“If God is real, then He can be known.” This is the assertion made by Dr. Sharon Dirckx, who has a PhD in brain imaging from the University of Cambridge and has held research positions at the University of Oxford and the Medical College of Wisconsin. Dr. Dirckx does not say this lightly.
Dirckx grew up in a secular household, asking questions like “Why can I think? Why do I exist? Why am I a conscious being?” as a child. She was impressed with the “awareness of my own existence, of my own consciousness.” These questions led her on a lifetime quest.
Dirckx knew she wanted to be a scientist as a teenager. Her biology teacher gave her the book, The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. That book set the course of her thinking as a child “that we are just gene machines, that there’s just the material and that’s all that it means to be a human being.” She absorbed a materialistic worldview from Dawkins and the people around her.
“I arrived at university to study biochemistry assuming that we were material beings and that science and God were not compatible.”
Dr. Dirckx achieved her dream of becoming a scientist, but her path deviated from the materialism she assumed and absorbed as a teenager. She is now the author of several books and a frequent speaker on the subject of faith in God. You can listen to her story on the eX-skeptic podcast embedded below.
I want to pick up and run with her statement: If God is real, then He can be known. I agree with her, but I believe many people make the mistake of thinking that God can be known on their terms. We make the mistake to think that if God exists, He exists within our own purview and within the limitations we experience as human beings that we can control on our terms.
He doesn’t. When we are talking about the creator God who made the universe, and all that is in it, including human beings and all of material reality, we are talking about a God who is transcendent. He is the uncaused causer and the uncreated creator. He is not found in his creation as if He was a component of it.
Such a God is said to be “outside” of the space/time continuum. The concept of such a God includes a spaceless, timeless, immaterial reality that is not contained within or limited by the material world.
Some quantum and theoretical physicists speak variously of consciousness that collapses the wave function of particles, Platonic or Mathematical Realism that imagines immaterial mathematical forms underpinning material reality, and Philosophical Idealism that imagines consciousness or mind-like properties out of which the material world emanates. These are non-theistic attempts to get at the idea that the material world is contingent, and immaterial reality is the fundamental building block of and force behind the universe and reality.
The most robust of these conceptions is the theistic one pulled out of the text of the 60 some writings by 40 some authors compiled in the work we call the Bible. If God is real, and He created the universe as these writings claim, with all of it’s immensity, and if He created life, including humans, He is completely different (Other) than us: God is transcendent.
Yet, people have always had some sense of this transcendent reality. Religious expression is among the oldest of the traces of human history we can find in the archaeological and written records we are able to find from our ancestors.
While we may tend to assume that all primitive humans believed in a panoply of Gods animating the material world, evidence exists to suggest that primitive people from diverse corners of the world believed in one, Creator God. This monotheistic conception of God may, in fact, by the oldest form of religious belief.
Perhaps, the pagan gods that inhabit the material world seem more accessible. They might make demands on our behavior, but they have no province over the thoughts in our minds, our wills, and our hearts.
That we would have a hard time finding a transcendent God and making sense of him is understandable. Imagine a living being the size of an electron viewing a human being from an electron’s vantage point: How does an electron-sized being make sense of a human being – or anything above the quantum level, for that matter?
The difference between a human being and a transcendent, creator God is much greater then the difference between an electron-sized being and a human being. For one thing, they are both part and parcel of the same material reality. The biblical conception of God understands that God transcends the material world.
To quantify this difference, we might imagine a human being compared to the infinitely vast space of the universe. Now add in the bit about God being completely “Other”: spaceless, timeless, and immaterial.
I maintain that such a God would need to reveal himself to us. How could we know such a God unless He revealed Himself to us?
I have written about this before. God must “stoop” to us to make himself known. We cannot “ascend” to Him.
In Episode 20 of the Christian Atheist Podcast (Ethics (Part 3): the Origin on Ought), John Wise focuses on a primary difference between human beings and animals. Though humans beings are animals, human beings are qualitatively different than other animals in rational capacity, and the rational capacity of humans allows humans to exercise agency over the natural world. This unique human capacity to exercise rationality through agency is the focus of my thoughts today.
Human beings exercise their agency and rational capacity to change and redirect the laws of nature. Other animals can do this in very primitive ways, but the human capacity to manipulate nature through human agency, rationality, and ingenuity is light years beyond what other animals can do.
Of course, humans cannot do things that defy the laws of nature. Rather, human beings use their understanding of those natural laws to manipulate them.
Wise observes that the human ability to manipulate the laws of nature includes the ability to separate cause from effect to acheive a desired result. For instance, human beings have learned to breed various types of plants and animals to achieve results imagined by humans which would never likely have occurred in the natural world left to random, natural processes.
Human beings can exercise their rationality to imagine different effects and to manipulate causes to achieve those desired effects. In this sense, human imagine the effects they desire to achieve, and they manipulate the causes in the natural world to achieve natural effects by design that the natural world would not obtain randomly.
The world seems to act randomly, unless agency acts upon the world. The examples of agency acting on the world to achieve results that would not obtain without such agency are legion. All of human endeavor is replete with examples of agency imagined and initiated by humans to obtain designed effects that we desire.
Human beings are able to produce effects that would never have occurred in the natural world but for human agency manipulating the natural processes. In other words, human input redirects the natural processes to produce results that would not have occurred if the natural processes were left alone.
Our ability to separate cause from effect to achieve desired ends that would not occur in the natural world by manipulating those causes to achieve the effects we desire is an example of supranatural agency in the world. In other words, we are in and of the natural world, and we use our knowledge of the natural world to manipulate natural causes to create natural effects.
We do not suspend the laws of nature or violate the laws of nature to accomplish our desires ends. We use the laws of nature to achieve our desired ends – albeit, ends that would not have occurred but for our intervention.
Ocean liners and skyscrapers are things that do not occur through the laws of nature, but for human agency. Even so, human agency des not suspend or violate the laws of nature to create them. Human agency uses the laws of nature to create them.
These observations are a model for understanding God. The fact that laws of nature act in very rational ways that are predictable and dependable suggests design. The way the laws of nature act suggest an intelligent agency that set them in motion just so. We would call that intelligent agent God.
If God created the laws of nature, He would certainly know how to manipulate natural causes to achieve His desired effects. God would have much greater capacity than us to manipulate natural causes to achieve desired effects. Exponentially so!
Many skeptics, like David Hume, reject the idea of miracles because they assume that miracles violate natural laws. The foundational premise of Hume’s logic, though, is false. The God that created the natural laws would not need to suspend or violate those laws to obtain desired effects. God could manipulate natural causes to achieve His desired effects without the need to “suspend” or “violate” natural laws just as we do.
God’s knowledge of those natural laws and the possible effects that can be achieved through the manipulation of them is certainly greater than ours. Exponentially greater.
Many people have called phenomena they didn’t understand miracles, but subsequent discoveries about the way the natural world works have provided explanations to us of natural laws and how they work that we didn’t previously understand. Once we understand the laws at work on those phenomena, we no longer call them miracles.
A primitive intelligent being might think that human beings are violating natural laws to fly airplanes, for instance. We know this is not true, but a more primitive being may not understand the principles of natural laws being manipulated to achieve the end of flying a heavy chunk of metal through the air.
Just as we manipulate natural causes to create effects that do not occur naturally, God may do the same. Thus, what we call miracles may be nothing more than the manipulation of natural causes by God to achieve effects that would not ordinarily occur in nature without the involvement of an agent.
Just because the primitive being does not know the principles being manipulated does not mean that a violation of natural laws has occurred. In this same way, a human being, who is certainly a more primitive intelligent being than God, may not be able to know or understand the principles of natural laws being manipulated by God to achieve a result that we call a miracle.
We call occurrences miracles that we cannot explain based our understanding of natural laws. But our measure of understanding is constantly changing. For this reason, modern people often say they no longer believe in miracles (and, by extension, God). Experience shows that many things we didn’t previously understand we now understand, and they assume, then, that we will find explanations in the natural laws to explain all the things we do not presently understand.
I note that this belief is not necessarily warranted, nor can we prove it. People who make this assertion do it on the basis of faith in the human ability to know and understand the world.
Further, our mere understanding of the way natural laws work, does not negate the need for intelligent agency to achieve desired ends. It isn’t enough for us to think something up; we must exercise our agency to act on the laws of nature to achieve our desired ends. Our understanding doesn’t create anything.
Imagine Aristotle seeing a pilot entering into a Boeing 737 and taking off into the air. Aristotle did not know enough about the law of gravity or aerodynamic lift to generate a good explanation based on the natural laws that were understood at the time. He may have called it a miracle because it defied explanation to him based on the level of knowledge he had.
The more often Aristotle might have seen a Boeing 737 takeoff, the less likely he might have considered it a miracle, even if the phenomenon still defied natural explanation to him. In fact, we still don’t really understand aerodynamic lift. (See No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air, by Ed Regis, Scientific American, February 1, 2020)
It is such a common phenomenon today, however, that we take it for granted even though we don’t completely understand it. Understanding that such a thing as aerodynamic lift occurs allows us to manipulate it, even if we don’t fully understand it.
Even if we think we fully understand natural laws, we probably don’t. One big example is the Big Bang. We know what happened from the “point” of the Big Bang, but we know virtually nothing before that “point”. We also have no idea how life formed.
Even if we did know exactly how the first living cell or organism developed. Our ability to trace the process and understand it does not tell us how or why it developed in the first place.
More precisely to the point, our understanding doesn’t create anything (without exercising our agency to act on that understanding), and it doesn’t eliminate the need for agency in our world to achieve desirous (beneficial) ends.
In fact, our experience suggests just the opposite. Our experience tells us that fire happens only randomly and often destructively in nature. We have learned to create fire and use it beneficially by exercising our agency in light of our understanding of the causes of fire. Agency is required to manipulate the natural causes for beneficial effects.
Our own experience affirms this. If I leave may backyard to nature, nothing is likely to grow there that is particularly beneficial. I might find a wild strawberry plant or wild raspberry vine with very small fruit on it. If I am lucky. The vast majority of it will be weeds and undesirable plants.
If I plant a garden with seeds cultivated by human ingenuity over many years of gathering seeds from the right kind of plants and developing new, heartier and more fruitful plants, I can turn my backyard into a cornucopia of beneficial plants that will feed my family and my neighbors’ families. This kind of benefit requires my agency.
I have to plant it, water it, weed it, and maintain it with much care and intentionality. If I stop maintaining it, my garden will relatively quickly return to a tangle of undesirable plants that will choke out and eventually replace my desirable plants.
It requires my agency to develop a garden and to maintain it. Nature, left to its own devices, will not do that. This is our common experience.
If you like archaeology, as I do, you become aware that time and nature destroys all the improvements generated by human agency and endeavor over time. Whole cities are reduced to rubble over time, and rubble becomes overgrown with windblown sediments, scrub brush and weeds such that we do not even recognize that a city once existed there, but for some remnants we can find by digging up the site.
We have made much about evolution since Charles Darwin first championed it as a theory. Evolution (the gradual improvement of life forms over time (by whatever means it occurs)) runs counter to our common experience. The formation of life from nonlife (the complex from the simple) (by whatever means it occurred)) runs counter to our common experience.
Does that mean that evolution is not fact or that life did not arise from nonlife? Not necessarily, but our common experience does suggest that this did not happen by natural forces acting according to their laws. Our common experience demonstrates that complex, beneficial effects arising from natural causes occur through agency and intentionality.
Human endeavor obviously did not create evolution or the formation of life from nonlife. Most scientists concede the appearance of design in the mind-bendingly complex interaction of amino acids, DNA, epigenetic materials, mechanical processes and other features of a living cell. If evidence of design appears in the world that was not achieved through human agency, that fact leaves us with the suggestion that some other intelligent agency is at work in the world.
People cite the great church father, Augustine, in defense of the view that the earth is only thousands (rather than billions) of years old. Indeed, I believe this was (more or less) Augustine’s view, based on the science and knowledge that was available to him in the 5th Century when he lived. Augustine believed the earth was young.
That isn’t the end of our understanding of Augustine, though. To understand Augustine, we might be aided by a basic review of the mythological, philosophical and scientific views that were prevalent in his world at the time.
According to my inquiry on Bing Co-Pilot, the mythology of the time didn’t attempt to date the age of the earth. Science (such as it was) also had not established a position. Philosophy, however, provided two opposing views.
The philosophical camps were led by Aristotle and Lucretius. Aristotle argued that the earth was eternal, and Lucretius argued that the earth formed relatively recently (based on a lack of records prior to the Trojan War). (The Trojan War dates to the 11th or 12th Century BCE.) Thus, the two competing views in Augustine’s day were 1) eternal earth or 2) young earth. There was no inkling in Augustine’s time that the earth might be very old, but not eternal.
Interestingly, Aristotle’s view of an eternal earth shifted to an eternal universe, and that view became the accepted scientific view that lasted well into the 20th Century. This was Einstein’s view when he developed the Theory of Relativity.
The past eternal view of the universe was only debunked and rejected by the scientific consensus in the second half of the 20th Century, and then only very reluctantly. (Even now, some scientists demonstrate a desire to find support for a past eternal universe, but support for that view seems to get thinner and thinner as time goes on.)
In the uncertain stew of mythology, philosophy, and science in the 5th Century, Augustine acknowledged that a literal, 6-day reading of the creation story in Genesis is not an irrational interpretation. That is basically how he put it.
He didn’t endorse that view, however. He thought the better view was that the “days” in Genesis 1 do not correspond to earthly (24 hour) days. Even in his exploration of a “literal” reading of Genesis, Augustine incorporated allegorical nuance.
Augustine did not believe that “literal” and “allegorical” meanings were mutually exclusive, and neither did most of the early church fathers. What Augustine and the early church fathers meant by the “literal” meaning of Scripture was what the people who wrote the original words literally meant and how the audience to whom they communicated understood them.
In this effort to understand what the writers meant, the early church fathers assumed that the original meanings included metaphor, symbolism, and literary devices. None of the early church fathers (that I am aware of) argued for the modern sense of strict literalism in the interpretation of Scripture.
Though most early Christians believed literally in the historicity of the biblical accounts (to use a modern term), they also accepted the richness of allegorical meaning in Scripture at the same time. In fact, the metaphorical meaning of Scripture was assumed to be the deeper, more significant meaning of Scripture.
Augustine (along with Clement of Alexandria and Origen) ultimately rejected the calendar-day view of the Genesis creation story in favor of instantaneous creation with a kind of day/age view of the creation passage in Genesis. The great Jewish theologians, Philo and Hilary of Poitiers also took this view that God created the earth instantaneously.
We should recognize that the day-age view that Augustine and others preferred was probably not the consensus, but it also wasn’t considered heresy. The theology and the philosophy were unsettled, and science had not yet developed as we know it. The Church allowed for robust disagreement on age of the earth, because it was not considered essential doctrine.
I should stop here, at the risk of pointing out something you already know, and look at the meaning of the Hebrew word, יוֹם (yom). This word is translated into the English word, day, in Genesis 1. As with most Hebrew words, yom has many nuanced meanings and applications, both literal and figurative. The various meanings include:
Day, as opposed to night
Day as a division of time
Day as defined by evening and morning
Day as in a time (like harvest)
Day as in an age or epoch of time
In addition to the definitions, most Hebrew words have both literal and figurative meanings and applications. Thus, Augustine’s position that the days in Genesis can be read to mean an “earthly” or “ordinary” day did not exclude the idea of applying them more figuratively. That duality is consistent with the way Hebrew words and Hebrew language works. This built-in literal/figurative duality of Hebrew words informed the thinking of the early church fathers.
Augustine is famous for preferring allegorical readings and applications of Scripture. In his early two-volume work on Genesis in which he took issue with the Manicheans, Augustine explored the position that the days in Genesis are seven epochs of redemptive history corresponding with seven stages of the Christian life. (See Did Augustine Read Genesis 1 Literally? by Gavin Ortlund citing De Genesis contra Manichaeos 1.23.35-1.25.43, in Augustine, On Genesis, 62-68.)
When Augustine set out to write a “literal” interpretation of Genesis, he didn’t mean what people today might think he meant. Even his “literal” reading of Scripture was not strictly literalist. It was an attempt to understand what the original writers and audiences (literally) meant and what they understood it to mean.
Science in St. Augustine’s day was not advanced enough to weigh in on the age of the earth, but Augustine was a strong proponent of understanding science. The science of his day, for instance, had settled the spherical shape and circumference of the earth. That the earth was round and even the size of the perimeter of the earth was well established and understood among academics since before the time of Christ. (It is purely a myth, for instance, that Columbus had to convince people the earth was not flat.) Augustine’s view of scientific knowledge and its relationship to Scripture is what I want to highlight here.
I recently spent some time listening to Dustin Kensrue’s new album, Desert Dreaming. I like his music, and the new album is good. The first song I heard, though, reminded me of the rumors that he has walked away from orthodox Christianity:
When I left town, I was swept up With the visions of a man from Galilee Along the way, I lost my bearings I got swallowed up by sins of certainty
The heart of sedona
The words to this song triggered a desire to research the truth. Kensure was an impactful Christian musician who wrote the worship album of the year not to many years ago. I wondered, therefore, why he walked away (if indeed he did).
I learned that Kensrue was a former worship leader for Mars Hill, the failed church that rose to the heights of evangelical influence with many campuses, only to collapse with the failings of its erstwhile leader, Mark Driscoll.
Listening to the song, Heart of Sedona, off Kensrue’s new album, Desert Dreaming, gave me pause. The words seem to confirm the rumor, and the story seems all too familiar lately.
His music is as good as ever, but it comes with the melancholy of what used to be. Or maybe it never was. It’s hard to know how to process the deconstruction of someone else’s faith.
Given the back story (involvement in a failed church movement), I suspected his “deconstruction” (and many other artists who seem to have followed a similar path) may be symptomatic of some malady that has infected Evangelical Christianity.
My entre into Kensrue’s story begin with the article, It’s Not Enough: Dustin Kensrue’s Turning Away, which is where I learned that Kensrue was intimately involved in the toxic environment of the Mars Hill church movement led by Driscoll, a controversial and polarizing personality.
I had heard of the rise and fall of Mark Driscoll and the Mars Hill Church, but I did not jump on the curiosity bandwagon when people associated with Christianity Today produced the podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. I only heard about it, and I had listened to a discussion of the podcast on another podcast. Therefore, I finally felt a need to hear it firsthand to gain some perspective.
The podcast describes the talent and bravado of Mark Driscoll, who was also polarizing and toxic and seemingly proud of it. Driscoll was staunchly reformed in his theology with a cultish personality and a flair for the dramatic. He attracted people on the edges of faith in the notoriously countercultural Seattle area. I summarized some of my thoughts on what I learned in Keeping It Real for the Church: Talent in Tension with Character)
I have also gone back, now, through the tweets highlighted in the article I noted above, and I have poured over Dustin Kensrue’s Twitter (X) feed to gain further insight. These things give me additional food for thought in considering the “deconstruction” of Dustin Kensrue as it relates to the American Evangelical Church.
Though I have spent considerable time researching these things, my thoughts remain preliminary and exploratory. I am not certain that I have gained sufficient perspective to be clear or certain of any conclusions, but all this seems to confirm my sense that the story is symptomatic of a problem with the American Evangelical Church.
In fact, the original article I found, itself, seems to be symptomatic of issues in the American Evangelical Church. These issues may also be reflected in current American culture, affected as it is by social media. I apologize for the length of this article, but I am afraid I do not do much more than scratch the surface here.
A theme I return to time and again is the finiteness of human beings and the limitations we face as finite beings. I wrote on this subject the year I started blogging, as you can see in the article I am reblogging here:
It’s not that “science” (the methodology and concept of it) or logic are necessarily flawed. It’s that human capability is limited. In science, we don’t know what we don’t know, so all we can is do is the best we can with what we know.
In logic, we must start with premises we can’t prove. We can test those premises, and we can construct syllogisms that hold together, but those syllogisms are only as helpful as the premises that lead to a logical conclusion. If the initial premise is wrong, our logical construct is useless.
Navigating by Faith 