Looking the Right Way through the Telescope

Martin A. Christiansen, PhD Fellow at the Institute of Lutheran Theology, serves as Communications Director and Managing Editor for ILT Press. He also teaches as Adjunct Assistant Professor in the State University of New York system. This article attempts to demonstrate that seeking proof and scientific validity for the real metaphysical God is unnecessary and is in fact looking the “wrong way through the telescope.” Rather than peering down through the large end of the telescope cylinder from the top, thinking that we are even ABLE to prove God’s existence or that it is somehow our PLACE to do so, we are instead look UP to God from the intended smaller end of the cylinder in faithful inquiry and trust his loving care and protection for us as He promises. Some might call this naive, but faith ought to be bold and trust with confidence that God’s promises are REAL. Thus this article proposes an audacious idea: that our intellectual approach to scientific and philosophical discourse should shift its foundational framework by altering how it understands all existence. Rather than determining the truth of our ontological reality from the standpoint of our own acceptable scientific proof, we must begin with the assumption that God is indeed very real and that all matters of earthly design and scientific understanding should ultimately be explored from a position of faithful inquiry, one which assumes God’s design and omnipotence is behind the framework of the entire world and all existence. Are we willing to truly acknowledge the actual theophysical causality that God actively does in our lives?

by Martin A. Christiansen

How should we as Christians rightly view our gift of life from God if we confess that we truly believe ourselves to be the products of an amazing and indeed somewhat unexplainable and unfathomable creation? Our common confession of God’s sovereignty over the whole universe holds as divine miracle the forming of human existence by the creating Lord writ large across history, and that He did this creating as revealed in the language of the biblical accounts. But time and centuries since have brought with them the impacts and interests of a cognitive Renaissance and afterward an Enlightenment of consciousness which has produced in our Western society first an awareness of modern technological capability and then a postmodern mindset of infinite individuality. As a result, the demand for scientific inquiry to provide proof of anything and everything with absolute certainty in the form of empirical positivism has become ingrained in our ordinary expectations. Scientific certainty indeed provides significant value in the physical realm as it extends through chemistry and biology, to an extent such that we have made vital and excellent advances in improving the conditions of human life in many ways, and we continue to explore further possibilities for the benefit of our posterity. But for validating matters of the metaphysical, empirical proof is not to be found and as such metaphysics is not granted the luxury of any commonly accepted authority or approval in the scientific community.

So humanity has found other ways to describe God’s role in the “making” of the world: approaches that align with a more recognizable scientific sensibility of “design” and thus feel more credible. But can we simply equate intelligent design as proof of the divine creating Godhead? Does this not imply that the creature seeks and demands proof of its own creator? How can any creature truly “prove” or validate its own creator? Yet humanity insists upon the expectation and demand of verifiable proof for everything. So with time, science has positioned itself as the final authority on all matters related to fact, truth, and reality. Unfortunately, we all too easily fall into simply living and thinking with this mindset because it is what everyone else around us is doing; it is what the world as we know it tells us is “reality.” And this is the problem: when we give empirical positivistic proof the final say and the ultimate authority to define truth, we renege on the basic conviction of our confession of faith and betray our genuine acceptance of the sovereign creating God. We’re looking the wrong way through the telescope.

Therefore, I propose an audacious idea: that our intellectual approach to scientific and philosophical discourse should shift its foundational framework by altering how it understands all existence. Rather than determining the truth of our ontological reality from the standpoint of science, we must begin with the assumption that God is indeed very real and that all matters of earthly design and scientific understanding should be ultimately explored via a position of faithful inquiry. For the past few centuries, we have based what we call “truth” and “reality” on the criteria of scientific definition, on evidence that we humans define as authoritative as we find it in this world, and solely on that which we consider reliably verifiable. While certain hard evidence is indeed valuable for those matters of physical and tangible determination, scientific inquiry has not succeeded in establishing any verifiability for matters metaphysical—and thereby of its own self-appointed autonomous authority has errantly assumed that faith in a God who cannot be seen is useless. But such an assumption is, as John Lennox describes, a “category mistake.”¹ Even as the realm of faith has comforted humanity across the millennia, the past 400 years or so have seen the human conviction of such a metaphysical truth gradually disintegrate into a spiritual illusion that only serves in lieu of any solidity of absolute assurance…. I posit that any Christian dialectic of philosophical exploration with the scientific community on matters both physical and metaphysical ought to operate from the initial position of a complete assumption that the creating Lord is in fact fully real beyond any human proof and acts as the continuous Divine Sustainer via his ever-present theophysical causation in this world.

Let us consider what this means and how it should be articulated in order to be a valid assertion as our thesis. Indeed, how we establish a framework of functional meta-language for understanding such a miracle as creation will require a frank confrontation with the common assumptions readily available in our scientific world. One may easily posit that the origin of life as we know it in all its complexity cannot be fully explained with any finite and verifiable certainty, even as quantum cosmology has come to represent the structure of our universe by the theoretical options of an open, flat or closed structure, and traces the beginning of time to an initial singularity of T=0.² Nonetheless, I am disputing the practice of explaining our existence and seeking proof of God from the starting point of scientific and empirical certainty; instead, I am positing the absolute reality of the biblical God of theophysical causation that we can and should simply assume has produced and governs both the physical and metaphysical realms (pp. 95-97).

Reality Problems

It’s not as simple as I would like to make it sound. Various problems arise in the connection between the creation event of religion and a world-order design fitted in and under Darwin’s evolutionary process. David Hume had sharply objected to the lack of verification for the metaphysical and insisted on the empirical certainty of natural causes. Over time, numerous instances of miscommunication and misunderstanding have occurred, along with the dismissal of many presuppositions and differing viewpoints, all leading to a common yet formidable stalemate in the paradigmatic debate. But scientific authority has come to be expressed in a rather common assumption: if we cannot understand it on our own terms, then it must not be real. Humans often exhibit a tendency to believe they should be able to grasp all reality in an exhaustive definition and thus attain full knowledge and certain confirmation of everything, much like Adam and Eve desired in the Garden.

So how difficult is it to simply commit to believing in a God we cannot see or verify? The problem here is the question we are asking: how can we know what we are saying, how can we describe our conundrum, or how can we even have topics that prompt us to ask such questions? All these things are the products of a God who created us in the first place. John Lennox effectively illustrates the philosophical and perceptual category error made by deist naturalism, which persists in the current scientific worldview: the notion that the creature is its own creator. Lennox’s clever story tells of a man who supposed that a Mr. Ford must be inside a Ford car, making it operate. When the man examined the internal functions of the Ford engine, he realized that Mr. Ford could not be found within it because the engine’s inner workings showed no evidence of the actual Mr. Ford as the man had expected to find. As a result, he completely denies the existence of Mr. Ford because of Mr. Ford’s complete absence from those internal operations. At this point Lennox indicts the errant man’s misunderstanding of the ontological situation for assuming Mr. Ford to be only within the creation of the mechanisms of the car itself and not its actual creator. Lennox therefore identifies the indictment: “In philosophical terminology [the man is] committing a category mistake. Had there never been a Mr. Ford to design the mechanisms, none would exist for him to understand. It is likewise a category mistake to suppose that our understanding of the impersonal principles according to which the universe works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in the existence of a personal Creator who designed, made, and upholds the universe. In other words, we should not confuse the mechanisms by which the universe works either with its cause or its upholder.”³

This logical fallacy sharply illustrates the thinking prevalent in modern science, demonstrating what routinely occurs in our unbelieving world, so much so that even the confusion it causes has also become blurred. The questions surrounding the existence of an intelligent God behind the design of the world and the evidence of that God within the natural artifacts of physical and empirical observation each create havoc when the baseline for acceptance and truth becomes misplaced. What science provides for our earthly understandings and what religion promises for our spiritual care are easily confused for each other. Our discussion is strongly polarized; even the variety of interpretation within the Christian community is often overlooked and stereotyped into a strict creationism that dismisses any empirical values. The vital distinction between recognizing the intelligence of the design itself and identifying the Designer behind it becomes much obscured (pp. 103-104).⁴

Theophysical Causality as Reality

What then does it truly mean to believe this simple yet staggering assumption that God actually is real? But the assumption has been with us all along! For is this not simply a restatement of the full and literal understanding of what it means to say “I believe in God”? Yet we have been ensnared by the human comfort of empirical certainty and have been told since Socrates and before that we should seek certain autonomous proof. Even as the details of the ancient Hebrew biblical account of the theophysical causation of all creation provide a rather specific form and description to the way it happened at that time in the moment it occurred, evidence of intelligent design within God’s creation is also something observed after the fact, and as something which holds an irreducible complexity⁵ grasped only in hindsight, and then seen as a product of such creation.…

I am arguing that the kind of faithful inquiry I describe does not imply a simple naïveté that might be assumed; it should be understood that a Pauline mindset of mature Christianity employs a stewardship of thought that will prevent simplistic or wildly deductive conclusions about spiritual meaningfulness or even just basic metaphysical concepts. My thesis is not a blind defense that naïvely accepts anything and everything that appears remotely religious without a critical sense of scrutiny or wise understanding. Nor does it wish to discard the worth of scientific inquiry and validation. At the same time, the identifiable presence of design can and should be simply recognized as evidence of God’s creative work in the world and be used wisely and productively. Yet in all this, we must still insist that the acceptance of this truth of reality concerning the divine creating God is a matter of faith—childlike faith—and is something that by its very nature does not require any scientific empirical proof….

The authors of the New Testament were highly concerned about evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. In other words, the writers of the New Testament note that reliable witnesses could attest to having seen, touched, and heard the resurrected Jesus. They did not have “faith” in the resurrection of Jesus. They had actually witnessed the living, bodily resurrected Jesus, who had been dead. What they had “faith” in was the promise of what this real resurrection did for them. It demonstrated that Jesus was indeed who he claimed to be, that his death was truly for the forgiveness of their sins. This resurrected Jesus had the power to actually give them life, eternal life.

Writing some twenty-five years after the event of the resurrection, the Apostle Paul could still give the names of the people who witnessed the bodily resurrected Jesus. He writes to the Christians in the city of Corinth, some of whom were having doubts about the resurrection: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. After that he appeared to over five hundred brothers at the same time, most of whom are still alive, but some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, and then to all the apostles. Last of all, he appeared also to me” (1 Cor 15:3-8a; EHV) (pp. 105-106).

Our faithful response must be to recognize him as the only saving reality by whom we are moved to serve throughout our lives, using his gifts and blessings to respond in grateful thanksgiving. A wise and productive Christian perspective of faithful inquiry does just this; and since assuming God is real directs us to see all the world from the initial viewpoint of God’s divine sovereignty, science must also reset its parameters and re-orient its method of inquiry toward the objective natural world to be one of a faithful inquiry that recognizes the cosmos first from the position of a “creature” who knows its real Creator, as well as the faith that his love engenders….

We must acknowledge that the question at hand ultimately revolves around whether one truly believes God is the real Lord and Sovereign of all existence. When reduced to its most basic epistemological tenet, this is the bottom-line issue. By starting from the intended end of the telescope, I posit 1) that science will reveal to us the genuine fruits of the Lord’s creation and blessings upon the physical natural world, and 2) that design in all its complexity makes perfectly logical sense when viewed as coming from a loving God who is the all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-present theophysical causation that is all-determining of the everyday epistemological and ontological expressions of our reality. Our human make-up reflects the very same design as the Imago Dei, the image of Christ, who is that same creating Lord and who came to us and became one of us to fulfill his promise of our all-determined reality with him. A faithful inquiry in response can do naught else but serve him with our lives, even as he strengthens our own faith with a power that is internalized into all of our intended being as loved creatures of a divine Creator. We will gain a more profound understanding of this amazingly complex, divine creation and all-determining reality when we truly take the leap of faith and acknowledge the actual reality of the divine, creating Lord. In so doing, we will observe and understand through the larger lens of God’s wisdom, for that is looking in the right way through the telescope (pp. 108-109).

Notes

1. John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford, UK: Lion Hudson, 2009), 45.

2. Ian Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (Harper San Francisco, 1997), 195ff.

3. Lennox, God’s Undertaker, 45.

4. Lennox, God’s Undertaker, 11.

5. William Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 146ff., provides a thorough discussion of Michael Behe’s “irreducible complexity,” demonstrating how remarkable and unfathomable an autonomous human design of any such system can be, let alone attributing it to the divine Designer. Earlier, Dembski, on 127ff., discusses “specified complexity” as the primary process by which any creative intelligent causes may function. Both sections provide a glimpse at what anyone might yet be convinced is evidence of God’s divine providence and all-powerful creating omniscience in the real world.

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The complete text of this journal article is currently available for free online at https://verba-vitae.org/index.php/vvj/article/view/53 (Verba Vitae, vol. II, no. 2, pp. 95-110).