Starting in weakness…..

There is something arbitrary about identifying 1^st January every year as holding some significance, and yet we do (at least in this part of the world). It is not as though between 31^st December and the 1^st January there is a change of season. It’s not the winter solstice (the day with the shortest period of daylight, after which day length increases again); that was on the 21^st December. Yet every year the transition between the 31^st December and 1^st January induces reviews of the previous twelve months, predictions for the next twelve, and even manages to induce, in at least some of us, an incoherent and usually unwarranted optimism about what is to come. Not this year.

I started 2023 off with a dose of the ‘flu (the real thing, not the ‘man’ variety). It commenced on New Year’s day, and I went rapidly downhill from there. I’m assuming that if I had not had my ‘flu shot back in the autumn my experience would have been a lot worse. But it was bad enough. It is said that if you feel like you’re dying you have a cold; if you don’t care if you’re dying, it’s the ‘flu. So, instead of long forest or beach walks to clear the mind of Christmas fug, I spent the first week of the year unable to do much of anything, much of it in my bed, and I spent the second week recovering. And when I have the ‘flu it also always messes with my head. Admittedly I didn’t have any serious near-psychotic episodes this time, but there were weird dreams and the occasional loss of place and person. It was all very odd indeed. Bounce into the New Year I did not.

All in all it was a reminder of my frailty and fragility. After all I had been floored by what for someone of my age and generally good health was a fairly minor viral infection. However, as the pandemic reminded us all, frailty and fragility is part and parcel of our human lot. Perhaps partly as a coping mechanism, many of us avoid the reality of just how frail as human beings we are. The reason the pandemic was such a shock to many of us was that, initially there was nothing that could be done. We all had to stay home and hope we didn’t get the bug. And if we did get it, we had to hope it wouldn’t be too bad.  And of course for many it wasn’t. And yet intensive care units filled with people who couldn’t breathe, many of whom did not survive. I was scary. How quickly we forget and move on.

But there is value in starting the year off with a reminder of one’s fragility and indeed mortality. I admit this is partly a function of age. When I was twenty I doubt that even a bad dose of the ‘flu would have had much of an impact. There was lots of time to recover and move on, and no need to worry about anything as serious as death. But it is worth bearing in mind that it is only relatively recently that life expectancy has been long enough, and general healthcare good enough, for us to fool ourselves about mortality. Current male life expectancy in the UK is just over 80 years. Given this, my suspicion is that most of us probably spend about the first fifty years of our lives convinced implicitly that  we are invincible and immortal, even although we know that we really are not. But there are lots of things to engage with and to keep us busy and distracted. Any younger person whose mind takes a more sober turn is likely to branded morbid. But then one reaches a certain stage in life where contemplating one’s demise in this life becomes much easier. There is a realization that, all other things being equal, one is nearer one’s death than one’s birth (something I wrote about last January).

All of this would be depressing were it not for the fact that there is a bigger picture. As important as life in the here and now is, if I really thought that this was all there is, I’m not sure it would be enough. If I really thought that from this point all that faced me was an increasing propensity to succumb to disease or injury, until my resources (plus those of various health professionals) were exhausted and I was unable to make a recovery, what really would be the point? So it’s just as well that my conviction is that there really is a bigger picture. Our very weakness and fragility is a sign, a reminder, that we are created creatures, and our needs are no accident. The tragedy of Western individualism is that it has misdirected us, telling us that each of us is all that we need, when this is clearly not the case. To deny my creatureliness and my createdness is to deny that I have a Creator, and also to deny myself the resources that He has provided. Importantly, my Creator is not the remote watchmaker-type creator of the Deist, but a Creator who is self-described as Father. Henry Lyte captures the reality well in his famous hymn. As well as writing “Frail as summer’s flower we flourish; blows the wind and it is gone; but while mortals rise and perish, God endures unchanging on”  he writes: “Father-like he tends and spares us, well our human frame he knows”. My reality (and I would suggest yours too) is that I am dependent on Him and created to know Him.

The here and now matters; this physical life now is important. If the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity tells us anything, it is that there is value to these lives lived now in weakness, frailty and dependence. Jesus Himself lived a life like this (and paradoxically a life completely unlike it in other ways). The value of these lives lies partly in what we learn about how things really are, and what we really are or ought to be. To deny all of this is of course a common strategy that has been adopted by humanity from almost the beginning of everything. But such a denial never ends well. Reality has a way of asserting itself eventually and inescapably. So to begin a year by being reminded reality is no bad thing. To be reminded of my real physical and spiritual dependence on my Creator and Father, and to be reminded of His gracious provision of all that I need will keep my focus on exactly where it should be. 

Science + theology?

A while ago I took to thinking about the area of study in which I am now engaged (theology), and also the area in which I had previously been professionally occupied (science). I suppose I conceived of these as two largely separable and separate fields. Sitting next to each other in the intellectual landscape, I suppose I would have expected to find a fairly well defined boundary between them. But because I am a realist (technically a critical realist), committed to a single , overarching and knowable reality outside of me, I would expect the boundary to be a fuzzy one, allowing friendly contact and interchange. If both represent valid pursuits, then they both deal with the same reality, although from different perspectives, using different tools. They are neither enemies or rivals. Admittedly, few scientists spend much time in properly theological reflection (except the ones who do), and there are probably more than a few who would deny theology any validity at all. But that has more to do with weaknesses in the education of scientists (at least in the Anglo Saxon world) than with any real problem with theology as a discipline. It has its problems of course, but validity is not one of them. However, it turns out that there may be a bigger overlap between theology and science than I had suspected.

I was alerted to this by having to critique a paper published in the Journal of Empirical Theology. Can there be such a thing I wondered. If theology is the study of an ineffable and inapproachable God, then it seems unlikely that empirical methods will have much traction. I am rather assuming that there are theologians (Barth perhaps?) who argue that when it comes to knowing anything about God, what is required is revelation not scientific experimentation. And while God’s self-revelation can be examined, debated and understood (and misunderstood), this is not a task that the methods of the natural sciences will be much help with. But theology (rather like science) is really not one single institution or discipline, with a single object of study from a single standpoint and a single set of tools. Given that things are believed about God (and indeed gods) by people, there are reasons for studying these beliefs, the people who hold them, and perhaps thereby discover things  about the God in whom they believe. In general, those who study people develop interests in the beliefs people have. So it is no surprise that tools have been developed to study such things, and some of these are thoroughly empirical.

Obvious examples are found in social and cognitive psychology, where many of the classic approaches found in other branches of the natural sciences, are used to study things like beliefs. The general approach can often be couched in classic hypothesis-driven terms (observation-hypothesis-prediction-test), using standard instruments and testing strategies to get at what is going on in people’s minds (or at least inside their heads). Religious ideas and beliefs might simply be seen as a subset of beliefs and ideas, examinable using exactly the same techniques. This is not a new idea; that religious belief was nothing special is a view that Scottish arch-sceptic and empiricist David Hume would have agreed with. Such investigations, undertaken from a standpoint of “methodological naturalism” generate explanations for the phenomena under investigation that do not invoke God, any more that I would have invoked His activity to explain the eye movement phenomena that I used to study. But then this doesn’t really sound like any kind of theology. And indeed it isn’t – it’s psychology.

As an aside, as a Christian believer, while I did not invoke the actions of God to explain the things I was investigating, I was well aware that He was not remote. He was as present in my lab as anywhere else; I am a Christian not a Deist. I was always quite comfortable with the belief that underpinning everything I did, indeed underpinning my very existence as well as that of the universe, was God’s power (revealed by writer of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews; Heb 1:3). But my job was to find immediate and natural explanations for what I was investigating, based on natural rather than supernatural mechanisms. My hypotheses were couched in terms of these natural mechanisms, and these were what my experiments tested, and what my theories invoked. But God and natural explanations are neither contradictory or mutually exclusive. They are different, and pertain to different levels of reality. But this poses a conundrum. I assume that there is an explanation that connects the power and working of the God who is spirit with the existence and maintenance of this universe which is material. I have no idea what it is, and my gut feeling is that even if God had revealed it I would not be capable of understanding it.

But back to empirical theology. There are models of belief and thought that originate within an avowedly theological context and use theological concepts. These are likely to be dependent, at least for the most part, on the revelation of God mentioned above. Empirical methods could, I suppose, be used to study such beliefs. But the methods themselves would have to be theologically informed, otherwise we’re simply back in the realms of psychology. This seems to be what goes on in what is called empirical theology. What I don’t quite understand is what it’s for. Mind you, that applies to a lot of science which is actually at its best when it is just about finding out stuff. It is only subsequently that it turns out that some of the stuff is useful or important or worth lots of money. There’s a lot of serendipity involved in even the hardest of hard sciences. There are contexts where finding how what and how people think is important. An example would be education where if you wanted to know whether a concept or belief was being adequately transmitted, then there are ways of finding this out in a rigorous manner. This is likely to be as useful in theological education as elsewhere. But is this really theology? Who’s to say. Defining disciplines is famously difficult. But I can conceive of investigating theological concepts and beliefs in a thoroughly scientific manner. Whether it ever is, is a different story.