Sympathy For Fundamentalists and Atheists

It is not easy to live between science and faith. I can certainly see why some people feel it is important to just pick one or the other. There is truly a hard road that lies between.

Once you start questioning certain Christian assumptions and look deeper for the sources, there are some rather disturbing questions that get raised. Many of us don't take the Bible literally, anymore. Well, if that's true, then you start thinking: If God never spoke to Abraham in actual words and if God never handed the Law to Moses, then why in the world do we believe any of this stuff? Why do we believe in a God at all? Who told us that God exists??

If original sin didn't enter the world through Adam and Eve's sin (since Adam & Eve likely didn't exist), then what exactly did Jesus come to save us from? (See Bishop Spong's Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism).

It is easy to despair in light of this. Its easy to say "Its all just made up!" But there are good guides out there, though they are few and far between. I would argue that this hard path to faith is what it's all about.

I think once we start asking these questions, we have the potential for a really adult and healthy faith. A more true faith, if you will. By using the word "true", I am not trying to demean anyone else's faith, only to say that this definition gets to the core of what all faith ultimately is--It is a faith in God, not a faith in the testimony of others. A faith that is a true reaching out into the great unknown that each of us is called to do on our own (and in community).

Its not a matter of just believing that God announced himself to the patriarchs in clear and certain terms and taking that at face value. There is a role for a long-standing faith tradition, but it is not as much about handing us "truths" that we simply swallow whole. It is about offering us some breadcrumbs left by previous travelers for food and direction (manna, if you will) and some snippets of advice in code, the stumbling, incoherent speech of a person truly in awe who can't really describe what they have found, but they sure hope they can get you to see what they see, somehow, if they can just point to it and hope you can catch some glimpse.

You may end up with an answer like: The human race has sensed and experienced God and built theologies around that over time. How does that sit with you?

It is not a faith devoid of reason, nor is it a faith that does not have a reason for being. I do believe God does reveal self to us. It may not be through burning bushes or tablets of law, but the revelation is there. As my prof Barb Finan says, "We can know something about this God."

Scripture scholar Raymond Brown would urge people not to craft a sermon based upon simply debunking the literalness of scripture accounts (101 Questions and Answers on the Bible). What good does it accomplish to say "The world was not created in 6 days" and leave it at that? That's not exactly spiritual food, and you could risk jeopardizing the entire faith of the audience. Why stomp out pillars of someone else's faith and leave them nothing to rebuild with? Faith is a good thing, after all. A better sermon might be like: "The world was not created in 6 days, which frees us to see the ability of God the Creator in the wonders of evolution from the Big Bang forward. The Biblical accounts of creation can be enriched with an understanding of evolution, and visa versa." Showing people how to embrace science while still maintaining faith is a wonderful gift. Perhaps that is a lonely road people should trod themselves, but it wouldn't hurt to have faith communities out there offering a helping hand, would it?

People have an "Experience of God", as Dermot Lane puts it in a book with the same title. People have a sense of faith and a relationship to the Divine. I would add that when science conflicts with that, people either pick science or faith, depending on which has left the stronger impression. Fundamentalists cannot deny their faith nor their experience of God, so the parts of science that do not reconcile with this faith they simply throw out. Scientists do the same thing with religion. While it is important to reconcile science with religion, it is better to try to keep them both alive.