Big universe...small me...

One of my nephews sagely advised me "When you have worries, just think of how big the universe is and how small we are and your worries will go away."

I later told him that I prefered to think how wonderfully powerful and loving God is that he made all that we see and know, and that makes my worries go away.

This is not just a cute bit of theologising, but betrays an unarticulated and probably unconsciously absorbed materialism in the first statement; the second deals with it, but I'm concerned that we've so disconnected God and creation (now its God and 'the universe') that he drifts out of our framing of our experience; thus the importance of allowing the words of Genesis 1, etc. to confront us, discomforting our incipient materialism.

Eyes wide shut!

A friend directed me to an essay by Richard Rorty from 1992: "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids".

Read with a little thought it is scary. Not for its content, but for its indicators of a church that collectively fails to bring to a questioning mind the answers that only come in the Bible: not the John 3:16 answers...we have to get to that. But the philosophical answers that can only be formed from a sound and responsive theology of creation: of a God who made all in a loving immediacy, who is directly involved with a concrete reality and communicates in terms of that reality; who shows in his acts the primacy of personhood in community, of love, and of relationship; all of which evaporates when the church leans over to philosophical and ethical materialism, no longer able to answer anyone.

Some quotes:

I wanted to find some intellectual ... framework that would let me ... hold reality and justice in a single vision.

To say that truth is what works is to reduce the quest for truth to the quest for power. Only an appeal to something eternal, absolute, and good -- like the God of St Thomas, or the 'nature of human beings' described by Aristotle -- would permit one to answer the Nazis...

 ...even if there were no such thing as 'understanding the world' in the Platonic sense -- an understanding from a position outside of (sic) time and history...

Dewey now seemed to me a philosopher who had learned all that Hegel had to teach about how to eschew certainty and eternity, while immunizing himself against pantheism by taking Darwin seriously.

...the whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision had been a mistake...I decided that only religion .. only a nonargumentative faith in a surrogate parent who, unlike my real parent, embodied love, power and justice in equal measure -- could do the trick Plato wanted done.

The two will, for some people, coincide -- as they do in those lucky Christians for whom the love of God and of other human beings are inseparable. 

Interesting to note that Dewey was not attracted by the theistic-evolutionist artifice...he saw no need for it's 'god' at all.

Also interesting that love power and justice come together in equal measure in God who created (setting the parameters of our approach to being, ethics and knowledge), loved and redeemed.

In avoiding a real time creation account, and fussing about obscure readings of 'days' instead of taking Moses' lead and building an assertive philosophy on this ground, the church talks to no issue of moment for any thinking person.

Real world effects only result from real world causes; if the creation account is not accurate to the real world of event and order, then it doesn't tell us what really happened and it is something else that really happened. It is this something else, then, and not the creation account, that is the real cause of the effect we experience and can only be the real basis for our approach to being, ethics and knowledge. This fact de-basing what would be built on a real-time creation as Moses has taught us, and been affirmed by the word of God in Exodus 20:1 and 11. So, what would this 'something else' be? As far as we could tell, it is akin to Dewey's position, leaving us in Rorty's dilemma, or equally in Sartre's...where nothing finally hangs together, no integration point, no final relationship, no final love, but everything an outworking of random material interactions: all that we have is...power. Not love, not hope, existentially alone in the universe and adrift.