God and the certainty of faith

It's almost Christmas and many people take this time of the year to reflect on the past year and look to the future.  For many people in the United States, this process also includes an appraisal of how their past actions reflect in the eyes of God and more specifically a Christian God.

Pew recently released a poll which showed that certainty of God is slipping.

In 2007, 71% of Americans were certain God existed but in 2014 that number dropped to 63%.  

The numbers by religious affiliation are summarized in the chart to the right.  Polls like this intrigue me because the word certain means that it is provable by direct evidence yet there is no direct evidence that God exists.  There is indirect evidence like the cosmic dance between the Sun, Moon, and Earth which gives human beings a great place to live but that is residual evidence.

Science would consider the idea of God a theory but you could never publish a peer reviewed paper of God as a fact due to the lack of direct evidence.  Yet a large majority of people are certain God exists.

Why is that?  None of us know with certainty how the universe originated.  Scientists understanding starts with the Big Bang but they can't explain what happened before that.  Some religious will claim that God initiated the Big Bang but even if that were true, that leads to the question of who created God.

The number of people certain that there is no God jumped from 5% to 9%.

This number intrigues me almost as much as those that are certain he exists.  No one is certain God exists.  No one is certain that God doesn't exist.  People have faith that God exists.  Doubters assume there must be another answer for the universe's existence but they don't know for sure.

Seeing this poll reminded me of something that happened to me when I was twelve.  At the time, my family lived in an apartment complex and door to door proselytizer from a megachurch convinced me and my brother and sister to attend their church.  Looking back it still feels a little surreal.  A couple of days later, a bus driven by someone none of us knew drove into our neighborhood and dozens of kids were carted off miles from their homes without a single adult they knew (only churches could ever do something like this).

When we arrived we were all in awe.  The church was an immense mix of glass and concrete paid by thousands of people that watched the television services held there each week.  My sense of awe turned to fear when I got split off from everyone else.  I was the oldest and was told I couldn't attend the children's service.  I had to attend the young adults session.  Having no choice, I went into the room with hundreds of other kids my age.  The first thing they did after we sat down was to ask us to bow our heads, close our eyes. then the leader called out,

"Raise your hands if Jesus Christ is your personal savior."

That was a tough question.  I'd gone to a Christian Church most of my young life, attended Sunday School and went to Bible camp.  Yet the question still bugged me.  Some things in the Bible didn't make sense to me and somehow I knew I couldn't raise my hand.  After all, the church had taught me my whole life that God would know if I was lying and I certainly didn't want to go to hell.

Less than a minute later an adult approached me and asked me to come with him.  Like the obedient kids I was, I followed a complete stranger into a back room (again ... only churches could get away with this).  I certainly noticed I was the only one in the room asked to do this and can still remember my growing embarrassment as a hundred pair of eyes watched me trek through the room to a little booth with a door.  I can still remember my hands starting to sweat as the man sat at the table across from me.  He said,

"I noticed you didn't raise your hand.  Why don't you feel Jesus your personal savior?"

I hemmed and hawed for a bit as I shrugged my shoulders but the man was insistent.  I wasn't sure what to say so I asked the first thing that came to mind.  I asked,

"Where did Cain and Able's wives come from?"

I'm sure the question took the man off guard.  Looking back I'm guessing he was just a volunteer of some sort and might not have even thought about that part of the Bible.  On the other hand I'd tried to read the Bible many times.  My love of reading was something of a family joke as I had a habit of reading encyclopedias when I didn't have something else.  Yet I struggled with the Bible.

Here was the word of God and little things like the above quote didn't make sense but it was more than that.  This man wanted me to say Jesus Christ was my personal savior when I never met him.  If he'd asked me to say my grandpa was my personal savior I would have agreed in a second.  How could I do this for a man I only knew from words in a book I barely understood?  Jesus wasn't any more real to me than George Washington, Thomas Edison, or General Patton.  I asked him how could I find a way past my issues.  After all, God would know if I had doubts.

The man read verse after verse to me about Jesus and how much he loved me but none of it answered my core question.  The only answer is faith but for some reason he answered every question with a Bible verse that made the matter worse.  I felt myself growing frustrating and angry that this adult was try to trick me somehow.  Why wasn't he answering my questions?  Near the end I remember asking the man something that had bugged me for a long time,

"What is the Holy Spirit?"

I understood God as he had worked with Moses.  Jesus did things like turn water into wine.  What was the Holy Ghost's role?  The man didn't even try to answer the question and instead read me a couple of quotes by Jesus then told me Jesus was my personal savior and that I would always remember the date of (I've long since forgotten) as the day I was saved.  I wanted to ask more questions but I could tell the man was annoyed and as we walked out I saw the young adult service was over.  The last thing the man told me was to raise my hand the next week when they asked if Jesus was my personal savior.  I never went back.

In hindsight I've always found this story funny.  I'm sure this guy was a volunteer for that church and when he saw me he thought it would take five minutes to read a quote and get me back into the lecture hall.  Instead he got an hour long grilling by a pint-sized skeptic.

At the core, my question to the man was the role of certainty when it comes to understanding God.

In time I came to understand that you can't be certain when it comes to matters of faith.  All you can do is follow your instincts.  There are no certainties because there is no proof other than a book passed down from our ancestors.  Everyone has doubts but that fact is hard to explain to a twelve year old.

Yet looking at the poll where 63% of American are sure that God exists tells me that other men were far more successful with the people they took into that cubicle.  A majority of American have been taught to force back any doubt and lie.

On the other hand, since the dawn of the internet the number of skeptics has continued to increase.  Frankly I really think it would serve the church much better to embrace doubt and help their members work through it.  If they don't I expect the drop in poll numbers to continue.

Tweet

The Telephone Game

As a kid, I used to play a game called the 'telephone game'.  The rules were simple.  You'd sit a bunch of kids in a row and whisper something into the first kid's ear.  They'd whisper it in the next kid's ear and so on until you got to the last kid in the line.  He'd announce the message to the group and then the first kid reveal the original message which never matched.

The results always made us laugh though occasionally arguments would break out when kids claimed they were told something else.  This simple game mimics miscommunications that happen often between people.  This is especially true when no one investigates whether something they are told is true.

The other day my mom said she'd heard something that really upset her:

I'm worried for this country.  Just the other day a school decided to let Muslims pray in public but they won't even let Christians carry Bibles.

My first response was to laugh which I'm sure upset her.  After apologizing, I explained that there is no way anyone in the United States could ever stop a person from carrying a Bible as the 1st amendment gives people freedom of religion. She paused and said ...

Maybe not that but they won't let Christians pray in public but are using the school bells to call Muslims to pray five times every day.  They are allowing them to pray on their rugs on campus and won't let Christians do the same thing.

I hadn't heard this story and I asked if she remembered the school.  My first instinct has always been to take a skeptical view of things and I wanted to get a better understanding.

I think it was at Duke.

The words Duke and North Carolina are about the last places on earth I ever thought I'd hear claim say had become a  bastion of Islam.  My skepticism became acute and I googled 'Duke Chapel'.

I found that Brown's Schoolhouse was founded by Methodists and Quakers in 1838 but changed its name when the son of tobacco baron Washington Duke set up the Duke Endowment in 1924. This initiated a massive building campaign that quickly increased the school's facilities and enrollment.  The culmination of the building campaign was Duke Chapel, a huge church based on Canterbury Cathedral in England.  The structure holds 1,800 people and since it was completed in 1932 it has been the centerpiece of Duke University.

The church's original inspiration is shown through its statues of Methodists leaders like Francis Asbury, Thomas Coke, George Whitefield and John Wesley, Protestant leaders like Girolamo Savonarola, Martin Luther, and John Wycliffe, and American leaders like Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, and Sidney Lanier also adorn the structure.

In the 80 years since Duke Chapel was built it has moved away from the Methodist church to a more inclusive nature.  The mission statement of the chapel now reads:

Duke Chapel continues to be a Christian church of uniquely interdenominational character and purpose. Through its tradition of inspiring worship and music, and a calling to walk with people of all faiths and circumstances, Duke Chapel stands as a beacon of hope on campus and in the community that bridges faith and learning.

Duke itself has moved from a Methodist based education to a secular based education. but Duke Chapel still plays a huge part in the lives of its students.  The building holds Christian services on Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, its church bells ringing from its massive tower allowing those within earshot to know that church service is about to begin.

In the spirit of inclusiveness, the church has given Muslims a spot in the basement for their daily prayer service.  Muslim's are required to pray five times a day, the start time based on the position of the sun.  A simple description of the timing is sunrise, midday, afternoon, sunset, and dusk.  These times change with the seasons which can make it tough to know when services start which is why mosques call out its members so they know when it is time for prayer.  Muslim Duke students requested that the church ring its bell to mark the start of each prayer session on Friday, a day the bells usually remain quiet.  

In January 2015 Duke Chapel agreed to their Muslim student's request and their timing couldn't have been worse.

The United States has been on a tentative war footing with multiple Islamic countries since Muslim terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.  Things cooled after the United States left Iraq but heated again when ISIS invaded northern Iraq last summer.  Their stated intention was to conquer all of Iraq to set up another caliphate.  Making tensions even worse was their success in getting Muslims throughout the world to heed their call to join them in making their dream a reality.

ISIS has also has told Muslims that can't get to Syria that they should attack their own country which some have done, the most horrific being the attack of January 7, 2015 on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, France.  

A week later, Franklin Graham, the son of the legendary preacher Jimmy Graham, responded to Duke's decision to allow Muslim's to use their bell tower.  He posted the following statement to Facebook on January 14, 2015:

Duke University announced today that they will have a Muslim call to prayer from their chapel bell tower every Friday. As Christianity is being excluded from the public square and followers of Islam are raping, butchering, and beheading Christians, Jews, and anyone who doesn't submit to their Sharia Islamic law, Duke is promoting this in the name of religious pluralism. I call on the donors and alumni to withhold their support from Duke until this policy is reversed.

Social media exploded as this message made its way through the internet and eventually found its way to my mom.  It's easy to understand why she was confused.  The second line says 'Christianity is being excluded from the public square' and while I'm sure Graham was speaking to things like nativity scenes at town hall, Christians throughout the country passed this message to one another on Facebook as the message changed.

It is easy to overreact to things on Facebook and Twitter.  A constant barrage of messages combines with limited space to make misunderstanding easy.  As each person sees something posted to their Facebook they each add their own opinion and the story changes.  It's a telephone game on a massive scale.

Having said that, I'm sure few Christians wants Muslims to pray inside a church and that would be especially true a week after a horrific terrorist attack 

That doesn't mean they are right.

• Yes - Religious items aren't allowed to be displayed on public property due to the 1st amendment but Christians have the exact same rights as Muslims at Duke, a private university.

• Yes - ISIS executes people that aren't Muslim with a goal of world domination and so far appears to be as intolerant as any organization in recorded history.  On the other hand, no Duke students are members of ISIS so far as I'm aware.

• Yes - Duke wanted to allow its Muslim students to use its bell tower to make a call to prayer every Friday in accordance with its interdenominational mission statement. 

Franklin Graham has a history of playing politics and stirring the passions of his supporters to create policy change in America.  This is in stark contrast to his father who stuck to a message of tolerance once he reached the national stage.  A week after Graham's post, Duke rescinded its decision but that didn't stop the hate which continued on Facebook long after the initial post.

Tensions between Muslims and non-Muslim are high throughout the world but more hate won't improve things.  Irresponsible statements by Christian leaders like Mr. Graham is akin to throwing gas on the fire.  Add Facebook to the mix and it's like a telephone game played with millions only with much graver stakes.

Tweet

We live in Miraculous Times

We live in miraculous times and each of us should feel lucky to be alive.

Think about it.  Our solar system in 4.6 billion years old.  That number is so big that our species that is lucky to see 100 years can scarcely fathom the magnitude.  At a constant rate of today’s human generational length of 25 years it means you’d need to got back from your mother’s mother’s mother almost another 200,000,000 generations to get to the real Adam and Eve.

Of course that is oversimplifying the situation.

Every person alive is literally 1 in a million.  We all hit the lottery.  We are long shots.  We are miracles.

Think of all the conveniences we have today that would seem like magic to our ancestors going back only ten generations.  These people lived in a time of enlightenment and set the stage for the greatest series of revolutions in science, politics, farming, transportation, etc. the world has ever known.  In a short 200 years we have gone from dark shelters to living in well-lit, climate-controlled palaces.  Even the poorest of cultures have amenities that would have stunned our ancient forebears.

Go back fifty generations to the Dark Ages and you’ll find most of the world living in huts, most people lacking understanding in a basic understanding of the world in which they lived.  In a geological sense, fifty generations is a blink of an eye yet it is long enough for the 8 billion people living on the world today to be interlinked 150,000 times (2⁵⁰ /8,000,000,000).  Despite our differences, everyone alive today is family, the only difference being how long you need to go back.

Modern Human Migration

According to the best current scientific theory, 200,000 years ago a woman scientist’s nickname ‘Eve’ existed in Africa whose DNA is present in every person living today.  No more than 80,000 years ago our forefathers began their last great migration out of Africa.  After a stop in the Middle East, homo sapiens moved north into Europe and east into Asia, crossing the Bering Straight into the Americas around 15,000 years ago and covered both continents in less than a thousand years.  We had the advantage of speech with the ability to learn patterns and to adapt to our surroundings.  Over 10,000 years ago tribes in the Middle East developed a systematic form of agriculture.  About 5,200 years ago their descendants learned how to mark symbols on clay tablets to retain knowledge.  Most tribes on earth either copied these learning's if they came in contact with the Middle East or discovered farming and writing on their own.

In a geologic sense, it only took a blink of an eye to the world changed forever.

Humans have made great advances in taming the world since that time.  Better housing for shelter, better plumbing for water and sanitation, and better medicines for health.  Every aspect of our lives have been impacted by our ability to learn and pass to our children the knowledge of previous generations.  This has swelled the human population from estimated 10,000 homo sapiens alive just before we left Africa to the 7 billion alive today.  We have forced the world to adhere to our wishes.  We can mold landscapes if they don’t suit our needs.  At our core we are builders but we can also destroy.

It’s amazing when you consider the grand timeline of our planet.  The Big Bang happened about 14 billion years ago and our Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago.  Organic life began about 3.8 billion years ago.

The formation of coal - About 300 million years ago, vast forests surrounded low lying seas created huge peat bogs and as it sunk into the ground, the resultant pressure created almost all of today’s coal.  Ancient humans used coal when they could find it but as most of it is buried deep in the ground we couldn’t get to it without the better mining technics developed as demand increased due to the invention of the steam engine and better heating fixtures.  Ignoring controversial topics like global warming and acid rain, coal has been a huge boon to society as it allowed us to grow much faster than it could have done otherwise.  The world currently uses around 8 billion tons of coal per year and current estimates say we have approximately 147 years worth of coal reserves at our current usage rate.


The formation of Oil - The earth’s oil was also formed over 300 million years ago.  Oil forms when zooplankton and algae settle into warm sea beds in such quantity that the ocean cannot decompose it fast enough and allows it to form into a waxy material known as kerogen.  Lack of oxygen is the key to preventing the rotting process and as the kerogen is covered by the earth’s activity, thermal heat transforms it over millions of years.  The ideal depth for oil is three kilometers to give the proper amount of geothermal heat.  Above that line you will normally find a different state of kerogen known as shale oil.  If kerogen goes too deep it heats too much which transforms petroleum into natural gas.  The current world estimate states we have 1.4 trillion barrels of oil reserves with a current usage of around 85 million barrels per day.  Assuming these numbers are correct (and they change frequently), that give us 45 years at our current usage rates until we completely run out of oil.

The world was a much different place when our fossil fuels formed over 300 million years ago.  All the world’s land was in the process of forming a supercontinent called Pangaea.  Human beings didn’t exist.  Dinosaurs didn’t exist.  It was about that time that the first vertebrates emerged from the sea to live exclusively on land.  An atmosphere rich in oxygen caused a massive explosion in the diversity of life on Pangaea.  Dinosaurs arrived about 230 million years ago and were the dominate life form for the next 135 million years.  The first mammal evolved to distinguish itself from lizards about 160 million years ago.  Around the time the first mammal appeared, rift valleys had formed into massive cracks in the supercontinent of Pangaea as the Americas started to separate from Europe and Africa.  By the time an asteroid finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, Pangaea had separated in to the 7 continents we can recognize.

Humans have used the carbon stored in wood for heat every since we learned how to make fire.  The Romans, Indus, and Chinese created mighty empires long before the Industrial Age yet it took the ability to retrieve the energy rich fossil fuels of oil and coal to give us the advances of the last 200 years.  The intense heat given off by coal was vital to the formation of the iron and steel industries which rebuilt the world.  The discovery of how to process and use oil took us even further as it is the foundation of modern industries like plastics, transportation, aeronautics, computers, chemicals, and explosives among others.  Even today’s advanced farming techniques depend on oil.

Modern society wouldn’t exist without fossil fuels yet no one can argue that we will run out of them eventually.  Even the most optimistic estimates show that sometime in the next century demand will outstrip supply which will cause world wide crisis unless we find an alternative source of energy. 

One way to look at it is it took the Earth 300 million years to create its fossil fuels and we will have essentially used all of them in less than 300 years of human consumption.

This has brought riches beyond anything known before our time.  It isn’t uncommon for someone in the United States to eat a meal of beef grown in Montana, potatoes from Idaho, and beans from California.  Dessert might be be made from fresh fruit from Chile and nuts from Georgia, spiced with herbs grown in the Caribbean, and all washed down with tea from China.  Water is pumped to millions of homes which has ended cholera epidemics in all but the poorest nations.  Air conditioning has made living in deserts and rain forests not only bearable but preferable for some.  Instead of being stuck to local knowledge spread by word of mouth, our world is connected as news spreads at the speed of light.  None of this is possible without cheap fossil fuel.

The universe is a cold, dark place and fossil fuels have made human existence bright for a speck of time on the geological clock.  Every person alive today should feel lucky as they couldn’t have chosen an easier time to be born.  Humans dominant the planet much like the dinosaurs did when fossil fuels were first forming. 

I know it’s pointless but I can help to think how much life has changed for the current generation as compared to our ancestors ten generations in the past.  These people broke the first bonds of autocracy just as science had started to enlighten the world.  What will life be like for our descendants in ten generations?

• What will life be like when we run out of fossil fuel?
• Can scientists develop a viable alternative and ensure the same quality of life?
• How many people can Earth support without oil?
• Will democracy survive the chaos of the transition?
• Will our ancestors look on our accomplishments with pride or disgust?

There’s an old saying that says the brighter the candle the quicker it burns.  The world has been a dark place for most of its approximate 4,600,000,000 years until we moved out of Africa around 80,000 years ago.  The last 200 years of human progress has seen things no other species could hope to match.  Can we make it another 80,000 years?  800,000? 8 million?  Can we surpass the dinosaurs in terms of longevity?

I hope so.

Either way there is no doubt that we live in a miraculous time and each of us should feel lucky to be alive.

Tweet