// September 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // church, photos
I feel like mashed two somewhat unrelated ideas together this weekend.
The philosophical mistake of arguing for a God-of-the-gaps who exists in the shrinking window of what we don’t know about the universe, and the more practical mistake of believing in a God who is only present in the shrinking gap of possibility defined by the choices we have already made in life.
Nevertheless here’s how I worked it through;
Life is only worth living because of the possibility of new experiences. There is always something new to discover, taste and experience.
Twist Movie endings (Sixth Sense)
Black Swan (Nicolas Nassim Table)
Wine (8000 years and still learning)
That doesn’t mean we should try to explain God only by what we don’t know. God-of-the-Gaps type arguments are fundamentally flawed because the frontier of knowledge keeps pushing that type of God in continual retreat.
Barnett
To use the God-Of-The-Gaps argument is to open up your poor old deity to scientific scrutiny. If you say that proof of your God can be shown by a particular unexplained phenomenon, you’re going to be in trouble when science gets round to examining and explaining that phenomenon. Does your God vanish or die, or just scuttle over to the next Gap, like some giant cockroach when the light is switched on?
Sometime, someday, most of the important gaps will be closed, and those remaining believers who rely on this form of argument will be heard saying “Ah, but what about the mating ritual of the Venezuelan Accordion Beetle, eh? You can’t explain that with your stupid test tubes, can you? Bow down and praise the Lord in apology!”Far and few, far and few, are the gaps where the deities live.
Bonhoeffer
How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge.
If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat.
We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know
Instead Jesus uses the term born again to frame this idea that sometimes we need to go back and look at our lives with fresh eyes to see God not just in “what’s left” but in places we may have missed him before.
When we’re born we are open to everything, full of potential. It’s over time that we learn to manage, focus and direct that potential to the point where it can seem like our options are pretty limited. The idea of being born again, in a lot of ways, is about seeing things with new eyes again and being open to new possibilities. Perhaps it was meant to be less about a new set of conclusions and more about a recapturing a willingness to consider new ideas or reconsider old ones in a new way that we’ve lost over time
We see Nicodemus three times in the Book of John.
John 3
Nicodemus shows a willingness to engage with something that doesn’t initially fit in his world
John 7
He opens himself up to listen and learn and be surprised
John 19
And then eventually – though a process of journey and discovery he allows that new experience to become the catylist through which he reinterprets everything in his life
Where was the moment when Nicodemus was “born again”? Perhaps it was closer to the moment he opened himself up to a new possibility than to the moment he settled on a new set of conclusions.
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Sept 28: Gaps in our Experience
