God is Not Tapioca — C.S. Lewis on Miracles
How Transhumanism Could give Christianity a 21st Century Face lift
Happy Easter! Easter is one of those holidays that has meaning for the over 1 billion Christians around the world. It is the day that we believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, dying for our sins, and cleansing humanity for all time for those who accept it. But for so many, believing in the mystical is simply too much. George Carlin has a video where he has a cow about how stupid we all are to believe, which is summarized (and sanitized) below:
“It’s all silliness! God hasn’t shown Himself by now, well, it’s simply too late. All Christians are praying to some invisible man up in the sky who was started by a bunch of ignorant farmers thousands of years ago. He needs money and if you don’t listen to the list of ten things he makes you burn in hell forever. This world is crap! If God is running the show, then he’s incompetent or evil!”
These criticisms are as old as faith itself. There’s nothing new or original about them, and yet we have a generation now that needs to understand that these sound-bite attacks have no real validity because they attack the images, not the soundness of the concepts behind them.
The guy help us with this task is none other than C.S. Lewis and his wonderful work, Miracles. Lewis goes into exquisite detail on how a modern person can still believe in Miracles in the age of Science.
For this analysis, I focus on the three rules can help us when we think about our images around the faith (page 116 if you’re playing at home).
Rule 1 — Thought is distanced from the imagination which accompanies it.
Rule 2 — Thought can be valid even when the false images that accompany it are mistaken
Rule 3 — Anyone who talks about things that cannot be seen, or touched, or heard must inevitably talk as if they could be seen or touched or heard.
We use images that approximate our reality all the time. Think about how we talk about an company’s beliefs, or a team’s energy, or a country’s moral compass. None of those items are literal — but they inform us through metaphor and image. When we “let some steam off” after work at a pub or cafe, we’re using images from our time (actually a time past) to make our point with flair.
According to Lewis, metaphorical language is unavoidable (Rule 3), our thoughts are separate from the imagination of it (Rule 1) and the thought can be valid (Rule 2) since we do build up love, and our hearts can be broken.
It’s an issue of language, not of reality or myth. Dr. Lewis continues:
“Let us admit at once that many Christians (though by no means all) when they make these assertions do have in mind just those crude mental picture which so horrify the skeptic. When they say that Christ ‘came down from Heaven’ they do have a vague image of something shooting or floating downwards out of the sky…. But we now know that the mere presences of these mental pictures does not, of itself, tell us anything about the reasonableness or absurdity of the thoughts they accompany…. They may picture the Father as a human form, but they also maintain that He has no body. They may picture Him older that the son, but they also maintain the one did not exist before the other, both having existed from all eternity.”
Lewis gives a hilarious example –
“A girl I knew was brought up by ‘higher thinking’ parents to regard God as a perfect ‘substance’; later in life she realized that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding (to make matters worse, she disliked tapioca).”
The point of all of this is that we must be conscious of the visual vs. the thought. Most of science today replaces the visual imagery that we associated with the Mystical, but that doesn’t invalidate the thought itself. Perhaps we don’t view God as “up there” anymore because we understand that there is space and moon and vacuum above us. We must replace the image, but the thought is unaffected.
Lewis continues:
“[saying] ‘I don’t believe in a personal God,’ says one, ‘but I do believe in a great spiritual force’. What he has not noticed is that the word ‘force’ has let in all sorts of images about winds and tides and electricity and gravitation…says another ‘I do believe we are all parts of one great Being which moves and works through us all’ — not noticing that he has merely exchanged the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas of fluid.”
When you see a critic on YouTube mock theism, ask yourself — ‘Is this a substantive criticism or is this person simply attacking an image I am using?’
We intuitively understand that if there is a God, it/he must be much different than us. We are as different from God as we are from a Goldfish, and as such our language will be fraught with images that need to be updated as reality is revealed to us.
However, it would be a mistake to think that the use of metaphorical language is exclusive to the domain of theology. Indeed, modern science has had a long and sordid history of metaphors that come and go. Einstein believed that the universe contained an “ether” that made his equations work. Physicists have visuals such as “dark matter” and “black hole”. Is a black hole really a hole? Is it black, because it turns out it radiates light at its edges. Yet, black hole is the best language we have for it now.
This is the Bohr model that we all learned in high school. I still think of this image when I think of atoms — neat little rings with tiny spheres rotating around it. Yet, an atom looks more like this:
Does this mean we throw out the Bohr model? Of course not. The model has its use and we just have to be cognizant of its limitations.
Science has been bumping up against language itself lately, where we can’t even use metaphor to help us understand the nature of reality. In quantum mechanics, and you’ll learn about particles being in two places at once, that Alice can finish the race before and after Bob, and there might be ten dimensions.
So metaphor is safe, and when we find good ones we should stick with them.
Now at this point in the previous writing, I moved to parry and jab against an old George Carlin video attacking believers. You can still read that here, but as I thought about this tool that C.S. Lewis gave us, I realized I had stumbled on an important position on replacing the metaphor without damaging the faith. C.S. Lewis has given us a new way to think about the images in the Bible, and permission to update that image if it serves the faith.
Much of what Carlin went into, and what I think often holds back people from believing is that we’re using very old metaphors, mostly because the Bible was written in an agrarian time. They give offerings of food, they sacrifice animals, they speak of shepherds and flocks, and vineyards and trees.
What if we swapped out those metaphors with some more modern, common experiences?
Maybe we could call the Holy Spirit’s behavior like a good antivirus program, preventing what it can without completely circumventing freewill. If that person is bent on getting a virus, through risky online behavior, well, then they’ll get one. It doesn’t have the same visual as a Shepherd, but at least its current.
Another example. In the Bible it states that God forgets sin. “It is as far as East is from West.” (Psalms 103) Well, humans cannot forget, at least not on purpose. Forgiving is another thing entirely. But what if God’s mind had the ability to actually forget? What if He simply deletes the files, as a computer programmer would? It’s an image we can easily conjure, and it illustrates and educates.
One metaphor that nearly isn’t one — we’re all ‘programmed’ using DNA. There’s debate on what behaviors are or are not, but there’s at least a powerful image that our ancestors did not possess and that we should leverage.
One more — the Noosphere itself. This concept was an extension by de Chardin and though remains somewhat obscure in Christendom, persists nonetheless. Organizations like the Christian Transhumanists exist and persist, along with Christopher Benek who frequently writes and talks on the subject. This group of people are working on updating our imagery about God, Heaven and the nature of reality in the light of technology. Noosphereists are those who believe we merge with technology and form a unity of being that stretches the imagination.
If we don’t update our imaginings of spiritual concepts, we run the risk of it appearing as tapioca to someone who doesn’t like it. Moderns look at the metaphors we use from that time and come back wanting for something more. If preachers and theologians are careful they can avoid diluting their messages and still update their metaphors to help believers.
It will be very interesting to see how our current technology driven language effects the description and mental imagery, and thus the acceptability, of faith in the 21st century.
