Various helps: Being Christian and a scientist

  • blue_scientist2.jpgFinances are sud­denly a cause for major stress in our house­hold, as they are in so many fam­i­lies these days. We’re in a period of rel­a­tive calm right now, with the next storm already on the horizon.

    The point of this is not to get sym­pa­thy, because it seems like almost every­one is going through some­thing like this these days. The point is to use this interim time to write down the things that helped me. Because I may need them again, and maybe they’ll prove help­ful to any­one else going through tough times.

    The first one may sound incon­gru­ous, but I was con­stantly aware of the need to keep doubts in per­spec­tive, by way of what Mpn. Anthony Bloom called ‘being a scientist.’

    I hate that the strug­gle to make ends meet affected my basic faith, but it did. “Doesn’t God know what’s hap­pen­ing to us? Doesn’t He care?” Ratio­nally, I knew that some­thing was wrong with ask­ing the ques­tions, but emo­tion­ally, they come out of you like the cries of the psalmist. (“How long, O Lord, how long …?”) So what was I get­ting wrong?

    To the res­cue came rec­ol­lec­tions of an essay by Mpn. Anthony Bloom enti­tled “Doubt and the Chris­t­ian Life”(**). The whole essay has points to make about the nature of doubt and faith, but draw­ing on his life expe­ri­ence as a sci­en­tist, Mpn. Anthony said one thing that really struck me [high­lights mine]:blue_scientist.jpg

    There  are two absolutely dif­fer­ent atti­tudes to doubt in the mind — there is that of the sci­en­tist and that of the believer. For the sci­en­tist, doubt is a sys­temic weapon; it is a joy. For the believer when he takes the wrong atti­tude to doubt and to the prob­lems he is fac­ing, it is a moment of anguish.

    What hap­pens usu­ally to the believer is that hav­ing believed in all sim­plic­ity that every­thing is clear, sim­ple, straight­for­ward, he sud­denly dis­cov­ers that life gives the lie to what he thought to be true. Then his answer is ‘I am dis­loyal to what I thought. I am dis­loyal not only about sub­tleties but about basic things — about God Him­self, about the Church, about what is at the core of the believer’s life. Then he feels that what is at stake is the break­ing down, the destruc­tion, the dis­ap­pear­ance of the object of faith, and God’s exis­tence is now ques­tion­able. The val­ues which were essen­tial, which were exis­ten­tial val­ues for him, are ques­tion­able, and there­fore his very exis­tence becomes a prob­lem and seems to be insu­per­a­bly problematic.

    But when the sci­en­tist engages in research, he gath­ers together all the facts he is capa­ble of col­lect­ing. … if as a sci­en­tist, he is a man who is out to dis­cover what things are in real­ity, his first action will be to go round and round his model in all direc­tions, exam­in­ing and try­ing to find where the flaw is, what the prob­lems are which are gen­er­ated by the model he has built, by the the­ory he has pro­pose, by the hypoth­e­sis he has now offered for the con­sid­er­a­tion of others.  …

    At the root of the scientist’s activ­ity, there is the cer­tainty that what he is doubt­ing is the model he has invented — that is, the way in which he has pro­jected his intel­lec­tual struc­tures on the world around him and on the facts; the way in which his intel­li­gence has grouped things. But what he is also absolutely cer­tain of is that the real­ity which is beyond his model is in no dan­ger if his model col­lapses. The real­ity is sta­ble, it is there; the model is an inad­e­quate expres­sion of it, but the real­ity doesn’t alter because the model shakes.

    ‘Model’ can be replaced by another word when it is not used in a sci­en­tific way — it can be replaced by the word ‘truth.’

    In other words, we Chris­tians know that besides being the Way and the Life, Jesus Christ is the Truth. BUT … this side of glory, we can only take in Truth in lit­tle amounts, and that gives us our “model” of truth that gets us through from day to day. One may believe that the great­est proof of God’s good­ness is to be found in the smile of his chil­dren; another may find it in the chemother­apy that brings heal­ing but at a price. Both are mod­els — both can be right and both can be wrong. If the chil­dren don’t smile today, has God turned away? If the chemother­apy doesn’t work, is God unmerciful?

    This is where the good words and bright moods meet the dirt and grit of some hard real­ity. If I am feel­ing let down and dis­ap­pointed by unan­swered prayer and won­der why God hasn’t heard me, then can I be a Chris­t­ian sci­en­tist as Mpn. Anthony sug­gests and real­ize that the prob­lem may be not with God but with my model of God? It’s not pos­si­ble to box God in with my lit­tle con­cepts and words — if He breaks loose of them at the times of great­est cri­sis, whose fault is that? And more to the point, is that nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing? The mis­ery and unan­swered prayers of hard times don’t prove that God won’t or can’t take care of me; they only prove that my model of Him is flawed. I tried to keep Him in too small a box — He broke out. Thanks be to God.

    (photo: istock­pho­tos )


    Related posts:

    1. Why I don’t believe what Penn believes
    2. A Chris­t­ian in Afghanistan
    3. His­tor­i­cal guess­work and the Chris­t­ian spoilsport
    4. Here we go again
    5. Tough talk, the Fore­run­ner and Mother Teresa

    November 22nd, 2009 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • Gretchen­joanna 11.22.2009

    I always find Met­ro­pol­i­tan Anthony so encour­ag­ing, and you have intro­duced me to yet another essay and more help­ful words from him. Thank you for shar­ing how these truths work in your own life.

  • Grace

    Glad to find another fan. I *really* like Mpn. Anthony’s writ­ings, and I don’t hear peo­ple talk about him much. “Begin­ning to Pray” is a book that is so good I don’t just think I should read it over and over, I think *every­one* should. I sound like Gush­ing Fan­girl, so I’ll stop now. :-)

  • Mimi

    Prayers to you, and hugs. It is so hard to (in bumper sticker par­lance) “Let Go and Let God” I agree with you, Met­ro­pol­i­tan Anthony is very good at remind­ing us of that.

    I’ve only read a cou­ple of his books (“Begin­ning to Pray” one of them, rec­om­mended to me by my Spri­ti­tual Father).

  • Grace

    < < the end of my “lifestyle” but not the end of the world. »

    I like that. That’s just it. It’s sur­pris­ing how much of the adjust­ment comes from hav­ing to take a hard look at what we value and what we think gives us OUR value. Still wish I’d wake up and find that I dreamt it, but oh well.

  • s-p

    I too like Anthony Bloom. And I too am behind on every­thing and nego­ti­at­ing to keep water and lights on and pos­ses­sion of our cars etc. But, in the end I’m not los­ing any weight and heck, I’m post­ing on the inter­net from my base­ment. In the end it might be the end of my “lifestyle” but not the end of the world. Hang in there.

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