Is there anything wrong with “biting at the heels of men far greater in the Kingdom” than we?

Like Heidegger, who regarded it as “the fundamental question of metaphysics”, the philosopher Robert Nozick concluded that it impossible to answer why there is ‘something rather than nothing’. Both men’s voluminous writings were complex, distanced from the concrete and actual that this “something” primarily referred and, in their own peculiar way, became increasingly attracted to an abstruse mysticism.

Christianity, in its orthodox version, is eminently up to the task of answering this question. Its centerpiece discourse with the world is an historical event in which God, as man, allows himself to be murdered and by this sacrifice of love is able to effect reconciliation of the whole cosmos to himself. Far from being “foolishness” in which rationality departs, the Christian argument is that this act of God freely exposes itself in order to be understood. Unfortunately, one scion of Christianity has been recently performing public sleight-of-hand artifice and replaced comprehension with nonsense. Almost Marcion-like in its approach to Old Testament history, the Sydney Anglicans have deracinated the apotheosis of God’s appearance in the world from its historical backdrop. Now robbed of meaning and significance, these men try to convince their followers that their mystical theology is Christianity’s genuine article while ignoring the voluminous weight of historical testimony and rational argument that stands in opposition to their claims.

I’ve previously referred to Bishop Rob Forsyth’s address to ISCAST on the putative dangers of looking to science to prove God. The problem, Rob says, “is that this attempt to directly derive strong grounds for the existence of God from the existing state of science, usually by postulating a point at which ‘then a miracle occurs’, has some very significant dangers for the Christian faith.” The main “danger” is the god-of-the-gaps-argument which, as knowledge about our physical world increases, leaves less room for God as Creator. Traditionally, so Rob believes, God was regarded as principally transcendent, though of course immanent in that he somehow held everything together. As science developed and causes of the phenomena were given physico-chemical explanation, and naturalism began to be synonymous with the scientific method, Christians in their apologetics had to place God somewhere at the beginning of a line of cause and effect situations. With this increase in knowledge God was pushed farther and farther away as more material causal factors were discovered. Thus, the ‘then there was a miracle’ moment of invoking God became more and more irrelevant. Eventually, as can be appreciated from the scientific enterprise to develop a Grand Unified Theory for everything, God has become but a reminder of our society’s primitive past, a mere invocatory lucky charm for those who are superstitiously religiously inclined.

Rob’s address, it may be demurred, is a doleful harbinger of Christian bad times ahead. On the contrary: he actually hints at a solution. Rob wants us to return to the good old days when God knew his place in the scheme of things and respectfully allowed man to get on with his business of making scientific discovery. It’s horses for courses with Rob: No more God talk in the lab because science is science, and theology, theology. Science has limits and in order to understand God the religious person must down the tools of his trade, take a running jump across some mythical epistemological divide, and only then experience the transcendent. Rob believes that the universe, the world of scientific investigation, is just a “brute fact” and that it does not fall under science’s terms of reference to evince evidence for the things around us being ultimately explicable by God. Fair enough if you’re into a form of mysticism. By stating this, however, Rob’s church sits astride a pagan epistemology and cannot help but tether itself to an equally pagan worldview.

In his paper to the pagans at ISCAST, Rob favourably cites William Placher’s ‘The Domestication of Transcendence’. Placher’s argument is that if Europe had followed Calvin’s and Luther’s respect for God’s sheer otherness and left science to its own business rather than finding a place for God in the creation, atheism wouldn’t have the hold on the Western mind as it now enjoys. Although I may quite speedily be accused of “biting at the heels of men far greater in the kingdom” than I (surely to go down as one of Sydney Anglicans’ humblest self-assessments!), I want to suggest that Placher, Rob, Calvin and Luther are really part of the problem of why there is far too much atheism in the West.

These men’s two-tiered epistemology is a thorough-going Greek view of knowledge and is not the one presented in the Bible. The compartmentalization of reality into separate realms of transcendence and immanence reflects the Aristotelian and Platonic belief structure in which, notwithstanding their idiosyncratic differences, God was irreconcilably distinct from the creation, if creation is indeed even the appropriate descriptor. Both Greek philosophers could never manage to somehow bring everything together. Aristotle, arranging everything in concentric spheres according to the degree of materiality, had “God” outside and omitted any worthwhile explanation how the things of this world began. This world, our world, may have been “created” by God, but Aristotle’s philosophy could not provide true causality because of God’s being ultimately transcendent and other. Plato, on the surface, appears to be saying something far different to Aristotle. However, world of Ideas and Demiurge notwithstanding, the argument and effect were intending nothing different from his pupil: God and the source for creaturely blueprint were taken as a matter of faith to lie across a metaphysical and epistemological divide.

Both Calvin and Luther held a disparaging attitude to any attempt to understand God. For Calvin, God did not speak clearly about himself and what knowledge he did divulge was merely an accommodation to our “slight capacity”. Despite his acceptance of a young world, Calvin held, like the Sydney Anglicans, that the ancient Jews were primitive and did not have a sophisticated mind for understanding higher order truths. As a result, he believed that God did not speak “according to how things are” but lisped for the ordinary people. Faith for Calvin did not involve knowledge and understanding but a mystical tautology of the “mind ha[ving] to go beyond and rise above itself in order to attain [faith]. Even where the mind has attained, it does not comprehend what it feels. But while it is persuaded of what it does not grasp, by the very certainty of its persuasion it understands more than if it perceived anything human by its own capacity.” (Institutes 3.2.14)

Luther, a chap occasionally and favourably quoted on various Anglo-blogs, was less abstruse and cut to the chase by declaring reason a whore. Speculation about God was dangerous because Luther’s was a “hidden God” and “must therefore be left to himself in his own majesty”. (There is a line in Rob’s address to the ISCAST heathen which reflects this Gnostic elitism. Rob primarily lays the blame for the rise of atheism in Europe on “a desire to make all the reasons for the belief in God publicly accessible”. Once more Rob’s sacerdotal mien wants to shut the door, lock it with the key of knowledge, stand guard and keep the unworthy out.)

As is well known, Rob and his followers’ first and only response to atheist attacks on the orthodox understanding of Genesis 1 is to capitulate. The modern (as well as ancient) creationist, in contradistinction, does not fear contemporary views on origins and does not compromise the Bible’s historical accuracy by performing tendentious and unwarranted linguistic gymnastics, as is demonstrated by the Sydney Anglicans’ cowardly retreat of recategorising narrative as poetry or some other figurative form. Rather, creation apologetics encourage the thinking Christian to meet the challenge head-on and speak out with confidence about the plethora of scientific data that support a young, created earth.

In further support for his attack on contemporary creation apologetics the bishop’s address also pusillanimously relied on Michael Buckley’s ‘At the Rise of Modern Atheism’. Rob attempted to demonstrate that when early modern creationists, like Newtown, proposed a natural theology from their scientific discoveries this inevitably led to a viable and convincing atheist backlash. The atheists countered that there was increasingly less role for God to be God in his role as Creator and sustainer because the data could, with equal rationality, be understood through a materialist model. However, the good bishop shortchanged his listeners by overlooking the finer details of what this atheist “backlash” consisted. Two incidents mentioned in the book, and the reaction to them, are significant.

It was reported in 1741 to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris that a Swiss zoologist, Abraham Trembley, had split a hydra in half and watched as both halves grew their missing pieces. Creationists, in opposition to the chance-filled universe of the then Epicurean influenced materialist world-view, had been arguing that life can only arise from seeds which contain the design for their final form. The materialists unwisely and unscientifically viewed Trembley’s work as evincing the wholesale pagan idea that matter had some sort of internal vital force that produced life. By doing this they ignored the much earlier evidence of Francesco Redi and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek who had overturned and replaced the deductive proclamation of Aristotle that life arose from decaying matter with their experimental work that correctly demonstrated life cannot arise from non-life. These two creationists were resolute that science supported the biblical assertion that life can only come from life, God being the ultimate giver of all life. Equally importantly, they challenged, rather than ceding to, the then widespread pseudo-scientific pagan worldview of life having ontological independence. (As an aside, it is clear, too, “from “[Leeuwenhoek’s] stand against non-Christian superstitions such as the doctrine of spontaneous generation, that he held to a Biblical doctrine of creation. He believed it foolish to think his little “animalcules” could have formed by chance, and he worked diligently to prove that all things reproduce after their kind, as the book of Genesis teaches. For example, after working for weeks observing the propagation of insects, Leeuwenhoek stated confidently, “. . . This must appear wonderful, and be a confirmation of the principle, that all living creatures deduce their origin from those which were formed at the Beginning.”” Schierbeek, A., the Editor-in-Chief of the collected letters of Leeuwenhoek, p. 137.)

The other incident centered upon the blind genius Nicholas Saunderson, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. Saunderson vociferously argued for an atheist worldview which substantially centred its attack upon his predecessor Newton and his idea that the mathematical arrangement of the cosmos clearly demonstrated design. Like most atheists who make it a life’s pursuit to loudly deny the existence of a Creator, there frequently lie personal reasons for this career choice. Saunderson, as a baby, had been attacked by the smallpox virus which not only took away his sight but had actually removed his eyes. Saunderson, brilliant as he was, used his deformity and misfortune to bolster his belief that the universe was nothing but the result of eons of blind chance tossing up endless possibilities and permutations of matter that eventually formed life. The key for Saunderson was his own disability. He argued that if a creationist is going to argue design from nature’s exquisite beauty and remarkable intricateness, then he has to find a place for monsters like himself: if God exists, he must have permitted the horror of Saunderson. Saunderson’s argument was but a more pointed version of why there was something rather than nothing. His atheism quite reasonably argued that an evolving universe has to churn out beauties and beasts for no other reason than the interplay of chance, time and matter. Now here is something entirely ironic.

The Sydney Anglicans, represented by men like the bishop Rob Forsyth and his boss Peter Jensen, have declared that God has purposed the principle of evolution as the guiding hand in nature. God is now responsible for Saunderson’s misery and unbelief because, according to their Christian version of evolution, God from the start wanted the mutations and deformity caused by evolution to be a part of his “very good” world. Rather than tackle the validity of evolution being a genuine scientific description of the world, the Anglicans have been seduced by it, accepted it, and then stated that it is “a fatal mistake amongst Christians…to try to attempt to make the Christian faith believable or defensible within the limits imposed by science.” By artificially opening a divide between theology and science, one area of knowledge cannot converse with another. One can talk scientifically, but to talk on matters of God, one has to take off the lab coat, take a running jump across a chasm and land in the theology box, then, and only then, begin a separate discourse. What would have been our good bishop’s best response to Saunderson’s argument if the two had been contemporaries? Not much that would have made a whole lot of sense, I’d imagine.

On other entries I’ve contended that the Anglo-heretics present a quasi-Gnostic view of Scripture and the world. One latest version of this departure from orthodoxy is found over at our old mate Mark Baddeley’s site. Mark writes that, “[t]he point from this is that Creation Science is a natural theology par excellence….Creation Science tries to move to God’s glory by reading it off those things that we find glorious, and explain away those things that offend our notions of good and the like (like suffering).”

One distinguishing outworking of Gnostic thought is a disdain for the creation and Mark’s proposition is nothing more than a veiled version of this. (A less oblique attack on God’s creation, the reader may recall, comes from the Anglican minister Gordon Cheng who found in the koala clear evidence of God’s incompetence. Gordon’s armchair observations discovered that baby koalas have a tendency to fall out of their mommas’ pouches when climbing through the trees because evolution made the koala’s pouch the wrong way around.) Creationists on the other hand, involve themselves in the creation in order to discover the wisdom of the Creator, believing that there will be a plausible direct link between the creation and the Creator (after all, He made it!). Furthermore, creationists have no need to explain the evil in the world away – we actually search for reasons why, knowing that God is not responsible and that there will be indirect scientific argument for evil’s being non-natural (e.g. Haldane’s Dilemma or the clear scientific data which demonstrate the truth of a young world.). It’s actually the theistic evolution heretics who explain it away either falsely and indirectly attribute it to God, or, as is so often the case, present an insipid theodicy by shrugging their shoulders and claiming it’s all one big mystery.

As is the case in their compromising commitment to long ages and evolutionary mechanism, the Anglo-heretics have also joined with the atheists in other matters. One such noteworthy aspect is seen in Baddeley’s subtle distinction in his italicising the ‘we’ in “those [created] things that we find glorious”. What this obscures is the Anglo-heretics’ widespread criticism of the validity of analogous reasoning, part of the logical machinery that drives so much of the philosophy within the creationist and intelligent design. Analogous reasoning is a perfectly reasonable way for the mind to rationally secure a bridge from creature to Creator. Of course, the heretics inevitably end up dismissing this example of rationality as salvation based on our own efforts. Nothing could be further from the truth. Taking our lead from Genesis 1’s “made in the image of God”, creationists hold that logos is one of the components of this “image”. As a result man can rationally adduce from the things that are made, which are obviously not eternal, to the eternity of the Maker of these things. (Analogous reasoning allows us to establish that just as we utilise our wisdom, knowledge and understanding to plan our houses, construct our machines and to, “out of nothing”, bring forth our inventions, God also creates by using the same attributes. When we apply our intellect to our constructive tasks in effect we are following God’s own method of applying his intellect in a three-fold way. The pagan searches for wisdom; the Christian has been given this jewel; yet the Sydney Anglican heretics bury it when they replace God’s creative method with a pagan worldview.)

This raises the other reason why Baddeley stresses the ‘we’. Generated and sustained by his non-biblical belief system is his acceptance that the creation, from the beginning, had the good, the bad and the ugly. As a consequence of routinely ignoring or sophistically reworking the wisdom and knowledge of Genesis 1, Baddeley accuses creationists of only seeing God in the beautiful aspects of the world while explaining away the not-so nice through fanciful aetiologies resulting from the Fall. As someone profoundly influenced by evolutionary thinking this is to be expected; for why else would Baddeley hold that carnivorous animals were what God originally created.

But at this point there is an even more reckless outworking of his pagan theology, his downplaying of the intrinsic evil of suffering. Sure, he does commit to a pain-free world in eternity; but the concern I have is his acceptance of it in the present. He writes, “I still want to claim that our obsession with pain is wrongheaded. We elevate it way too high in the ‘evils’ that exist in our world (and I say that as someone who has an embarrassingly low pain threshold). When Romans 8 looks at the ‘good’ for God’s people, suffering is actually an instrument in accomplishing the good…Pain is not the great evil we make it out to be, even though it is part of the glory of the new creation that there will be no suffering. It’s part of the parochial patheticness of our day and age that our existence is getting increasingly defined by the attempt to avoid deprivation at all costs.”

Well, here we have it on his expert testimony that suffering is jolly well good. Note his astute theological underpinning, as well as the objective disinterest, almost stoic in its acceptance of pain being good for the soul. Do tell us Mark, ol’ chap: Just how many visits to the children’s oncology ward have you recently made? Watched anybody die a lonely, painful death this weekend? Been on the receiving end of any beatings lately for giving a testimony for Christ? Been in jail for Christ? Death threats? Spied on? Had your house burned down lately? Or what about your family executed in front of you? I guess not, eh? (Let me help you out. How about you bend over son and I’ll give 6 of the best, you take it like a man, and then I’ll consider you better equipped to write further theologically profound comments on your blog.)

But I digress. Let me conclude with the following.

Of course, such a god of the Sydney Anglicans was completely unknown to the Apostle Paul. In opposition to the Bishop of South Sydney and his supporters, Paul declared that from a deep knowledge of the creation and its components one can reason to some fairly dependable and accurate information about the Creator. Indeed, Paul argues that our minds are sufficiently perspicacious to comprehend something about the dunamis, or miraculous element, in creation and God’s deity and nature. (Paul quite astutely had also observed that some men attempt to foolishly argue away these facts but the truth is inescapable because it is the truth and God’s creation makes it quite plain to them.) The Sydney Anglicans have long ago swapped their inheritance of gold and pearls for atheistic dross and in the process emptied the scientific world of God. They have accomplished this by bringing into the Church a belief that the world is ancient and that God used an unscientific and ungodly method of creating called evolution.