A Meaningful Dialog with a Young Pastor
The most joyful moments of my life come when I meet another human who is passionate about whatever there is to be passionate about! When I am spending time in Wisconsin, I run into a young pastor at Starbucks. The pastor owns the Lakewood Baptist Church. He is in his early thirties, an extremely handsome man with a great sense of respect for other human beings; he has adopted four infants of color in his early marriage [he does not have any children of his own, yet; yes, he is white] and extremely articulate in expressing his beliefs. Invariably, I never engage in any discussion on politics or religion, but he tempted me with his great smile. So, we decided to have a written dialog; here is an unedited exchange between a young pastor and an old man [me].
PASTOR:
As you know, we all view the world through our lenses; such is our worldview. From my understanding, yours is a rationalistic-scientific lens, which cannot itself be proven to be an accurate lens for all of life’s questions. In other words, one cannot prove the axiom, “everything that we believe must be verified by the scientific method,” because the scientific method itself cannot be used to prove the axiom in question. Science, as you know, has limitations; namely, it is limited to what is observable and repeatable. And so, when it comes to questioning, “how we came into existence,” science is actually the wrong tool because the event(s) of our origination is neither observable nor repeatable. Of course, this is no slight towards science, for the method can answer a great many important questions, just not this one. So, when you say, “To make a scientific discussion…we need a clean slate, to begin with,” I challenge the presupposition that any scientific discussion can have truly begun with a “clean slate.” To invoke a worldview that demands that all claims be verified by the scientific method is not really a clean slate at all, because it rests upon the unproven presupposition that all truth need to verify by a scientific authority (when, again, science itself cannot be used to prove that it is the required intellectual authority). I’m belaboring this point, however…
ME:
One assertion that was made clear is that whether there is anything to know; I agree that once we decide that there is a first cause, then it must have an existence raising the question of what and who. The reason we dwell on a first cause because our brain seeks out the first cause to everything and this is the pivotal reason why we need to invent god or a first cause; what I am saying is that even the desire to know the first cause is based on the faulty brain network that forces us into requiring an answer to our existence. A clean slate means to remove this desire as well, and then establish the need for creating god. It has little to do with science and deals with rationality. Now one can say being rational too is a presumption and again it is this dilemma that makes us vulnerable to accepting a divine existence. Our current stage of evolution is not advanced enough to provide us wisdom to assert that there has to be a starting point to everything. We should always leave science out of the discussion because it is indeed limited by the accuracy and precision of our observation and that is surely not either. So again, a clean slate would mean taking out the human thought to have a starting point—if you say otherwise then you are basing it on a scientific viewpoint that we both agree can only be as perfect as our observations.
Your statement that not being knowable is a characteristic of god presupposes that there is an existence of an unknowable entity, a circular argument.
PASTOR:
My dear Sarf, further, when you state that “we cannot know, ‘what’ or ‘who’ is this first cause,” you imply the positive assertion that the first cause is unknowable. Ironically, unknowability, then, is an attribute or quality of this first cause — the same first cause that you have already labeled as unknowable. Philosophically, this is a self-contradictory belief — that one can attribute certain qualities to that which is unknowable, without acknowledging that we must know something about that which we speak. Again, your discussion plate is not clean, because your unprovable presupposition is that the first cause is unknowable.
My foundational presuppositions are mainly these: (a) God exists, and (b) God has revealed Himself to His creation in a comprehensible manner. These presuppositions have led me to the meaningful evaluation and comparison of religious texts — not to sweeping out-of-hand dismissals that lack nuance, but sadly characterize much religious discussion in our world today. For example, I will not judge the merits of Islam based upon the horrific actions of radical jihadists, nor will I judge the merits of Catholicism based upon the crimes of the Crusaders or the modern priest molestation scandals. I actually reject them both on other bases altogether.
ME:
See the doctrines of belief to determine our behavior; it is intended to distinguish the believers for the same reason the foragers huddled together but broke the ranks when the size of the group increased to about 50-70; religion brought a possibility to expand this group by handing over the authority to an unquestionable ruler; later came empires to do the same and now we live in a “civilized” societies called nations. The motives of the human mind remain the same, and it could not change much in a 100,000 year, to control others—nothing does better than religion. It is a doctrine of politics that sells very well because our thinking comes to a halt once we begin questioning our existence and our future.
ME:
ADDITIONAL COMMENT:
As a scientist, I am used to taking a structured, step-wise approach to resolving a query, the most fundamental being, “how did we come into existence,” I did not form the question, “who created us,” that would make the question is biased. Over 5 out of 7 billion people living today think (I am not saying belief) that there is a greater power, an omnipotent God out there managing and manipulating the Universe, including our day to day fate and who condescended to reveal Himself in the Bible, as Christians would, in the Quran, as the Muslims would say and in Torah, as Jews would say. Each one making it omniscient to their belief. Now, to make a scientific discussion (not argument), we need to have a clean slate to begin.
Because we exist (physically), there must be a precedence to our existence, for we believe that something cannot happen from anything—that is our genetically coded though response. Until about the middle of the last century, this hard connection was stable, but with quantum physics, we have learned that electrons, photons, and muons, and many other fundamental particles do not really exist until they strike another. So, perhaps our hard-wired belief that there must be a precedent is now questioned—but let us leave that discussion on the side, for now. Let us start with a clean slate again. We know we exist, so there must be a first cause. And we cannot know, “what” or “who” is this first cause. Every religion making a claim to a god or God addresses it as if it were a human; in Quran, there are 99 names for Allah, each one of them representing a human trait—and that worked nicely with over a billion people believing in Allah that is God of Muslims, not Christians, not Jews, nor anyone who does not believe in Qur’an. So, if one believes that Qur’an, Bible, or Torah are the books of divinity, indisputable and unquestionably true, then there can be no further discussion of any kind because we do not have our discussion plate clean.
I have absolutely no druthers about listening to proof that God needed to create books to communicate with humans. At the same time, I would expect those believing in their faith to be open to hearing an alternate presentation. So here is that presentation. Humans are differentiated from other species by our ability to use a language that creates beliefs; you need a medium to talk to yourself. And when we fail to resolve an observation, like “how we came into existence,” because our brains are not yet evolved to deconstruct this question, we become prey to religion because every religion closes this uncertainty. Religion came into existence and remind an exercise in the political control of fellow human beings. And I have no issue with that until I conclude that much of the hatred across the globe is because of, not despite religion. Indeed, accepting for a moment that “He” is omnipotent, and then examining His impotence leads to contradictions, as Mother Teresa says in her book. Christians talk a lot about "faith." At points in her life, Mother Teresa could no longer believe in God. Does that mean she didn't have faith? Well, she was an ordained sister in the Catholic Church, and she devoted her life to following the teachings of Jesus. Objectively, she was a Christian, no matter what she subjectively believed. She practiced "the faith of the body" as opposed to the "faith of the mind," a concept captured by the proverb "Act as though ye had faith, and faith shall be given to you.”
