A Place For God

Navigating Timeless Questions for our Modern Times.

Pete Nicholas

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781789741599
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789741582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Where are you?Today, your favourite maps app will give you your location down to a greater level of detail than ever before. But do you really feel like you know where you are?Major cultural shifts over the past generation have left us feeling disorientated; constant connection has left us feeling dislocated. And many of us are searching for something we can't seem to find. Could the problem be that we have lost a place for God?Pete Nicholas invites you to explore the big questions asked by each generation from those of origin and identity to happiness and hope, arguing that by reinstating God's centrality in our lives we can find a sense of rootedness, peace and the answers we've been looking for.Featuring a foreword by Timothy Keller, author, speaker and church leader.

1

Origins

Where have we come from?

Where have we come from?

‘Where are you from?’ It used to be a very common question, but in today’s globalized world it is not that easy to answer it simply. Author Amanda Mukwashi notes how, as a member of a visible ethnic group, when she replies, ‘The UK’, the question is often followed by ‘But where are you really from?’1 Is the question asking where someone was born? Is it asking about their ethnicity? Is it asking about where they live? Because rarely today are all three of these areas aligned. Nonetheless, being able to answer the question is vital for every person because origins matter.

One of my good friends is Martin Nangoli. In many regards, we are unlikely friends. He grew up in a small village in rural Uganda, ran away from home as a child, lived as a street child for some years and then by God’s grace turned his life around and now runs an NGO in Eastern Uganda. My background, life experience, education and opportunities are all very different from his, but it is a joy to call him my friend and I have learned a lot from him. I remember one of the first times that I went with Martin to a meeting in Uganda and we were asked to introduce ourselves. I said, ‘Hi, I’m Pete Nicholas and I come from London.’ Martin then gave his introduction and it went on for several minutes! It resembled a mixture of a kind of genealogy followed by a summary of his life story:

I am Nangoli Martin, son of Pastor Samueli who is married to Enida, also brother of Moses and . . . from Kikobero village . . . as a small child I ran away from the village . . .

As we became friends I asked Martin why Ugandans often give such long introductions when they meet one another. He replied:

It is only if we know where we are from, and something of our story, that we really get to know one another and work out where we are going.

How true that is. The issue of origins affects the decisions we make, it informs our identity, it shapes where we are going and it determines how we see the world and how we see ourselves. This is why it is so important and why it is a good starting point as we seek to build our foundations.

‘Where are you from?’ has two areas of focus. The word ‘from?’ nods to context, with the ‘you’ pointing to who you are and what you are like. So to understand our origins we will first consider our context, the universe we live in and how we understand it, before we turn to thinking about who we are as human beings. Along the way we will need to grapple with the important issue of science and religion and their compatibility.

Our context: cosmos and space

On Monday 26 November 2018 NASA’s Mars InSight probe touched down on the red planet. It was a wonderful technological achievement and I mean that literally: it was something that should inspire wonder.

But what was noticeable in the news reports at the time was the lack of excitement generated by the event. Sure, there were the now-expected photos of the NASA scientists awkwardly high-fiving as the probe landed, but then the news quickly faded into the background. Even the name of the probe was markedly less interesting than other missions. Early NASA flights were characterized by the names of mythical gods, such as ‘Mercury’ and ‘Apollo’, but more recently we are into catchy and not very inspiring acronyms: ‘Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport’; hence InSight. It hardly inspires.

Yes, the name does what it says on the tin, but this is the pinnacle of exploration, our ‘final frontier’. Shouldn’t there be a greater sense of marvel and awe? Even one of the British scientists working on the mission seemed to find it all a bit mundane: ‘Where we land is an intentionally dull place,’ said Neil Bowles, a planetary scientist at Oxford University who was involved in the mission; ‘it’s flat, empty and hopefully not very windy. And that is precisely what we need.’2

If all this seems a bit far away from your lived experience, then please reflect on how you felt the last time you got a new gadget (iPhone, Android, computer). How excited were you when you got it? How quickly did the excitement and happiness, if indeed there was any, wear off? Or think about a bit of countryside you are familiar with. Was there a time when you first saw it when it captivated you? The colour and hue of hills, light glinting off water, clouds rolling down a valley. But after a time it can become all too familiar, even mundane.

The Christian thinker and writer G. K. Chesterton once wrote, ‘The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.’3

In the medieval era and for the ancients the universe was seen as a ‘cosmos’. It was an arena tingling with life, more like a festival of dance than an impersonal machine. Planets were called ‘heavenly bodies’, which made music that governed their movements in the night sky. As humans we were like children peering in at the window of a great mansion, trying to get a glimpse of the things inside, things wonderful and awe-inspiring, sometimes things scary and uncontrollable. Theirs was an enchanted universe.

Today there is a tragic irony in the fact that scientific advancement has enabled us to explore and understand our universe better than ever before, but rather than this inducing wonder, we have actually lost our sense of wonder. Our universe is mostly made up of ‘space’. The word shift from ‘cosmos’ to ‘space’ is significant. Space implies emptiness, nothingness. As the 2012 Facebook advert celebrating 1 billion users stated, ‘The universe, it is vast and dark, and makes us wonder if we are alone .’4

Implicitly we have been told that this trade-off between the wonderful and the scientific is inevitable. It is a bit like the difference between children reading fairy stories and adults reading the news. One may be more interesting and may capture the imagination, but it is just fantasy. What we ‘grown-ups’ need to deal with are facts, like the bore Thomas Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’ s Hard Times, a man who goes around

with a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.5

But what if this is a false dichotomy? What if this buffer (as philosopher Charles Taylor has called it6) that we have erected around our scientific and modern selves , keeping out the fantastic and the enchanted, is depriving us of a world view that is no less scientific and grown-up , but one which instead of removing wonder, cultivates it and promotes it?

Science and religion, not science versus religion

Even if you haven’t read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you may know that the real monster in the book is not the creature, but Victor Frankenstein himself. Victor is a brilliant scientist who one day does the miraculous and creates life. He does it not because he should but just because he can. But he doesn’t give any thought to how to govern his creation or the impact that his moral flaws will have on such a powerful creature. Victor’s neglect of his creature ends up in tragedy. His creation becomes a monster, who ends up killing and destroying much that is dear to Victor.7

Part of the reason this story has endured is that the lessons it teaches are timeless. The danger of creating something that is more powerful than we can properly govern. Doing something just because we can without first asking whether we should. The way that as human beings our character failings leave an indelible impression on our innovations and corrupt them, causing us great harm. These warnings resonate in the modern scientific movement. And then there is the supreme warning of a creation becoming so distorted that it tries to kill off its creator. So, has science killed God?

Some scientists claim that by their scientific endeavour they have killed off any need for God. ‘God is dead; now we have science!’ This is despite the origins of the modern scientific movement being rooted in the Judeo-Christian world view, and despite there being no inherent contradiction between science and Christianity. Here is Frankenstein’s creature corrupted and wreaking havoc on its originators.

The eminent historian A. N. Whitehead was interested in tracing the roots of modern science. He compared the prevailing medieval culture and its belief in Christianity with other cultures and observed:

When we compare this [scientific] tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah . . . Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.8

He is saying that modern science has at its very core a presupposition of the orderliness and rationality of the world. It is predicated on certain basic assumptions and these assumptions originate from a culture deeply shaped by a Judeo-Christian world view in which there is a belief in a rational and orderly world because of a belief in a rational and orderly God who made it and sustains it.

Please note that A. N. Whitehead is not saying that science didn’t also arise in other non-Christian cultures; it clearly did. But this causes us to ask what accounted for the explosion in modern science whereby the West rapidly outstripped the rest of the world in its technological advancement and scientific thinking. What was the seedbed for this rapid growth that has so profoundly shaped Western culture? Far from its being a reaction against God, historically it originated from a belief in God.

For the atheist who claims that it is ‘science versus religion’, this much should make them pause for thought. If the two are in fact so incompatible, why did Christianity provide such a fruitful context for the modern scientific movement to grow and thrive in? Equally, why do so many eminent scientists, including multiple winners of Nobel Prizes for Physics, Chemistry and Physiology and Medicine, describe themselves as Christians? Have they somehow missed the inherent contradiction in their position, or is there no contradiction?9 In fact, in the UK only a minority (32%) of all scientists themselves think religion and science are in conflict .10

I would suggest that the very framing of the ‘science versus religion’ debate has been determined by a vocal minority who hold not just to ‘science’ but to a belief in what is sometimes called ‘scientism’. Science is the study of the natural order and how it is organized and structured. It is one area of study and one area of human life among many, along with aesthetics, morality, politics, etc. Scientism is very different; it seeks to be a ‘grand theory of everything’. It claims that science can explain all things (and, ironically, claims this with an almost religious fervour). Scientism boldly says that the scientific method can and should underpin all areas of human life and study and is sufficient to account for all areas of human existence and thinking. Careful reflection shows us that it is not science vs. God but scientism vs. God.

But, when you think about this, isn’t the scientism claim very odd and something of an overreach? First, isn’t it a wildly inaccurate description of reality? Can you think of anyone, let alone the vocal proponent...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1
• Origins
• 2
• Truth
• 3
• Morality
• 4
• Happiness
• 5
• Identity
• 6
• Hope
• Conclusion
• Notes