On God's Creativity

I recently encountered a link (http://imgur.com/a/pPJmj#0) to a posting of a grade four Science quiz that I thought must surely be a parody.  It turns out to be real, the mother of the child who brought it home sent Snopes.com a message to verify the child as hers and that she will transfer her child to a different school next school year.

“Oh Lord my God When I, in awesome wonder, Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made: I see the stars; I hear the rolling thunder; Thy power throughout The universe displayed.  Then sings my soul, My Saviour, God, to Thee, ‘How great thou art.’”

Every autumn, if I get out to a dark enough night sky, I look out at M 31, the Andromeda Galaxy and the most distant object visible to the naked eye.  I always feel awe at knowing that that the light falling into my eyes from M 31 has taken a little over two million years to reach me.  Yet this is our closest neighbouring spiral galaxy, with thousands of millions of others extending thousands of millions of light years in every direction.  I am reminded that God’s scale is not human scale, God’s scale extends across thousands of millions of cubic light years of space and over thousands of millions of years through time.

When I was a teen, in personal conversation with the Reverend George Searcy, our minister at Oliver United Church, he pointed out that the Bible is not, and does not purport to be, a scientific text.  This freed me to recognize that the knowledge our God given intellect discovers through Science does not threaten faith in God.  Rather it enhances my wonder at God’s creative power.  God’s creative dynamic can most surely encompass evolution by natural selection, just as it involves relativity and quantum mechanics, along with much else still totally unknown to us.

I object to that quiz purporting to be Science, yet containing the utter nonsense of denying God’s own scale with the absurd suggestions that dinosaurs and humans coexisted and that our Earth cannot be a few thousands of millions of years old.

Love and Mutual Exclusion

Our faith tells us how we should relate to our neighbours. Jesus tells us to love our neighbours. In faith we know that this is not a selective admonition; we cannot arbitrarily discriminate who we define as neighbour and limit our love. Yet, never does Jesus guide us as to how to relate to matters between various of our neighbours. Far too often mutual exclusivity comes into play. In many cases, if I am to love one neighbour, I must necessarily deny another neighbour.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus has his Samaritan arrive after the attack, choose not to pass by but lovingly assist and support the stranger who had fallen among thieves. This is entirely a one-to-one, polar, relationship. What if Jesus had had the Samaritan arrive on the scene during the attack instead? The neighbour relationship would be triangular. The thieves are as equally the Samaritan’s neighbours as the stranger on the road to Jericho. Yet the choice is obvious: deny the thieves and, in love, defend the stranger, rendering whatever assistance may be necessary, even to the point of violence, to drive the thieves away from their target. There is no way around it, in order to love the stranger on the road to Jericho, the Samaritan would have to deny the thieves.

In real life, we face this dilemma almost constantly. The choice is often far more subtle than between thieves and a victim but the consequence remains: to love the one requires denial of the other. In subtlety, the choice becomes far more subjective and truly difficult. When neighbours' needs conflict, how do we decide which neighbour to love and which neighbour to deny? We must prayerfully determine this for ourselves as Jesus never tells us how to make the choice. I suspect some Christians become catatonic at the dilemma, never choose, and effectively deny both. I suspect also that people in the greater community may quickly give the label “hypocrite” to Christians who make a choice to deny love with which the greater community disagrees.