The Midnight of the Blind Watchmaker Some New Year thoughts on
Richard Dawkins and the "God Delusion"
Lectionary: Isaiah 637-9
Psalm 148
Hebrews 210-18
Matt. 213-23
As the clocks chime twelve tomorrow night, we will enter the year 2008,
perhaps with new hopes and new resolutions. And as Newton and his
scientific contemporaries realized with their primitive telescopes, the
motion of the planets brings us into each New Year with striking
regularity. Some scientists espoused rationalism, arguing that
our entire universe was structured just like an enormous clock, a
mechanical device with no place for God. Newton himself dismissed
the magic and mysticism that the mediaeval church had imposed on
Christianity. He saw that the principle of gravitation explained
the current course of the planets, but he also saw it could not explain
who set the planets on their particular paths. God was the
ultimate governor of all things and knew all that is, or can be done.
Jumping forward a hundred years, we find William Paley advancing a
similar thesis in his book Natural Theology. Paley maintained
that the very complexity of living organisms was evidence for the
existence of a divine creator, just as the subtle movements of a
beautifully designed watch compel belief in an intelligent watchmaker.
Scientific knowledge has taken further giant strides since Newton and
Paley. We wrestle now with ideas of black holes, big bangs, and
the ultimate disappearance of our planet. And this new
understanding of reality has brought its share of arrogant
intellectuals who argue loudly that the universe can be explained
without invoking any near or distant God. In recent years,
perhaps the most strident of these voices has been that of Richard
Dawkins, a fellow of New College, Oxford. In 1986, he published a
book entitled "The Blind Watchmaker," scorning Paley's belief in intelligent
design, and emphasizing that
the elaborate wonder of our present universe had evolved from quite
simple structures. He has gone on to sell over a million copies
of his latest outpouring, "The God Delusion." In this second
book, he suggests that God is a a persistent false belief, held
in the face of strong contradictory evidence. He quotes Pirsig,
that when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity, but
when many people suffer from the same delusion, it is called religion.
Dawkins spent some time at
Berkeley, and he probably wrote his latest tract in part as a reaction
to George Bush and the religious right in the United States.
Interestingly, he himself has had several conversions into and out of
the Anglican church. And while he now categorically rejects the
God of George Bush, he still talks of “Einstein's God", a metaphor for
nature, or the mysteries of the universe. He draws a sharp
distinction between what he regards as the sustainable hypotheses of
Einsteinian religion, and American ideas of God the Creator of the
universe who must be worshiped to ensure success in business.
Many have criticized his latest book as both rude in its treatment
of deeply held personal tenets and lacking in theological
scholarship.
Certainly, the religion Dawkins criticizes so harshly is a far cry from
the beliefs of most of us. Listen up, Professor Dawkins! We have
news for you! We don't engage in the persecution of homosexuals.
We don't go around killing abortionists. We don't believe in
orthodox Rabbis having exclusive access to the temple mount.
Muslims share a building with a protestant church in Little Mosque on
the Prairies, and neither we nor most Muslims support the suicide
bombings in the Middle East. Even your diatribe about the
Blind Watchmaker is misplaced and sadly dated- we don't really believe
that there is some old man up in the sky, barely able to see, yet
trying to figure out which salmon should spawn in stony creeks, and
which go for the muddy ponds. We understand, perhaps even more
clearly than you, how the forces of genetic and social evolution have
shaped the wondrous components of our universe.
Nevertheless, the noisy writing of Professor Dawkins may have performed some service for us,
making us think more clearly about the religion that we espouse.
Most young Canadians reject the mumbo-jumbo of the Nicene Creed as a
meaningless superstition They are unable to buy the
fundamentalist hope of pie in the sky by and by. But many of
them also think that is what we believe. So it is important that
we enunciate our faith clearly. Evolution is the easy part of to
understand. Most of us have "Inherited the Wind," and we would side
with Scopes and the monkey in any public trial. But how do we get
from the Word, the creative Verb that powered the Big Bang and started
the atoms on their complex evolutionary adventure, to a personal God
who cares for us as individuals living here in Squamish?
The puzzle of how God gets
close and personal seems the dominant theme behind our lectionary this
morning. The passage from Isaiah was written from exile, after
the Babylonian conquest of 587 BC. If we turn the page to the
next chapter, we read that the temple has been destroyed and Jerusalem
is a desolation (Isaiah 6410). Our holy and beautiful
house has been burned by fire (Isaiah 6412). God seems
angered by the present apostasy, the social injustice and the worship
of false gods. But this is the anger of a loving parent who
suffers as he punishes, a God who has a HESED, a steadfast love for his
people,. In the past, he guided the exodus of the Israeli
people. And he will again become known to his people as a
living, loving presence, redeeming them, leading them back to the
promised land, and restoring Jerusalem to its former glory.
Psalm 148 is one of the five Hallelujah psalms. The writer
praises God for commanding that the heavens be created (v. 5). In
keeping with ancient cosmology, he sees the sun, moon and stars
travelling atop the earth in concentric hemispheres , and above them
all is God’s storehouse of “waters above the heavens” (v. 4), The
movements of the celestial bodies follow an everlasting law (v. 6), and
the heavens should praise him for making their existence
permanent. There are also the many wonders of our earth- the
mountains and forests, the oceans, and the diversity of creatures that
dwell therein. But behind this display of creative power
and magnificence, there is the “stormy wind” or RUAH (v. 8), a force
that carries people near to their creator, a spirit that enters their
hearts, bringing about God’s will.
As so often in our lectionary, the epistle is the most difficult for us
to follow. Even the author is something of a mystery.
Origen said around 200 AD "God only
knows who wrote the epistle to the Hebrews." It is much
more of a sermon than a letter, and (as its name suggests) it is penned
for a Jewish audience. It presents an elaborate argument that Jesus
makes clear how God can become personal in the life of a man born of
the same flesh and blood as us. His life and his teaching reveal this
mystery to us. We begin to understand the epistle as we enter the
minds of the ancients, and see the immediate world as controlled by
angels. But in an eternal perspective, this is untrue; the world
to come is not subject to angels (v. 5). Through the advent of
Jesus, we have become a part of God's plan. Jesus himself was
tempted, as we so often are (v. 18). Knowing human weakness, he
can help ordinary mortals like you and me, the seed of Abraham (v.16);
this strengthening of our frail personalities will become clear to us
in the midst of the congregation (v. 12).
Matthew's account of Christmas speaks to us of the presence of God in
an infant child. But he also brings the scientists into the
story! Because divine wisdom was so strongly personalized in the
birth of Jesus, Matthew has the wisest of Eastern sages bring not only
their costliest material gifts, but also homage to a greater
wisdom. The Greek word for homage, proskunesai, could imply the
honouring of either a God or a king. Either was enough to give
Herod a fit! None of the other gospels make any mention of the
magi. Western tradition argues that if the wise men were more
than a striking metaphor, then they were probably Magupati,
priests of Zoroastrianism, men who had devoted their lives to
mathematical studies of the conjunction of the planets. However, the
Chinese church maintains that one of the voyagers was Liu Shang,
astronomer royal to the Han dynasty; he discovered a new "king star,"
and then disappeared from court for two years.
Our King James Bible is politically correct, dodging the term magi for
the learned visitors. It prefers to call them Wise Men, thus
distinguishing them and their mysteries from the notorious sorcerer
Simon Magus (Acts 8), founder of the heretical sect of Gnosticism.
Today, we have read the second half of Matthew's story- the holy family
are now refugees in Egypt, and Herod the Great, a paranoid Edomite, is
making a brutal ethnic cleansing of all Davidic children under the age
of two. Perhaps because Matthew likes to unify the wisdom of the
bible, when the brutal dictator dies, he has Joseph recalled to Israel
with much the same words that God had spoken to Moses (v. 20).
Thus, Jesus becomes a new Moses for his people. Herod Antipas,
the son of the murderous Herod, is now ruling Galilee, and he is seen
as more benign than his brother Archaelus in Judea. So Joseph
settles in Nazareth, and possibly finds construction work on the
magnificent new palace Herod is building at Sepphoris. Matthew
seems to stretch the text a bit when he finishes the passage with the
quotation "he shall be called a
Nazarene." There is no trace of such a text in our current
bibles. Perhaps he is harking back to a verse from Isaiah (111): “a branch [or NEZER] shall grow” out of
Jesse’s “roots;” Matthew thought it important to prove to his
readers that Jesus came of the lineage of David.
So much for biblical views on a personal, caring God. But what of
our own day? Here, the argument becomes a matter of individual
belief. I can certainly tell you my views, but in the liberal
tradition of our United Church, many of you will have entirely
different perceptions. I can envisage the power of God as seen in
the big bang, moving out into those atoms that lie all around me and
within me. This power, the RHUA of the creator, is necessarily
within all of our universe, even in me, the least of
mortals. And as I use that power, as I shake those atoms
about, all of our universe is going to be affected to a great or a
lesser extent, sometimes for good, and sometimes for evil.
Over the centuries, the wondrous processes of genetic and social
evolution have brought a beautiful unity to our world. We have
the opportunity to live in harmony with it. Year succeeds year.
And the clockwork of the seasons, of birth and rebirth, of nitrogen and
carbon cycles that an Einsteinian God has set in motion will continue
in their perfect rhythm- unless- and this is a big unless, we puff
ourselves up to become Dawkins' blind watchmaker, unless we tinker with
the mechanisms of ecology and carelessly ignore their delicacy until a
critical cog is lost or a spring broken beyond repair.
The capacity of caring for others is a central aspect aspect of life
that Dawkins found difficult to explain in terms of genetic or social
evolution. Altruism carries no apparent benefit in the struggle for
individual survival.. It may have begun in pack animals, as a
means of enhancing survival of the species as a whole. Whatever
its origins, humans have evolved with the capacity to nurture and
develop this attribute, or to suppress it until we become murderous
dictators. The principle of reciprocal caring- do unto others as
you would have them do unto you- is found in most major religions. Here
the RHUA, the spirit of a distant God has the potential to become a
warm, personal and selfless love. We see it in the life and
death of Jesus, and in the teaching of the great prophets of many
faiths. Most importantly, it is an attribute we can strive to
develop, through prayerful meditation and meeting with like-minded
individuals. So, if we are making resolutions for the coming
year, let the first be to take the incalculable, all-pervasive power
behind our universe, and to channel it through our lives so that it
becomes a personal, loving force. Then will this season bring a
real epiphany to our community.