Why the Delay?

On page 100 of The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion, Herman Wouk (if I'm interpreting him correctly) talks about how human beings have been on earth for such an infinitesimal amount of time, in comparison with the vast age of the universe.  I once saw a visual aid about this in a museum: it showed a line, which represented the age of the universe, and a very tiny sliver of that line was how long humans have existed.

An atheist I know once made that point to me: If there is a God, he wondered, why did God take so long to create human beings?  Of course, young-earth creationists believe that God didn't take that long, so they don't struggle with this issue, but those who accept modern scientific consensus while also believing in God as the creator may wonder why there were so many millennia before human beings, who are supposedly the focal point of God's plan, finally appeared.  Then there's the issue of theistic evolution.  Many who consider a scenario that accepts evolution and God as creator may inquire: Why didn't God simply create human beings in one fell swoop, rather than allowing them to develop from proto-human creatures?

I have the same sort of question about the narrative that I got growing up, within Armstrongism.  I was raised on the gap-theory, the belief that there could be billions of years between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.  The gap-theory accepted the scientific consensus regarding the age of the universe, and it was open to the eras of dinosaurs and mammoths occurring during that time.  But I wonder what exactly the point was.  Why didn't God just cut to the chase and make human beings, who, as I said, are supposedly the focal point of God's plan?

A common answer is that time is not a factor with God.  What to us is a long time is not necessarily a long time for God.  I'm cool with that, pretty much.  I'm a little skeptical when Christians apply that insight to eschatology, when they argue that Jesus' statements that the end is near are not necessarily false for the simple reason that "near" to God may not be what's "near" for us.  I'm skeptical because that would be mis-communication on the part of God: wouldn't you expect for God to adopt our understanding of "near" when he speaks to us, since that's essential to communication?  Moreover, if God were attempting to comfort suffering people with the notion that God's reign is near, when it's not actually near but could occur centuries after their time, then the comforting message is false.

But, when it comes to origins, I'm more open to the idea that God may not measure time as we do, that millions of years could have gone by, but that wasn't much time for God.

Why would God use evolution, though?  I'm not sure.  Perhaps God foresaw that evolution by natural selection would lead to the result that he wanted----intelligent life.  God's strategy may not be so much to micromanage every little detail, but rather to allow events to unfold, and to be there whenever we want a relationship with God.

My Science Block

On pages 48-49 of The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion, Herman Wouk states:

"A distinguished physicist once gave me a book of his inscribed, 'To Herman Wouk, one of the few who does not write if he does not understand.'  Not true here, alas.  About astrophysics, I am the man on the street.  As a Columbia freshman I registered for an astronomy course, but upon leafing the textbook crawling with calculus, I dropped out fast.  Astronomers, I guess, hear God talk all the time.  In that language, I never will.  Galileo and Newton need no further words of mine."

Wouk is probably more of a science-guy than I am, though!  To be honest, I had a hard time getting into his discussions about science in The Language God Talks.  They just didn't interest me, whereas his discussions about religion did.

I've long been this way about science.  I remember when my fifth-grade teacher was having conferences with each student to discuss grades, and she noticed that I stayed the same in science: in both periods, I got a "B".  She said she had an idea about why I didn't improve in science: because I didn't like it.  And I was like, "Wow, how did you know?!" (And I was not sarcastic in my response!)

There were a few times in my junior high and high school years when I got more into science.  In seventh grade, I studied science diligently and got good grades.  Why?  I think it was because I admired my teacher and wanted him to like me.  He was also my home-room teacher, and so, in a sense, he exemplified to me the challenge of junior high school.  When I was able to answer one of his questions about science correctly, I felt smart.

In eighth grade, I was a diligent student in science.  I even made comic books about the class material in studying for my quizzes and tests!  I think that I was studying hard to be among the smart kids, since I was wanting to impress a particular girl.  But, to tell you the truth, science didn't interest me then.

In high school, I took biology, chemistry, and physics, but they just did not engage me that much.  I usually studied for my biology and chemistry exams the day of the exams!  Regarding physics, I tried much harder, since it was Advanced Placement, but there were some physics problems that I simply could not figure out!  One science class that I actually enjoyed, however, was physical science.  This was true for a variety of reasons.  For one, I felt smart in that class, since I had an edge in the first semester of it, having already taken chemistry.  Second, the material was understandable to me.  It wasn't over my head.  Moreover, I was becoming more religious, and so I was excited about studying God's creation, without overdoing it by getting into territory that was too complex for me!

Math came easier for me.  I one time took an IQ test, and my math IQ turned out to be above average (not off-the-charts genius, but above average).  I took lots of math----Algebra I-II, Geometry, Analytic Geometry, Trigonometry, and Calculus----and I did quite well in my classes.

Yet, when I entered college, and I had the option of skipping a subject area, I skipped science and math altogether.  I was required to take a quantitative reasoning class, so I took logic.  And, in the Honor Scholars' Program I was in, I had to take a seminar on science and postmodernism, but that class didn't get into the depths of science that much, so I did fine.

Science still does not interest me a great deal.  Try as I might, I have difficulty getting into nature shows.  They just don't interest me.  I prefer to watch documentaries about history, politics, and religion----the adventures and struggles of human beings!  I get more interested in science when it is tied into religion, however.  I enjoy reading different perspectives on creation and evolution, for example.  In college, I read on my own time a debate on creation and evolution between creationist Duane Gish and evolutionist Ken Saladin, and I was fascinated by what Saladin was saying.  Whenever some of my more scientifically-inclined friends discuss with me their views on the interaction between astronomy and religious issues, I'm usually interested.  But, when the topic is science alone, I tend not to get excited.

I have contemplated, however, reading more elementary books about science.  My religious beliefs hold that nature somehow reveals the mind of God, and I have thought that perhaps studying science on a superficial level could help me to arrive at a greater appreciation for the order and beauty within nature (though not all of nature is orderly and beautiful!).

Aaron Jastrow's Sermon

I finished Herman Wouk's The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion.

At the end of the book, Wouk quotes the sermon of Professor Aaron Jastrow, who was a character in Wouk's book, War and Remembrance.  As I read the sermon, it seemed familiar to me, and that was because my family watched the War and Remembrance miniseries when it was on TV in 1988.  The miniseries was jarring to me at the time because it was the first time when I saw on television a depiction of the Holocaust, and I remember that I cried when Jews (including Professor Jastrow) were being gassed in the concentration camp.  I recall that Professor Jastrow was reciting Psalm 23 as he went to his death.

Professor Jastrow in his sermon spoke about Job.  Jastrow's assumption was that Job was a Jew, which is not explicitly in the biblical text.  But his main point was that the Jews themselves are like Job, in that they praise God even when the universe does not make sense.  After my family watched the sermon scene, my Dad said that it was a good sermon.

I recently watched the miniseries' depiction of the speech on YouTube (see here), and it was more pious than what I read in Wouk's quotation of the sermon in The Language God Talks, for Jastrow in the book questions whether God's reason for allowing the Satan to afflict Job (namely, to meet the Satan's challenge) was a good enough reason.  But the main point in the book's version of the sermon is the same as what was on the miniseries.

Although I finished The Language God Talks, I may still write another post about it, maybe even two.

A Tiny Speck in a Vast Universe

For my write-up today on Herman Wouk's The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion, I'd like to feature Wouk's quotation of theoretical physicist Richard Feynman on page 65.  Feynman states:

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil----which is the view that religion has.  The stage is too big for the drama."

Some of what Feynman says is actually compatible with certain sentiments in the Bible.  The Psalmist in Psalm 8 asks "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?"  God in the Book of Job essentially tells Job that human beings are not the center of the universe, for God pays attention to other aspects of nature, as well.  And why not?  God is a creative God.  Would it be so unlikely that God would create creatures and other aspects of nature for his own satisfaction, even if they don't relate that much to human beings?

But I can understand why people might ask: Why are human beings so small----not just small, but infinitesimal----in a vast universe?  Doesn't that conflict with any religious notion that God is so concerned about the human struggle for good against evil?  Moreover, in Romans 8:19-22, Paul affirms that the entire creation groans and waits for the manifestation of the sons of God, when the creation will be freed from its corruption.  So is the entire universe affected by events pertaining to people who live on an infinitesimal planet? 

My Armstrongite heritage, as I understand it, interpreted Romans 8:19-22 to mean that sons of God would rule over their own planets in the new heavens and the new earth.  Or something to that effect.  When many of us consider outer space, what strikes many of us is its futility.  There is so much space out there that lacks intelligent life.  It all appears rather meaningless!  But, according to my Armstrongite heritage, this will not be the case in the new heavens and the new earth; rather, that space will be populated with life.  And the sons of God, which Christians will become, will be involved in bringing about and supervising this entire process.

Whether Paul himself had that sort of vision, I'm not entirely sure.  When I was in a New Testament Greek class, my professor said that what Paul probably had in mind was things such as deserts, which are futile.  Paul was probably echoing certain prophets in the Hebrew Bible, who held that God would one day replenish the deserts and bring forth life on them.  But didn't biblical authors believe that human beings were small in comparison to the vast cosmos, for the Psalmist in Psalm 8, after all, asks what is man, that God is mindful of him?  In a sense, they probably did.  I doubt that they envisioned what scientists know now----that the earth is a tiny speck in a vast universe.  My hunch is that the biblical authors believed in a universe that was much smaller than what we today know to be the case.  But they could still look at the stars at night, notice how many they were, and feel rather small.

But perhaps Paul and the author of Psalm 8 had only a limited insight, not only into the extent of the cosmos, but into the extent of God's plan.  Maybe God some day will replenish outer space, and the sons of God will be involved in that process.  One problem that I had with Armstrongite discussion of this issue was the dogmatism that often accompanied it: that Christians who did not believe that way were looked down upon.  I wondered what right Armstrongites had to be so smug and dogmatic, when there's no text in the Bible that explicitly says that believers will rule their own planets!  But God is a big God, and the universe is a vast place.  It may happen that the manifestation of the sons of God in the eschaton will lead to a dramatic transformation of the cosmos, as life comes out of apparent futility.

God, the Bible, and Meaning

I started Herman Wouk's The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion.  Here, I'll feature something that Wouk says on pages 10-11:

"...the Bible has long been waning as the core of religious upbringing, a way of life once handed from father to son down the millennia, rooted in an epic history and an encyclopedic literature; a practical guide to the insoluble mysteries, brief joys, harsh blows, and everyday workings of a human existence.  That upbringing survives here and there among our people, but most Jewish babies----in Israel, in America, in all the diaspora----are born today into the world view of Feynman and Gell-Mann; and a Nobel colleague of theirs, the physicist Steven Weinberg, has written lucid books in which the insoluble mysteries loom especially large, most of all the old agnostic paradox of an orderly universe without seeming purpose."

Of course, a number of atheists will say that people can endow life with purpose, whether there is a God or not.  Perhaps the Bible reflects one attempt to provide life with purpose----to give people a sense of mission beyond themselves, to guide them through the ups and downs of life, and to entertain them with stories with which they can identify. 

Is the Bible "a practical guide to insoluble mysteries"?  I think that it contains a lot of insights that can instruct and edify people.  I wouldn't exactly look to it for natural scientific knowledge, for my impression is that it reflects ancient Near Eastern cosmology rather than the cosmos as current scientists understand it.  But can the Bible surprise us by addressing things that some may not expect it to address, such as what's going on in our lives, or insights of psychology?  I think so.  I like the rabbinic statement that we can turn the Torah and turn it again and be surprised when we find something new.  Texts are complex, as are readers.

If (or, according to most scientists, since) evolution is the way things are, is life without purpose?  I don't think so.  Of course, as I said, there are atheists who believe that we can come up with our own meaning to life, even without a God.  But I don't believe that evolution precludes God's existence.  Perhaps God started the whole process and has watched it unfold for many years, as complex organisms have developed and as humanoids have learned and grown, and this God desires a relationship with us.