Truth
Atoms and Icons 6
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 24 November 2002
The Language of Metaphor
Fuller turns in his last chapter to language and immediately says this:
Language about God can appear ambiguous, and, indeed, from a literal point of view, even false.
If that is not admitting that Christians are liars, it is hard to know what is, since they are not likely to admit it with complete frankness. If this language appears false but is not, then again there is a methodological problem for theologians, but they seem to spend little time clearly addressing it. The answer is, of course, that it is all metaphorical, so there is no problem—except to interpret it, and that must be entirely arbitrary. It is so arbitrary that many Christians still think their biblical allegories and metaphors are true history, and they still continue to read it as such. Though even ignorant and unsophisticated Christians, unlike Fuller, will read about God riding on the wings of a cloud and will assume it to be metaphorical, even though the author might indeed have had his real conception of God as being precisely like that.
God did not make the world in six days because there were no days to measure by when he started, and science has shown that it actually took billions of years. So, that too is poetic irrespective of the intention of the author who obviously thought they were real days because the last one was designated a rest day, and so it remained. However, there is nothing merely poetic about a man waking up from being dead, and later ascending in full view of a crowd into heaven. If that were only poetic, there would no longer be a historic basis for Christianity, the religion that above all rests its claim to belief in history.
The Language of Science
Fuller seems quite unable to distinguish a metaphor from a joke. Scientists, from their observations find the constituents of matter have certain properties that they need to name, so that the state of the particle can be described. The “spin” of an electron is one such property. The particles too, when first proposed or discovered have to be named. Scientists, unknown to Christians, often have a quirky sense of humour often reflected in the names they choose. The hypothetical particle that makes up protons and neutrons were given the bizarre name “quark”. The quarks have been given properties called “colour” and “charm”, ironic names for something that they certainly are not, just as the spin of an electron has nothing really to do with spinning. Fuller thinks that these novel properties are metaphors, but, if anything they are anti-metaphors.
Fuller also thinks it is metaphorical to say that particles like photons can act as particles and as waves. He thinks they are poetic descriptions, and while it is true that they are not particles or waves, the properties that these descriptions refer to are those of a particle and of a wave. They were used because they were the properties of a particle and of a wave and not because they bore some metaphorical similarity to them. Now there is nothing mysterious, in the sense of inexplicable, about these curiosities because quantum mechanics explains them wonderfully well, but Fuller is right that, being beyond human experience, real life approximations have to do to give us a concept of them. He hopes to draw parallels between getting an idea of these things and getting an idea of the Trinity, say, but the important difference is that the science can be shown to be true, but the Trinity is just the triune Harvey in the sky, a figment of the febrile minds of those with nothing better to think about.
Concerning Richard Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene, po-faced Fuller solemnly declares that genes can have no conception of self and so the word “selfish” used of a gene is metaphorical. Not just that, Reverend Fuller, but ironic too, since Dawkins is unlikely to subscribe to any sort of teleological hypothesis. It is Fuller, whose big huggy bunny in the sky has imbued everything with purpose who ought to think that genes could be selfish. This book title looks like a gentle self-parody that really does not need a Christian to explain it.
Dawkins also coined the word meme for a social construct that can pass on from mind to mind, temporarily infecting them like a virus. Fads and fashions are the obvious examples, but such viruses are not necessarily that temporary, and religions are “memes” too. Fuller thinks that, if this is so, the argument “cuts both ways”. If Christians are infected with the Christianity virus then atheists are infected with the atheism virus. This is like saying that health “cuts both ways” with infection. People with the flu have the flu virus and, because it cuts both ways, healthy people must have the awful health virus. Quite plainly, atheism is the state of the brain before any ideas of the supernatural and God are introduced to it. Atheism is health. Religion is infection.
The Language of Theology
The language of theology is the next focus, and theology is immediately undermined as a respectable study because:
God is not something we can experience directly through our senses in a regular or predictable way.
God cannot justifiably be described in terms of sensory experience. How then can Christians talk about God? The impossibility of it is shown in Fuller’s first few words of explanation:
It is generally asserted that God is infinite.
Now, it seems that what is generally asserted is true. No scientist would be willing to accept a statement as true just because it is generally asserted, and few sensible people would. There is no foundation at all for this assertion however generally it is asserted. It is cited by Fuller because it is Christian belief. That is what he means. A non-Christian should not accept an unfounded Christian belief, and a scientist should not accept any unfounded belief at all. Anyway, let Fuller ramble on, for the sake of argument.
An infinite God must be different from people in the world because they are finite. Despite that, they experience a small part of God, personally, and each person experiences a different part of Him. It is as if God were the Atlantic ocean and each person can have a pint of the Atlantic holy water only. Each pint is different, so everyone gets a tiny but different experience of the complete ocean. Needless to say, Fuller’s leaky buckets would not hold much of this argument.
God cannot be experienced by the senses in any regular way but Christians need only dip their metaphorical pint jug in the ocean and they can experience at least their own portion of it. It seems they all do. It was not supposed to be sensory, so, if that condition still pertains, then the experience must be a psychological one. It therefore should be studied by psychology not by theology.
Anyway, Christians regularly experience their pint of the Atlantic which is a metaphor for the infinite God. The Atlantic, though, is not like God in being infinite. Suppose therefore that the Atlantic were infinite, to make the analogy more precise. Each person now has a pint of an infinite Atlantic. Fuller reminds us:
We, who are finite and limited, will only ever be able to comprehend a small part of the immensity of God.
Quite so. A pint of an infinite Atlantic is infinitesimal in relation to it. Christians do not only get a small part of God, they get an infinitesimal part of Him. What is infinitesimal is actually nothing. If we looked out on God’s world, we could not even see these infinitesimal parts. Christians who are enamoured with the idea of an infinite God because it seems to imply His mightiness, do not consider that it means His worshippers are nothing to Him. Not only that, but in logic, anything that is finite, however big it might be, is nothing to an infinity. If God is infinite and the universe is finite, then God cannot be aware of it. If God is infinite, then He is not aware of a finite creation at all.
How then does a believer communicate their own experience of the infinitesimal part of God with another believer with a different infinitesimal bit? They do it by saying anything they like about their bit so long as it is kind about Him. They can say He is life or love or beauty but all of it falls short of Him because He is infinite. Whatever good qualities that can be given to Him, He must have more beside. Indeed, these good qualities are an infinitesimal amount of all His good qualities. That is one valid way of talking about God, though it is a bit boring. The other way is metaphorically, a way that does not seem any different from the previous one, but the worshipper has to realize that the metaphors are not literally true. All of it boils down to God being whatever a pious believer thinks is good.
Paradox and Contradictions
The great theological trickster goes on to explain the theological use of nonsense or paradox. Some strange people apparently think it is preposterous that obviously self-contradictory statements can impart truth. They do not understand the reasons why the bible can give contradictory impressions about God. They do not understand how Jesus could be fully human and fully God at the same time! Christians understand these things. Or then again perhaps they do not because they are mysteries of God. Either way, they are true because Christians believe them.
Think of whatever you like and the holy ghost will make it true. All these paradoxes are true so that Christians can believe them. The beneficial side effect is that all lies are true, so it is not fair for critics of Christianity to say that Christians tell lies. They only seem like lies to those who do not believe. In fact, it proves they are unbelievers. Only when someone high in the hierarchy of a church says that a lie is contrary to belief is it declared heretical, and the heretics, if unrepentant, are told to find another church. This is never a problem. There is always another church to accept them.
Fuller continues with his main aim of trying to show that science and theology are compatible, by showing us that theological and scientific languages overlap. He begins with Popper’s criterion of falsifiability which he takes to be a criterion of falseness. He considers the two statements, the velocity of light is 2.998 x 108 ms-1, and the velocity of light is not 2.998 x 108 ms-1. On the Fuller criterion of falseness, the second one is truer, and is the one that tells us something scientific! Fuller seems to be trying to say that the second is certainly true in the sense that more precise measurements would find a minutely different number, so no number can ever be precisely quoted. A better value must always be possible.
But the second statement is not saying that at all. It is saying that the velocity of light is not some particular value that is actually very close to the velocity of light. This is quite misleading. On this basis the velocity of light is 50 mph is more not true than that it is 2.998 x 108 ms-1. It must therefore be a better statement on the Fuller criterion. Really the better expression of the velocity of light is 2.998 x 108 ms-1, the degree of accuracy being indicated by the last significant digit, as scientists do.
Fuller is trying desperately to find something that is the scientific equivalent to apophatic descriptions of God. In this notion, nothing positive can be said about God. Only negative statements can be made about Him. We can justifiably say, “God is not a cabbage”, but we cannot say, “God is a cabbage”. Apparently no one can say, “God is a spirit”, or even, “God is a god”. To say, “God is not a cabbage”, seems acceptable even to atheists but to say the velocity of light is not 2.998 x 108 ms-1 seems an absurd technicality that is seriously misleading. It is on the same level as saying, “God is not a god”, which must be acceptable in this apophatic sytem of thought. When scientists want to be particularly clear about the meaning of the velovity of light, they say the velocity of light is 2.998 (+-e) x 108 ms-1 where the (+-e) denotes the range of error of the result cited. If Christians cannot understand these things, it is a shame, but it is up to them to learn it, not for scientists to unlearn it.
Metaphors and Models
He casts his line now into metaphorical waters again, quite unable to see, as an obfuscator of the truth, that what he supposes are metaphors for God in the bible are more likely to have been describing God than being poetic about Him. “The Ancient of Days” and “the Lord of Hosts” were not intended as metaphors for God. By pretending that different titles and descriptions of God are only metaphors, he hopes to make many different conceptions of God become a single monotheistic one.
For some reason, perhaps because he identifies models as metaphors, he talks about the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom. It is wrong. The Bohr model has a classical electron orbiting a classical proton like a planet around the sun. The model is impossible in classical mechanics and is replaced by a quantum mechanical one. Fuller says that in the QM model, the electron is most probably at the nucleus itself. He means the electron density is greatest at the nucleus, as might be expected because the positive nucleus attracts the negative electron.
The probability of finding the electron however relates also to a volume that might contain the electron, and in a radially symmetrical system like an atom the different shells from the nucleus are what are important. Thus in the classical model, the electron notionally has a fixed radius and the electron can only be found at that radius and nowhere else. Taking into account the volume of space available for the electron at different distances from the nucleus, and the electron density, the probability of finding the electron is zero at the nucleus where the radius is zero, the probability being proportional to the radius squared. A simple integration yields the radial distribution function of the electron and it is found that the radius where the electron is most likely to be found is the Bohr radius! That shows the power of quantum mechanics. The electron is found in practice where the naïve Bohr model placed it.
Fuller explains that electrons are simultaneously particles and waves—his proof that Christ could be divine and human simultaneously. He needs this because, as a supernaturalist, he places gods—divine beings—in the realm of the supernatural whereas human beings are merely natural. To be supernatural and natural simultaneously is something that even Christians find difficult, and find it easier to understand when electrons can be particles and waves at the same time. The scientist is flattered that humble efforts in the natural world should help the slaves of God with their tortuous inventions, but, since that is all they are, there is no need for it. If they say Christ is fully human and fully God at the same time, it is no more absurd or impossible than just saying he was God. Christians can do miracles. What they utter is God’s Word, so it is! The use of physics to show that meaningless statements mean something is unnecessary. Meaningless statements are meaningless in their own right.
The source of the observational basis of the notion of a fully human man being simultaneosuly God is the bible, which earlier Fuller was happy to declare “poetic”. It would be easier to do this than to accept the necessity for a crucified man to act like an electron and display a dual character.
Fuller seems to be worried that he cannot say precisely what the Big Bunney in transcendental space is, but he finds relief that the electronic physicist cannot say what an electron is, either. Never mind that fat volumes have been written on the properties of an electron and how they can be used. That is not explaining what it is. Whatever definition you try to find of what something is, Fuller will reject it because it does not say what it actually is. How does any definition say what something actually is? A definition of something is a list of the properties that the something has. A god is a being with supernatural properties. Words are defined in terms of other words and phrases. If Fuller does not know, or will not accept, their meaning, then nothing can be defined for him. The problem arrives in defining something that is imaginary. Fuller gives us his definition of God:
God is that being or principle, which creates, sustains, and loves the universe and all it contains.
A principle cannot love anything. Arguably, it could be a source of love, if love is thought of metaphorically as some sort of liquid, but anything that actually loves has to be alive. Fuller is not good on distinguishing things, and the holy ghost seems not to be helping. So, to love the universe, God must be alive and thinking, not merely a principle. Whatever remains, if love is not a requirement of God, is something like energy, which can create and sustain quite well. So, love is the essence of Fuller’s God—surprised?
Anyway, Fuller’s point is that this defines God just as an electron is defined, by a list of His properties. Fine, except that the properties of an electron are not arbitrary but have to be realised in practice when electrons are tested. What of the God? Much of Him is energy and so is not distinctive. The distinctivre part is love. God loves the universe. Is that love supposed to manifest itself? There seems to be far too much “anti-love” in God’s “creation” to convince any skeptic that He is pervading the universe with His love. That God loves the universe is a definition of Him cannot match up with reality. Moreover, any tabloid horoscope writer could come up with something that sounded more convincing, but also was untestable. Ultimately, there is nothing to chose between them. They both sound as though they mean something but do not.
Poetry and Imagination
Fuller, with his gift for stating the obvious but not drawing the obvious conclusions from it, now tells us that “our imaginations are very powerful”. He has not noticed that a modicum of imagination, such as a child might possess, allows them to imagine giants, and even giants in the sky, or beyond the sky. If they are brought up properly, they soon grow out of such childishness and start thinking about real things, making their careers in science, engineering, medicine, business or flying aeroplanes. Some kids, all too many still, are encouraged by their parents—forced in many instances—to stay childish and to hang on to these childish imaginings. They become priests and pastors, spiritualists and magicians.
He also returns to his theme that poetry reveals something beyond reality. Indeed it does. It uses imagination, and what emerges is beyond reality because it is imaginary. That is what God is. Fuller cites bishop Richard Harris as thinking this pearl of Christian wisdom:
All, works of art, whatever their content, have a spiritual dimension.Bishop Richard Harris
All bottles of whisky, whatever their label, have a spiritual content.
All colostomy bags, whatever their dimension, have an intestinal content.
The first is meaningless. The other two mean something. Nobody knows what “spiritual” means in particular and so a “spiritual dimension” is even less meaningful. “Spiritual” means “religious” mostly in these contexts, and, if that is what is meant, anyone who is not a rogue would say so. It is a tabloid sun-sign sentence! So, bishops are soothsayers and astrologers, in kind. They write nonsense that sounds as though it means something to many people, and they take away whatever meaning they read into it. Since they put it there it seems profound.
All works of art are incomprehensible in the sense that the artist had some uncertain impression or emotion they wanted to convey, the point being that no one knows what it was. Much art is intended to generate emotional responses, not intellectual ones. Perhaps Harris means “emotional” when he writes “spiritual”. It would make his statement true but no less trite. It is the use of the mystery word “spiritual” that gives it the illusion of profundity. What is true is that Christians are desperate to bring God into every aspect of life from scratching your escutcheon to composing a symphony.
Of course, some things are considered wicked, and so cannot have been the influence of God. Only what is good is God’s. What is wicked is human sin, the work of the Devil or the intrinsic wickedness of the fallen world—amything you like but it is not God. Human sin is the favourite to blame because it imbues people with guilt and they then dole out their coin into the platter of salvation.
Fuller calls prayer and meditation “practical relating to God” but what then are Buddhists meditating to? Buddhists do not believe in a God, but must get more out of meditation that Christians because they do it habitually whereas it is a Christian fad. Most Christians do not meditate. Prayer, on the face of it, should be useful if God is listening to it, but Christians are not allowed to pray for anything that can be counted, even though their lesser Harvey, in his recorded sayings, claims they can pray for whatsoever they wish, and get it. Some Christians say that God always answers them, but He has not read what the lesser Harvey said, and so He sometimes says, “No”. The lesser bunny and the greater bunny, although both parts of the triune bunny obviously disagree. “Duh. Don’t ask me”, says the holy ghost bunny. What are the theological consequences of this?
Christians have been completely thrown in respect of meditation and prayer because psychologists can account for their apparent benefits. They can show that they are normal reactions quite unrelated to God or religion. They use the phrase, “a placebo effect”. When people think they are being treated, they improve, even though they are not being treated at all. The illusion of treatment suffices. The same is true of “TLC” or “Tender Loving Care”. Care and attention without any medicine is beneficial. Prayer falls into these categories and is no effect of a supernatural God. Benefits are psychological or psychosomatic. Prayer will not produce bags of gold on demand, but when someone is feeling depressed, perhaps after a bereavement, then praying for strength can bring out the strength that they have.
Authority, Tradition and Change
Near the beginning of his final chapter, Fuller blows the Christian trumpet in respect of the gentile Roman Christians setting up charities for the first time. It is an interesting point. The Essenes, before the Christians, felt a duty to look after orphans and widows. They felt an obligation to destitute people, because they had the idea that Jesus had from them (but Christians no longer have), that poverty had a spiritual value. Abandoned children and mothers also provided them with a practical source of recruits, since the core of the movement were chaste and celibate, and so had no children of their own to indoctrinate. Christians typically still vehemently deny that their earliest ancestors were Essenes because they are not interested in truth but to hold on to their belief that Jesus Christ started it all from scratch.
Yet the first Christians of the gentile world had a remarkable number of practices that are now known, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, were Essene. This habit of adopting widows and orphans was just one of them. So, when Fuller speaks of the charity of the earliest Roman Christians, he is not talking about anything they introduced as a novel consequence of God’s newly revealed presence. It was an old requirement and necessity of them coming from the Jewish sect of the Ebionites who were at center a chaste brotherhood.
Moreover, it is a distortion, to say the least, that the Romans had no “social services”. No doubt they did not have them like ours, but it is typical Christian hubris to say the Romans had none until they found Christians in their midst. The Romans had a mass of poor and an extremely wealthy nobility, but the wealthy nobles were not misers. They served the state and they owed their public duty to it, and this was onerous in terms of expenditure. They had duties to take particular offices, both civil and religious, and these required the expenditure of money on feasts and festivities. On these occasions, the poor who mainly could only get bread, could get a treat. Indeed, the Roman games, reviled by Christians largely because of their mythology—Christians claiming that their innocents were the main victims of them—were occasions when free food was distributed.
Even more damning of Christian ignorance is that the “meat offered for idols” was an important source of protein for the poor. As at the Jerusalem temple, people brought animals for sacrifice to the gods. The whole animal was not burnt to a cinder in either of these cases. The greasy parts were used to feed the holy flames and certain parts were the pick of the priests, but the rest of it was distributed to butchers who would sell it or give it to the poor and destitute. Christians forbade this practice, and had therefore to provide food for those who otherwise would starve.
Finally, the hospitals of Roman Paganism were the temples of the god, Aesculapius, where the priesthood and attendants would minister to the sick. Those who recovered would become sponsors of the temple, which was effectively a hospital. Reports of the god, Aesculapius, being seen at night doing the rounds, in Florence Nightingale fashion, were common.
The point of this is that Christians habitually distort historical truth to put themselves in a unique spotlight of goodness. Christians simply cannot write honest history when their own beliefs come into it.
Authority in Theology
Fuller now tells us that ideas about God and Christ are not arbitrary because they are the result of centuries of discussions among Christians. He has here a hint of a practical criterion—“effectiveness through time and experience”. He does not tell us what the ideas have to be effective at doing, although it requires no genius to guess it. It is effectiveness at extorting the maximum from the guilt-ridden worshippers to keep the clerical elite in a good living. In this sense, the meaning of God and Christ are not arbitrary. They have a function. The question is, “Is it right?”.
Christians will plead that the money chinking into the platter is not the point, it is the worshippers getting spiritual fulfilment—“spiritual” again! This is arbitrary because had those people not been obliged to become Christians—the vast majority are brought up to it by parents and schools—they would have remained content without any “spiritual fuulfilment” or with some other type of it of their own choosing. Christianity has honed its scam over the years to be as emotionally compelling as possible, and the aim of theologians is to give it a modicum of intellectual repsectibility too. Fuller convinces only those already deluded by the scam.
Fuller now rambles on about the Trinity, another absurd doctrine that is totally unnecessary to Christianity, but is clung on to, despite the rift between Protestant and Catholic for reasons only of tradition. Skeptics would consider all of the analogies and pseudoscientific exlanations of the Trinity as typical violations of Occam’s Razor. They introduce unnecessary and spurious entities. To anyone not religious, it is a total puzzle. If God is omnipotent, as most Christians are still glad to believe, then there is no need to explain his ability to do just as He wants, so long as it is all notional. He can be believed to have appeared as a man, if that is what belief requires. Why does it need explaining? It is a miracle and a mystery of God.
The riding called the holy ghost is the truly puzzling one. How does the holy ghost differ from God? It is a lot easier to believe that the HG and God are “homoousios” than that a man and god are. They are so homoousios that they are exactly the same. God is a permanent ghost except for that occasion long ago when He decided to appear as a man, still homoousios even though it did not seem it, and had Himself crucified. The whole debate is fatuous, all the more so for still being discussed in the modern age. If a doctor still spoke of the four humours and elements, everyone would think he was mad. But the doctors of the churches talk about the precise nature of the holy trinity still in the same archaic and unedifying way. Fuller does. Should anyone entrust these people with their soul?
Authority in Science
Fuller now seeks to prove that science is subject to the same pressures of authority as religion. His example is the publication of scientific papers which would never see the light of day unless the editor of a scientific journal was willing to publish it. Editors depend too on the opinion of two or three referees about the prospective paper. Fuller’s point is that the editor and referees have the authority to reject work that might nevertheless be valid. It is true that this happens. Injustices have been done that have been later revealed because the person has eventually got into a position where they could reveal it. Others might not be so lucky.
In fact, a rejected author has other journals to try, including many foreign language ones, and anyone who had done genuinely original and important work but could not get it published at all would have been most unlucky. Even if this were to happen, the comments of the referees are usually helpful and when taken into account might effect the desired change. Most scientists must have had papers rejected by referees for improvements to be made, with a recommendation to publish when they have been. Nor is this authority so great or so arbitrary as the leaders of churches have. Fuller is using the polarity argument again. Science is mainly open and democratic, but has a little authoritarianism, whereas churches are authoritarian but tolerate a small degree of free discussion as long as it stays in hand. Science and Christianity are therefore on a par!
The more important aspect of authority in science—funding—is skated over by Fuller. It is much more akin to the power of Popery than the work of editors, and does need serious examination. Here, though, the responsibility passes from scientists to politicians who control the funds and the make up of the funding bodies. Scientists at the topmost level are not in control of their own profession or destiny. Theologians are among the clergy who control churches.
Fuller devotes a page to the story of cold fusion, the supposed fusion of hydrogen atoms to form helium at room temperature, using the simple equipment of electrolysis. The story shows in some ways how science works. The remarkable experiment was published, caused a sensation and also caused a good deal of skepticism. It was repeated and repeated in many laboratories around the world, and eventually the consensus was that the original authors were wrong. It did not work, and was not cold fusion. The odd feature about the case is that the original authors did not publish their work in an academic journal but in popular newspapers. They broke the story to the press and were taken seriously because they were prominent physicists. Why use the press instead of orthodox channels? They knew their interpretation was sensational and probably thought they would not get peer group approval. Perhaps they would have been wiser to have been conventional.
Fuller tries to make out that James Gleick’s book, Chaos, gives an example of science closing ranks. Again, what he says is partly true but typically he contrives to make it seem sinister when it was probably not in the least. Young scientists interested in chaos theory were apparently told their “careers would be in jeopardy”. Though it is meant to sound like a threat, it was most likely to have been sober advice. Young scientists are advised to eschew trendiness while they are building a reputation. There could be nothing worse than to find you have wasted five years on a scientific fad that came to nothing. Besides that, Gleick dramatises it—he was writing a popular book on what would have been a dry subject to most people. Furthermore, some of what Fuller cites of Gleick contradicts his thesis:
Some departments frowned on the somewhat deviant scholars; others advertised for more. Some journals established unwritten rules against submissions on chaos; other journals came forward to handle chaos exclusively.
It all sounds fairly balanced, and not in the least like an authoriatian clamp down. If it was, it was a failed clamp down because chaos became big and popular. The truth is that science tries to discourage faddishness while not stifling imagination and creativity. It does not always get the balance right, but it is right that it should try, otherwise science would finish up anarchic—the dream of Fuller’s opinion, Paul Feyerabend. Having tarred science with the oppressiveness brush, Fuller feels he can permit himself a rare moment of honesty:
Oppression in theological circles has been both heavier and more censorious in the past than any which has prevalied within the sciences.
Could it be that this is a theme worth developing for ignorant Christians who believe Christianity is necessarily sainthood? George Santayana famously said that those who do not remember the past are doomed to relive it. Christians make a point of expunging the whole evil history of Christianity from the mind, if not the record. What should be frightening is that our children might have to relive it, on Santayana’s dictum, if the Christians continue in their dishonest habits. Any truly good Christians would be taking Santayana seriously and berating Christians with their history of crime in the hope that no one else will ever do the same.
Anyway, the outcome is the usual, that both science and religion are the same, conservative and resistant to change. The difference is that religion depends on it. Fuller wants churches to be more willing to change like science, showing that they are far from the same in conservatism. Fuller wants doctrines to be optional for the sake of debating them until their full meanings are uncovered.
Not Infantile, Primitive!
This is the end of the book, a book, Fuller suggests, academic scientists and theologians will not consider remarkable. Except in its ignorance. He repeats the banal conclusions he has reached during the book as if they were remarkable revelations. Perhaps they are to Christians, but he might have done a better job if he had told them frankly to learn some elementary science. He recapitulations are mainly of his polarity joke:
- science is not entirely rational so it is just like Christianity which is not entirely irrational,
- science has its myths, so it is like Christianity which is mythology,
- science uses models of reality, so it is like Christianity which is essentially metaphorical,
- science is not imaginative, but Christian theology is! He must mean imaginary.
Thus there is enough common ground for science and Christianity to work together. Christianity is no longer “infantile” because its philosophers and theologians have made “great advances”. Both science and theology are needed, they are similar and they are complimentary.
Fuller’s ultimate prayer is that denial of one will impoverish the findings of the other. Yet, Christianity has no findings to impoverish so it can freely deny science with no harm coming to it. Science is entirely findings, so, according to Fuller, denial of Christianity would ruin it. The prayer is so lopsided, it is effectively a curse on science. Even so, no honest scientist will be discouraged from denying Christianity. It is not infantile, it is primitive. Not to criticize barbarism is to want to return to it. That is the danger.
