The Chocolate Teapot Circling the Earth

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For the next few weeks, this blog, Skeptical Faith, will be a bit different. That’s because I recently read in the New York Times an interview with Rowan Williams that was so cogent, so relevant to my goal of helping people searching for God that I don’t want to deprive the blog’s readers of any of his wisdom. So, I’ll be using the interview in the next few blogs.

For those of you unfamiliar with him, Williams is a poet, theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury - principal leader of the Church of England and ceremonial head of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The Times story is entitled “The New Atheists Attack a God I Don’t Believe In, either” and the interviewer is Peter Wehner, a contributing opinion writer for the Times.

A recent Skeptical Faith blog reported on the benefits of watching “The Chosen,” the wildly successful movie about the life Jesus, the fifth season of which is available on several streaming video sites.

Struggle to Understand

An awkward, but powerful, scene in Season 5 shows Jesus seated at a horseshoe shaped table with his disciples, trying to tell them things they struggle to understand. Things like, “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me.” Their frustration with such vague language is written on their faces. And Jesus’ face registers the frustration of trying to be understood.

Most viewers, I believe, can relate. Jesus says so many things in the gospels that are hard to understand. In this scene, he seems unwilling to plainly tell his beloved disciples what was about to happen - that he would be mercilessly crucified, and they would be scattered - knowing that they would be unable to accept it.

Rowan Williams
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Isn’t the disciples’ relationship to Jesus similar to our own relationship to God? We have such difficulty understanding it all. The prophet Isiah tries to explain this by putting words into God’s mouth: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

And this brings us to the Rowan Williams interview and the truth that the God whom so many of us seek, is unknowable. God is mysteriously identified in the book of Exodus as “I am,” whose third person translation from the Hebrew is “Yahweh,” or “He is.”

“In Semitic thought,” according to the Jerusalem Bible, “knowledge of a name gave power over the thing named,” and the writer of this Exodus passage couldn’t abide that. So instead, religious people have been stuck with the word “God,” dating from about 4,000 B.C., used in ancient times for the gods of the various nations. So, “God” is not even the name of the entity Christians and Jews worship. “God” doesn’t have need of a name, of course.

Says Williams: “It’s not that God is deliberately making things difficult, but that God is God. God is not a thing among other things. God is not an item in the world…. He doesn’t simply slot into what we think is intelligible or manageable. God is the infinite, unmanageable, unconditioned context of all that we are and we do, and so it’s not entirely surprising if we can’t boil that down into something we can manage….

Invisible and Intangible

“So, the old chestnut about God (attributed to philosopher Bertrand Russell) is like saying, ‘Well, there’s a chocolate teapot infinitely circling the earth, and it happens to be invisible and intangible and incapable of offering any evidence at all for its presence, and I still believe in it.’ Well, no. Open a page of St. Augustine or George Herbert or T.S. Eliot or Dostoyevsky, and chocolate teapot doesn’t quite do the work there.”

That is to say that, belief can be difficult, but there’s plenty of evidence for God’s existence – at least as much as you’d find in a court of law – starting with the witness of millions, perhaps billions, of believers over the ages. And there’s evidence from the order in the universe, especially at the biological-evolutionary and mathematical level, according to many scientists.

There’s also evidence from our own human nature, according to St. Augustine’s famous prayer: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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