parallel lines

I've been wanting to blog for some time about where my thinking has reached, as I have surveyed all this emerging stuff. But it is hard to reach conclusions, because the process still seems to be ongoing. And I'm aware of the danger of stumbling into some ham philosophy which will not bear scrutiny.

But I have reached an emerging point of accommodation. Or perhaps you could say that I'm holding some parallel narratives in my mind, and am for the time being unconcerned that they don't seem to join up.

So, on one hand, there is the story of God. The story of the bible; the story of the church. I have a 40-year-old mind-set filled with lifelong Evangelical thinking. I can talk the talk - by grace I sometimes manage to walk the walk. I read the bible in public; I expound it; I lead people in prayer. The bible holds a privileged place here: I've never held an exceedingly conservative evangelical view - plenary verbal inspiration of scripture, and all that follows from that, is something I'd want to hold lightly. An inspiration of sense, not each word, has always seemed much more attractive. Nevertheless, it follows that the bible is and should be normative for the Christian community. Whatever that means.

Of course, that asks more questions than it answers: how are we to read and understand the bible? This is a big theme of MacLaren's A New Kind of Christianity, which I'm reading at the moment - so we'd better return to that later. But we could certainly say that we need to understand the gospel as being about reconciliation, about unconditional love, and a few other things which are often missing from our society.

But on the other hand, I am emphatically a scientist. It really does seem that the Universe is ordered according to a number of simple laws: it seems that cause and effect is universal, and immense power flows from the ability of the accompanying method to allow us to make predictions about the future behaviour of our world. The last two centuries have opened so many doors for us in understanding how things came to be as they are: astrophysics and evolutionary theory open our eyes at once to immense beauty and to simple ideas giving rise to staggeringly complex systems.

Of course, that's a classic dichotomy: but I'm not so bothered by that. There's no a priori reason why I cannot hold onto both at once: but I'll agree with Dawkins that the idea of 'separate realms' is too simplistic. Prayer just doesn't makes sense in the second model. But for all its advances in psychology, it is far from clear that science is competent to address our social and emotional questions - still less to give us real foundational understanding. 20th century advances in maths and physics put paid to any idea that scientific method can give us a firm foundation on which to build.

Strong adherents of the scientific approach try to invoke Occam's razor to suggest that we don't need God to exist. But that notion of existence seems to miss the point: it isn't really very helpful. Do quarks exist? Do Platonic solids exist? The God of the bible isn't an abstraction; he isn't a theoretical omnipotent agent; he is a character who interacts with creation. Whether he 'exists' seems much less interesting than what he does, and what he calls us to do.

I'm not an agnostic: I want to have my cake and eat it. I don't see why these parallel lines cannot exist (oops!) together. They do challenge each other: there is certainly an unresovled (unresolvable?) tension. Am I allowed to use different narratives in different contexts, or is that cheating?