A pause to explore

I am having a pause in posting the blog as I am reading two books.  The Koran ( English translation) and 'God is not Great' by Christopher Hitchings. More than a casual reading.

Attribute of God ..2

 “stars re-aligning to spell “I am God” in the sky....

When I immediately moved from the subjective conversion experience based on a few verses of the bible, I need to find the anchor of belief. It must be more concrete that the vague experiences people shared, more precise than the denominational idiosyncrasies and more timeless than the current published books. It must be relevant to my daily life and diverse enough to cover challenges I faces. There is a need of my philosophical test of the existence of an intelligent creator. If there is such a God, He must speak out!

To me He did! He inspired and coordinated the Bible. Below are some of the facts about the bible, that when pulled together showed evidence of divine intervention.

1. The sixty six books that complied together made the bible were written over 1600 years. Not a coordinated effort of one or two life span.

2. Written by over 40 different authors from varied walks of life. This includes kings, peasants, philosophers, fisherman, poets, statesman, doctor, tax collector and scholars (and a few more).

3. Written in different places (Asia, Africa and Europe) and circumstances.  Moses in the wilderness, Jeremiah in the dungeon, Daniel on the hillside and in the palace, Paul inside the prison walls and John in the island of Patmos.

4. It was written in three languages, Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic.

5. “ The writings include a great variety of literary types. They include history, law (civil, criminal, ethical, ritual, sanitary), religious poetry, didactic treatises, lyric poetry, parable and allegory, biography, personal correspondence, personal memoirs and diaries, in additional to the distinctively Biblical types of prophecy and apocalyptic.

For all that, the Bible is not simply an anthology; there is unity which binds the whole together. An anthology is compiled by an anthologist, but no anthologist compiled the Bible.” FF Bruce

Biblical authors spoke on hundreds of controversial subjects with harmony and continuity from Genesis to Revelation. There is one unfolding story: “God’s redemption of man”.

To me God did spoke out. He did it in black and white. That’s anchoring. 

Attribute of God ..1

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence." 
" 
— Immanuel Kant

  

As I reflect on why I came to believe in Jesus Christ as a teenager, I had to struggle not to superimpose with the sophistication of my present thinking as an adult. This will not capture the truthfulness of that crucial moment by giving reasons and justifications for my decision when they were not there at the point of belief. Although these I later found it to affirms that the experience was valid and resonates with the study of the Bible. In that crucial moment, what I needed to know to believe was there, and all that I knew at that moment need not be corrected.

Two significant strands (attribute of God) of thought impacted me.

The Holiness (as regards to moral purity) of God.  Rather than rejecting this to stamp a wanting to be fully autonomous, not having to contend with a moral requirement (that I failed), I find this truth to be a solace in an uncertain cruel world. This cruel world I find even within myself, and how I hurt others externally. I may not be the worst moral failure, but to me I am. As the Bible put it ‘all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God”, I am that.

The second strand is “God is love”, and in His plan He provides a way for reconciliation, of forgiveness through the suffering, death and resurrection of the historical incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. It was not the theology of the event, but an act that define the extent of God’s love and charity to even me who am undeserving.  

I responded to this love in thankfulness.

Ps

Can I suggest you also consider this presentation by a Nobel Prize winner

Francis Collins
California Institute of Technology
5 February 2009

Why do we have a moral law within us? Francis Collins, renowned scientist, director of the National Institute of Health, and former director of the Human Genome Project, explains how this puzzle impacted his journey to faith. From The Veritas Forum at Caltech, 2009.

By going to www.veritas.org and create an account(free) for yourself. 

Certainty of Science part 2

God or leprechauns..we could never be certain they don’t exists. Science cannot disprove their existence. But the implication of the possible existence of God is weightier. In my observation, it comes out in the academic world in debates and thesis, not counting the amount of books written.  ‘...eternity had been set into our heart’ (the Bible Ecclesiastes 3:11), and it gnaw into our private thought. We can choose to position ourselves to reject it, but we just cannot dismiss it. It does come back again and again.

We can try to drown this thought by structuring our lives with seemly more urgent issues and concerns of the present. It will still creep in.

We try to claim of having intellectual integrity by not accepting what we cannot manipulate or replicate in the laboratory. Then we have a long list of other important things that we had accepted as real to reject. We even have to contradict the philosophy of science that we hope will support our claims. So much for intellectual integrity!

What we perhaps can only claim is the selfish lack of revelation by the transcendence. If IT would not show up, don’t expect me to conclude.

Before that we should explore and test the claims of revelations in the belief systems that exist.  We need to define even the concept of ‘revelation’.

Certainty and science

A scientific theory is empirical, and is always open to falsification if new evidence is presented. That is, no theory is ever considered strictly certain as science accepts the concept of fallibilism. The philosopher of science Karl Popper sharply distinguishes truth from certainty. He writes that scientific knowledge "consists in the search for truth", but it "is not the search for certainty ... All human knowledge is fallible and therefore uncertain."^[38]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science#History_and_etymology‘

Gravity existed in the most elegant form even before Newton’s postulation. Actually Leonardo’s experiment of dropping weights from the tower of Pisa predates Newton. But up to now, the wisest of the scientists cannot answer his/her own question, ‘What actually is it?’.

Are we alone or are there aliens in other planets? In order to prove conclusively that there are none, extensive searches through every nooks and corner of the universe have to be made. Such thoroughness is required.

In engineering we used the knowledge known through science within the limit of perceived reality. You cannot ask the most accurate laser cutter to produce dimensions with zero tolerance, but within the tolerance the product can be useful.

The above are truth statements. How much authority do we now give to scientific claims? Engineering pimped science by churning out fascinating toys, but it is a discipline that recognizes its limit and would be paralyzed if absolute are demanded.

Science has not being able to measure and test the substance of a transcendence being..yet. It maybe because of its own evolution of skill or it maybe it is out of the range of thoroughness. It cannot say that the transcendence being only starts to exist when science can detect it.

Davids and the Goliath

She was rich, sophisticated, and intelligent. Coming from an ultra modern city when she married to the local dentist, she was our school senior science teacher. Her passion and leadership helped our local school win the country’s science project many times. Being the movers and shakers of the town, she helped and inspired many of the students to achieve educational and career significant. If I were to as for one person of whom I will model as a good teacher, she is it.

There is only one indiscretion she had. She loves to run down Christianity in her classroom and Christians loudly in the staff room. I never found out why. Maybe as a biology teacher she has to hold on the evolutionary theory to that extent.

He is retarded. This may be due to the trauma at birth. I later found him to be gentle, friendly and always look at you with vulnerable eyes. I remembered when walking back from watching his favourite sport of football, where he named the players in the team, he asked me ‘who won the game?’. He was her sixteen years old child.

They were a bunch of youth, from fourteen to sixteen years. From just three of them, I and two others, managed to grow the group to about twenty. Other than the first three, the rest did not have any church background, and most came from incomplete or broken homes. Although there were engaging funs activities like picnics and games, the main regular activity was bible study and worship. They seem to enjoy the meeting and keep up to regular attendance. When the group was going past twenty, concerned about the dilution of care to each of them, I whispered a prayer that the group will not grow any larger.

Through another friend, she asked for her son to join this group of youth. She had tried with her influence and resources to fit him to many groups. Somehow he always came back with a sense of being rejected.

Happy with just my small corner of service, I was thinking of how to politely say no to the request. Anyway isn’t a more specialised skill is required to handle a retarded child? When I shared about the request to this bunch of youth, almost in unison they said, “Let him come, and we will take care of him.’  That was how he came to join this group. When I saw how the group really took care of him and helped him, I was both ashamed of my initial selfish reluctance, and proud of how far these youth came through. When he participated in the study discussion and contributed inadequately, he was not laughed at but was listened patiently by the youth. When they go out to play, he was included in the game and not blamed losing the team. I must remind myself that these a bunch of kids who are in their private world quite challenged as compared to his privileged home. Learning about the love of Jesus over the past six months had transformed them.  I remembered my transformation was nearly the same. Jesus’ love changes lives.

She was promoted to be the principle of the school. She never confessed to have changed her mind as to the Christian’s claim of belief, when she passed on due to cancer. But six months after observing how her son was well and respectfully treated by this bunch of church youth, not only she stopped castigating the Christian, but openly praised the Christianity, as represented by this group of youth, in the staff room. Since then the burning of Christians was off the menu in the staff room.

Half and half a baby does not make one

In the dispute of the parentage of a baby between two mothers in Solomon’s court, the real mother denied her right of claim to stop the sword dividing the baby into two equal shares as settlement. Two half baby do not make one.

There are some important questions that we struggle with because it has implication to our outlook, conduct and wellbeing. I think the four are about origin, ethics, meaning and destiny and these questions need answers that unites them as a whole without compromising the integrity of each. Although each of them is already a tough challenge, we have to raise the stake otherwise we won’t be satisfied (‘two half of the baby does not make a whole’).

Charles Darwin at the end of his life saw the implication of the theory he proposed. He knew that once we go for an impersonal origin, we also change our outlook on ethics. This linking was also prophesized by Friedrich Nietzsche stating the 20^th century would be the bloodiest once he buried God. In the book Freedom Paradox, Clive Hamilton links ethics and meaning, and found that if meaning was about enjoyment without the boundary of ethics, it is disastrous. (“Sex out-side the bound of committed relationship is not just tagged as a moral mischief but harmful’). He did not write from a religious platform as found in the later chapters of the book.

 The suggestion of answers to each of the question has implications to the other answers. It is a high standard we must set, because only then we can have satisfaction.