Christian dogma changed by science?

I am sure that the majority of Christians believe that when they recite the Nicene creed on a Sunday morning and say “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth” that they believe that God was the agent that brought the world into being. This is not just a modern understanding and probably goes back to the time of the writing of the creed itself and beyond. However, we moderns understand it in a different way. Now we think about the origin of the universe in terms of physical causality, a new kind of thinking that had its origins in the 17th century. Before that the statement was taken on faith and the details were not thought about, they were simply out of their mental framework.

I have written about this at some length in my On Line Opinion article “Is God the cause of the world?”. Basically, I argued that the creation narratives we find at the beginning of the Bible are not cosmogonies, not explanations of how the universe came to be. This is obvious when you read them. The first account is the creation in seven days that has a liturgical structure with the emphasis on the Sabbath. The second narrative is more agricultural and probably older and tells the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden. These are stories that produce a moral backdrop to the stories that follow; they define the relationship between man and the world and, happily for natural science, leave the world free of spirit. So to say that because we discovered the big bang and the theory of evolution we have proved the Bible wrong is nonsense.

A good example of Christian dogma is the Nicene creed. This is the creed that Christians recite on a Sunday morning and it is a summary of what we believe. I cannot see any statement in the creed that has been proved wrong by natural science. That is because there are no statements in the creed that purport to define the mechanisms of the physical world. Take the following sentences:

“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in being with the Father. Through Him all things were made. For us men and our salvation He came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit, He was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”

This series of statements are obviously metaphysical statements. “Eternally begotten of the Father” has no physical referent. This is obviously not the language of natural science. The statement that “he came down from heaven” may alarm us because it refers to a storied conception of the universe in which heaven is above the earth, clearly nonsense in terms of the physical universe. But in theology, the separation between heaven and earth carries freight that does not refer to the structure of the physical universe but to two qualities of time.

First, there was the time in the garden of paradise before the Fall during which God could walk in the garden. There was at that time no separation between heaven and earth. God was with his creature. However, the disobedience of Adam and Eve and their subsequent expulsion from the garden ruptured the relationship between man and God, symbolically producing a separation between heaven and earth. This time was “the time between the times” or secular time. In Christian theology the final time, the last days, will be a time when heaven will come down to earth and all things will be fulfilled. This is what I mean when I say that scripture and the creeds define a moral and not a physical universe.

Clearly, similar explanations can be made for the rest of the creed including the alarming idea of someone being born of a virgin and the resurrection of the dead. Our problem with these texts, one I own, particularly given my background in science, is that we have been trained to think in the terms of natural science. It requires some effort to think in a different way, a way that is figurative as opposed to positivistic.

Scientists are trained to gather evidence and construct systems of causation. Anything outside of this is deemed illusory. This is why we can have an eminent scientist like Colin Blakemore produce a program about religion without even the slightest investigation into what religion might be. This is sad because it confirms non believers in the opinion that it is all bunk and leaves them in the desert of autonomous rationalism with technological progress the only hopeful glimmer on the horizon.