No Time for God

Stephen Hawking had no time for God. In Brief Answers to the Big Questions and other places he claimed that the role played by time at the beginning of the universe is the final key to removing the need for a grand designer and revealing how the universe created itself.

On Hawking’s view, time itself began at the instant of the Big Bang. This claim is not uncontroversial among scientists.* But if we accept for the sake of argument Hawking’s understanding of the physics of the big bang, what are we to make of his claim that this removes “the need for a grand designer” and reveals “how the universe created itself”?

Three observations:

(1) The question of the existence of God should not be reduced to the question whether we need to postulate a god to explain the existence of everything else. The only “theology” with which Hawking shows familiarity is one that uses “gods/God” to plug in the gaps in our knowledge. This is completely inadequate for Christian theology and I am not sure that it is adequate for any other major religion.

(2) The conflation of the language of causation (used in his argument in a specific sense) with that of design (used in his conclusion about “the need for a grand designer”) seems to be indicative of a more general failure to differentiate causality. Since Aristotle four types of cause have been distinguished: formal, material, efficient and final. Natural laws define material and efficient causes. To deny that there are formal and final causes on the basis that the natural sciences cannot demonstrate them is a logical fallacy.

(3) Language of the universe creating itself is not unproblematic, not only because it attributes agency to the universe but also because we cannot readily conceive of an action of which we cannot say that there was a before and after. In other words, we could just as well say that the universe is eternal: if time does not exist apart from our space-time universe, there is no time at which the universe is not. If Hawking’s science can be shown to be correct, we can exclude a temporal cause for the universe but this not only fails to demonstrate that the big bang was an uncaused event but also still leaves us short of a compelling answer to the question why there is something rather than nothing. (Hawking seems to claim that there really is nothing because for everything positive matter there is, there is negative energy to cancel it out, cf. this previous post, but this does not sound to me like an answer.)

What then is the relationship between God and time? Gregory E. Ganssle who authored the entry on “God and Time” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy also edited God and Time: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 2001) which hosts a discussion between proponents of four different views: Paul Helm who defends the view of divine eternity as timeless, Alan G. Padgett who argues that God is everlastingly temporal but not in physical (metrical) time, William Lane Craig who speaks of God as timeless without creation and temporal within creation, and Nicholas Wolterstorff who advocates “unqualified divine temporality.” As far as I can see Hawking’s science would not rule out a single one of these options.

The leap from Hawking’s reconstruction of the origins of the universe to atheism is not made on the strength of the science but relies on the truth of his premises, namely (a) there cannot be causality without temporality and (b) all temporality is material. This means that we seem to be dealing with an entirely circular argument.  

* Other physicists favour “the idea that our universe is but one expanding bubble in a much larger pre-existing area of space-time, sometimes called the multiverse” (source).

Hawking on Belief Systems

A few observations on the first BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week in 2019, Stephen Hawking’s Brief Answers to the Big Questions, beautifully read by Anton Lesser.

“Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion. Religion was an early attempt to answer the questions we all ask: why are we here, where did we come from? Long ago, the answer was almost always the same: gods made everything. The world was a scary place, so even people as tough as the Vikings believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses. Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science.”

Hawking believed that religion and science are two fundamental belief systems, competing frameworks for understanding the universe around us. The better we are able to explain events and phenomena in terms of natural causes, the less need there is to appeal to the capriciousness of the gods until the god who lives in the gaps of our knowledge can abdicate because no gaps are left. The final loophole to be closed, in this view, was the question of the origin of the universe. Who or what was there before the Big Bang to get everything going? Because we are (nearly) able to offer a definitive answer to the question how the universe begun by the application of universal and unchangeable physical laws alone,* Hawking felt, there was no longer any need for a god. Science offers a simpler alternative.

I cannot judge the soundness of Hawking’s science (and have no great issues with accepting it) but it is clear to me that Hawking pronounced on more than science and in ways which are clearly unsound.

The claim that “people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science” is untrue. I do not know whether this sentence was meant as a dig at his first wife, whether the claim was informed by some unfortunate encounters, or whether it is purely the result of wishful thinking. In any case, it is not plausible that Hawking did not come across a good few people to whom this verdict does not apply and we therefore seem to have prima facie evidence here for a refusal on his part to acknowledge facts that do not fit his world-view.

Science is a method, not a belief system. The scientific method is capable of being turned into a belief system but only by the addition of non-scientific propositions about the nature of reality. The method itself does not yield the world-view Hawking espoused.

Religion is not a belief system either. This is so not only because every religion is a cultural system that encompasses far more than belief, including also behaviours and practices, but, more importantly, because “religion” in the abstract cannot be a belief system. The various cultural systems we designate religions and the world-views they imply are incompatible with each other and cannot add up to any system.

Whether the Vikings “believed in supernatural beings” in order “to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses” is a matter for historians to debate. As a biblical scholar, I claim that this will not do as an explanation for any “religion” promoted in the Bible.

First, there is little concern with explaining natural phenomena in the Bible. There is a delight in creation expressed in various places and no attempt to curb curiosity about explaining phenomena naturally.

Secondly, the understanding of disasters as divine punishment is not a given. There is no assumption that we can readily deduce anything about the divine will from the presence of disastrous natural or historical events and several explicit warnings against assuming that suffering is the result of having offended God. 

Thirdly, biblical authors assume a version of compatibilism and the possibility of explaining events at different levels (the destruction of the city can be seen as a divine judgement even when it did not involve any unusual, supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events), philosophical views that are at odds with Hawking’s zero-sum-game assumptions.

Fourthly, the Bible speaks of a Creator God who is logical and has imposed order on his universe. This renders the language of “laws of nature” plausible (see, e.g., Jeremiah 31:35-36; 33:25), if the genitive is understood as “laws pertaining to nature” rather than “laws given by Nature,” as if nature was a personal agent. 

* The explanation is roughly as follows: It seems at first as if three ingredients are required to build a universe: matter, energy, and space. Einstein taught us that mass and energy are basically the same thing. Energy and space are therefore the only ingredients needed and these were spontaneously created out of nothing according to the laws of science. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called ‘negative energy’ (if you build a hill on a flat land, you also make a hole; the stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out). Laws concerning gravity and motion tell us that space itself is a vast store of negative energy, enough to ensure that everything adds up to zero (the mass and the energy is like the hill; the corresponding hole is spread throughout space). If the universe adds up to nothing then you don’t need a god to create it. So what triggered the whole process? Quantum mechanics tells us that particles such as protons really can appear at random, stick around for a while, and then vanish again, to reappear somewhere else. Because the universe was very small at its beginning there is no need for an explanation beyond the laws of nature. The Big Bang was a random act of the sort quantum mechanics observes for protons.

Referring to God

The question whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God is being discussed ad nausea on the blogosphere at the moment. Much of it is rehearsing some fairly obvious points, some of it is sloganeering. Only a few posts explore the logical issues involved, e.g. Ed Feser on the one side, and Bill Vallicella on the other. One seems to be missing is a discussion of the premises involved. Indeed a good many commenters show zero awareness of the possibility that there might be an issue here. God is not an object to which we can unambiguously point and then agree or disagree about its features. Bill Vallicella asks,

What makes my use of 'God' (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?

This is the question. To what am I pointing when I say "God"? If I answer the question by way of a philosophical definition of divinity (Godhead), the rest is easy. I only have to establish whether the God worshipped by Christians and the God worshipped by Muslims agree with my definition of Godhead. If they both do, Muslims and Christians are worshipping the same God. If not, they don't.

If I answer the question by way of theology ("what are the essential things I have to say about God to make proper reference to him?"), the argument proceeds along the same lines. In fact, the distinction between a philosophical and a theological approach may be one of convenience because the two usually lead to opposite conclusions. But they do seem to me genuinely different at a deeper level in that the former seeks to abstract without reference to any specific religious tradition, while the latter believes this to be impossible or inadvisable.

Those pursuing a more philosophical approach might define "God" in the words of David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God, 7, as follows:

the infinite fullness of being, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, from whom all things come and upon whom all things depend for every moment of their existence, without whom nothing at all could exist.

It follows that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, as do possibly Hindus and other polytheists who acknowledge one Godhead distinct from specific deities that in monotheistic traditions would more likely be referred to as angels rather than gods.

Those pursuing a more theological approach will tend towards the opposite conclusion. Christian theologians speak of God as being both one and (in another sense) three and both essentially so. If they reject the claim that God is essentially one and only accidentally (in another sense) three, they are likely to reject the claim that Muslims worship the same God, as Muslims do not worship the Trinity. Muslim theologians speak of God as the one whose eternal word is revealed in the Quran and to the extent that they consider "and Muhammed is his prophet" an essential part of defining "God", they must reject the claim that Christians worship the same God.

A third approach would be to define "God" biographically or, more accurately, by way of a history of revelation. In the context of the present discussion one might often find a reference to Abraham. God is "the God of Abraham," i.e. the one who revealed himself to Abraham. In and of itself such a reference to Abraham is not helping the discussion as much as many seem to think. Christians believe that Abraham worshipped the Trinity. Many, maybe most, Christians would qualify this by adding that Abraham had no clear conception of the Trinitarian nature of God. What is often overlooked that if it is true that Abraham had no access to Nicene-Constantinopolitan theology, neither did he have access to classical theist philosophy and the claim that Abraham worshipped the capital-B-Being is no less proper as well as problematic than the claim that he worshipped the Trinity.

Abraham, we believe, got to know God. His descendants received that knowledge and with further revelation a deeper knowledge of God was gained. Biography serves as an analogy here. God of course did not change but perception of him grew. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob became the God who led Israel out of Egypt, YHWH who revealed himself through the Torah given to Moses, and climatically the one who raised Jesus from the dead.

Such a biographical approach is closer to the theological approach but without necessarily leading to the same conclusion. Say, by way of a rough analogy, A and B got to know G from childhood. B lost touch with G in adulthood. C got to know G only from adulthood (but of course learns about G's childhood in the process of making further acquaintance). D hears about G but never gets to meet him. Do they all refer to the same person?

A (the historical community of Jews who follow Christ) and C (Christians who joined the church from outside the synagogue) clearly do. B (the community of Jews who reject Christ) seems to refer to the same person as well but less reliably so, as their conception is based on childhood memories without a proper awareness of G's adult life. D arguably also refers to the same person at least in intent, although the link to the referent is more tenuous than with B to the extent that hear-say is different from memory. Lacking a genuine, contemporary acquaintance, neither B nor D can be said to be on speaking terms with G. (This is where some commenters focus on the word "worship".)

The analogy is merely meant to sketch the line of reasoning that would follow from an approach that identifies reference by way of tradition rather than philosophical postulate or theological thesis.

Which of these approaches is right or best? The interesting thing is that most commenters seem to assume that theirs is self-evidently the only approach there can be.

Do Jews and Christians worship the same God?

This question is even harder to answer than the question addressed in the previous post whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Christianity is sometimes spoken of as a daughter religion of Judaism. It is more accurate to speak of them as siblings. Both have the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament as their first canonical document. Both have arguably been shaped as much or more by a second volume, the New Testament in one case, the Talmud in the other. Events in the first century were obviously crucial for the development of the Christian faith; the destruction of the temple within a generation of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was arguably just as decisive for Judaism.

But this is not the chief obstacle in addressing the question of the title. The chief obstacle is that being Jewish is an ethnic and cultural identity at least as much as a religious one. Many Jews are agnostics or atheists.[1] A good few Jews are Christians. Some Jews dabble in New Age spiritualities, others follow one of a number of ultra-orthodox traditions. There are  orthodox, conservative and liberal interpretations of Jewish faith and traditions.

In other words, it is perfectly impossible to generalise about Jewish theology. Christianity and Islam have of course their own divisions and denominations but what they are agreed on arguably provides a sufficient core for at least addressing the question whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

I see no benefit in developing a detailed taxonomy but maybe four things can be said by way of a rough sketch of some configurations.

(1) Jewish atheists do not worship the same God as Christians.

(2) Jewish Christians worship the same God as non-Jewish Christians.

(3) The concept of God held by many Jews is probably less definitive than that held by most Muslims. For Muslims the Quran offers an authoritative account of God which is explicitly formulated over against the Christian faith.[2] With a less definitive picture it becomes harder to say whether an account is an inadequate portrayal of God or an account of a different “God”.[3]  

(4) Forms of Jewish belief in which the Hebrew Bible is read through the lens of a more definitive theology which has been developed in monistic or other anti-Christian ways are closer to presenting an account of a fictional character based on a real person (as I have suggested for Islam) than forms of Jewish belief which are open to a variety of experiences and descriptions of God.

And two final points, not so much by way of conclusion but as a reminder:

(5) There is a significant difference between a (Jewish) prayer whose words a Christian can appropriate without qualms and a (Muslim) prayer which makes claims that a Christian cannot affirm.

(6) A Christian prays in the name of Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit to the Father or to Jesus or to the Holy Spirit.  

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[1] It is not generally considered possible for a Muslim or Christian to be an atheist and rightly so. An atheist can emerge from a Muslim or Christian background but they cease to be Christian or Muslim (in anything but maybe the vaguest cultural sense) when they identify as atheists. A Jewish atheist does not cease to be a Jew.

[2] The Christian faith is misrepresented in the Quran but this misrepresentation is canonical and there is no ground for believing that a properly understood Trinitarian faith would be acceptable to any school of Islamic theology.

[3] The same question arises with regard to other, modern movements. Mormonism may be closer to misrepresenting the true God, while Deism present a different “God” from Christianity.

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

Do Muslims worship the same God as Christians? has quickly become the most viewed post on my blog and by some distance. This is a re-written and abbreviated version of the earlier post. 

Some think it “bizarre” to deny that Muslims worship the same God as Christians. Others phrase the question differently and ask “Is the God of Muhammad the Father of Jesus?” to which the answer is “Of course not.” What are some of the things we should consider here?

“Allah” is Arabic for “God” and has been used by Arabic speaking Christians from before Muhammad was even born but “Allah” was also used by pagans to refer to the moon-god worshipped in Mecca. Just because the same word is used to refer to two entities does not mean that they are the same.

But, it could be argued, “God” (capitalised, distinguished from “god”) refers to someone unique, the Creator of heaven and earth, the only one to be worshipped as God. Is not this the one whom we praise and to whom we direct our prayers whether we are Christians or Muslims? It is certainly not possible that there are two of this sort. God is one of a kind. “God” (capitalised) cannot take a plural.

The difficulty is that God is characterised in the Quran in ways which do not merely diverge a little from the God worshipped by Christians but are significantly different. The portrayals of “God” in Bible and Quran overlap but there are also big contradictions that go to the heart of who God is. At best only one of the portrayals can be true.

If their God is the same, either Muslims or Christians (or both) bear false witness about him. Those who affirm the truth of the Quran cannot but deny that the Christian Scriptures accurately testify to the truth about God; those who affirm the Christian faith cannot but question the characterisation of God in the Quran.

The question is how significant these divergences are. Consider this: Allah-who-does-not-beget and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ cannot be the same person. The God-who-became-human is not the God to which Muhammad testifies. The God-who-lives-in-Christians-by-His-Spirit is not God as recognised in the Quran. The God of which the Quran speaks is not tri-une and therefore cannot be Love, Love-among-persons-from-all-eternity.

So the question is whether these ways in which I have just described God are secondary to a more basic idea of a Deity that is the grand architect of the universe or whether they are fundamental to how we must speak about God.

In truth, I believe God is essentially Love, essentially Trinitarian. It is the fact that he created the universe which is secondary. If that is so, the Allah to which the Quran bears witness may be better described as a fictional character (loosely) based on a real person.

Do Muslims worship the same God as Christians?

In short, as explored in the previous two posts, this is not in fact the only question that matters in deciding whether to open a church to a service of Muslim prayers, and the answer to the question is not as clear-cut as some seem to think.

Kelvin Holdsworth considers it “bizarre” to deny that Muslims worship the same God as Christians. Glen Scrivener asks the slightly different question “Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammed?” and answers “Of course not.”

Here are some incomplete considerations. 

Language. “Allah” is Arabic for “God” and it must therefore follow that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. This line of argument reflects a basic confusion of terms and referents.

True, “Allah” is Arabic for “God” and has been used by Arabic speaking Christians from before Muhammad was even born until today to refer to our God, maybe except for places where the local government doesn’t allow non-Muslims to use the term. In addition, before Muhammad came along, “Allah” was regularly used by polytheists to refer to the moon-god worshipped in Mecca.

The English word “God/god” has Germanic roots and was used to refer to Odin, the chief Teutonic deity who was thought to live on top of the world-tree and to have created the first humans with his wife Freya, a blonde, blue-eyed goddess of love and fertility.

Are these then all the same? The Tri-une God is Mohammed’s Allah is the moon-good is the husband of a blonde, blue-eyed goddess just because various people use the word “God” (“Allah”) to refer to these entities? Of course not.

Referential uniqueness. But what about the fact that some things are said of Allah (God) in Islamic theology and God (Allah) in Christian theology which can only be predicated of one and the same person? Thus Allah is said in the Quran to be the only one to be worshipped just as the Bible affirms that only God is to be worshipped. Muslims seek to direct their worship to the Creator of the universe, so do Christians. From this perspective the Muslim Allah and the Christian God cannot be two different, competing gods. But does this necessarily mean that the Allah of the Quran and the God of the Bible are in fact the same God (Allah)? No, because it is possible that one (or both) of them is fictional or that false claims are made about one or the other (or both).

Characterisation. The God to which the Bible bears witness can be characterised in one way, the God of which the Quran speaks must be characterised in another way. The portrayals overlap, even allowing for the fact that "compassionate" and "merciful" etc. do not necessarily mean the same in these different contexts, but there are also significant contradictions so that (at best) only one of the portrayals can be true.

The question here is what sort of divergence can be tolerated before it becomes impossible to affirm that we believe in the same God. Do those who hold out placards saying “God hates fags” believe in the same God as I do? Maybe, maybe not. At the very least, I would want to say that they bear false witness about God. 

Those who affirm the truth of the Quran cannot but deny that the Christian Scriptures accurately testify to the truth; those who affirm the Christian faith cannot but question the characterisation of God in the Quran.

Christians and Muslims who sit lightly on their respective Scriptures may find more common ground in a less specific notion of God (or one that is specific in some respects but vague in others) but those who affirm the historic Christian faith can do hardly other than conclude that the God of the Quran is either a false God or a false picture of the true God.

Experience of worship. Kevin Holdsworth argues, “If Paul could recognise those worshipping “an unknown god” as people who were worshipping the same God as he was and then use that recognition to go on to share his experience of God with them, then it doesn’t seem to me to be that difficult for us to presume that the Muslims are worshipping the same God as we are worshipping.”

Alas, there were lots of temples in Athens dedicated to one god or another. Paul picked up specifically the devotion to “an unknown god”. Why? Because he was looking for a starting point to share the truth of the Gospel and the idea that the Athenians were worshipping someone they did not know served the purpose well. In John’s Gospel Jesus tells even his Jewish opponents that they do not know God. It is a tenet found elsewhere in the NT that those who do not know Christ do not know God. Hence "unknown god" is a suitable starting point.

The situation with Islam is rather different. Muslims do not acknowledge that they worship a God they do not know. As a post-Christian religion Islam contradicts the Christian faith explicitly. The starting point is therefore different, even if the end point (faith in Christ) were to remain the same.

Can those who worship in one tradition really know what it is like what worship in another tradition means? We can listen to one another. Should we privilege the witness of converts (in either direction) because they have insider experience of both religions? Maybe, but this is not likely to be conclusive. Converts report various levels of discontinuity, some more compatible with the view that we are talking about one true and one false God, others more compatible with the view that Islam and Christianity present one true and one false portrayal of God. The devout would have had to unlearn some things, while continuing with other things.

What are the options?

• Some claim that referential uniqueness demands that we identify the Islamic-conceived Allah with the God in whom we Christians believe. As indicated above, this is a logical fallacy, as it excludes other conceivable options.
• Others say that the overlap, especially with regard to characteristics that can only be assigned to the one true God, allows us to presume that we are worshipping the same God, even if we have serious reservations about the portrayal of God in one or both religions.
• Still others insist that because it is not possible for someone to have and not have a son, Allah-who-does-not-beget and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ cannot be the same person. 

Which of these options we find most attractive will also relate to our own conception about what or who God essentially is. 

Those for whom God is essentially “the ground of our existence” (or some such thing) that manifests itself to some but maybe not to others in personal ways will cast their nets most widely, maybe even claiming that in the end all human beings are striving towards the divine regardless of the religious or non-religious forms through which this happens.

Those for whom God is first of all the grand architect of the universe (or some such thing) who secondarily can be said to send prophets and have a son etc. will likely be attracted to the second option.

Those who believe that God is essentially tri-une (Love between persons, even before the creation of the world) will likely be attracted to the third option. 

While I do not exclude the possibility that "you worship what you do not know" may apply to Muslims in the sense that their worship is directed to the one true God but without personal knowledge of that God, I lean towards the third option. Muhammad's Allah is not the Holy Spirit who leads us into all truth. Muhammad's Allah is not the Son who sets us free. Muhammad's Allah is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Muhammad's Allah is not tri-une. The Allah to which the Quran bears witness is maybe best described as a fictional character (loosely) based on a real person.

PS: To what extent angels and demons might make use of worship of a fictional character is another discussion again.

An argument in favour of equating the Allah of the Quran with the God of the Bible is put forward by Miroslav Volf in his Allah: A Christian Response, reviewed by Mark Durie here.

Believing in God and believing in fairies

Believing in God and believing in fairies are two completely different things. David B. Hart puts it well:

To speak of “God” properly, then—to use the word in a sense consonant with the teachings of Orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Baháí, a great deal of antique paganism, and so forth—is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. God so understood is not something poised over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being. In one sense he is “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of discrete, finite things. In another sense he is “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things. …

Yet the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God—especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side—is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact. …

At a trivial level, one sees the confusion in some of the more shopworn witticism of popular atheism: “I believe neither in God nor in the fairies at the bottom of my garden,” for instance, or “All people are atheists in regard to Zeus, Wotan, and most other gods; I simply disbelieve in one god more.” … Beliefs regarding fairies are beliefs about a certain kind of object that may or may not exist within the world, and such beliefs have much the same sort of intentional shape and rational content as beliefs regarding one’s neighbors over the hill or whether there are such things as black swans. Beliefs regarding God concern the source and ground and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at all. Fairies and gods, if they exist, occupy something of the same conceptual space as organic cells, photons, and the force of gravity, and so the sciences might perhaps have something to say about them, if a proper medium for investigating them could be found. … God, by contrast, is the infinite actuality that makes it possible for either photons or (possibly) fairies to exist, and so can be “investigated” only, on the one hand, by acts of logical deduction and induction and conjecture or, on the other, by contemplative or sacramental or spiritual experiences. Belief or disbelief in fairies or gods could never be validated by philosophical arguments made from first principle; the existence or nonexistence of Zeus is not a matter that can be intelligibly discussed in the categories of modal logic or metaphysics, any more than the existence of tree frogs could be; if he is there at all, one must go on an expedition to find him.

The question of God, by contrast, is one that can and must be pursued in terms of the absolute and the contingent, the necessary and the fortuitous, potency and act, possibility and impossibility, being and nonbeing, transcendence and immanence. … Evidence for or against the reality of God, if it is there, saturates every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us. (The Experience of God, pp. 30, 32, 33-34)

Cited from https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/god-elves-and-silly-atheists/

Studying Theology

“Theology is primarily speaking about God; but, since God is by definition not available for inspection as an object in the laboratory, this entails speaking about the imprint of God on human lives – and thus what humanity looks like when exposed to an active, intelligent transcendent reality. Many who study theology may not believe for sure that this sort of language describes a real state of affairs in the universe rather than just a state of affairs in the human mind; but they study because the images of humanity and its world that come from such language remain fertile, provocative and significant at many levels.

For those who do believe, for whom the biblical languages and the history of religious reflection and action still represent a world to inhabit, theology has the added excitement of being the exploration of a relationship more comprehensive and transforming for human beings than anything else.”

The Right Reverend Dr Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, in a letter dated 26th November 2009 commending the first issue of The Oxford Theologian. He expresses “the conviction that what is done here in the name of theology really has the capacity to help build that critical and creative spirit without which no culture can live – and, for those of us who do think it’s about a reality greater than the human mind alone, the capacity to open us further to a transfiguring grace, a worship of intellect and heart together.”