surely, gifts that the best of scientific exploration and discovery offer – knowledge, to be sure – most of them fall into that category of “hard to count” or “hard to account for.”
Yet most of us would agree that a life absent these gifts, fruits, characteristics, or whatever you want to call them would not be one worth living.
This is a sermon – a brief one at that – not a book or even an essay. I don’t want to chase down every rabbit trail or debating point with Mr. Harris or his friends. Frankly, at the end of the day, my faith, my trust in the God whose story is told for me best in the stories of Jesus, rests mostly in reverence, in awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of creation.
Science has revealed and will continue to reveal ever more layers of that creation whether in the details of the brain or the vastness of the universe. But the reverence I feel in the face of it comes in a relationship that science can observe but can only explain away by reducing it to firing neurons. Rather than reduce it to firing neurons, I prefer to expand it to the fire of the Holy Spirit. I freely acknowledge that it is my preference, at the end of the day, merely a choice and one among many. Nevertheless, I prefer to ground my experience of awe and wonder in an expansive spirit.
For it is that spirit which gives us the gifts that we share in this community. As you have reflected on the gift you received this morning, what comes to mind in terms of the ways that this gift has been important in your own life?
posted by David Ensign at
9:13 AM
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