Blog – Your comments

6 thoughts on “Blog – Your comments”

1. Your challenges to some of the traditional semantics in the Bible effectively include more people inside the religious fold than is the case in the formal religion of the Catholic Church. To my mind this is a good and well-meaning endeavour. All religions pay tribute to God (monotheists) or to their gods. All religions are man-made with respect to the details of their doctrines and beliefs. I suggest therefore that all religions are of secondary importance in relation to the fundamental question of what is God? We need to take the question of God first and foremost. You ask in your essay, how can we deepen our knowledge of God? This then begs the question, how far can one strip away the core traditional beliefs and teachings of the Bible regarding God (and Jesus Christ) without damaging or destroying their residual truth and the value of the Christian faith? How far can the Catholic church be pushed?
   Some see conflict between science and religion, but it has long been accepted that they are totally different disciplines, which attempt to explain the “how?” and the “why?” of the universe respectively. Some scientist are believers, others claim to be atheists. Let us explore whether the “atheist- scientist’s” view of “god” is completely alien to, or compatible with, the true heart of religious orthodoxy. I wish to illustrate the question with quotes from just two eminent scientists: Fred Hoyle and Steven Hawking.
   Fred Hoyle said that he had yet to meet a person who was not imbued by a religious sense. The great differences between us (scientists and people of faith) lie in our varying attitudes to formal religion. Non-formal religion according to Hoyle includes the sense of awe of the stars at night and the feeling that the majestic play of the universe has some deep laid purpose which we seek to find. By formal religion Hoyle cited the miracles of Jesus Christ and the stories of the Old Testament. Hoyle sought harmony by saying that there must be compromises on both sides. Science must recognise its core purpose to give a coherent view of the universe, however crude and in need of later revision. The religious person must be prepared to compromise in two ways, by being willing to discard statements which are in flat opposition to our experience of the physical world, and by accepting a humbler role for the human species in the universal scheme of things – by being willing to admit that our picture of the universe must not be centred around this little earth and around us humans, but must be painted on an incomparably vaster canvas.
   Steven Hawking declared there are universal laws (of nature) which are never broken, unlike man-made laws. These can be called (by some) the laws of God but that is opinion, and such a statement is a definition of God, not a proof of his existence. Hawking can accept an impersonal god, but most religious people have a human-like being as an image and seek a personal relationship. He renders down the essential ingredients of the universe to just energy (equivalent to mass) and space. This may seem to be a colder and more distant view of God than that of Hoyle, but could it be that he was a pantheist, who sees his god as the entire universe, with everything in it, including human beings? His job was to discover the beauty of the “how” not the “why.” Certainly Hawking’s view of a possible god is consistent with the view in your essay that it is a “mistake” to see God with a human face, which in turn makes more sense of “why bad things happen.” I suggest that prayer most often does not work, even when it contains absolutely no self-interest and is not in response to humans’ own digressions .Could it be that God is concerned with the collective progress to “perfection” of the human race, and not so much with the individual? If God created the universe, is it not paying tribute to God to try to understand it? Are these scientists really atheists, or do they merely feel excluded by man-made rules? So, where do you draw the line between atheism, and a form of theism which is not based on traditional and ancient portrayals of God, and how would the R.C. church respond?
   Geoff Gould (13/03/22)

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2. Thank you, Geoff, for your interest in, and attention to, my ideas. I am sure your concerns about how the religious view of God can be reconciled with modern science are held by many people with a scientific training.

   Perhaps I could start with ‘miracles’. As I explain in section 17 of my essay, a ‘miracle’ is simply something wonderful, perhaps a happy chance or a phenomenon that (at the time it occurs) cannot be explained. Most competent Christian theologians accept fully that the laws that govern the universe do not have exceptions – God does not ‘suspend’ or ‘tinker with’ them for his own purposes or at some believer’s request. However, most competent scientists accept that we do not yet fully and finally know the laws that govern the universe – well evidenced hypotheses may have to be revised in the light of counter-examples, and even ‘scientific laws’, such as Newton’s law of universal gravitation, for centuries considered immutable, had to be modified in the light of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
   If we look at some of the ‘miracles’ in the Bible, to which Fred Hoyle objects, it is sometimes possible to conjecture natural explanations for phenomena that people in ancient times found wonderful and inexplicable, such as the crossing of the Red Sea in about 1290 BCE. There is some evidence that a marshy area at the extreme northern end of the sea (‘the sea of reeds’ Exodus 13: 18), which is usually covered by water, can in certain climatic conditions (‘a strong easterly wind all night’ Exodus 14: 22) dry out sufficiently to be passable by a large group of lightly armed Israeli refugees, but not by a heavily armoured Egyptian army pursuing them, which would get bogged down and drown when the wind changed and the sea water flowed back. Since it was essential to the liberation of the Israeli people from Egyptian slavery, this event entered into the (oral) tradition of Israel’s historical epic, and was much embroidered (‘walls of water to right and left of them’ Exodus 14: 29) before being written down in its current form about 700 years later. It seems more reasonable to assume there was some real event underlying this tradition, however misleadingly described, than that a completely fictitious event was told and retold generation by generation
   Another set of unexplained phenomena are the reported sightings of Jesus in the forty days after his death on the cross. Again, it seems reasonable to accept that a number of Jesus’ disciples (over 500, according to St Paul at 1 Corinthians 15: 6) had a real experience which they described as seeing and sometimes conversing with Jesus, though many had difficulty recognizing him at first and the apparition disappeared after a fairly short period. The experience had a profound and long-lasting emotional effect on them. It would seem unreasonable to say nothing at all happened and their account was fictitious, but we cannot offer a full scientific explanation even now. However, we can compare it with hallucinations or mass hysteria, of which there are many modern examples, and look to psychology and neuroscience for possible explanations. They would not undermine the value of such experiences in persuading his disciples to devote their lives to spreading Jesus’ message more widely.
   A more common type of ‘miracle’ both in biblical times and now, is the healing of sick people, without obvious medical or pharmacological treatments. There are many examples in the Bible, and there have been spiritual healers and faith healers throughout history, as well as witchdoctors and shamans in other cultures, and numerous claims of healing at shrines like Lourdes. There are too many examples for them all to be dismissed as fraudulent, but no clear scientific explanation is available, though psychosomatic medicine may offer some hypotheses.

   You say that Fred Hoyle cites the miracles of Jesus Christ and the stories of the Old Testament as examples of ‘formal religion’ and implies that they are ‘statements which are in flat opposition to our experience of the physical world’ which the religious person must discard. Maybe by ‘formal religion’ he means the biblical literalism of a few Southern US fundamentalists who insist the world was made in seven 24-hour days and that Eve was made from Adam’s rib. This is certainly not the religion of most Christians or Roman Catholics.

   On the efficacy of prayer, see my sections 6 and 15. If my views are not clear, I can come back on this later.
   Some of your questions about God need quite a lot of unpacking to see how much they presuppose that God is a human person. When God is understood in my terms, the line between atheism and theism shifts considerably. I have yet to find out how the R.C. Church would respond to my ideas.
   By all means press on with your concerns.
   Jonathan

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3. Geoff Gould [Comment posted by jaholden from email from Geoff Gould]
   10th June 2022

   Jonathan, thank you for your interesting reply, 31/03/22. I think despite our different academic backgrounds and our very different degrees of proactive participation in the liturgy, I conclude that our core beliefs are very similar. I hope I do not presume too much. One of your concluding sentences leads me to this opinion, “When God is understood in my terms, the line between atheism and theism shifts considerably.”
   I know you understand my reason for referencing the views of certain scientists, but for clarity I reiterate that I have few, if any, major issues with the well-worn debate and supposed conflict of “religion versus science”, for the reasons I have given already. I quote Hoyle and Hawking merely to give examples of scientists who would likely be excluded from formal religion, and branded atheists by normal liturgical standards, and I ask is this right and fair? Also, in my reference to these scientists’ views of “god”, I intended to explore further your statement that it is “a mistake to speak of God as a person…” , a statement with which I firmly agree (Part 2, Section 11).
   Before leaving the subject of science, it is worth recording that “good” scientific theories are rarely proved to be wrong, but in light of further study, they are merely shown to be incomplete or not entirely accurate. Newton’s Laws of Gravity are still used effectively, and by choice, to this day to calculate escape velocities, and orbital trajectories (etc) for space rockets and satellites. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity adds important refinements and explains the surprising behaviour of light, and perhaps most fundamentally, explains the “inexplicable” nature of gravitational attractive force, which is not a “force” in the traditional meaning at all, but the bending of space-time (like a dish), by a massive object which causes another object to veer towards it, which in the extreme case can result in an equilibrium captured orbital motion. As a former research chemist, another example I often quote is the 100 years-old planetary model of the atom by Rutherford, which explains and predicts very satisfactorily many important properties of elements, such as reactivity, electromagnetic behaviour, radioactivity, radiation and the colour of things. This model is still used proactively today. Quantum mechanics has proved extremely accurate and is the basis of the whole electronics industry, but for some practical purposes it is too “sophisticated.” Hypotheses on the other hand are inspired assumptions without proof. Many are later disproved by experiment (e.g. phlogiston, the aether), but others are eventually proved to be true (e.g. Avogadro’s Number). As you know, the high point of science is that it does not dictate, and it welcomes challenge.
   On the subject of miracles, I accept that some accounts, especially in the Old Testament, are explanations and assumptions given in the knowledge of their time. But, the miracles of Jesus Christ are events in more “modern” times (2000 years is not a long time in recorded historical terms), and are not of the same nature as traumatic, but natural, geological and cosmological events. I am not an apologist for Hoyle, but he did quote specifically the miracles of Jesus as a barrier to his belief in formal religion. You allude to Richard Dawkins when you mention the dismissal of formal religion by reference to USA religious extremists. Dawkins is not in the same league as Hoyle and Hawking; he has an atheist opinion, and hand-picks evidence to suit his prejudice, in a very transparent way. I do not take him seriously; he is an observer of science, not a proactive contributor. (However, it is right to ask if it is necessary to believe the miracles of Jesus in order to be a Christian? In Section 5, you ask “who are the true followers of Jesus?” and you suggest someone who has “absorbed his teachings, is selfless, and gives true love (etc), but not practisers of abstruse doctrines, without understanding, and attending rituals designed to unite.” The divinity of Jesus is covered well in your very interesting appendix A1 →, and elsewhere in your essay, but this is best a subject for later discussion).
   You mention Lourdes as an example of miraculous medical cures, but I believe fundamental statistics show that the vast majority of hopeful, faithful people who attend Lourdes are not healed. However they may benefit positively from the psychological and spiritual experience of communal synergy.
   I find the subject and rationale of the efficacy of prayer unsatisfactory. I have already read and absorbed your Section 6 and 15. In Section 15 you quote Saint James as saying that unanswered prayers are because we don’t pray properly, but pray to indulge our desires. He goes on to say that if we pray only for God’s providential plan, we are likely to be answered. This is a circular statement with no real content – how do we know the plan? And the plan is presented as the only possible eventuality, by very definition, no matter what we pray for as an alternative. In Section 6 you say “praying for something one wants increases the likelihood of it eventuating”, but not according to Saint James! To repeat my earlier response to your blog, I believe most prayer is not answered, even when there is no self-interest, and when prayer is not in response to our own human digressions, such as war. We all know “bad things happen”: the lingering painful illness of a terminal patient; a shipwreck in which 9 men drown but one survives (often saying that he prayed), and the real case, in the last year, of a little boy (in Morocco?) who fell down some sort of bore-hole. Most of the world prayed for his survival, but he died. We know this happens, but we must address this dilemma honestly in the context of religion. For many people this is a make or break problem, both for religion and for God. In my earlier reply I mentioned my “thought” on whether God looks for collective progress to perfection in the human race, since this could explain personal tragedies. I think of an analogy in the successful communal world of the ant and the bee, and even molecules which behave predictably en masse, but not individually (Boltzmann). But I realise this destroys the notion of a very personal God, who takes care of us.
   In Section 6 you describe communal prayer, which can be liturgical (as in church ceremonies and rituals), or private prayer and meditation. You acknowledge solitary communion clarifies one’s own views and awareness, but you do not make it clear if it is fully effective and “legitimate.” Speaking personally, I find solitary communion (literally on one’s own) is the only meaningful way to pray. To my mind nothing can be more disengaging than the chanting of set texts, mostly without thought of the words, due to local distractions, but I accept this is a personal view. You continue to explain that “in communal prayer, in time, if enough people express their common hope for a practical change in the world, those in power are likely to respond and achieve it.” I agree with this statement, but the same is true for any like-minded group of people lobbying the Government for change.
   My response to your blog on miracles and prayer sounds highly cynical, and dismissive of the whole subject, but this is not the case. For example, I find prayer is instinctive. One finds oneself communing with God spontaneously, not only in times of adversity for self or for loved-ones, but as a way of expressing joy and thanks for the relationship, through the connection with music, the arts, landscape, and yes, through certain revelations in science. The true cynic would just say, “you like the sound of music, that’s all there is to it!”
   I recognise my reply is too long, but my hope is that it is tightly knit together. It is all connected with your statement that “it is a mistake to speak of God as a person…” Geoff Gould (10/06/22)

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4. Thank you, Geoff, for clarifying my rather imprecise remarks on scientific laws, theories and hypotheses; also for reading my Appendices A1 to A6, which contain fuller explanations of some of the things I allude to briefly in the essay.
   You still seem to find, with Hoyle, the miracles of Jesus as a barrier to belief in Christianity. (I am not sure whether my interpretation of Christianity would count for Hoyle as ‘formal religion’, but I certainly consider myself to be a Christian.) I see those ‘miracles’ (things to be wondered at) as falling into two main categories.

   (a) Faith healing, which existed before Jesus and continues to this day in far too many instances to be dismissed as all fraudulent, and for some of which modern scientific explanations now exist; for others, plausible psychosomatic hypotheses do not clearly conflict with established scientific theory; and for yet others it seems reasonable to keep open the possibility that future medical research will provide explanations. In this category I would include cases of Jesus ‘driving out demons’ which we might now describe as treating psychotic or other mental illnesses, and the two instances of his ‘raising people from the dead’, in the light of what we now know about patients being revived from comas that look, in the absence of medical expertise, like death. The gospels describe crowds bringing their sick to Jesus from surrounding areas, but do not claim he healed them all – indeed describe only a handful of cases. And, given the immense strides in medical research over the last 2000 years, the gospel-writers’ description of symptoms provide an unreliable basis for a modern doctor’s diagnosis of the illnesses that were cured.

   (b) Jesus’ own ‘resurrection’, including the finding of an empty tomb on Sunday morning, and the brief appearances of Jesus (though most accounts stress that the disciples did not recognize him by his face) in the six weeks after his death. I do not believe that these phenomena show (nor are claimed by the gospel-writers to show) that the corpse that was buried on Good Friday became a living human being, walking on earth for the following forty days. There are a number of possible explanations of the empty tomb, including the one used by the Jewish authorities that Jesus’ disciples had removed the corpse; I have already, in my last reply to you, drawn parallels between the appearances and hallucinations or mass hysteria. In short, neither example is so far-fetched as to make these ‘things to be wondered at’ an absolute barrier to faith. In Section 16 of my essay, in my comment on the word ‘consecrating’, I mention my view that the principal meaning of Christ’s resurrection is that after his death his disciples would make him present again, not just as a fond memory but in a real way, so that through his spirit active within them he could continue to do his work on the earth.

   I turn now to your comments on ‘prayer’. St James says ‘Why you don’t have what you want is because you don’t pray for it; when you do pray and don’t get it, it is because you have not prayed properly, you have prayed for something to indulge your own desires’. He doesn’t go on to say ‘If you pray only for God’s providential plan, you are likely to be answered’ – that is my slightly cynical comment, pointing to the inherent circularity. I am saying that dead saints are not listening to our prayers as we make them, and lobbying God to act instantly on them, but that communal or public prayer achieves its results (if it does so) by influencing people of good will living today who want the best outcomes in the present circumstances – it addresses the goodness (= God) working in them. It is my (perhaps optimistic) belief that the great majority of the human race are such people of good will, with some (albeit limited) capacity to discern what is really good from what is bad, and some motivation to do what they can (in some cases, very little) to bring it about. It is essentially the same process as lobbying politicians, but much wider (and usually longer-term) in its targets and aims.
   It is important to pray for what is really good, so far as we can discern it. (If people on both sides in a war pray for victory. some at least will not get it; if they pray for peace, they may.) This is where private prayer (raising the mind and heart to God – i.e. to what is really good) can be “legitimate” (whatever you mean by that) and effective. Different types of prayer work better for different people. Your spontaneous prayer, including enjoying the sound of music, is fine, especially if it leads you to share your enjoyment with others. But most Christians say that you also have to stick at praying even when you don’t feel like it, to learn to distinguish good from evil and to build your character for a virtuous life.
   In contrast to some traditional views that religion is a purely private pursuit in which each individual seeks his or her own salvation alone, the Catholic Church since Vatican II has stressed the communal nature of the Church and of its goal of saving the world. So I believe one objective of communal prayer is for Church members to help one another to grow in their discernment of right and wrong and in their faith: private prayer is not enough in itself.
   I hope this answers your concerns on miracles and prayer, and maybe we could move on to other more theological areas, such as the divinity of Jesus, my take on the Trinity, or the nature of eternal life, on which I suspect a number of committed Christians would disagree with me strongly.
   Best wishes, Jonathan

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5. Geoff Gould [Comment posted by jaholden from email from Geoff Gould
   29th June 2022

   Jonathan, thank you for your reply 17/06/22. Your ideas regarding miracles and prayer are presented clearly, and once again they warmly include many good people who feel they are currently on the religious sidelines. Before moving on to other subjects, and at risk of being pedantic, I still seek absolute clarity on the miracles of Jesus. My uncertainty resolves to a simple question: is it necessary to believe in (all) the recorded miracles of Jesus in order to be a Christian? I use the word “necessary” advisedly, because with an omnipotent God, who created the entire complex universe, of course it is possible (although maybe improbable) that God chose to allow a man (God in person) to “walk on water.” The question of whether Jesus did, or did not perform the recorded miracles, becomes important only if it is necessary to believe these accounts in order to be a true Christian. Perhaps the most challenging of all the miracles is the physical, bodily resurrection. You are a Christian, and you explain in your own way that you are “comfortable” with a liberal interpretation of the biblical account of the “resurrection.” I conclude therefore that your view is that a rigorous belief in the miracles of Jesus, at least certain miracles, is unnecessary. Can you please confirm this issue. You are correct to state that your wider interpretation of the resurrection should not present an absolute barrier to faith.
   Finally, on the subject of the miracles of Jesus, and for my better understanding, can you briefly advise what you understand is the official view of the Roman Catholic Church on this subject? I highlight the RC Church, because there are, I believe, twenty five “branches” of Christianity (Mormons, Moravians, Baptists etc ), not all of which believe every detail of the traditional account of Jesus, his life and death, as recorded in the Bible.
   I understand your view on communal prayer. I was expecting your answer that “private prayer is not enough in itself”, and in my heart, I agree with you. It is a pity for me that I find the set rituals of the liturgy distracting to prayer; perhaps I should try harder…….or become a Quaker!
   Perhaps you would kindly and briefly reply to my queries, and then I will be pleased to move on to the other important subjects which you highlight, starting with the divinity of Jesus. As a brief prelude to this complex subject, I understand from your Appendix A1 → that there is much diversion of thought by the theologians: was Jesus divine from birth (Bible), became divine through his willing choice to follow the “perfect path” (God’s plan) throughout his life (Rahner), or not until his death and glorification (Durrwell), or not divine at all in the Christian sense of “God on earth” (Vermes). (You do not review Vermes, but he is a theologian, and a scholar of ancient languages, a former RC priest, and he declares that at The Council of Nicea (312 CE), Constantine not only converted to Christianity, but decided to support the view of a minority of Christians at that time that the Father and the Son had equality, and hence that Jesus was divine). Geoff Gould (29/06/22).

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6. Thank you, Geoff, for your further comments dated 29/06/22.
   You ask ‘Is it necessary to believe in (all) the recorded miracles of Jesus to be a Christian?’ I repeat that I consider myself to be a Christian, and I do not believe that any of the phenomena ‘to be wondered at’ (i.e. miracles) recorded in the Gospels are inconsistent with the scientific laws that we know today, and I know that many Catholic theologians would agree with this statement. I do not believe that any of them were conjuring tricks intended by Jesus to deceive the onlookers, nor that the Gospel writers or the witnesses they drew on for their accounts deliberately lied about what they witnessed. Therefore each case is in principle explicable in terms of natural phenomena and/or misinterpretation by the witnesses of what they saw or experienced. This does not mean we are able today, on the evidence given in the Gospels, to provide a plausible explanation in each case. (I can easily conjecture that Jesus was walking on a long spit of sand inches below the Sea of Galilee when his disciples in a boat which ‘in no time reached the shore’ (John 6: 21) thought he was walking on the water. It would still be ‘something to be wondered at’, the literal meaning of a ‘miracle’.)

   You ask ‘What is the official view of the Roman Catholic Church on this subject?’ As far as I know, no formal dogmatic statement has ruled on whether the miracles in the Gospels do or do not conflict with scientific laws. They are among a number of issues routinely referred to as ‘mysteries’. Undoubtedly, there are many Christians, including Roman Catholics who assume that God intervened ‘supernaturally’ to suspend the natural (or scientific) laws in these cases.

   I would like to comment briefly here on a few other points you mention, which I could discuss at greater length later if you wish.

   • Your phrase ‘an omnipotent God who created the entire complex universe’ needs, on my interpretation, a lot of unpacking, and is not a helpful way of putting things – see Section 11 of my essay, particularly (on the term ‘omnipotent’) the section commenting on ‘more powerful than its opposite, badness’;

   • you refer in passing to ‘God’s plan’ (and in my essay I sometimes use ‘the divine plan’ as convenient shorthand for something more complicated) – again, note my sentence in Section 2 ‘Now I am not saying that a person made this plan …’, and my comments in Section 11 on ‘a plan which one would call intentional and rational’;

   • you will find (especially in my Appendix F) much agreement with your criticisms of Roman Catholic liturgy;

   • you seem to think I should have reviewed the views of Geza Vermes – not only are there thousands of RC and Christian theologians whose thought I have not reviewed as not directly relevant to my essay, but I am far from sure that Vermes is a Christian theologian at all, though he may claim to have been one at some stages of his life.

   Jonathan Holden 6 July 2022

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