The thing that struck me is that nearly everyone, regardless of perspective, had an answer. The one thing that almost nobody wanted to settle for was mystery.
Mystery.
This is something that makes many of us uncomfortable. We want an answer to everything. We want an explanation, regardless of how unreasonable. In our world it is better to have an unreasonable pseudo-scientific answer to cover the mystery than it is to live in the tension of the mystery.
Mystery is a vacuum of knowledge that threatens us. We are afraid to be found out. We don't want to be thought of as stupid. So, we create answers and fill in the gaps with arguments that sound good.
The problem with this is that it makes learning anything new nearly impossible. Especially when learning something new threatens the structure we created to protect us from the mystery.
When there is no mystery we cannot learn.
When we cannot learn we cease a search for what is true.
Mystery is legit.
I don't know if it's mystery that people find threatening so much as knowledge. In my experience, there seems to be this idea that there needs to be some kind of unknowable mystery in order to justify the existence of/belief in God. If there exists a "naturalistic" explanation for something, then God is "unnecessary" and therefore doesn't exist.
ReplyDeleteI think that way of thinking is fallacious, but in my experience, is what drives most of the division and argument regarding evolution - scientifically minded unbelievers justify unbelief by simply making God "unnecessary" and in defense, believers feel the need to preserve some sort of unknowable mystery to justify belief in God.
IMO, the entire distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" is a bit silly and unnecessary. If God does exist, and He is the creator of what we call "the natural world," then what could possibly be more natural than God Himself? Why does there have to be some violation of the natural order or physical laws for something to be considered a work of God, when God Himself is the designer?
As a software engineer, if I have to violate the rules of a program, or smash through the architecture, or rewrite something every time I want to make a change, or if the whole program has to be stopped and restarted to change a single value, I consider that a poorly designed piece of software. A good design is one where I can work with and through the rules and architecture to do what needs to be done, and where I can build on top of what I've already done rather than constantly re-writing it, and at best I can tweak and tune values without even stopping a running program.
MattLanting I don't disagree with anything you said. Except that I would say the believers who "feel the need to preserve some sort of unknowable mystery to justify belief in God" are afraid of real mystery. The non-believers are afraid to admit there are some things they just don't know or can't know.
ReplyDeleteI'm talking from a broader level than the evolution/creation debate. True mystery creates uncertainty and believer/non-believer both hate uncertainty. The believer alleviates mystery with "it's God" and the non-believer alleviates it with pseudo-science. The uncertainties of life are the spaces where mystery exists and it's in those spaces where we can attain knowledge and grow.
I think in a nutshell we're saying the same thing, just a little differently.
danielmrose Nature abhors a vacuum :P
ReplyDelete@MattLanting yes it does! =D
ReplyDeleteRead a book a while ago written by a couple of Christian scientists who offered several plausible views about creation based on the latest discoveries that evolution could easily fit into. The main point was that God is the source of all knowledge so we Christians should not in any way whatsoever fear any science. If science disproves a theory we formerly held sacred, God is still God while we may just have to change our own theory. After all, our views, including all science, are no more than our interpretation of reality based on what we currently know. The shortcoming of evolution is that none of the current theorists were actually THERE. No eye-witness accounts. Carbon-dating is merely a model that assumes a certain set of conditions that may or may not have been true. Long ago, science generally held that the world was flat but when empirical (as in duplicable) knowledge surpassed that theory, we had to adapt. We can't duplicate a past none of us were part of. And even if we could, God was still God before AND after our theories. I find that extraordinarily liberating.
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