The point I’d like to make is a general one, but I’m mostly targeting my fellow-Christians who have the greater responsibility if they truly have the belief they claim in God as the all-powerful Creator of this world. First, a poem by Emily Dickinson:
Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency!
I’m not sure Emily Dickinson would agree with the fullness of the claim I’ll be making but she’s at least noting a certain fragmentation in our thought where faith is no longer allied to matters of ‘prudence’, of practical decision-making. At a more fundamental level, faith is no longer allied to our views of created being and that means faith has been separated from the mainstream of modern empirical knowledge.
We have a funny understanding of prudence in the modern world, turning the guiding virtue of Stoic and Christian ethics into a cowardly sort of attitude. In truth, prudence is ‘practical, but mostly an ordering wisdom that allows higher moral claims to overrule considerations of personal safety or comfort. Prudence can lead a Christian to martyrdom, but it could also lead pagans to great sacrifices, even a form of martyrdom. When Cato, the great defender of the Roman Republic, dived off a cliff rather than accept Julius Caesar’s offer to return to his honored place and his family wealth in Rome — Cato had accepted the offer for his family and retainers and sent them to Rome — he was a martyr for a complex set of political beliefs that did contain some valid elements of moral truths shared with Christians and those poor, incoherent creatures I’ll label as ‘post-Christians’.
So, faith is a fine invention, especially when we’re cheerfully singing songs of our God conquering evil and bringing a new world to existence, a world which is free of evil and corruption. On the other hand, microscopes are prudent — MRIs even more so — in an emergency. If our faith, or rather — our human statements of our faith, be in conflict with the underlying assumptions of the use of microscopes and MRIs, we can always discard that faith or hold it in abeyance when we enter regions where our worldly ills are to be ameliorated or even healed, if only for a matter of a few years.
When the life of a bishop or a priest or an evangelical minister or the most devout of Christians is at risk, they rush to a hospital which practices medicine according to the highest of scientific standards, standards that include knowledge that is in conflict with the Christianity’s more or less official explanation for man’s state of sin — the Augustinian version of original sin which is an idea which seemed necessary to Augustine after he had rejected the idea that mankind transmuted from another species. Augustine had then proposed man was created by God outside of the natural order, though man was inserted from the instant of his special creation into the natural order. Having now claimed man as a special creation of God, Augustine had to explain how an all-mighty and all-knowing Creator had made such a botch of things. He grafted onto Christianity the pagan idea of a great Fall from a Golden Age, an idea not really consistent with the Christian understanding of the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator, but it’s an idea which seems to have a frightening staying power. It’s an idea which makes it all but impossible for Christians to make peace with God’s Creation as known through empirical investigation.
Now this idea of original sin is a stale doctrine, a miserably poor explanation of the sinful state of a mankind evolved from an earlier species of apes. Like many other Christian teachings about Creation, this Augustinian doctrine sits and grows fungus in the back of that refrigerator which is the storehouse of ‘current human knowledge’. When our own lives and comfort are at stake, we Christians take out the fresh food in the front of that refrigerator. Nothing but the best for our precious selves. When it comes to paying God honor and glory by understanding ourselves and the rest of His Creation, that fungus-covered, rotting stuff is good enough.
An afterthought: When I spoke of my point being more general, I meant to say that many current thinkers, economists and political philosophers and literary critics deliver up stale doctrines which are not absolute truths but rather time-bound speculations. It would seem that the human mind can’t readily distinguish between truths and speculations, at least not when those two are dished up in the form of a textbook.