Some Fundamentals: Uncertainty

            It’s about eighty-five degrees outside, ninety-five percent humidity.  The kids are happy to be inside.  We’re in New Orleans on a week long work and educational trip.  Right now an old man is telling us his version of a story we’ll hear again and again throughout the week.  He describes his experience of Katrina.  He talks about leaving, hearing about the catastrophe from afar, returning to death and devastation.  His details are different, but the story is a sliver of that great tale of anguish and appreciation.

            He’s talked for almost an hour now.  The youth minister leading the trip raises her hand and asks about his faith.  How did it help him during the flood and after, when neighbors died and the city lay in ruins?

            “Sometime you’ll get to the point where all you have is your faith.  That’s all you have to lean on,” he says.  The kids nod appreciatively.

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            This week, five months later, I listen to a debate between an atheist and a Christian.  They are remarkably polite to one another and that’s more interesting to me than their tepid arguments for and against the existence of God.  It’s their stories and their generosity to one another that catches my attention. 

Then the moderator describes the atheist’s position as not like Christopher Hitchens for whom religion was a virus.  This debater speaks of religion as a placebo for the soul¯.  I think in some way that’s how our guide to Katrina was describing faith.  It can actually help.  It can push back the darkness.  It can make sense in a chaotic world.

            Placebos are amazing in that they do not depend on an outside influence to heal.  They tap into the body’s innate strength.  Placebos depend solely on my ability to believe and my body somehow responding to that belief in order to produce whatever it needs to survive.  But their worth is limited.

            Placebos don’t work against bullets, for example.  The catastrophe of the Ghost Dance demonstrates that¢.  Belief will carry a person a long way, as will determination, drive, will, and fear.  But after that, when I come to the end of myself, I need something more than me.

            I’m somewhat resistant to the notion of faith placebos because I’m all too aware of my own limitations.  If supernatural things depend on my ability to believe, I’m dead in the water.

I think where I sometimes frustrate people is in my unwillingness to say that what I believe about God is synonymous with God.  Caution in speaking for God is a growing area for me.  It seems like the best we can do is to say what seems to be the case, what seems consistent with God’s character, what people in the past have observed about God.

            I’m not even comfortable saying that what the Bible says about God is how God is.  It’s observational, certainly, it is even revelatory, but it isn’t God.  When I say God I mean someone who cannot be understood by the finitude of the human mind.  Any description of God, like my favorite, “God is love”, is limited by our ability to comprehend.  Language can’t contain God any better than temples can.

            That is not to say that there is nothing true.  Some people have determined “absolute truth” to be absolutely important.  I do not think it is, but I am not opposed to the idea that there is such a thing as absolute truth.  In fact, I think that the people who insist on it are really insisting that God is, and that God does not change like we do.  I’m perfectly happy with that idea, even though it seems rather small and less useful than a lot of other ways of speaking of God.  What I am at pains to point out and model is that human beings do not have access on an intellectual level to absolute truth.  At the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfield: we know only what we know.

            A non-theological example of this is the idea of the atom.  Around the middle of the fifth century BC, Democritus summarized concepts that had been floating around the Greek world and the Indian subcontinent.  He said that all matter was made up of very small parts, atomos, which were irreducible.  Today we are told by scientists that atoms are actually made up of even smaller bits.  And we believe it.  Atoms are no longer imagined to be tiny balls of solid matter, but as whirling energy.  Were Democritus and the early Indians wrong?  Not exactly.

We know only what we know.

The postmodern word is uncertainty.  The religious word is humility.  Both are useful for approaching God.  Both are valuable in reading the scriptures.  Both are indispensable for human interaction. 

Neither is easy.

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¯ Well, actually, I made the for the soul part.  He just says placebo affect.  I like my turn of phrase better, though

¢ Look it up.  It’s a fascinating tale.