CUSTODIANS OF THE FAITH
IN SECULAR SOCIETY
Keynote Presentations at the 2015 Diocese of Ottawa Synod
October 29th – 31st 2015
Kawuki Mukasa
Session Three
So, here are a couple of questions that we may want to
consider. What are we being called to do in a secular missionfield? And how do we go about proclaiming the gospel and
doing God’s mission in the context of secular humanism?
I started out yesterday on a rather pessimistic note. I
suggested that religion is on a steady decline in Western society
and that some mainline religious institutions may become
extinct in a generation or two. I would like to voice a more
optimistic view this morning. I would like to say that we are in
fact on the cusp of seeing a major transformation in the
worldview of contemporary society; a transformation that could
make this a much more receptive mission-field than it has been
lately. We are right in the middle of what we might call a kairos
moment; a moment of opportunity that requires us to mobilize
our resources in particular ways in order to fulfil God’s mission.
The predominance of secular humanism and its segregation
from religious beliefs rests on the assumption that science has
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now superseded religion as the most reliable source of our
knowledge about the world. It is the assumption that in due
course – perhaps even within our lifetime – science will enable
us to understand the world in all its complexity and detail. This
is part of the quest for the so-called theory of everything. This
overwhelming confidence in the ability of science to explain
reality climaxed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At that
time the Newtonian mechanistic worldview promised the
possibility of a total and absolute knowledge of every aspect of
the world once all the data is made available.
According to these assumptions, the key to accessing all of
this knowledge is the methodology (although some may call it
the ideology) of reductionism. Reductionism is the view that all
of reality may be explained in physical terms by reducing it to
its component parts, all the way down to those subatomic
particles, quarks or strings that physics tells us are the most
basic building blocks of all material things. What we are saying
here is that (according to this ideology) all of our reality –
including our consciousness and whatever we may be referring
to by concepts like the soul or spirituality – all reality will in the
end be explained in materialist terms. In other words, our
consciousness and spirituality but also other non-physical
dimensions of our experience including free will, value,
meaning and purpose; all of that are but mere illusions of the
material world and should not be taken as foundational or
fundamental to reality.
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These assumptions have filtered down into society over the
last century. They have reverberated through popular culture,
infiltrating and dominating a wide range of conversations
including religion, for most of the 20th century. The dramatic
emptying of church pews in the mid-twentieth century which I
referred to yesterday; the flurry of radical theologies in the
1960s (including the Death of God theologies) and the
prediction that mainline churches will soon become extinct are
all a direct consequence of the assumption of materialism and
the reductionist ideology which grounds it.
Now, this materialist worldview was already under fire
long before its repercussions began to spread widely into
popular culture. In other words, the seeds of the transformation
that I am now claiming, the transformation of our contemporary
worldview, may be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth
century. The first shift happened in the earlier decades of that
century, when the determinism of Classical physics was
superseded by the contingence of General Relativity and the
indeterminism or uncertainty of Quantum mechanics.
Confidence in the mechanistic model of the world would now
have to be adjusted and modestly re-framed in terms of
probabilities (rather than certainties).
Shortly thereafter, logical positivism, the philosophical
doctrine that supports a materialist worldview, began to unravel.
The central claim of this doctrine is that only those statements in
our language that are empirically verifiable (that is to say
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provable by means of observation or experiment) only such may
be called meaningful in any real sense. All other statements we
make in our conversations, in as far as they don’t meet that bar,
are (according to this view) meaningless. But this ignores about
75% of the ways in which we use language. In other words an
overwhelming majority of our speech and experience –
including the claims of positivism itself – would have to be
dismissed as nonsense. Positivism had to be let go in part
because of its self-contradiction. Its rejection, however, rattled
the foundations of a naturalist worldview and the kind of
secularism that has evolved out of that, especially in Europe. But
perhaps even more significantly, it allowed the possibility for
scientific language to explore dimensions of our reality that
were, until now, dismissed as too incoherent for scientific
investigation. I am thinking here in particular of fields like
Cosmology and the Philosophy of Mind; fields that have since
generated bodies of literature that are beginning to change how
we view and understand the world today.
Let me conclude by lifting up a couple of inter-related areas
where this transformation is beginning to happen. First, the hope
in our ability to solve all the mysteries of the universe some day
is receding rapidly. It is true that scientists are still pursuing that
elusive “theory of everything”. But the deeper they dig the more
mysterious nature seems to be and the less confident we become
in our ability to explain it. There is an often cited exchange
between Napoleon and French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace.
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Napoleon asked Laplace why there was no mention of God in
his monumental work on the universe and Laplace is said to
have replied: “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.”
The story may be apocryphal but it illustrates the
confidence with which scientists believed that we no longer
need to make any reference to God. Today scientists, even those
who might consider themselves hard-core atheists, cannot
dismiss God willy-nilly, in the way Laplace is alleged to have
done. Today the mystery thickens and a comprehensive secular
explanation of our existence continues to elude us. Listen to how
Stephen Hawking concludes one of his most popular books: “If
we find the answer to why we and the universe exist, it will be
the ultimate triumph of human reason, for then we will know the
mind of God.” Almost two centuries since one giant of science
dismissed God, another giant brings God right back into the
conversation. Therein is the moment of opportunity: God-talk;
theology regaining currency in the middle of secular culture.
Secondly, the dismissal of God was followed by another
perspective on reality that dominated Western society
particularly in last century: the sense that life is meaningless and
without purpose. Five hundred years ago, before the Copernican
revolution, we assumed that we human beings are at the centre
of the Universe and that we are the ultimate meaning and
purpose of God’s act of creation. Since then we have come to
realize that we live on a tiny piece of debris orbiting a relatively
small star in a solar system that is tucked away on the margins
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of an average-sized galaxy. We have come to suspect that
perhaps there is nothing special about us or the planet upon
which we happen to live.
Our sense of significance was dealt another blow by
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. This very influential
theory brought us to the shocking realization that far from being
the star of a cosmic drama, we are in fact quite incidental.
Darwinism taught us that we are a random by-product of an
aimless process that started long before we emerged on the
scene and will outlast us by billions if not trillions of years into
the future. This new knowledge about the nature of our
existence in the universe gradually sipped into Western culture
and informed the work of such influential thinkers like Friedrich
Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Satre, Albert Camus and others. Such
thinkers popularized the impression that life is meaningless; that
life is absurd and that life is without purpose. In one often cited
quotation, Steven Weinberg, one of the most distinguished
scientists of our time, draws a direct correlation between our
growing knowledge of the world and the view that life is
without meaning. He says: “the more the universe seems
comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
This is the ideological environment in which the mass
exodus of people from church pews took place in Western
society. If God is dead and life is without meaning, what is the
point then of religious faith? The good news (and this is my
point) is that over the last few of decades a growing generation
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of thinkers has emerged that is helping to transform the
worldview of contemporary society. These are thinkers who
reject the notion that life is without meaning or that the universe
is pointless. And they do so not on the basis of religious faith but
science.
Let me give some examples. In 1974, Australian physicist
Brandon Carter observed that the coincidences involved in the
way the universe has ordered itself would lead one to suppose
that it is fine-tuned for intelligent life. This “anthropic principle”
(as he called it) seems to rule out the claim that the universe is
pointless or that life is meaningless. Other prominent scientists,
including Stephen Hawking, have endorsed this principle, albeit,
to varying degrees conviction. In The Intelligent Universe, a
book published in 1983, theoretical physicist and astronomer,
Fred Hoyle (himself a confessed atheist) rejects the notion that
we are a random outcome of an aimless process. He argues
instead that life appears to be the result of a deliberate plan
(although he does not go so far as to invoke theism in this
regard). In The Mind of God, published 1992, physicist and
cosmologist Paul Davies argues that meaning and purpose are in
the very existence of scientific enquiry. “If the universe is
pointless,” he writes, “then it is also incomprehensible and the
rational basis of science collapses.”
Biologist Stuart Kauffman, who is also a student of selforganizing complexity in the universe, proposes a new scientific
worldview that goes beyond reductionism; a worldview that
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offers perhaps a more teleological; more purposive account of
evolution. He says that in the process of evolution new entities
with their own properties and causal powers emerge and become
part of the furniture of the universe. According to him, the
reductionist worldview does not adequately account for the
emergence of these complex systems and therefore leaves gaps
in the explanation of certain dimensions of our experience
including value, ethics and even consciousness.
Philip Clayton takes Kauffman’s proposal one step farther
in his book Mind and Emergence, published in 2004. According
to him, if the hypothesis of emergence explains the development
of complex systems such as human consciousness, it must also
have the ability to explain the dimension of transcendence,
thereby opening the door to theology. Clayton also demonstrates
(successfully in my opinion) that materialism and dualism are
not the only choices before us. Like Kauffman, he sees a viable
middle path in the new biology of self-organizing complexity
and emergence.
Thomas Nagel, one of the most distinguished philosophers
of our time, recently published a very controversial book
entitled: Mind and Cosmos, published 2012. In this book, Nagel
argues flat out that the materialist neo-Darwinian view of nature
is almost certainly wrong. According to him, the success of
scientific materialism depends on one crucial limiting step,
namely: the subtraction from the physical world of everything
mental – consciousness, meaning, intention and purpose. Yet we
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who are physical organisms and are indeed part of the physical
universe, are also conscious beings with subjective experiences.
Science leaves this important aspect of nature unexplained. “If
science aspires to a more complete understanding of nature,”
writes Nagel, “it must expand to include theories capable of
explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena
and the subjective points of view in which they occur.”
These are but a handful of the growing chorus of voices
that are beginning to challenge the naturalist/materialist
worldview that has dominated Western culture over the last two
centuries. They include some of the most distinguished scientists
and philosophers of this generation. With time more and more
voices will join the chorus, the emerging vision will reach a
tipping point and spill over into popular culture, bearing a
worldview that will be ready to listen again.
In 2nd Timothy 4:2, Paul tells Timothy: “Proclaim the
gospel. Be prepared to do so in season and out of season.” We
are custodians of the faith in contemporary society. I believe that
in two or three decades this mission-field will come full circle. I
believe that society will be looking to the remnant Custodians of
the faith for narratives of meaning, value and purpose. I believe
that theologians and scientists will become increasingly engaged
in conversation about the nature of our reality and our existence.
And so, as you embrace God’s future; as you brace
yourselves to engage the world, prepare to encounter a society
that is increasingly thirsty and open to the old narratives of
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meaning and purpose; a society that is ready to listen again to
the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
We are on the cusp of a kairos moment. Let us embrace it
in the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit.
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