Tag: Jana Harman

Christmas and the Transcendent, Imminence of God

Jesus is called Emmanuel, which means God, with us.

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“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.”

Making Sense of Science and Faith – Sharon’s Story, By Sharon Dirckx, Jana Harmon,on September 13, 2024 Sharon Dirckx, eX-skeptic, Side B Stories, CSLI Podcasts, Jana Harmon

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.

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Is Your Faith Determined by Where You Live, Your Parents and Your Culture?

People do tend to adopt the faith perspective that is predominant where they live, that their parents had, and in the society in which they were raised, but….

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Richard Dawkins famously claims that religion and faith are a product of where people live and the influence of their parents and the culture in which they live. A quick look at data on religious faith might suggest Dawkins is right.

On other hand, Richard Dawkins was raised in the Anglican faith and was confirmed at the age of 13. He didn’t remain a Christian, though. In his later teens, he rejected the God and religion he was raised to believe in and the religion he was confirmed in.

Dawkins, himself, proves the falsehood of his own claims – unless, of course, Dawkins is the extremely rare outlier.

Dawkins’ assertion is generally true if we take a quick look at the data, but even the data reveals it isn’t so simple. People who live in areas in which religious belief is enforced by law and social custom tend to remain (at least) nominally loyal to that religious belief, but there are significant outliers in the data.

Iran, for instance, had 100,000-300,000 Christians in 1979, comprised of ethnic Armenians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans who had lived there for centuries. Organizations like ELAM Ministries and Transform Iran reported only 300-500 Muslim converts to Christianity in 1979.

In 1979, revolution dethroned the Shah formed an Islamic state. Since that time, Islam has been enforced by law and strong social mores. Onerous legal and social penalties are imposed on people who convert from Islam to other religions, including physical punishment, social exile, imprisonment, and even death.

For the past 44 years, Iranians who decided to become Christians have been persecuted with religious zeal and governmental force. (The World’s Fastest Growing Church, July, 20, 2023 (International Christian Concern)) “All missionaries were kicked out, evangelism was outlawed, Bibles in the Persian or Farsi language were banned and several pastors killed.” (A spiritual revolution in Iran?, September 16, 2020) Global Christian Relief))

Some people report that the number of Armenian, Assyrian, and Chaldean Christians has slowly dwindled to around 100,000. (See The World’s Fastest Growing Church) This kind of outcome is to be expected in a country like Iran in which one religion is not only predominant; it is enforced by legal decree and social coercion.

Unexpectedly, though, the number of Muslim converts has risen exponentially since 1979 according to faith-based groups that support them. Until recently, the claims of exponential growth in Muslim conversions to Christianity in Iran were largely anecdotal reports from faith-based organization.

Those claims have recently been affirmed by the secular, Netherlands-based research group, GAMAAN. A 2020 poll of 50,000 Iranians aged 20+ Iranians shows that 1.5 percent of then identify as Christian. (Survey supports claims of nearly 1 million Christians in Iran, Aug, 27, 2020, (Article 18)) With a population of 80M+, that works out to 1,200,000 Islamic converts to Christianity in 2020. (See A spiritual revolution in Iran?)

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God Speaks to Each of Us in Our Own Love Language

The poignance of human longing, existential angst, and the intimacy of God with us

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Photo credit to Carolyn Weber: author, speaker and professor

Carolyn Weber has always been an academic, but she is no longer an atheist. She has a B.A. Hon. from Huron College at Western University, Canada and a M.Phil. and D.Phil. from Oxford University, England. She has taught at faculty at Oxford University, Seattle University, University of San Francisco, Westmont College, Brescia University College and Heritage College and Seminary, and she was the first female dean of St. Peter’s College, Oxford.

My inspiration today comes from an interview of Carolyn Weber by Jana Harman on the Side B Stories podcast. You can listen to the hour long interview in episode 4, Finding God at Oxford – Carolyn Weber’s story. She turned her personal story into a book, “Surprised by Oxford”, which is being made into a screenplay staring Phyllis Logan from Downton Abbey and Mark Williams from the Harry Potter movies.

In the interview, Carolyn Weber shared that she was drawn to the romantic writers of the 17th and 18th centuries in her college years because they wrote about infinite longing. Carolyn long recognized a similar longing in her own life, and they romantic writers resonated with that longing in her. 

Carolyn was raised in a non-religious home. She had no experience with religion, and she was not familiar with the detail of Christianity or the Bible.

She recalls that she knew nothing of the Bible until she read the Bible for the first time in a college class. As an undergraduate literature major, her first impressions of the Bible included included recognition of how well the story of the Bible holds together in intricate detail, though it was written over many centuries by almost four dozen different writers.

These elements of Carolyn Weber’s story remind me of my own story. I was raised in a religious home. We were Catholic, and we went to church every Sunday, but I had never read the Bible. I knew next to nothing about the Bible before college, and church seemed to have no relevance for me.

I was also an English Literature major. I also read the Bible for the first time in a college class. I wasn’t particularly drawn to the romantic writers, but I did notice the theme of longing, and it intrigued me. (You can read my story here.) Our first impressions of the Bible were also very similar.

I recognize that my resonance with Carolyn Weber’s story may not translate to every reader (and maybe not to any reader). A statement she made in telling her story, however, may. She said, “God speaks to us in our love languages.”

I can identify with that, perhaps, because my “love language” seems to be so similar to hers. The same things that spoke to her, spoke also to me. I will explain below, but I invite you to consider as you read (or go back to listen to her story) what your love language is and how God has spoken intimately to you in your love language.

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