By this he reminded me of his lifetime commitment to a worldview that ruthlessly subjected any claims about spiritual reality to rational, scientific scrutiny. The result was predictable: such scrutiny convinced him that most spiritual truth claims were not believable, since to him they were neither rational nor scientific.
My somewhat sheltered upbringing and education left me unprepared for presenting my faith in the high-altitude jetstream of thought where he operated, so I determined to prepare better for the future. My preparation has led me to exciting discoveries that have enriched my conversations with persons who were confident that scientific and philosophical discoveries had eradicated God. The good news is that defending the faith is, in some ways, easier today than when I started, because science and rationalistic philosophy have failed to account for important aspects of reality. Their leading spokespersons have finally acknowledged the failure, and the alliance between them against belief in the existence of God has all but disappeared. In a word, "reality isn't what it used to be,"1 and we can once again talk about God without fearing that our belief can be rationally
dismissed as "fairies at the foot of the garden."
Religious belief was considered a carryover from an earlier, superstitious age, and religion's disappearance was confidently expected by thought leaders, who assumed the revolutionary advancement of humans would soon carry them beyond need for it. Communist governments attempted to accelerate the demise of religion through repressive legislation. No wonder Christians have been on the intellectual defensive for the past couple of centuries!
Contrary to expectations, however, religious belief has not disappeared, but the narrow, rigid "twin towers" of philosophical and scientific rationalism have! Their collapse has been less dramatic and newsworthy than that of New York's twin towers, but just as real.
Please do not misunderstand my claim. I'm not declaring the end of philosophy and science. Rather, I'm sharing the news of the collapse of the narrow, rigid assumptions on which modern philosophy based its critique of Christian belief. Collapses frighten bystanders, and thought leaders who thrived in the old structure's shadow are scrambling for cover. But every loss carries within it potential gain, so let's peer through the settling dust of the collapse and ask what practical difference the collapse of rationalistic philosophy and classical science make for Christian belief.
God's Existence in a Scientific Age
Let's consider first the question of God's existence. Three centuries of scientific advancement, in the minds of many people, settled that question. God was progressively relegated to the sidelines before being dismissed altogether. To eighteenth-century scientists, the universe was a machine that God made, then set in operation before walking away. Soon God's involvement was restricted to creating a simple, primitive protomachine, which then evolved on its own through the mechanism of random natural selection. Scientists took God's death, or nonexistence, for granted.
Leading eighteenth-century philosophers, enamored with scientific explanations of the universe, made life easier for their scientist friends by declaring the question of God's role in the origin of things off-limits to thinkers, and urged thinking people to stop asking it. Amazingly, their request was heeded! So philosophers joined scientists at God's graveside in an optimistic funeral ceremony with immense consequences for ordinary people. The idea of a bright future without reference to God spread through society. For the first time in history atheism, formerly the preserve of a tiny minority, became popular, subscribed to by multiplied thousands under the impact of philosophy and science.
But nothing threatens scientific theories like further scientific theories. Twentieth-century developments, such as quantum theory and relativity, followed by the uncertainty principle and the expanding universe theory, exposed scientists' inability to find a rational explanation for everything. At the same time it overturned the view that the universe was not the eternally existing, steady-state, law-abiding place assumed by earlier scientists. Shock waves moved beyond the scientific community to shake the larger society's confidence that science is all-knowing.
God's Existence in a Postscientific Age
A second wave of scientific theories, this time in the late twentieth century, brought even more convincing evidence that science's earlier claim to have replaced God as the sole source of knowledge about everything was premature. Popular books such as Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes2 and James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science3 acknowledged by their very titles the scientific admission that there is more to reality than anyone had previously dreamed, and that exploration of the universe was not nearing completion; rather, it had hardly begun! John Horgan's 1996 book The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age4 suggests the shrinking place occupied by science in our postcollapse world. Earlier confidence about God's death or nonexistence has been abandoned, and for the first time in two centuries serious talk about God has become scientifically as well as politically correct.
What happened to philosophy's support for the old science? Recent philosophers have quietly acknowledged that, despite that funeral, God might still be alive, and they have abandoned their traditional alliance with science, with its insistence that science can provide knowledge of all there is. In a 1984 challenge to science's traditional domination, philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard declared bluntly that there are other forms of knowledge than scientific, and that scientific knowledge can never, for example, explain the most important field of knowledge of all-knowledge of the self.5 Richard Rorty, another philosopher, agreed6 that scientific knowledge is strictly limited, and can never, for example, predict what people will become, or even what they write the next time they pick up a pen.
What Difference Does God Make?
If God exists, what difference does it make? Can He interact with us? The old rationalist answer of No has become a widespread assumption for a very popular objection to Christian belief. The question often comes in the form of "If God really exists, where was He when . . . ?" In my experience this question is rarely asked while on vacation, enjoying a sunset beside a campfire, or at the end of a satisfying meal with stimulating company. Rather, it grows out of confrontation with our own, or someone else's, loss and pain, an emotional reaction to a fundamentally unsatisfactory situation in a flawed universe.
My answer to this question builds on the suggestion of the two philosophers referred to above, Lyotard and Rorty, who insisted that science was of no use in gaining knowledge of the self. Taking a lead from them, I began by asking, "Does God interact with persons?" This very big question needs focus, so I ask it again, "Has God interacted with anyone in particular in this world?" Can I find a single instance in which God undoubtedly and clearly interacted with someone? I believe that I can. In the life of Jesus of Nazareth I see convincing evidence that God was directly involved.
Most dramatic of all was the Resurrection, which could not have been a stage-managed work of deception by Jesus' followers. The life (and especially the death) of Jesus was a public event, witnessed by a people known for their reliable observation and recordkeeping. Had the Resurrection been a stunt or a fable, they would have said so, countering the claims with evidence. But no convincing evidence or argument against the Resurrection of Jesus was produced, and those opposed to Jesus' followers resorted to coercion in their attempts to silence them on the matter.
>From the point of His resurrection, I work back through Jesus' ministry, noting there as well that amazing things happened both to Jesus and others, which convinced His followers that through Jesus, God was involved with the world. In light of the good things that Jesus did for others in His ministry, and His resurrection, even the pain and loss of the Crucifixion was later seen by His followers as part of God's interaction with the world. From the experience of Jesus I then trace God's involvement in the lives of the followers of Jesus, including myself.
I acknowledge that my way of answering the question about God's involvement in the world leaves many questions unanswered, but I have discovered that many people today are not looking for all the answers to all the big questions. In fact, they often express distrust of big questions, big answers, and big systems altogether, looking rather for meaning in their life, right now.
Luke records the story of a man whose evil spirits were exorcised by Jesus, allowing him to return to society and function normally after a life lived in a graveyard. The man begged to stay with Jesus, but was instructed instead to return home and "declare how much" God had done for him (Luke 8:39, NRSV). Like the demoniac, I then go to my own story. It is far less dramatic, but I have reached the place in my life where evidence of God's involvement is so clear that I wonder how I ever could have missed it.
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1 Walter Anderson, Reality Isn't What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990).
2 New York: Bantam Books, 1988.
3 New York: Penguin, 1987.
4 New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996; Broadway paperback, 1997.
5 "Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth," Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
6 Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
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Steven Thompson is the dean of the faculty of theology at Avondale College
in New South Wales, Australia.
ARLY IN MY MINISTRY I ATTEMPTED A series of Bible studies with a gracious and hospitable retired government scientist. He enjoyed my visits and told me about his work on a top-secret project of World War II, the development of radar. Whenever we read a Bible passage that referred to anything divine, otherworldly, or supernatural, he'd chant his stock response with a courteous but condescending smile: "Fairies at the foot of the garden!"
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