Advent One: Post-Truth?

On November 8 the Oxford Dictionary announced the word of the year: 

post-truth - an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

The announcement quoted Independent columnist Matthew Norman: 

The truth has become so devalued that what was once the gold standard of political debate is a worthless currency. 

What happens to a culture that has lost interest in truth?

This election season highlighted our disordered values and the underlying cracks in our ways of knowing.

We elected a president whose candidacy was built on contradictory promises and easily discredited lies. 

Is something true because we prefer it?

Is evidence dismissed because it doesn’t fit our cognitive framework?

If a story is repeated enough times in enough places does that automatically make it so?

We are living in a tangled space, unsure who to believe, no longer certain about what’s right, or true, or good.

Not even sure those words have meaning.

My goal in this blog has been to dig around in what I believe, to examine premises as well as consequences, to try to hear the half-heard words that form and inform who I am, what I do.

Advent leads me back to the foundation of that inquiry, as the narrative of a baby born two thousand years ago collides with the narratives of power and profit playing out in the stress and strain of an American December.

So I’ll start here: why would anyone listen to the story of a provincial baby, nobody child of nobody, born in a stinking animal stall in a dusty village in an occupied Middle Eastern country?

What halfway intelligent modern person would believe, for even a millisecond, that that distant brown baby was the product of a deity’s word spoken to an unmarried teenage girl, or that mythical creatures no one can document showed up in force to sing to a group of migrant shepherds?

Approach this as a scientist and the narrative crumbles quickly.  Two thousand years later, who could “prove” the facts of an immaculate conception? What evidence would it take to support the stories of angel visitations?

The birth of Jesus, like many stories of scripture, sits outside the realm of science, which is not to say that scientists can’t be Christians; many are. 

But for those who insist on scientific naturalism, on a reality that conforms, is explained, can be proven, by the laws of science, the Christmas narrative is a fairy tale, a silly myth, of no more weight and maybe less interest than Seuss’s Grinch or Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin.

Philosopher Peter Kreeft speaks of “the radical insufficiency of what is finite and limited”, the “cramped and constricted horizon” encountered when we “see the material universe as self-sufficient and uncaused.”

I like that phrasing: radical insufficiency.

If this material universe is self-sufficient and uncaused, then perhaps Donald J. Trump is right, as were predecessors to whom he’s been compared. If this cramped, constricted horizon is really all there is, then objections to exploitation and manipulation have limited moral standing.

Yet most of us want something more: some basis for kindness. Some rationale for recognition of our shared humanity.

Advent is a reminder that we all, whatever we profess to believe, find ourselves constrained by the limited horizon of "what is."

At first, (as young adults, or willful dreamers) we rebel at the “radical insufficiency” of the current regime: we try to be generous, even though generosity looks foolish. We try to be honest, even when honesty is rarely rewarded. But slowly we cave. We blend. We realize that those ideals we held have no place in a material world.

Yet sometimes God grabs our world and shakes it – like a child shaking a snow globe – and the scenery changes.

I’ve been reading again the gospel of Luke. Luke, the only Gentile writer represented in the Bible, was also one of the most educated: an upper-class Greek doctor, Paul’s “beloved

physician” and a careful historian.

He starts his account of Christ’s life with a promise to share only what he's researched himself and is convinced is true: 

since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account . . .  so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

After his quick introduction, Luke plunges headlong into the story of Zechariah, John the Baptist's father: names, dates, simple history. In verse eleven, the narrative takes a turn: "Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear."

I love the detail. Not just an angel, but “standing on the right side of the altar.”

The angel explains what is about to happen:  Zechariah’s aging wife will become pregnant with a longed for baby. The child, a son, will be part of God’s plan of intervention for his people, and the world.

Reading the text this time I’m struck by the length of the angel’s speech: detail about what to call the baby, how to parent him.

In the past I’ve identified deeply with Zechariah’s response: “How do I know this is true?”

Religious leader though he is, he's asking for proof: Will you give me some kind of unassailable documentation? Will you come tell my neighbors, so they know I’m not crazy? Could you make this announcement in church next Sunday? So everyone else hears you too?

I love the angel’s response. Polite, but sharp. Let me paraphrase: 

“Seriously? You’re a priest, here we are in the inner sanctum of the temple, I’m standing here in front of you, straight from God’s throne, me, Gabriel, still God's messenger, the same one who spoke to Daniel, centuries ago. I'm here telling you what God has planned, and you’re wondering if you can believe me, even while you're shaking with fear. You still need proof? Really?”

I’ve never had an encounter with Gabriel but I’ve seen God intervene in my life and in the lives of others. I’ve seen the intervention that brings forgiveness, freedom, joy, healing, laughter in the place of pain, a deep sense of belonging for those who felt abandoned.

And still, five minutes later, or five weeks later, five years later, we ask: “How do I know that was true?” “Why should I believe in miracles?” "Where's the proof?"

There are some great discussions of miracles available, including CS Lewis’ book titled “Miracles” and chapter seven of Tim Keller’s Reasons for God. Two interesting websites, Christians in Science in the UK, and American Scientific Affiliation in the US, offer extensive resources on the compatibility of  science and faith. Biologos, founded by Human Genome Project geneticist and physician Francis Collins, offers a helpful mix of articles about miracles and science.

But in many ways the questions this advent aren't about faith and science, but about the place of truth - any truth - in a cynically post-truth world. 

I'm part of that world. 

I’ve been noting how easy it is - for me -  to dismiss those who start from different assumptions than my own, who embrace different ideas, who trust authorities I believe are flawed.

I’ve been noting how easy it is for those around me to assume they are wiser, smarter, more informed than those who disagree with them.

We are all, in a way, like Zechariah, going about our business, unwilling to have our daily routine broken, determined to ignore any reality that threatens our tightly held beliefs.

What warning, what message of hope, what offers of love do we miss?

Thanksgiving One: Provision

Monarch caterpillar, Marshall Hedin, Wikimedia

At a recent funeral, I found myself talking with friends I hadn’t spent time with in years. The conversation turned quickly to challenges and changes, and to stories of God’s provision in recent times of struggle.

One friend recounted her experience of needing a car. Without one, her job possibilities had been limited. She had saved enough to buy something used, but was having trouble finding a car both affordable and reliable.

“I was praying,” she said, and I felt like God was asking, ‘What kind of car do you want? What’s your favorite kind of car?’” She laughed. “I kept thinking: I just need a dependable car, but the thought wouldn’t go away: if you had a choice, what would you want?”

She finally spent some time thinking about cars she’d had, and remembered one that had been totaled by a family member years ago.  “I loved that car!”

Not long after, she saw a similar car for sale, used, for ten dollars less than the amount she had budgeted. She took a mechanic friend to look and ended up with a far better car than she had hoped for. A car she loves. A car that makes her feel cared for. A car that makes her laugh with joy when she looks at the way God sometimes provides.

Another friend had lost her job and was anxious about how to pay the mortgage on a new home she’d recently settled on. She had had some interviews, but had been waiting too long to hear. Her job ended Friday. On Monday, she’d be on her own.

She called a friend to join her in prayer and together they prayed that she’d hear, very soon, about the one job she’d been waiting on.  That there would be an offer.

That same afternoon the call came. A very good job, for a very good salary. To start the next Monday. She was comforted by God’s care.

Sometimes God provides just what we need, just when we need it. Sometimes in ways that make our hearts sing.

Coincidence, I hear you say (you know who you are, my dearly loved friends, who shake your heads that someone so well-educated could continue to be so naïve).

Cedar waxwing, Putneypix, Wikimedia

The same kind of coincidence that delivers bequests to ministries in need – with just the right amount, at just the right moment.

Or leaves bags of clothes outside a seminary student's door on the very day he and his wife began to pray about how to buy winter clothes for their kids.

The same kind of coincidence that met a seventeen –year old me in the hall of a college administration building and promised “if you come here, you’ll never worry about money.”

Or stepped on the elevator in a crowded hospital, looked at an infant gasping for breath, and said “treat that child for strep pneumonia.” And saved that child’s life.

God’s provision is sometimes so blatant, personal, impossibly precise, that to ignore or explain it away is a greater leap of faith than accepting and rejoicing.

And yet, yes, there are times when provision seems lacking. When what we wanted doesn’t happen, when what we need seems too late, or too small.

I watch the refugees from Syria, the sorrows of our inner cities, and wonder.

Yet I don’t know those stories. And find, on those occasions when I’m blessed to hear from those with experiences far different from my own, that God is at work there, as well. Providing in ways I can’t see, wouldn’t expect, have no way of knowing.

The birds in my back yard are singing this week. High in our aging locust trees, Bluebirds and Cedar Waxwings have been celebrating a wealth of Virginia Creeper berries and the attendant clouds of tiny bugs. Robins, Titmice, Hermit Thrush: it’s a Thanksgiving party, a few weeks early.

The more I know of creation, the more I marvel at the ways provision is hard-wired into the interwoven webs of life.

Red knot © Hans Hillewaert, Creative Commons

Horseshoe crab eggs for migrating Red knots at just the exact moment they’re needed.

Milkweed plants hosting hungry Monarch caterpillars. 

Endless supplies of goldenrod seeds for Goldfinch young in the golden autumn afternoons.

Interdependent biospheres alive in human organs.

Yes, some believe that all happened by eons of undirected self-selection, the interplay of chance across endless millennia:

"By chance, of course!" As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
(from Leavings, Wendell Berry, 2010)

In recent years a small wave of scientists have quietly lost their faith in chance and converted to Christian faith, or more confidently and publicly affirmed the faith they started with. They affirm that the laws that govern energy and matter - atoms, cells, solar system, light - point to an intellect beyond understanding, that the details of our common life are fine-tuned so precisely that chance is no longer adequate explanation.

Astronomer Allan Sandage, discoverer of the first quasar, converted to the Christian faith at the age of fifty. In a New York Times interview he explained: 

“Science cannot answer the deepest questions. . . As soon as you ask why is there something instead of nothing, you have gone beyond science. I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery, but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.”

A 1998 Newsweek article quoted Sandage and other respected Christian scientists, noting: 

 “Something surprising is happening between those two old warhorses science and religion. . . Physicists have stumbled on signs that the cosmos is custom-made for life and consciousness. It turns out that if the constants of nature – unchanging numbers like the strength of gravity, the charge of an electron and the mass of a proton – were the tiniest bit different, then atoms would not hold together, stars would not burn and life would never have made an appearance.

"When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see," says John Polkinghorne, who had a distinguished career as a physicist at Cambridge University before becoming an Anglican priest in 1982, "that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it." 

The Anthropic Principle, first noted in 1961, affirms the fine-tuning of the universe to support life. Density of matter, presence of carbon, strength of gravity, levels of radiation, speed of light: the list of fine-tuned parameters keeps lengthening, gathered under the heading of the “fine-tuned universe.”

In a 2011 interview, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and mastermind of the Human Genome Project, said:  “If they (constants in the universe) were set at a value that was just a tiny bit different, one part in a billion, the whole thing wouldn’t work anymore.” 

NASA astronomer John O'Keefe, reflecting on this fine-tuning, marveled at God's provision: 

"We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in."

These scientists would be quick to say that fine-tuning does not “prove” God, in the same way that evolution does not “disprove” God. God, by definition, is outside the bounds of scientific proof.

I can’t prove that the provision I see in every direction is a gift from a loving God.

Just as no one can disprove it.

Instead, I celebrate, give thanks, and trust myself to the one who has been providing since the first atom was created:

Sing to the Lord with grateful praise;

make music to our God on the harp

He covers the sky with  clouds;

he supplies the earth with rain

and makes the grass grow on the hills.

He provides food for the cattle

and for the young ravens when they call.

His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse,

nor his delight in the legs of the warrior;

the Lord delights in those who fear him,

who put their hope in his unfailing love.

(Psalm 147:7-11)

from In der Provence, Van Gogh, France, 1888