MetaCatholic

On Wednesday Kevin P Edgecomb posted on both Harry Potter and The Golden Compass. This post was nicely categorised as an “unhinged rant” – a classification I will say no more about. He then, at Justin’s instigation in the comments, left this comment on an earlier post of mine about the Golden Compass.

Readers of this blog will be in no doubt that I completely disagree about the Harry Potter series. Kevin says this:

The appropriation of Christian themes of sacrifice and redemption, very, very real things to a Christian, are appropriated by an author as devices to be utilized in a plot narrative in an entirely fictional world. This in itself is a cheapening, a gutter-slumming of the great work of God for the world, which appropriates rather blatantly those themes. Yet there is a greater wretchedness at work in this.

What happens when your children no longer are able to recognize that sacrifice, redemption, and selfless love belong outside the pages of fiction? When they open their Bibles, and read of the work of God throughout the ages in history, real work in the lives of many real people of real nations, will they not be subconsciously reading fiction?

I think this seriously mistakes the nature both of fiction and the Harry Potter series. First, I have no idea why developing a fictional world in which the narrative slowly builds up to themes of self-sacrifice as the means of defeating evil, courage in the face of death as something not to be feared and conquered, but embraced in the hope of life, and the struggle to be selfless and self-denying in the use of gifts of power, in any way is a cheapening of these themes.

Secondly, far from coarsening people’s ability to respond to these themes when encountered elsewhere and in the real world, the imaginative portrayal of them should enlarge the mind, and sensitise it to these concepts. By imagining oneself in the heroic narrative world, one is challenged, child or adult, to respond to such themes and vocations in the real world. Having imagined oneself in identification with the hero, perhaps one is better equipped to imitate such behaviour in real life.

The case of Pullman and the His Dark Materials trilogy raises some of the same points, and because it increasingly overtly offers an atheist critique, also poses different questions. In fact, it is less successful as fiction the more overt it becomes in the promotion of Pullman’s world-view. But Pullman’s view is rather more nuanced than Christians like to see when critiquing “godless atheism”. Not least because aspects of Christian morality and mythos inform both what he expresses positively as well as what he attacks. See these two very interesting interviews, the first an email interview with Peter Chattaway, the second a transcript of a public conversation with Rowan Williams, for a sense of Pullman’s nuances. The following excerpt is interesting, precisely because it is about story (RB is the chair, PP is Pullman and RW is ++Rowan):

RB: Question from a fellow atheist who is appalled by the materialism of this society - how would PP recommend children develop spiritual life?

PP: I don’t use the word spiritual myself, because I don’t have a clear sense of what it means. But I think it depends on your view of education: whether you think that the true end and purpose of education is to help children grow up, compete and face the economic challenges of a global environment that we’re going to face in the 21st century, or whether you think it’s to do with helping them see that they are the true heirs and inheritors of the riches - the philosophical, the artistic, the scientific, the literary riches - of the whole world. If you believe in setting children’s minds alive and ablaze with excitement and passion or whether it’s a matter of filling them with facts and testing on them. It depends on your vision of education - and I know which one I’d go for.

RW: I think we’re entirely at one on that, I must say.

RB: The questioner is asking whether perhaps the relationship between Christianity and fiction is that Christianity itself is a story, and is about incarnation.

RW: Yes, I think there’s a lot of truth in that, that you can’t communicate Christianity simply as a set of ideas. At some point you’re going to have to sit down and tell a story. And tell a story which, because it’s a story, is bound to have some loose ends, some awkwardnesses. As it is we have four versions of the story of Jesus in the New Testament, because of that sense that a story can always be retold. And that introduces a bit of this irony in the narrative, which is very important in reinforcing the sense that this is something mysterious. I think there is something in that fundamental characteristic of Christianity which helps to enable a particular kind of storytelling.

PP: Story is fundamental. We began with Jesus. We might as well end by reminding ourselves that Jesus was one of the greatest storytellers there’s ever been. Whether or not he was the Son of God, he was a great storyteller.

About Pullman’s work Kevin, in the comment on my post says:

Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the sweetness of good art in the hands of those with evil intent leads children only to destruction.

I first note that actually this is not about the use to which people put art (which is a different matter), but the creation of it. And that should lead us to reflection on the relation between beauty and truth. Can something be good art if it does not is some sense help us perceive an aspect of reality more deeply? There can be a facade of beauty, but if that facade covers over reality, is it good art? And in the end, is it actually beautiful?

Art to some extent escapes and transcends its creator, not least because a huge amount of subconscious thought and feeling is also poured into the work, as well as those ideas which the artist is seeking to express. The “reader” too brings much hinterland to the experience. Thus, I do not think we can simply judge any work of art purely on the articulated views of the artist. So, for example, I have a fairly strong dislike for Paradise Lost as a whole: irrespective of Milton’s articulated faith, Jesus is appallingly dull and insipid, and Satan ruggedly heroic and poetic. In much the same vein I can appreciate not only Pullman’s often finely wrought prose, and narrative verve, but also a great deal of the book’s promotion of human love and virtue, and critique of a stultifying and aggressively totalitarian Church. And I can do so while profoundly disagreeing with Pullman’s philosophy. Paradise Lost contains a great deal of falsehood despite its author’s intentions, and similarly in spite of the author’s overt attack on Christianity, His Dark Materials contains a great deal that is beautiful and true. My biggest critique remains that the overt views Pullman expresses are in the end destructive of the narrative, and vitiate the books artistic merit.

Art is as complicated as life, and beauty and truth are only fully reconciled in the final vision of God, not the gazing on created artifacts, which like our world and life itself is often deeply ambiguous about the good. In the end, what I object to most in Kevin’s post is the Manichaean tendency to divide the world up into such stark categories, a tendency that sits at odds with his Orthodoxy.

written by doug

Michael Bird, without comment, notes and quotes the blurb for a new book by Nicholas Perrin. It seems to me the blurb is crying out for comment.

Here is Mike’s brief post in full – mainly consisting of the said blurb

Nick Perrin’s new book is called Lost in Transmission? What we can know about the words of Jesus? The blurb reads: “Bart Ehrman, in his New York Times bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, claims that the New Testament cannot wholly be trusted. Cutting and probing with the tools of text criticism, Ehrman suggests that many of its episodes are nothing but legend, fabricated by those who copied or collated its pages in the intervening centuries. The result is confusion and doubt. Can we truly trust what the New Testament says? Now, Wheaton College scholar Nicholas Perrin takes on Ehrman and others who claim that the text of the New Testament has been corrupted beyond recognition. Perrin, in an approachable, compelling style, gives us a layman’s guide to textual criticism so that readers can understand the subtleties of Ehrman’s critiques, and provides firm evidence to suggest that the New Testament can, indeed, be trusted.”

Now excuse me, but saying Ehrman uses text criticism to claim that “many of [the NT's] episodes are nothing but legend, fabricated by those who copied or collated its pages in the intervening centuries” seems to me a fairly gross distortion. I largely disagree with much of Ehrman’s view, but this is ludicrous.

And in what way does textual criticism, and only textual criticism, offer us any significant take on whether any individual saying actually gives us “the words of Jesus.”? Especially since the text critic works with what, even on the most conservative reading, are largely translations of whatever Jesus said.

Well, one can’t necessarily hold scholars responsible for what publishers say about their work, but I just hope this particular blurb in no way accurately reflects the book’s contents.

written by doug

A sigh of relief time. I’ve finally got one of those “hang over your head” jobs done. I inherited a site to manage which needed a ground up re-design and new content, and today I finished the basics. There’s still stuff to be added to it, but now it’s happily up and running.

All in all, it was helped by the fact that this blog installation seems to be going through some conniptions and that made me find time for something else. I’m not entirely sure, till I try, that this post will appear. Something (possibly a sudden glut of spam, seems to have overloaded my Akismet spam trap, and clogged up the cache. Earlier today the whole site was inaccessible, but now the site appears to be working, but I can’t access my Admin pages. That means of course, that I can’t de-activate Akismet to sort it out.

While I’m waiting for my technical support to come up with something, does anyone else who’s running Akismet with Wordpress have any ideas? I haven’t had much luck googling for a solution.

written by doug

(This post is part of a series on the 39 articles of the Church of England)

Those who sometimes compare the 39 articles to a confession of faith overlook the practical and non-confessional nature of some like the thirty-second. This deals entirely with the non-credal topic of clergy marriage. It is also (at least nowadays) not an issue between the Roman Catholic and other Churches. The Vatican is quite clear that this is not a matter of divine Law, but of ecclesial discipline and tradition, that the Church can change as and when it chooses. In some ways, therefore, there is little to say about it. In other ways, however, it might be worth some reflection. Here is the text of the article.

XXXII. Of the Marriage of Priests
Bishops, Priests and Deacons are not commanded by God’s Law, either to vow the estate of single life, or to abstain from marriage: therefore it is lawful for them, as for all other Christian men, to marry at their own discretion, as they shall judge the same to serve better to godliness.

This article was part of a move that re-emphasised the virtue of marriage. The marriage of clergy did a great deal practically and symbolically to insist it was not a second-best state of life, and undermined the superiority of celibacy, which seemed to be embedded in the tradition, especially the (not entirely misplaced) traditional interpretation of Paul. It also brought in its wake some unintended consequences, not least of which was the increasing binding of ministry to being a middle-class occupation, often domesticated and in many “clerical” families being made almost hereditary. The eschatological note that celibacy at its best represented was too easily overlooked. Clergy marriage almost certainly contributed to the Church of England’s loss of touch with the emerging working classes.

In today’s context the almost complete disappearance of celibacy among the clergy (and more widely) is a question the Church seems unable to address. It is hardly valuing celibacy to turn it into a compulsory option for a devalued caste of gay clergy, while vaunting the joys of marital sex for everyone else. Turning to it as the solution for homosexuality is not much more than binding heavy burdens for others to carry, unless it is also fully encouraged and promoted as a serious and valued vocation for straights also.

In a society which is, at least by most historical comparisons, heavily over-sexualised, perhaps the Church’s most distinctive stand against modern culture might be found in promoting celibacy as either a time-limited or permanent vow, among ordained and lay alike. As such, it witnesses to several strands of the gospel:

• our name and identity are guaranteed their future by God, not having children
• our most enduring relationship is one of love in God
• the fulfilment of all desire is the full and final vision of God

These are all positive strands in a society concerned about inheritance and property, troubled by swathes of broken relationships, and seeking the instant gratification of desire. Affirming these does not mean we cannot also affirm the many blessings of marriage (and rather less grudgingly than Cranmer’s marriage service, which notoriously presents it as an option for those “who have not the gift of continency” and “to avoid fornication”). But it does mean we should stop talking about marriage as a blessing by which God affirms “normal” people, and celibacy as a prison sentence for queers. Talking up, as many now do, the blessing and enjoyment of straight sex – even inventive straight sex – and the importance of focussing on the family, is itself a partial capitulation to contemporary culture. Arguably it is more of a capitulation than gay and lesbian couples seeking to affirm life-long fidelity (in sacramental imitation of God’s fidelity) in a culture where promiscuity and serial monogamy are increasingly the norm.

What is a clear to me is that the Church of England has forgotten how to value celibacy, and trotting it out as “the gay vocation” is an insult both to gay people and to the celibate call. A positive affirmation of it as a call – perhaps even a call particularly congruent with ordained and apostolic ministry – will do far more in the end to offer a counter-cultural mission to our society, even if it will be less pleasing to our (monogamously challenged) African brothers and sisters than thunderous denunciations of gays. It might even offer a rather more pertinent counter-cultural gospel in their society too.

written by doug

Despite the plethora of posts about the SBL, most of the lucky bibliobuggers who were there have said comparatively little about the content of what was actually delivered and a great deal about food, hotels, book-buying and weather conditions. One of the few remarked on debates/presentations was that between Tom Wright and John Barclay, by Loren Rosson and Mark Goodacre among others. The good news is that there’s an opportunity to listen to this (scroll to the bottom), and I intend to take it soon.

The other big issue around involving Tom Wright is nothing to do with SBL, but is the ongoing reaction against his work on Paul by those of a conservative Reformed view. I commented briefly on this here. In listening to some of the debate on Wright’s version of the New Perspective, one is struck, over and over, by the way in which Wright seems to be doing a better job of appealing to sola scriptura in articulating his views, while his opponents are found to be reiterating the tradition they’ve received. As I noted before, Jacob Paul Breeze, who sadly has given up blogging, commented delightfully:

If you observed the art on the two Dr.’s books you’ll see the presuppositions: Piper has Luther on the cover and Wright has Paul on the cover.

It strikes me that Wright’s argument for Paul’s coded references to empire, which has always seemed a little over-egged to me, is the negative flip-side of Wright’s sola scriptura emphasis. He wants, in my view rightly, to encourage Christians to reflect on the serious political implications of the gospel. Rather than appeal to broader and more theological work, he chooses to find them encoded in Paul’s language, so he can present them as “what the Bible teaches” in a straightforwardly expository way. The problem is, of course, that once his exegesis is unpicked, then it looks as though he’s lost the political implications. There are all sorts of ways in which Wright is not a conventional or straightforward evangelical, but in this overemphasis on finding everything in the “plain”(!) text of scripture, he surely looks like one.

written by doug

James Crossley has posted a detailed response to my previous post. I wish I’d been there for the discussion. Clearly we’re methodologically on a similar page – I knew that commenting on a partial summary was dodgy, but I’ve enjoyed the conversation. Historically I suggest that the question is one of assessing whether there are reports of perceived “miracles” (whether the historian believes the report is another question), or whether the story of the “miracle” is a mythic narrative. I would, theologically, give more space to the possibility of the “miraculous” than some do. I hope I can distinguish between those judgments. (And if you want to know why I use quote marks for “miracle”, read the previous post.)

Incidentally, I don’t usually comment on other people’s typing or spelling errors, since there are plenty of kettles out there waiting to call this pot black. However, I can’t resist this one. James says:

there are ancient axceptions

I like this word. Perhaps we should start using it for all those things people cut out of the data to make it fit their theories.

written by doug

It’s always risky to comment on a short summary of a longer discussion one wasn’t present at. Nonetheless, I was struck by this bit of James Crossley’s summary of SBL. He’s referring to his response to Richard Bauckhams’s new stress on eyewitness testimony behind the gospels.

The point of my paper was a thought experiment: ‘What if…Richard Bauckham is right about eyewitnesses’. As Bauckham used bits and pieces from eyewitnesses, I pointed out, does this mean they were eyewitnesses to miracles? If they were eyewitnesses to miracles then did the miracles really happen? If so, and given the use of approaches from professional historians and the general rhetoric of ‘doing good history’, then the discipline of history would have to be completely revolutionised, something akin to ID replacing/seriously challenging evolution. If the eyewitnesses did not see miracles did they then invent stories. I explicitly did not make a single judgment on the rights and wrongs or accepting the supernatural (lots of ‘rightly or wronglys’ in there). I wanted to see what the answer might be and what happens next. In direct relation to all this, I also discussed the idea of re-writing history (esp. haggadic stuff but replace that with whatever model you like) and whether eyewitnesses you (sic) create fictive stories.

I would suggest that if we are talking about doing history, then first of all we need to note that “the miraculous” and “the supernatural” are anachronistic concepts with which we read the stories. They are not the ways in which the eyewitnesses and / or story-tellers narrated the powerful deeds they are talking about. Things attributed directly to acts of God or his messengers, human and angelic, occupy a spectrum that ranges from things we would now explain by other scientific or naturalistic narratives, through to things that we are unable to explain and therefore classify as (possibly fictive) miracles. It is, broadly speaking, we who distinguish the nature of the events, whereas they distinguished the degree of power or divine immediacy.

Let us assume, for a moment, that continuing research into mind-body relationships allow us a better understanding of psychosomatic illness, which might well include such things as skin complaints (leprosy) and back problems (the paralytic). It is also conceivable that other acts of healing might find similar explanations. Our response then would be to move these events from one potential category to another, and what was hitherto thought of as miraculous becomes seen as naturalistic, and therefore “historical” within the post-Enlightenment frame of reference.

Now I am not, generally, a fan of seeking naturalistic explanations for miracles. Too many of them seem to belong to taming the difficult and making scripture palatable for a particular philosophy. But it does seem to me that this example illustrates that there is not just a problem with the nature of the material, but also with our (alien) categorisation of it.

Good history, it seems to me, deals with what people narrate about what they saw, then with how they conceptualised its signification, and only then with how we appraise it. It does seem to me to be difficult, historically speaking, not to attribute the power of healing, for example, to Jesus.

• It was attributed to others also.
• It exists in every stratum of the material.
• It is presented in a variety of contexts and ways.
• It helps account for his popularity and hence threat-significance to the authorities better than a simple teaching picture does.
• It seems to belong to the non-challenged “facts” that the earliest Christians assert as apologetic.
• It helps account for the place of healing among the expectations of the church.

Thus a reading of the evidence does point towards Jesus being widely perceived to be a healer. How we assess that is not, strictly speaking, a historical question, but a philosophical one. One may wish to go on to question whether an Enlightenment philosophy of history is the best one available, or whether the discipline needs challenging. Or one may wish to draw attention to the way in which some people seem to undergo spontaneous remission from or recovery in their illnesses even today, and assert that with fuller understanding we will be able to reach a better appreciation of the question. (Before you say so, I know I haven’t touched on the different and more difficult question of the nature miracles.)

It does, however, seem to me that historians, precisely as historians,need to recognise that within the culture of the past, we need to see the common acceptance of acts of spiritual power as part and parcel of people’s lives, not as supernatural disruptions of ordinary existence. This is part of the framework by which they interpreted the world, which the historian must enter into sympathetically (though not uncritically). The antithesis between “seeing miracles” and “telling stories” is anachronistic in its starkness, and one that gets in the way of an appropriate assessment of the evidence.

written by doug

The England manager needs to be sacked:

• not just because he has no strategy
• not just because he has made some fairly gifted players into incompetent plodders
• not just because he couldn’t manage a piss-up in a brewery

BUT because, at the end of tonight’s defeat, he turned his back on his players and walked out of the stadium without going to speak to any of them. That is not leadership, and for that alone he must go.

written by doug

I confess myself slightly baffled by this post of Iyov’s on the Septuagint. In particular, I found these two statements highly confusing:

I do not regard the Septuagint as a Jewish book — it has been thoroughly rejected by mainstream Judaism, and enough doubt has been raised about the validity of it as a textual witness to reject reliance of it from a Jewish point of view. It is somewhat offensive to read statements by some Christians asserting the “Jewishness” of a translation that is so reviled by Judaism.

Third, although we cannot read Jewish beliefs directly from the Septuagint, the textual witness of books not in the Hebrew canon at least suggests the outlines of former Jewish stories.

I follow his argument that mainstream rabbinic Judaism came to reject the Septuagint for varied reasons, not least its Christian appropriation. But I don’t fully grasp his point here. In what sense do scholars assert the Jewishness of the LXX except in so far as they insist it provides evidence for Second Temple Judaism, and especially for (at least parts of) the Diaspora. The parts of the LXX that translate the texts of what became the Jewish canon provide evidence both of (at least Hellenistic) Jewish readings, and the textual history of those books. Iyov seems to acknowledge this when he says “it provides a source for helping to interpret obscure passages in Hebrew”. The texts of the LXX which did not get gathered into the rabbinic canon provide evidence of the kind of literature which was read and heard among some Jews of the period, and which, at least in some parts of the Diaspora, and possibly among some groups living in Israel, were probably regarded in some sense as holy. This is far more than suggesting “the outlines of former Jewish stories”. I am not aware of any serious argument that any of these books were produced outside Jewish circles. In what sense, then, is it offensive to say that they were Jewish books?

Saying they were Jewish books is not the same as saying that they are Jewish in the sense of being Judaism’s books today, and I’m intrigued as to what sort of statements Iyov has in mind. He suggests that “One could analogously ask if Protestants are willing to accept all of Luther’s statements as being representative of “Christianity.” Well, I for one am not, but I do not therefore say Luther was not a Christian. It is, however, a false analogy. The LXX’s pre-Christian existence is testimony not only to the work of individual Jewish writers, but to the existence of groups of Jews who valued it as religious literature, if not holy writing, at a time when the bounds of the Scripture were not fully fixed. It is the value placed on them by groups that makes them more than an individual testimony and helps broaden understanding of second Temple Judaism. In that sense, a better analogy might be drawn from those early books that did not make it into the Christian canon, although some groups treated them as canonical for a time – the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas or the apocryphal gospels. These are Christian literature, even if some of them later came to be rejected as either non-canonical or even heretical. The later judgement of the Church doesn’t alter the appropriateness of calling them Christian literature, or lessen their value for constructing the history of early Christianity.

Yes, I agree with Iyov that the LXX is (for almost all of the Common Era) seen more appropriately as a Christian book, but I don’t think that alters the appropriateness of calling it Jewish in its historical context. Nor do I think that doing so should be taken in any way as usurping Judaism’s prerogatives of defining its own holy books. So I really don’t get whatever it is that upsets Iyov or what he actually finds offensive. Calling the LXX Jewish seems to me to be a sound historical location of these books in a diverse Second Temple Judaism in which the significant strand that emerged as Rabbinic Judaism was not the only one.

written by doug

Those many Christians who rightly reject the ramblings of the creationists often maintain that the Creation stories answer the “Why?” question, whilst science answers the “How?” question. There is a certain force, and truth, in that statement. However, I am increasingly dissatisfied with it as an over-simplification. I don’t know that I have any clearly better alternatives, but I want to offer four observations in the hope that others better versed in the questions will comment or offer posts in reply.

• We can’t simply brush aside the fact that the creation stories are “How?” stories in the way that they are shaped and narrated. That is not a complete objection, for creation myths are usually narrated in ancient cultures as “How?” stories: it belongs to the genre. Insofar as they are “How?” stories, we need honestly to admit that they are wrong. They are, however, not simply “How?” stories, they are also “Why?” ones. In the way they tell the story, the “Why?” questions are less “Why does the world exist?”, and more “Why are things this way?”. They are about locating humans in the world, and interpreting the human situation. They are not as interested in the question of origins as they are in the question of the present, despite their form. Perhaps this indicates that reading them primarily as origin stories is (at least in part) to misread them.
• We make a mistake when we think of Genesis 1- 2 as the totality of what the Scriptures say about creation. They are part of what is said, but other passages also need to be considered. Among them we might note Isaiah 40, where the power of God in salvation is equated with the power of God in creation, so that the former is possible because of the latter. Here the doctrine of creation is primarily a story about God’s power in the present and the future, undergirded by the apprehension of his universe- creating history. Creation is not understood simply as past event, but part of a continuous activity. Reducing this to a doctrine of origins is to miss a significant part of the point.
• When we come to God’s answer to Job (chapter 38 ff) the doctrine of creation takes on a new aspect. It is a kind of anti-theodicy. Questioning God is both a type of faithfulness to be rewarded by an encounter with the divine, and a temerity that will receive no answer other than the “God-ness” of God. Creation is something that only God can understand, and correspondingly we will never fully understand the “Why?” we ask about our location in the universe, neither our pain nor our pleasure. The doctrine of a transcendent Creator is not a full answer to “Why?” questions: it is rather a pointer to their lack of a satisfactory and complete answerability.
• Finally, on a different tack, I want to suggest that there is one vitally important area where the accounts of science and faith both need to align, and in fact do align, in the understanding of the world. The first, priestly, creation account, whose canonical position privileges it in relation to the succeeding stories and poems, is above all an account of ordering. The creation is the organisation of randomness into coherency. This not only gives a significant place to human reason and observation (as the linkage of Wisdom and creation elsewhere implies) but is the fundamental presupposition of scientific investigation. The accounts of Scripture and science are in this particular case making the same assertion about reality: the former seeks to know how to live within that reality, the latter to understand how that reality works. Both are “How?” questions, albeit of a different and complementary sort.

It is in this last area that I believe we can (and must) argue that science with God is more rational than science without God, and why these two accounts need each other as friends, rather than treating each other as enemies (always with the proviso that a doctrine of creation is about more than origins). It is not just that the observable universe is susceptible of rational investigation, but that science can’t work if it isn’t. We have an apparently random quantum fluctuation resolving with great speed into a universe that is not only organised, but finely tuned. We cannot tell whether that fluctuation that began things was actually random or not: whether it was one instant of a typical behaviour pattern that had occurred so many millions of times that the type of inflation that occurred was not in fact as improbable as it looks. It is equally a matter of faith that it was random as that it was the work of God’s mind, since science can’t look below, behind or beyond the event horizon to a non-universe: it can’t even fully approach it. Given the apparently rational and mathematical nature of the world, in which reasonably constructed experiments work, one might be tempted to see greater coherence in postulating a rational rather than a random cause.

When we look at the improbabilities involved in the fine-tuning of the universe, the so-called anthropic principle, we can come to three possible conclusions. The first is that all we can say is that the universe just is, but can give no reasons. A major improbability, but a necessary one given that we can observe it. This is, of course, to say that no explanation at all is possible, which frustrates the scientific and religious spirit in equal measure, and feels intellectually unsatisfactory. The second is to postulate the multiverse, in which all possible universes exist, and in which in millions and millions of other universes life has never formed, or the inflation ran away with itself, or collapsed back on itself, and so on, pretty much ad infinitum. Again, the multiverse is as much a matter of faith as belief in God: as an answer lying outside the bounds of the observable and knowable universe it has no claim to be science. There is, for those of us who tend to appeal to Occam’s razor, something inherently unsatisfying, and less rational about preferring such a complex solution as the multiverse over the simple explanation of God.

The third explanation is God. The existence of a Creator not only explains (with the limitations noted above of it being an transcendently incomplete and partially unknowable solution) the existence of the universe, it explains, at least by way of analogy, the rational nature of the observable universe. Our explanations of the universe are not simply rational because our minds are rational, and therefore construct a rational account, but because the universe is itself objectively rational. I do not think I want to press this as far as, say, Polkinghorne’s theory of mathematics as the equivalent of Plato’s forms, or indeed the mind of God. I do, however, want to suggest that it is more reasonable to see this rationality as a reflection of God’s ultimate reason, than it is as a product of an inherently irrational randomness. Creation is, I submit, ultimately more rational than happenstance.

written by doug