Archive: Biblical theism

First posted 6 Aug 2005. I have edited this old post before including it here - not to bring it up to date with my current thinking but rather to change the tone from one that was quite aggressive and disrespectful of fundamentalist theistic views. Over the past 12 years, I've learned that no good is served by being rude to people who think differently than you. I hope that the post manages to raise questions and points without being offensive.

I have much more love for the bible than I did at the time of original posting, but I have no greater agreement with those who interpret it literally rather than mythically. I believe that the Christian bible and other great religious books each provide a window onto a beautiful, ultimately indescribable, Truth. Each window looking at the same mountain summit, but one may be viewing it from the tropical forests of a village at the great mountain's southern base, while others take it in and describe it from quite different locations and therefore perspectives.

A spider could never understand the theory of gravity or the existence of other lands, oceans and planets. Yet gravity's law, along with those lands, oceans and planets, exists and applies to spiders. Our celebrated mental and scientific capacities are of no greater use than the spider's when it comes to rationally understanding God's wonder. So how can we deny, based solely on our inability to comprehend it, God's power? This is one argument of the believer against those who set science or philosophy against religion.

It is an argument for which I have a lot of time. Human reason does not reach the breadth and depth of existence. There is a large gap between what we know and what we can know, and there is a much larger one between what we can know (intellectually, versus experientially) and what is actually the case. My failure to make rational sense of God does not preclude His existence. In that sense, I am agnostic with respect to the existence of God. Count me as 'on the fence' up to that point.

But when the question before me shifts from 'Does God exist?' to 'Does God play an active part in the world, in the very specific way that is described by the canon of the major western religions, when interpreted literally?' I come down from the fence very firmly into the negative camp.

Why is this so? First, I guess I’d have to say that I find it hard to believe that - on God’s scale - humans are that special. Doesn't it seem like a very convenient coincidence that the universe's one all-powerful being created a world for the benefit of beings who just happen to be.... us? Isn't it striking how anthropocentric the biblical creation story and all that follows from it is? Isn't it... well... perhaps arrogant ... to assume that amongst all of creation, and within that among all of life, God should take a personal interest in Man and only Man?

I mean, if elephants had written the bible, don't you suspect that it would say elephants were created in God's image and that only elephants have a soul because, of course, only they, like God, have trunks? Birds would write that God can fly; fish that He was a swimmer. Each would claim their own unique characteristic as the one that qualifies them as God's chosen species. The unique characteristic we seek to base it on is the size and complexity of our brains and our concomitant ability to reflect upon our own thoughts.

Isn't it equally possible that He just watches the universe evolve as we watch a top spin or a pin-wheel twirl, with no moral stance at all? Or if He does make moral judgements, mightn't His rights and wrongs be quite different from, even diametrically opposed to, what the Bible says? Or if he takes particular interest in Life, mightn't he be equally interested in all life? Or mightn't he care about some others more than or rather than Man?

Yet, we find ourselves with a God who happens to care only about us. He tells us very specific things we must or must not do, and these all line up quite well with the needs of the ethnic group from which the authors of the bible come. He puts us centre stage. Quite convenient. We get to hold the pen, so we get to write the story, so the story says that God cares most about us!

And how do we account for all of the differences among the world’s religions? I guess followers of any one simply say the others got it wrong, huh? Do you think that maybe each religion puts its main constituency(with its particular history, traditions, economy and geographic peculiarities) at centre stage within humanity, just as humanity places itself centre state within existence as a whole? This again just strikes me as... just, possibly, arrogant.

I'm perfectly willing to accept the possibility of God's existence. But I'm not arrogant enough to think that God must place Man at the centre of the universe or my friends and me at the centre of the human race.

A second line to my reasoning is that - as implied in my question of biblical imperfection above - I am too much of a cynic to trust the powerful men of history (men whose names are not necessarily the ones that get official 'billing' on the books) to have faithfully transcribed God’s word. And I can’t think of the bible as something other than an amazing, powerful book of great depth that was written across centuries by different men, each of whom was a cultural captive or a cultural rebel in his particular time and place. The earliest writers have - I can’t help suspecting - had their original words edited many times over by the later powerful men, as they felt necessary.

I’m not saying that these men were bad or self-serving (although some, being human, probably were). It’s just that they were trying to make sense of the infinite using their meagre words, writing from within their own narrow setting. I see them as vaguely equivalent to the spider trying to write a book about thermodynamics.

I’m also not even saying that they got things all wrong. I’m just saying that the things that are ‘right’ are ‘right’ in a poetic, mythical, metaphorical way rather than in a rational, literal, factual way.

Finally, I’m not setting out to, and I don’t thank that I accidentally manage to, ‘prove’ that fundamentalist theists are wrong. I can’t. I do think that, on items of detail, they are wrong. I do think that there are better, worldly ways to address some of the questions that they look to resolve by biblical reference. But I know that I, like them, have no special licence on Truth with a capital ‘T’.