Our exploration in Part II, starting from the realities of the world as perceived by the sciences, has led us so far to infer that the best explanation of all-that-is and all-that-is-becoming is, in terms gathered from part II, an Ultimate Reality, God, who:
These general inferences concerning the nature of God and of God’s relation to nature, humanity and time are not specifically Christian and are significantly different from those of the classical philosophical theism that has dominated Christian thought. However, it is necessary to be clear about the status of the proposed revisionary inferences. It is not being affirmed that we have proved from our reflections on what we now know of the world from the sciences that there is an Ultimate Reality, God, with just these attributes – any more than science actually proves the existence of natural realities to be existents with the attributes that the terms of its theories incorporate. Science, too, only infers to the best explanation and its depictions of the realities to which it refers are inevitably metaphorical, revisable and not naïvely realistic without qualification. Thus, in this exploration, the postulate of the kind of God here depicted, even if properly inferred, is still only the best explanation. One cannot deny the existence of other possible, competing explanations, some of them particular to the various contexts in which the inferences have been deployed. However, I do argue that the proposed inferences about God, if taken together, are cumulative in their effect and make a more convincing case than any of the rival explanations – especially that of atheism (often under the guise of agnosticism), which asserts, among other things, that the world just happens to be rational and to display the emergence in and from matter of persons who possess values and creativity. That path is, in my view, an abandonment of the human exploration that seeks an answer to the question ‘why?’ over the whole gamut of experience.
The inferences we have made about God and God’s relations to nature and time have inevitably, because of the process of argument, been couched in general and abstract terms, some of which are to be found in philosophical reflections extending from classical Greek times to the present. To that extent, in our exploration, our resources for making judgements of reasonableness have been moulded by the social context in which this author, and many of his readers, are embedded, namely those of post-Christian Western civilisation. I do not think this is a fatal flaw, since we have to think with the linguistic tools we have inherited and have currently developed if we are to think at all. It is with those same tools that we conduct our own inner dialogue to establish by what beliefs and principles we are to steer our brief lives. Absolute truth is unattainable; but sufficient truth by which to live meaningfully and consistently with what we can best infer about the realities and the Ultimate Reality in which we live is worth seeking.
Moreover, many of the inferences about the nature of the Ultimate Reality, God, which are proposed here as the best explanation of all-that-is and all-that-is-becoming, have been made in cultures quite different from that of the former Christendom, both East and West. The same polarity and tensions, with a similar spectrum of emphasis – for example, with respect to attributions of transcendence and immanence to the Ultimate Reality and in its subtle relations to the observed world – are to be found not only when we consider the monotheistic beliefs of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but also when those of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism are in question.
The inferences summarised at the beginning of this chapter constitute, I am urging, key nodular points for the understanding of the nature of God and of God’s relation to the world with which we have to weave a web of beliefs. For this to be accessible to personal and communal life it needs to be interpreted and enriched by symbolic, analogical and metaphorical resources. The fabric of this web of beliefs about God (see pp.28–9) will, as in the past, be susceptible to revision and even replacement as new experiences and new knowledge impinge upon it – but these can be envisaged as exerting their influences only at its edges, so that adjustment will be gradual and not cataclysmic. It is precisely a process of this kind in which this work is engaged and which has led to the constellation of affirmations about God which have been developed here to revise those of classical Christian philosophical theology.
We have, then, been exploring some of the consequences for our understanding of God and of God’s relation to the world, humanity and time in the light of what the sciences have revealed. Even though these consequences are not yet spelled out very publicly, they are widely sensed as a consequence of the increasing accessibility of scientific knowledge and of the resulting increased awareness of the epic of evolution to people without scientific training. Today, intellectually educated but often theologically uninformed people, if they are still attached in any way to the Christian churches, are hanging on by their fingertips as they increasingly bracket off large sections of the liturgies in which they participate as either unintelligible, or unbelievable in their classical form, or both (e.g. the virginal conception of Jesus; the resurrection of the body; the use of sacrificial, substitutionary and propitiatory imagery with respect to Jesus’ death; and much else). There is an increasingly alarming dissonance between the language of devotion, liturgies and doctrine and what people perceive themselves to be, and to be becoming, in the world. For they now see themselves increasingly in the light of the cognitive sciences and of the historical sciences that have generated the epic of evolution (cosmology, geology, biology).
Hitherto Christian apologetic based on science, often undertaken by scientist-theologians, has been a well-expressed reinventing of the wheel which strengthens Christians who are wobbling in their faith but does not convince the general, educated public. It is still too entangled in worn-out metaphors and images. I have often argued for a more dynamic view of God’s continuous action in the processes of the natural world – the action of a God who is indeed Transcendent, Incarnate and Immanent, in whom the world exists and who is its circumambient Ultimate Reality. What we all have to do in this interaction of theology with the sciences is, by argument and imagination, to develop a concept of God, belief in the reality of whom is consistent with what we now know from science about the cosmos, this planet and our own arrival here. Theology – which I still take to be wisdom and words about God – has to develop concepts, images, metaphors that represent God’s purposes and implanted meanings for the world we are finding it to be through the sciences.
We require an open, revisable, exploratory, radical – dare I say it? – liberal theology. This may well be unfashionable among Christians who seem everywhere to be retreating into their fortresses of Protestant evangelicalism, traditional (Anglo-) Catholicism and/or so-called ‘biblical theology’. Nevertheless, transition to such a theology is, in my view, unavoidable if Christians in the West, and eventually elsewhere, are not to degenerate in the new millennium into an esoteric society internally communing with itself and thereby failing to transmit its ‘good news’ (the evangel) to the universal (catholicos) world.
Hence, a paradox: to be truly evangelical and catholic in its impact and function, the church of the new millennium will need a theology that, in its relation to a worldview everywhere shaped by the sciences, will have to be more genuinely open, radical and liberal. For such a Christian theology to have any viability, it may well have to be stripped down to newly conceived basic essentials. Only then will Christian theology attain the degree of verisimilitude with respect to ultimate realities that science has to natural ones – and command respect as a vehicle of public truth.
Consider, for example, the attempt of Bishop David Jenkins to capture in simple, direct words the essence of Christian belief:
God is. He is as he is in Jesus. So there is hope.
God is. He is for us. So it is worth it.1
Even well-meaning, recent liturgical revision (as, for example, in the Church of England), utilising predominantly what are believed to be scriptural images, savours too much of an exercise in rearranging the deckchairs as the Titanic goes down. A liturgy can be meaningful only when it relates to what can be defended as public truth – all else is in danger of becoming the mere whistling in the dark of a beleaguered minority. I have already (in chapter 2) argued for a ‘theology as it might be’, one that is genuinely open and not uniquely and wholly dependent on authoritative sources, especially sacred books, on traditional (especially hierarchical) communities or on presumed a priori truths. Because of the rise of excessive individualism in regard to ultimate questions and the infection of the common mind with debilitating relativism, there has been a marked tendency among Christians (and also, I suspect, among Muslims and some Hindus) to retreat into citadels fortified against these destructive tides. In the Christian church in Britain this has largely taken the form of a revived evangelicalism that ignores the results of over 150 years of careful biblical study and bases its teaching on interpretations of the Bible no longer justifiable, whatever may have been thought in previous centuries. But truth must be the overriding criterion in the exploration towards God, and intellectual integrity requires that the facile simplicities of unwarranted authoritarian paths (biblical, communal or a priori) be eschewed.
So we are encouraged to resume our exploration now by examining some of the ways in which the web of belief might justifiably be woven today around our inferences concerning God and God’s relation to the world, humanity and time. This contemporary interplay of theology with science and in the interpretation of religious experience will require us to deploy both new and old concepts and symbols – for, as Jesus himself is reported as saying, ‘a learner in the kingdom of heaven’ is like ‘a house-holder who can produce from his store things new and old’.2 A rebirth of images is desperately needed to satisfy the spiritual hunger of our times. We shall therefore look for clusters of concepts, images, symbols and metaphors that can integrate the key inferences to which we have been led in a way that might touch the spiritual nerve of our times.