Opening our minds in a secular century

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I began making a collection of jottings – thoughts that seemed worth remembering, tidying up, perhaps sharing with family and friends. Every time I tried to begin, I was off on another tangent. I’ve come to realise that creative writing is not for me—I need to have a purpose, a topic, a direction.  I don’t recall ever sitting down with a blank page for the sheer pleasure of writing.  From school days onwards it has always been an assignment, an essay, a lab report, a thesis, a lecture to prepare – always with a deadline!

Amazing thing, deadlines! There is nothing like the pressure of a deadline to turn a blank page into an assignment that could be handed in – perhaps a little overdue – but nevertheless complete.  Useful “deadline therapy”!  Perhaps it’s because I don’t have a deadline right now, that it’s hard to organise my buzzing thoughts.

So here I am with a blank screen, but what to do with it?  I’ve begun several times; having written a few thousand words, I find myself starting again.  Then I remember how often as a psychologist, I’ve advised people to catch their untidy thoughts on paper: that will help us slow down our thoughts, so we can inspect them, perhaps improve them — or at least clarify them.  Perhaps I can understand my own thoughts more clearly once they’re on paper (or computer screen).

So, I don’t have a clear topic and I don’t have a deadline, so I’ll just try to catch on paper some of my lifetime of buzzing thoughts – psychological thoughts and theological thoughts.

To start somewhere …The world has changed – there was a time when almost everybody I knew believed in God—the Christian God—it was just a matter of your flavour of Christianity: Roman Catholic, Church of England, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Salvation Army, Brethren, Orthodox. 

The world I knew in the 1940s didn’t seem so very different from what I have read about the Ancient Near East, a world where almost everyone accepted that there was at least one god.  In my early years, I rarely heard anyone disagree loudly with the thoughts of Psalm 14.1: The fool has said in his heart, “there is no God”.

Which sets me wondering: Is Psalm 14.1 suggesting that only an idiot would say “there is no God” or perhaps “you’ve got to be stupid to say there is no God”?

That seems a bit impolite especially if it’s in the Bible.  And unless I’m wanting my readers to tear up this page or smash their screen, I’ll say what I think it means.

Since my first days with French at high school, I’ve seen how it can be a bit tricky to translate the original sense of a foreign word into English.  And particularly challenging when the word was written thousands of years ago at a very different time in history and culture – as with the bible languages, Hebrew and Greek. 

Back in the schoolyard, I understood “fool” to mean “stupid idiot” – an expression of contempt.   I could have read Psalm 14 and felt smug about not being a stupid idiot so long as I agreed that there was a God.  But what if the Hebrew word translated “fool” in modern English didn’t imply “stupid idiot” and could be better translated as “someone well advised to think again on the subject”.  No reason to feel smug here – who of us can claim that we could never benefit from thinking before we speak and even having a second thought before we speak, and perhaps a third? 

When I turn up a Hebrew–English lexicon, I find it suggests that the “fool” is probably not a card-carrying atheist, engaged in serious arguments against the existence of God, but someone who doesn’t take time to consider God — even though they may be otherwise a thoughtful person.

In that ancient world, there seemed to be no shortage of gods – people commonly believed that there was a different god for every locality, and it was important to make sure that you kept on the right side of the local god. 

As people rebuilt their lives after the Allied victory in World War II, it was easy to claim that God was on our side – until we realized that there were many who had believed in the same God, in nations on the other, losing side of the war.

I find myself living in a different world these days – along with my children and grandchildren – and friends. It seems commonplace to consider talk of God and spiritual matters to be a superstition– quite out of touch with where life is happening!

There is no shortage of people in our day prepared to rewrite the sentence: Only a fool thinks that God exists.

Signs of the times

On Tuesday 28 June 2022, the Sydney Morning Herald commented on the latest Australian Census figures:

Australia has become strikingly more godless over the past decade, the latest census data showing the proportion of self-identified Christians dropping below 50 per cent for the first time and an increasing number of people describing themselves as “non-religious”.

And then I thought: I could today be describing myself as “non-religious” or “non-Christian” if my understanding of Christianity had not been, like the skin of a snake, repeatedly discarded and renewed over the past 60+ years.

The God that seemed to be in the air I breathed as a child and teenager is commonly thought to be no longer fit for purpose.  So, it is hardly surprising that I now find myself in a world where many people consider that talk of God and the spiritual world is a superstition – disconnected from reality.  A nice superstition, soothing and comfortable but out of touch with the real world in which we live! 

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his best-selling “The God Delusion” finds (at least) two problems with “religion” (a word he mentions 500 times in the Kindle edition of the book).

  • Just because people find emotional comfort in “religion” does not make it true.   Writes Richard Dawkins: ‘the consolation-content of a belief does not raise its truth-value’

    • I wouldn’t disagree.  Just because it’s comfortably familiar doesn’t make it true beyond question.  After all, there are many nursery rhymes we learnt as children that we can still recite, while waiting our turn at the pension office!

  • Religion has been used to justify discrimination in favour of religious adherents

    • on financial grounds (tax exemptions etc)
    • or political grounds (groups claim special status politically e.g in laws against religious discrimination – which often means laws in favour of religious discrimination against citizens following other religions or no religion). 

      Again, I agree that the rights of citizens protected by the law, should not be affected by any claimed religious status.   A presumed right to freedom of expression should make certain activities lawful for everyone or lawful for nobody.   

Over the years, I have often pondered these issues, as a psychologist and as a Bible student, which has left me quite sympathetic towards people with doubts and reservations about God.  Here is a list of some of the concerns I’ve stumbled upon:  

  1. I don’t need a God who is angry, vengeful, sadistic, authoritarian, totalitarian.
  2. I don’t need a God who is out of step with modern life.
  3. I don’t need a God who has a self-esteem problem, who needs to be praised all the time, like an insecure teenager.
  4. I don’t need a God who makes me feel like a child, having to be good and keeping all the rules.
  5. I don’t need a God who needs my prayers to tell him how to improve or fix the world.
  6. I don’t need a God who claims to be omnipotent but hasn’t put an end to wars, domestic violence, child abuse, cancer etc.
  7. I don’t need a God that I need to be saved from. Saved is a rusty old word if ever there was one. And I’m certainly not interested in any of that “old time religion” to save me.
  8. I don’t need a God who is foisted upon us by a church that seems to be stuck in the past —  against anything that seems interesting, new, exciting, or even just plain good fun — and which is spying on my case like a detective.  Church seems so stuffy, so old-fashioned.   If God doesn’t interest my friends, then I’m not interested either.
  9. I don’t care what the Bible says – it’s full of old-fashioned ideas in old-fashioned language – I am just as comfortable with the ancient teachings of Confucius, the Buddha, or even Mohammed!
  10. I don’t need a God who is bad for my mental health – I can’t afford to take God seriously.  If I did, I’d always be anxious or guilty, pacing on a treadmill while feeling I could never quite go fast enough to please him.

So …  Instead of all this stuff, I’d like to see myself as a modern, healthy, coping individual who doesn’t need any of these mental crutches.

What follows is an attempt to catch in words some of the buzzing thoughts I have thought (and continue to think) about these 20th– and 21st-century issues.

Each generation experiences a different psychosocial world.  We may be thinking of the same God, same bible, same gospel, but there’s a never-ending challenge to make sense of it for each new generation.   It’s not very helpful to today’s generation if we seek to relive the religious revivals of 1700’s and 1800’s or even the Billy Graham Crusades of the 1960’s.

God is not an idea or a person that we can represent in plasticine or clay and pass on to family and friends.  But if we remain open to the possibility that God exists, then our minds will not be locked against a God who seeks to make himself known to mortals.[1]

NEXT:  Science and the Supernatural – After the “Big Bang”

[1] I write “himself” not because I expect any God must be masculine gender, but following hundreds of years of tradition in English usage.  More about how language may have shaped and misshaped our idea of God later!)

/SCIENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL – AFTER THE “BIG BANG”

Synopsis – Chapter 2

Given the common objections to taking God seriously (like those in the previous chapter),  it is tempting to forget about God altogether. But some writers argue that religious belief appears to be intuitive.  So, perhaps the idea that there is “no place for God in this modern world” isn’t as popular an idea as I had come to think.

Some people accept that there is a God who exists and always existed in a universe that seemed stable and permanent, outside of time — or so it seemed until the 1920s, when talk of the “Big Bang” started people thinking that we didn’t need any God to start the universe going.  The “Big Bang” seemed to fit neatly alongside Charles Darwin’s theory accounting for how all the various living species could evolve spontaneously.

But there was a still a need to explain how the chaotic randomness accompanying the “Big Bang” and evolutionary biology came to be “tidied up” into something that we observe working to support the biology and psychology that we are familiar with — by a process called “self-organisation”.  Otherwise, it would take magic or divine intervention to turn the product of chance into a useful, rational and inhabitable universe.  

The Big Bang universe seems accommodate our view of reality – things we can see, touch, hear and measure – confirmed by the experience of other people as to what is real.

With the “Big Bang” to get things started, and self-organisation, a spontaneous process that does not need any control by an external force, there seems to be less and less reason to call upon “God” to explain something that scientists haven’t yet been able to explain.

From here it’s a small step to concluding that modern science says there is no God because there is no need for God — because we have explained it all without mentioning God. Neither logic nor science helps us prove the existence of a supernatural God.

We accept that the swing of a simple pendulum is a property of the physical world which we inhabit. The properties of the pendulum are described independently of our understanding of God, and independently of whether or not God exists. Simple harmonic motion is part of the fabric of the cosmos.

Likewise, self-organisation is part of the fabric of the cosmos. There is no point in arguing about whether God is needed to underpin the lawfulness of “self-organization” just as no one argues about whether God is needed to maintain “simple harmonic motion.”   I suggest that we need to look somewhere else if we want to use these features of the physical universe as evidence for or against the existence of God. And where we look will depend on the duty statement we plan to use when deciding whether God should have his term of office extended at his next “performance review”.

I think that the complaints in the list in the last chapter result from “mental barnacles” — ideas that have attached themselves, unplanned and uninvited, to what we understand by “God”.   I guess that the more barnacles that we accumulate, the more tempting it is shake off the barnacles, travel light, without baggage, and forget about God altogether.

After we were introduced to (or stumbled into) “God” as children or teenagers, the barnacles started growing when we heard people expressing various thoughts about God. 

It might be helpful if we could do some straight thinking without these barnacles. But first we need to start identifying the barnacles. However, that may not be so easy – we might decide that we could save ourselves time and energy if we just decided that there is no place (and no need) for God in this modern world.

In Eastern Australia, where I have spent most of the past 80 years, the majority view now seems to be that there is “no place – and no need for God in this modern world”. But then in the mail this week arrived a copy of New Scientist Essential Guide Number 14 – Human Society: How Evolution and Psychology Shaped Our World.

New Scientist Essential Guide Number 14, Chapter 3, Morality and Religion discusses “why we believe in Gods”. It begins (p 47):

Almost everybody who has ever lived has believed in some kind of deity. Even today, atheism remains a minority pursuit requiring hard intellectual graft, and committed atheists easily fall prey to supernatural ideas. Religious belief, in contrast, it appears to be intuitive.

So perhaps “no place for God in this modern world” isn’t as popular an idea as I had come to think from reading books like Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” or watching trendsetting commentators on TV.

There are two ideas which have kept my mind busy for decades:

  1. Some people accept that there is a God who exists and always existed – outside of bubble of time in which we humans live. Up until the 1920s, the universe seemed to be stable and permanent, so it was easy to think of a god existing forever — permanently.  Such a god would never need to be created – but let’s not ask how any god came to be there in the first place.


You’ve probably read (perhaps many years ago) some of the verse of English poet, A.A. Milne. He wrote about what many of us have thought, and perhaps still wonder:

  • Elizabeth Ann said to her Nan, “Please will you tell me how God began? Somebody must have made Him. So. Who could it be?


It seemed to be generally accepted, that Elizabeth Ann’s God could satisfy the job description that we had written for a god who was needed to create the physical world in which we live, as well as the social world which we share – and indeed could be the source of life itself.

This traditional way of thinking about the cosmos seemed to fit well with the biblical accounts of creation we read in the Bible in Genesis chapters 1 – 3, beginning:


In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1.1) 

  • But Elizabeth Ann and the Bible didn’t have the last word. Traditional thinking was shaken up in 1927 when a Belgian priest, Georges Lemaître, proposed an idea known as the “The Big Bang” – so called by English astronomer Fred Hoyle in the 1940s.  That was a neat phrase to contrast Lemaître’s idea with the widespread acceptance of the steady-state view of the universe. It was a new idea and a new name that seemed in keeping with the spirit of the times.

Could the “Big Bang” provide an understanding of the universe, a cosmology, which explained the origins of our planet without any need for God to start things going? 

Whatever the details of what happened before and after the “Big Bang”, the term “Big Bang” seemed to find company in the world of ideas alongside Charles Darwin’s evolutionary (and revolutionary) theory on the origin of living species.

If the “Big Bang” and evolution could explain how we came to be here, then the God who, for centuries, had been given credit for starting the universe and keeping it going could now be retired — or sent on long service leave prior to retirement. From there it is only a small step to conclude that there is no God existing outside of human imagination.

Science seems to have been gaining wide acceptance for the view that the universe began with a “Big Bang”, but then had to tidy itself up into something that would work — by a process called “self-organisation.” 

As attractive as the “Big Bang” hypothesis sounds, it is helpful to remember that it is a scientific theory – no one was present to observe or record the event – and there are cosmologists who cannot rest easy just yet with the so-called “inflation” hypothesis — the idea of an ever-expanding universe which began with the “Big Bang”. The cover story in New Scientist, 28 January 2023 describes one alternative theory (a parallel universe going backwards in time”).  I’m not a cosmologist, so I don’t feel the need to express an opinion on the matter.  But I’ll continue to refer to the “big bang” as a convenient way of describing a popular view of the universe, even though it could eventually be modified or replaced in the popularity stakes by another scientific model!

It’s not difficult for us to be interested in the Big Bang universe because it fits with our view of reality – where reality consists of things we can see with our eyes, touch with our fingers, hear with our ears, weigh on the scales.  This view of reality is also validated by the experience of family and friends.

Reality is defined as “what everyone knows and experiences”.  You see a table and chair, I see a table and chair, you seem to understand what to do with a table and chair and I think I understand how to use the table and chair, so let’s agree that the table and chair are real.  That agreement is the basis of what has been called consensual validation. And so on for the rest of the world that we accept as real.  We don’t need to stop and think too hard or long about it.

And it saves us having to answer Elizabeth Ann’s question about how God began.

Self-organisation is a neat idea, but when I first heard of it, I wasn’t so sure.  It sounded like a smart way to rescue an idea that didn’t quite work, saving it from the scrap heap of ideas.   Self-organisation refers to a process playing a significant role defining the shape of the universe, especially the planet on which we live. Coupled with Darwin’s theory of evolution of the species and natural selection (survival of the fittest to determine whether new species would survive), we have one explanation of how we find ourselves on planet Earth surrounded by the various living forms, plant and animal – without any need for God.

At first I found it impossible to accept that a process involving chance could finish up with an orderly, organised, functioning outcome rather than chaotic disorder.   And speaking of “chance”, it’s not just the chance of getting heads or tails in one toss of the coin at the beginning of a tennis, cricket or football match – theory is about chance on a mammoth scale taking place in eons – unlimited time.

Self organisation does the tidying up after repeated randomness on a cosmic scale.   (Wikipedia has a useful description of self-organisation) 

There seems so much to be accounted for by “self-organization”, which is given credit for imposing order on the expected chaos arising from the cumulative random processes thought to be initiated by the “Big Bang”.   Self-organisation depends on some inbuilt mechanism in the material universe, which will “blow the whistle and call time” so that whatever happens to be the current state of organisation – by chance or by divine decree — gets a guernsey, at least for the time being. Otherwise, the outcome would be chaotic – chaos on top of chaos – resulting in ever-increasing energy and temperature (referred to as entropy). Ever-accumulating entropy seems to spread through all that happens in the physical universe—the rule rather than the exception.  It seems that if self-organization doesn’t work exactly as expected, it would take more than a little magic (or a Creator God) for us to finish up with a useful, rational and inhabitable universe.  

But I remembered reading and understanding a little of Brian Greene’s book “Until the end of time: mind, matter and our search for meaning in an evolving universe”.  Brian, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, explains (page 64) that entropy generally increases due to the accumulation of random happenings – more or less as I’ve described – except when in local points in the universe some special factors produce a dramatic drop in temperature – i.e. reduced entropy – instead of rising temperature with chaotically accumulating, increasing entropy.

As I currently understand this theory of self-organisation, an unexpected reduction in entropy, leads to improved organisation – but it is not a common happening.  Because it is highly unlikely—we need to be prepared to wait for eons of time before we find it – or it finds us!    It all depends on encountering the necessary conditions (and long enough timespan) to experience this uncommon happening.

With these thoughts rattling around in the back of my head, I came across a more recent (2018) paper:

Order out of Randomness: Self-Organization Processes in Astrophysics  in Space Science Review (2018) 214:55 (1-75)  by Markus J. Aschwanden et al (14 others!!)

They examined for the first time 17 self-organization processes that operate in planetary physics, solar physics, stellar physics, galactic physics, and cosmology. They assert self-organizing systems create spontaneous “order out of randomness”.

I understand that it’s not possible in advance to determine what the features of the self-organized final product will be.   We won’t know what it is until it happens.

Markus Aschwanden and his co-authors begin defining self-organization as the spontaneous often seemingly purposeful formation of spatial, temporal, spatio-temporal structures or functions in systems composed of few or many components. In physics, chemistry, and biology, self-organization occurs in open systems (driven away from thermal equilibrium.) They state that the process of self-organization can be found in many other fields also, such as economy, sociology, medicine, technology (Haken 2008).

Self-organization creates “order out of randomness” that is opposite to random processes exhibiting increasing entropy. Self-organization is described as a spontaneous process that does not need any control by an external force — often initiated by random fluctuations and can then evolve in various ways. 

Among their conclusions I noted:

1.  Self-organization is a very multi-disciplinary subject that has been applied in planetary physics, solar physics, stellar physics, galactic physics, cosmology, ionospheric physics, magnetospheric physics, laboratory plasma physics, condensed matter physics, chemistry, biology, social science, and computer science.

2.  Self-organizing systems in astrophysics create spontaneous order out of randomness, during the evolution from an initially disordered system to an ordered and more regular quasi-stationary system.

3.  Self-organizing processes are not controlled from outside, but are driven by global forces such as gravity, rotation, thermal pressure etc.

I’ve spent some time trying to appreciate the “order out of randomness” paper having been sold the significance of self-organization by Brian Greene in “The Elegant Universe”. I am choosing my words carefully here: I wrote appreciate rather than understand. While the paper claims to focus on self-organisation processes in astrophysics, it helpfully adds a page of examples of self-organisation outside of astrophysics reaching into biology and social science.

The time I’ve spent reading this paper has broadened my appreciation of “self-organisation” far beyond what it had been at the outset.

I think I appreciate better how progress in the scientific understanding of the “Big Bang” and self-organization, contribute to an evolutionary model in cosmology. These scientific models seem to displace traditional views of a divine creator and sustainer of the physical and biological universe which we are fortunate to inhabit.  It consigns to the dust bag of human culture and history concepts of God where God is busy pulling the strings of a world full of marionettes or a clockmaker constantly maintaining the intricate mechanism supporting life in the universe (not forgetting to wind up the clock— as did human beings before battery-powered watches!)

Aschwanden et al.  describe self-organization as spontaneous and often seemingly purposeful.  I think there is emphasis on “seemingly”.

In a world where it is fashionable to define God out of existence – by reducing the scope of God’s duty statement one line at a time until there is ultimately no need to speak of a Creator God.  We now have the Big Bang plus self-organization to get things going – and not just creating cosmic randomness that one might expect after the big bang but “order out of randomness” – thanks to a spontaneous process that does not need any control by an external force.

According to this account there is less and less reason why one might call God up from the reserve bench to the A-team, to help out by explaining something that scientists haven’t yet been able to explain.

If one starts with the proposition that modern science says there is no God because there is no need for God — because we have explained it all — then we have entered a thought-space where science seems to say that there is no God and we’ve got as many reasons as you like to support the argument.

After being dazzled by the explanation of self-organization, accompanied by formulae, graphs, and high-quality graphic images, my mind wandered back to the physics lab at high school. There was a simple pendulum and there was a formula to calculate the period (length of time) for each swing of the pendulum depending on the length of the pendulum.  Turning up my old high school physics book, I’m reminded of certain basic assumptions – the string was effectively weightless, the arc (size) of the swing was small, and of course gravity remained constant.  (I haven’t hoarded all of my textbooks but physics was a subject I might have been happy to meet again).

Did your school have a school song – sung on presentation days?  Our school song included the lines “God bless our land, God save her and protect her”.   There may have been some problem with the breaking voices making a less-than- musical sound – but I don’t recall anyone in the school or the community questioning the sentiments of the song; certainly no one pulled out of the choir because they objected to the words “God bless our land…”. It never occurred to anyone to point out that while we might sing in the school song, that God would bless our land, God was never called into the physics lab to make sure that the pendulum in the science experiment kept going back and forth changing direction at the right speed.

While God wasn’t called upon to maintain the simple harmonic motion of the pendulum, I never heard it suggested (then or now) that because simple harmonic motion continued without calling upon God, that God was an unnecessary complication, which we could well do without.

Simple harmonic motion makes a case neither for nor against a creator and sustainer God. Likewise, “Big Bang”, self-organisation in any of its many manifestations do not inevitably and necessarily cancel God – unless we want it to be that way (and let’s include Darwin’s biological evolution along with the “big bang” and self-organization while we’re at it).

We accept that the swing of the simple pendulum is a property of the physical world which we inhabit. The properties of the pendulum are described independently of our understanding of God, and independently of whether or not God exists. Simple harmonic motion is part of the fabric of the cosmos. God is not specially honoured if someone points out that God is responsible for the lawfulness of simple harmonic motion.

The more I read about self-organisation, the more I see that it is part of the fabric of the cosmos. Why bother arguing about whether there needs to be God to underpin the lawfulness of self-organization just as no one argues about whether God is needed to maintain simple harmonic motion. Simple harmonic motion and self-organization are part of the fabric of the cosmos – whether or not we believe that God established it. If one of this pair of concepts this is described as spontaneous, then so is the other.   We need to look somewhere else if we want to use these built-in properties of the physical universe as evidence for or against the existence of God. And where this search leads us will depend on the duty statement that we have written for God.

If our argument for the existence of God in the universe is that God is responsible for every time a simple pendulum reverses direction, then that understanding of God will be threatened by a formula which associates length of pendulum to time taken— because the mathematical formula implies that it is inevitable. If I speak about God I would rather to speak about the One underlying, designing and sustaining all that dazzles our human minds. The God I’m thinking of is not threatened by someone coming along and saying “Look, this I think I have a graph, a formula or a theory to describe what’s going on here”. Not a problem! Since I understand God to be the God of self-organization, the God of the Big Bang and the God of simple harmonic motion.   God’s existence is neither proved nor threatened by simple harmonic motion, biological evolution and natural selection, nor the “Big Bang” and self-organization.

I have come full circle. My first thought was that self-organization was a neat theoretical trick to cover-up a failure in a theory explaining the existence of the organized universe to the randomizing Big Bang. Certainly, self-organisation helps us understand that the chaos arising out of the Big Bang, as part of that process.  Self-organisation isn’t needed to rescue the Big Bang theory like a blob of putty on a leaking water tank. The Big Bang has its place within the fabric of the cosmos as does what we call self-organization.

Is there any place for God in all of this?  The Big Bang and self-organization can be described without calling upon the activity of God. And if we are inclined to have a place for God in our theology of the cosmos, it doesn’t invalidate, cancel or question our cosmology.

We can opt out of having fries with our burger at Macca’s – the burger is still a burger, but our choice will affect nature of the Macca’s experience. We can choose to have our Big Bang and self-organization with or without God. Whether or not we treat God as an unnecessary or irrelevant option, our choice will affect the lifelong experience.

The general manager is not threatened (and does not sulk behind the desk) on being told that they are not needed to fix the plumbing — anyone may call the plumber without telling the general manager – the plumber can do his stuff equally well, no matter who called the plumber but if we go into an organisation and continually fail to respect, even ignore the role of the general manager, then a time may come that our interaction  with the organisation – or with the general manager is dysfunctional.  – and that is another story!

If we say we need God to account for something, then we may do well to line up with Elizabeth Ann and ask how God became available.

If we say we now have NO NEED of God because we now have the Big Bang, then Elizabeth Ann may ask what caused the Big Bang to happen.  And if we tell her that it was spontaneous, then she may ask, “Where did the spontaneity come from, what causes something to be spontaneous?”   Elizabeth Ann will say that spontaneous still needs to work with the stuff that the universe is made of – and it needs to be primed to act spontaneously.

Spontaneous may be a description but it’s not an explanation.

But then important parts of life happen without any explanation. We discover our parents through experience, not by logic:  it is true that we wouldn’t be here without our parents. But logic is not helpful in discovering our parents, nor getting to know them nor trust them.

While Science may seem to say “there is no God and we’ve got as many reasons as you need  to prove that”, I think that there are still two possibilities to be considered:

  1. we might attribute order in the universe to supernatural creativity and intelligence (one or more gods), or
  2. we might accept that reality – the natural world – has expanded and evolved as LeMaître and Darwin have proposed – rather like an out-of-control football match – increasingly chaotic until the whistle is blown. Chaos continues until some freakish happening in the natural world results in decreased entropy (observed as decreased temperature) – just as if a whistle was blown by some cosmic referee and the players come to order in one small corner of the cosmos.  With unlimited time available, the cosmos could slowly come to order, taking the shape that we know.

After thinking about these two possibilities for most of my adult life I think that the choice between them is not something that can be dealt with as a matter of science or logical proof – a topic to which I expect I will return.

/CAN I BELIEVE WHAT I CAN’T IMAGINE?

Overview 3

Imagination has been described as “the capacity to think about things in their absence”. It is an important aspect of thought – not just some magical force – that enables us to think creatively.

When we attempt to think about God, our imagination may play a greater role than we realise.   How do we represent God in our minds — a BEING (whatever that means) — who never needed to be created … without a beginning?  But just because we can’t imagine something, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or isn’t true.  

How is our imagination involved when we think about the primeval raw material with the built-in potential to become the Universe we inhabit?

In many cultures, the functioning organisation in the natural world is taken as evidence for the existence of one or more gods – because we can’t otherwise imagine how it all must have started.

Some of us may have difficulty imagining how self-organization could produce the universe we recognize — while some of us may have difficulty imagining an uncreated God.    

If “self-organisation” and “natural selection” enable cosmologists and biologists to do business without “needing” God, some scientists conclude not only that we don’t need God in the traditional (or biblical) sense, but also that there is no God. Nevertheless it is a gigantic step to conclude that science has accumulated overwhelming evidence for God’s non-existence. 

Natural selection, and self-organization are as much in need of having their origin explained as does God. 

Natural selection and/or self-organization are scientific models claiming our attention as alternatives to theological models (biblical or otherwise) of the universe and the life that we find in it.

The issue with models is not proving them true or false, but using them to help us understand and predict what is happening in the universe.   Emeritus Professor George E.P. Box has become celebrated for his frequently quoted comment:  “All models are wrong but some are useful”. More than likely, they will be more useful in some situations than in others.  But that doesn’t stop us hoping that one day someone will be prove that theology is right and that science is wrong, or that science is right and bible is wrong. 

 “Big Bang” and/or natural selection, offer an account of how our universe could have come to exist without a God, but they do not prove that there is no God.

The “Big Bang” and natural selection have nothing to say about the central issue in the biblical account of creation namely a self-revealing Creator God. 

Genesis is not so much about what God made, but who God is — a relating, caring personality. That personality (or character) is more significant than what he did in 6 days before resting on the seventh! 

If we wish to explore the possibility that God reveals himself in the Bible, we probably need to do some mental housekeeping.  We may find that the old images from childhood imagination are still there shaping (and limiting) our thoughts about the supernatural.

I have come to see that the God in the Bible desires that:

  • human beings might reciprocate God’s loyalty (often translated in English as love)
  • human beings might imitate God’s ethics or morality (what the Bible describes as godliness)
  • human beings’ treatment of family, friends, strangers and enemies will be marked by what English bibles call “justice” and “righteousness”.

I now see how all of us have been trying to do our best to make sense of a thousand-piece jigsaw when someone has lost the box with the picture on the front.

For me, reading around in the history and archaeology of biblical times has been a useful step along the way to shift the biblical episodes from the mental category of implausible/ fanciful to possible/probable.

The Old Testament makes most sense when viewed as part of the self-revelation of a possible, supernatural God. Allowing for the possibility of God’s existence allows us to consider other possibilities, including the possibility of God’s self-revelation in and through human history.  In trying to appreciate that revelation, I have tried to allow the bible to speak for itself rather than what I might have (since childhood) I imagined it was saying.

This chapter is about possibilities.  I won’t attempt to use logic or science to prove or disprove the existence of God, which I accept is not possible.  But that doesn’t mean that many (or most) have suspicions, which we may express, depending upon circumstances. But I suggest that we keep open the possibility of God, so that if God exists, then we haven’t closed our minds against a self-revealing God revealing godself to us.

Possibilities fire up our imagination.   Take the gold rush in Victoria in the mid-1800s as an example.   I can’t imagine people flocking to Ballarat in the 1850s without seriously entertaining not the certainty, but the possibility of striking it rich.  Without the possibility of discovering gold, they have no reason to leave home. 

Even when we are not consciously exercising our imagination, it may be playing an important role in our mental processes – more for some of us than for others.

Helen Burns considers that imagination is more significant than a magical force and is properly considered to be a fundamental aspect of thought. [1]

She gives a useful definition of imagination: “the capacity to think about things in their absence”.

 If I describe what I did during the holidays, you will likely be imagining, probably visualising what I am saying – but you’ll likely draw on your experiences on your holidays to fill inevitable gaps.  So long as your imagination can keep up with what I’m describing, you’ll have no problem accepting my account.  But if you start having difficulties imagining what I am saying about my holiday, then you will start wondering if I really was in Bali or the Riviera – or whether I went on any holiday at all.

When considering our idea of God, I think that our imagination plays a greater role than we realise.   How do we begin to imagine God – a BEING (whatever that means) — who never needed to be created … without a beginning. 

Unless we have reason to be sceptical from the outset, it is natural to process a new idea by imagining it.  We begin to visualise it – we can wonder what it looks like, what it sounds like – and so on. If our imagination begins to take us somewhere we’re not prepared to follow, we could cut it short saying “yeah, yeah, that’s hard to believe” and to stop wondering if it might be true.  If we are having trouble imagining a God that we are comfortable with, then it’s an easy way out to say that we don’t believe there’s such thing as God.  If we can’t imagine a God that we are comfortable with then we will likely say there is no God, even though millions of people speak about God. 

Imagination has a significant role to play in abstract thinking.  Unless we think we’ve seen God, we can’t think “God” without using our imagination.  Unless we were present to witness some “Big Bang”, our imagination will likely represent it in our minds as sights and sounds.   Whether we’re thinking “God” or “Big Bang”, our imagination will have a significant place in our mental response.

Some of us can’t imagine (there’s that word again!) how randomness on an industrial scale – on a universal scale – how that can lead to the geological, biological and psychological universe that we are familiar with.  We may find ourselves shrugging our shoulders saying, it didn’t all just happen, so perhaps there must have been (and still is) a God (by whatever name).

Some of us can’t imagine how a Creator Being has always existed and never was created, any more than we can imagine a universe that could have always existed.  Most of us lean towards the “Big Bang” rather than the possibility of a “steady state” universe – which may make us grateful that we don’t have to try to understand the present universe without any beginning. We each of us had a beginning, so we think we understand beginnings!  How can there be history without a beginning!

So with a sigh of relief, let’s jump on board the “Big Bang” train so that we don’t need to accept the idea that the universe always existed – that “Big Bang” explains it all – until we start enquiring about what may have triggered the “Big Bang”.

If we think too much, we find ourselves caught on the horns of a dilemma – or if you prefer, between the devil and the deep blue sea.  There are two situations we can’t easily imagine, so which of these alternatives do we prefer: 

  1. a God whose existence we have difficulty imagining without the aid of story books and artists.
  2. a “Big Bang” we have difficulty imagining – but at least we can see the results of the “Big Bang” in a telescope.

In a later chapter, I’ll return to this problem in the “God of Shrinking Gaps”.  But for the moment, please read on.

Just because we can’t imagine something, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or isn’t true.   If you’ve been taught about the inner workings of an atom in science classes, you may accept that atoms exist, but you and I both need to depend on scientists who have shared their image of the atom based on the evidence accumulated by John Dalton and later scientists from 1800 onward.

And from those same science classes, we may recall the law of conservation of mass or matter (“matter cannot be created or destroyed”) – which suggests that the universe we see is the merely the current arrangement of all the stuff making up the universe.   Which leads to the question, how do we start thinking about, visualizing the primeval raw material with the built-in potential to be the Universe that we recognize, just waiting to be triggered; and how do we imagine the moment of the triggering – the “Big Bang” — which leads to the universe as we know it?

As we begin visualizing it, we realise that organising it will be a major undertaking, which perhaps has us wondering how it is possible – if it doesn’t organize itself, there’s no one else to do it.  It sounds as unlikely as the football match (in the previous chapter) organising itself without a referee with a whistle!

In many cultures, there is a history of interpreting the this co-ordinated functioning  of the natural world as evidence for the existence of one or more gods — divine intelligence in the supernatural realm.  For thousands of years, one god or another has been given credit for organizing and maintaining the physical, biological and social world in which we find ourselves – adding up to a long history of human beings mentally exploring outside the natural realm, to the domain of the supernatural – because we can’t otherwise figure out how it all must have started.

Concepts like self-organization may save us from delving into the unknown (and unknowable?).  We don’t need to venture into the supernatural realm once we have self-organisation in our mental toolkit.  Everything can be explained!

Self-organisation offers a natural (rathe this this this r than supernatural) explanation.   But I can hear A.A. Milne’s Elizabeth Ann asking not only how God began BUT ALSO how did this self-organization begin!  

It seems quite a stretch to imagine some spontaneous, impersonal process of self-organization producing the shapes and textures that we take for granted following the chaotic explosion of atoms (as well as smaller subatomic particles), arising from “Big Bang”.

In this 21st Century, probably more of us have heard about Charles Darwin’s concept of “natural selection” than have heard of “self-organisation”:   Natural selection proposes that organisms, plant and animal, mindlessly evolve. Some organisms will be fit for purpose in the environment where they find themselves, so they will survive, thrive, and reproduce.  Others fall by the wayside (so sooner or later – perhaps much later — become extinct!)

If “self-organisation” and “natural selection” enable cosmologists and biologists to do business without “needing” God, some scientists conclude not only that we don’t need God in the traditional (or biblical) sense, but that God “almost certainly” doesn’t exist.

But even with God apparently out this of date and unemployed, it’s still a large step to assert that there is overwhelmingly conclusive evidence for God’s non-existence.

Current scientific theories cannot guarantee that there isn’t a God whose origin we cannot explain any more than we can explain the origin of the “Big Bang”, self-organisation or natural selection. They are descriptions, concepts or theories which help us to make sense of our existence — useful but not necessarily the whole story.

The question remains: have random processes, which play such a significant role in current scientific explanations of the cosmological, physical, biological, social universe just haphazardly occurred – or do the currently indispensable terms like “spontaneous” and “random” point to a massive “fudge factor” lumping together various unknowns including all the yet to be discovered, not yet understood and still to be documented properties of the physical and biological world.  According to our preference, we might find ourselves calling that Factor X, or perhaps, God.

It seems rather hasty to declare “mission accomplished” if, having described natural selection and self-organization we conclude that “the way things are is the way things are”.  You may recall the Cow pressing that point on Ferdinand, the Duck, in the movie “Babe” as the time for Christmas dinner approached.   But perhaps you recall more clearly Ferdinand Duck’s point of view:  “The way things are stinks!”

We might be impressed:  We may pause and reflect at leisure how the randomisation in the cosmic “kitchen whizz” is a marvellous thing when we see what it can do with physical matter AND/OR we may find ourselves marvelling at what self-organization can organise!

If we depend on the “Big Bang”, self-organization, and natural selection to avoid the need to explain a God who as an initiating and sustaining agent does more than merely tinker among the cogs of biology and cosmology, then questions about the origins of processes like the “Big Bang”, self-organization, and natural selection are still pressing.  Otherwise, these hypothesized mechanisms may leave Elizabeth Ann asking, “Please tell me where natural selection, or the “Big Bang” or self-organisation came from!   Giving something a name, even a most appropriate name, leaves us with a name but still no explanation.

The “Big Bang”, self-organisation and natural selection together offer an understanding of the universe without any need to think or speak about God.  But until the “Big Bang”, Self Organisation and Natural Selection have their origins explained, we are replacing God whose origin is unknown origin with three concepts of equally unknown origin.

In a later chapter, you will come across my quote of Paul M Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, in his opinion piece on the website www.space.com “What triggered the “Big Bang””? It’s complicated”.  He asserts that the “Big Bang” theory is a model of the history of the universe, but emphatically:  the “Big Bang” theory is not a theory of the creation of the universe. Full stop. Done.

One point is increasingly clear.  There can be no finding of ultimate truth in this relentless search for the origin of the universe.  At what point do we stop kicking the can further down the road, hoping to solve the mystery of origins? 

Models and their uses

I see that natural selection and/or self-organization and similar concepts are scientific models claiming our attention in parallel with theological models (biblical or otherwise). The models which we humans construct maybe verbal (including parables, allegories, drama and poetry), visual (graphic and artistic), mathematical (formulae and functions).   Present-day science uses a selection of these modelling approaches, theology uses a different selection. It is not surprising if there is more than one scientific model – nor is it surprising if there is more than one theological model.

And I can’t wait one sentence further without mentioning that the cover story in the New Scientist, 28 January 2023, outlined a completely different understanding of the cosmos, without needing the concept of cosmic inflation (the ever-expanding universe following the “Big Bang”) to account for the universe, as scientists currently understand it.  Every time we are presented with another model (in this case, a mirror-image universe stretching back in time from the “Big Bang”) we are reminded that science constructs models of reality, not absolute truth.

As I see it, what matters with models is not whether they are true or false, but how useful they may be in helping us understand and predict what is happening in the universe.  

As I was writing that sentence – which seems to me to crystallise how science operates – I felt the urge to gather support for this opinion from writers whose credentials in this area are already internationally established. Google and Wikipedia to the rescue! I soon found myself happily reflecting on the wisd this om of Professor George E.P. Box, who following a distinguished career in statistics, retired from the University of Madison-Wisconsin in 1992 as Emeritus Professor.   Professor G.E.P. Box is a name I instantly recognized as a member of the statistical elite whose work I had met in courses in statistical mathematics at the University of Queensland.  Professor Box has become celebrated for the quote:

“All models are wrong but some are useful”.

In discussing the physics of gas molecules, he observed that there was no need to ask the question of the volume, temperature, and pressure of gas molecules: “Is the model true?”. If “truth” is to be the “whole truth” the answer must be “no”. The only question of interest is “Is the model illuminating and useful?”

So relying on the support of Professor Box (and numerous people who have quoted him approvingly) I am comfortable to persist with the idea that the usefulness of models, not their truth or falsehood is what matters!

Different models seek to account for different parts of the cosmos and its contents. They may be only approximately true and perhaps only approximately true under certain restricted conditions, but they are not in conflict unless they lead to incompatible conclusions.  More than likely, they will be more useful in some situations than others.

This idea is useful far beyond the limits of the physical sciences.  It is tempting to think that if we persevere, someone will be able to prove that theology is right and science is wrong, or that science is right and bible is wrong.  But that hope will leave us with no more than hot air and wasted A4 pages — long before it becomes a footnote in an opinion piece in a newspaper.

If we consider “Big Bang” or natural selection, I don’t see how either of these models has anything to say about whether or not there is a divine creator. They offer an account of how the universe that we know might exist with or without a God.  The models are useful whether or not there is a God. The argument only gets difficult if someone wants to push ideas like

  • because “Big Bang” or natural selection don’t depend on (or even mention) a concept like God, that this leads us to conclude that God does not exist.

or

  • the “Big Bang” is ungodly fiction because it’s not mentioned in the Bible.

A self revealing God

The “Big Bang” and natural selection have nothing to say on issues central to the biblical account of creation – at least that’s how I read it. Ideas like creation in six days and the Garden of Eden are no more than wrapping paper around the central concept:  the self-revealing of a creator God – who is interested in more significant issues than getting angry and going on strike if he is not acknowledged as the creator who made it all in six days and then rested on the seventh!

My father’s pride and joy in his single days seems to have been his 1930s Overland automobile. He and the family shared many stories of adventures and misadventures – like wheels coming off on narrow mountain roads in southern Queensland – until he sold the car so that he and my mother could afford to marry and set up home in Brisbane. They bought a house next door to the home of one of mum’s telephone exchange colleagues.  I could go on with reminiscences, but those adventures – while they actually happened — are quite irrelevant to how he cared for my mother, and later for me and then my younger sister.

What the Bible is revealing in Genesis is not what happened, but a personality, God’s caring personality, that matters to us.

But we humans have difficulty imagining a personality without a physical body involved in a loving and caring relationship (with people like us!)  The whole point of a relationship is that it is based on loyalty – physical bodies aren’t the central point.   What is important is that there are certain expectations which lead to accepted mutual obligations – or there is no relationship.   “You will be my people and I will be your God” is theme that runs through the Bible.

As I have already suggested, most of us need to use our imagination if we are to think about God and all.  We have the impulse to represent God with something more than the X or Y in a mathematical formula.  So there is a natural tendency to provide what seems to be missing – perhaps a visual and emotional image that may be an amalgam of Santa Claus, the local policeman, the doctor, the school teacher with sprinklings of characters from Saturday afternoon movie matinees in the 1940s and 1950s.

Many of us first encountered the idea of God about the same age as we were introduced to Santa Claus, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – and all that crew.

It is possible that (like me) you first heard of places like Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee at about the same time as our minds were being filled with fairy tales and moralistic fables.  Since it’s hard to think about things that we can’t imagine, our imagination comes to our aid creating images of Noah’s ark in the Flood, Goliath conquered by David, the Shepherd, a baby in a manger at Bethlehem, fishers on the Sea of Galilee etc.

In retirement, I visited Israel. I realised that my childhood imagination had created mental “placeholders” for people and places in the Bible. These placeholders were simply mental folders, used to file ideas in childhood, conveying no intrinsic truth — somewhat like icons that we click to open an app in our computers or phones – little meaning in themselves but with the potential to open up more meaningful concepts.

After landing in Israel, I began to update my imagination: the Sea of Galilee was nowhere near Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s garden nor the home of the Three Bears visited by Goldilocks!

It seems to me that if we are to meet the God revealing himself in the Bible, we need to do some housekeeping in our heads and vacuum up the dust and thought fragments left over from our attempts to make sense of what we only partly understood as kids.  I suspect that our minds have accumulated these thought fragments of what we imagined as kids when we heard adults use words like God, Jesus, heaven (which was “up”) and hell (which was “down”) etc.  We may find that the old icons are still there in our minds, shaping (and limiting) the images in our adult minds, tethered to childhood memories.

I now understand that the God revealing himself in the Bible desires that

  • human beings might reciprocate God’s loyalty (often translated in English as love)
  • human being might imitate God’s ethics or morality (translated in English bibles as goodness, godliness, integrity and righteousness.)
  • human beings’ treatment of family, friends, strangers and enemies will be marked by what English bibles call “justice”, “righteousness” and “lovingkindness”.

As children, it was natural for us to assume that parents and the rest of their generation had a good grasp on what was worth knowing about the Garden of Eden, Moses and the Red Sea, David and Goliath, and the conquest of the Promised Land.  It wasn’t until much later in life that I came to see that these are merely interesting details, eye-catching pieces in the biblical mosaic, which together make up the “big picture” story of the Old Testament:  To me, that big picture reveals a God establishing a nation where the cultural norm is seeking what is best for every individual.   The key values of the Old Testament are rather unsurprising: justice and righteousness for all members of the nation, along with responsibility for sharing that benefit with the rest of humanity — literally “the Nations” (in most English translations, “Gentiles”). 

I now see how many of us — our parents and teachers, ourselves and our children have been floundering in a well-intentioned but clumsy way.   It seems like we’ve been trying to do our best to make sense of a thousand-piece jigsaw without the picture on the front of the box it came in, after someone has tried to make it easier, throwing away many of the pieces with one or more straight edges (perhaps they looked uninteresting, even boring!). And now we may have difficulty completing the puzzle without some of the cues that might help us begin putting the puzzle together.   Perhaps that’s why we often think of the bible as a collection of do’s and don’ts and consequences.  After all, we write a list of do’s and don’ts even if we’re missing the big picture.

If you follow the idea that it can be hard to appreciate what we can’t imagine, then it’s not just the physical or geographical situation of events described that the Bible but their cultural and historical context which add to our understanding of what we read. 

If we want to understand the lives of our parents’ generation then we will find that we get a clearer picture by discovering something about life in their town or village during World War II.

The value of local knowledge became particularly clear to me in late 1973 when visiting an Australian family temporally located in Hawick (in the south of Scotland near the border with England). Their neighbour visited unexpectedly.  She was a long-term resident of Hawick.  Our Australian friends had taken the opportunity of our visit to serve roast lamb reminding them and us of life in Australia.  And that would have been our standout memory of the visit until the neighbour began describing her experiences during the war.  She dramatically described nights (probably in March 1941) when the Luftwaffe bombers flew low overhead to drop their bombs just 50k further north-west on the shipyards and factories of Glasgow and the Clyde Valley. Instantly my memory of our visit to Hawick was emotionally charged with this neighbour’s first-person description of living under the flight path of the bombers, which had for a time dominated their lives – and which resulted in so much physical destruction and human suffering on Scotland.

A few sentences spoken by this visitor provided a historical/cultural context for life in wartime Hawick, which I could never had imagined earlier that afternoon as we drove through the quiet countryside, under December-grey skies.  Yes, I had heard of World War II, and since primary school days, I had known that Scotland and the rest of the UK, along with Australia and other Commonwealth countries had been at war with Germany and Japan.   My parents had told me that at home in Brisbane, they had an air-raid shelter dug into the slope of the hill behind our house.  Several of my mother’s 8 brothers and sisters served in the Australian Army or Air Force – one of her brothers earning a special commendation for his role in the Air Force flying against Japanese invaders over New Guinea. 

Yet, the war had always seemed distant history to me.  Darwin was bombed before I was born and I was too young to notice occasional air-raid drills in Brisbane.   Recollections of World War II usually centred round the happier memory of the dancing in the streets on the day the war ended on 15 August 1945.  No Japanese bombers flew over my cradle and I’m not aware of any member of our extended family who went to war and didn’t return.

It’s hard to believe (and understand) what you can’t imagine.  With this limited, distant contact with the war, I have always struggled to appreciate the horror of World War II.   This surprise visitor’s first-person recollection gave me an appreciation of the terror of life in wartime Scotland, which I could never have imagined if my only memory of that night in Hawick amounted to nothing more than a meal of roast lamb with the family of expatriate Australians happily living in peaceful, cold and grey Scotland. 

The unexpected visitor spoke so graphically of nights of terror during the war, that I felt goosebumps.  Prior to that evening, Hawick was nothing more than a name on a map.  Yes, they’d been through the war, but so had my family in Brisbane.   But no one who had endured the war in Brisbane ever spoke to me of terror.  My parents retreated to a room without windows and listened to the radio or read the day’s newspaper.  Yes, I never doubted that the war happened, but there was a persistent sense of distant unreality.

To understand the impact of the war on people of Hawick, it helps to know that night after night they trembled helpless but perhaps more concerned for their compatriots than themselves.  Having been treated to an unexpected first-person account of life under bombing raids, my psychological connection with the war in the UK was forever changed.  Never again was I able to say “I know that World War II happened – it’s in the history books”.   That would be an example of a “cold cognition”.

But the dramatic description of life in Hawick as the Luftwaffe flew low overhead triggered something like a “hot cognition”.  I didn’t need to read history books to confirm to me that the war happened.  And in the years since, whenever the south of Scotland has come to mind, it was always coloured emotionally by what I had heard of life in Hawick under the Luftwaffe bombers.  It may be hard to believe what we can’t imagine, but with no difficulty imagining what this visitor had described, I knew something about a war that I had never witnessed.

After returning from our 2008 tour of Israel where I had the opportunity of transferring places in biblical narratives from my imagination to my “geographical” memory, I began to take a more serious interest in the geographical and historical context of biblical narratives.

I recalled how from a hilltop, we overlooked the Valley of Elah, which archaeologists identify as the setting for the victory of David the shepherd boy (later king) over the Philistine champion, Goliath.  We can read an account in the Old Testament, 1 Samuel 17:

 Now the Philistines gathered their forces for war and assembled at Sokoh in Judah … Saul and the Israelites assembled and camped in the Valley of Elah and drew up their battle line to meet the Philistines. The Philistines occupied one hill and the Israelites another, with the valley between them.

Visiting this site mightn’t satisfy a sceptical 21st-century mind that the biblical account is historically accurate, but seeing how it could have happened leads many visitors to the Elah Valley to shift the story of David and Goliath from the “fantastic – unbelievable” category to the “possible – believable” category – then continuing on their journey with a more open mind.

But that of itself is just a useful beginning.  We might ask why this incident could have been significant to the people of the time.  What was David remembered for more beyond his skill with a slingshot.   Otherwise, it can have no significance for us apart from a catalogue of dramatic events that are mentioned in the Bible.

I understand that much of the Bible – Old and New Testament – was edited or written in what has been called the “Second Temple Period” — from the time Jews returned from Babylon and started rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem (around 516 BCE) to the destruction of the temple by the Romans around A.D. 70.  I have found it helpful to explore how the New Testament narratives might fit within the turbulent history of Israel.  There was a succession of national and international conflicts involving the rebellion of Jewish nationals against Greek and Roman domination and competition amongst the Jews belonging to different sects – like Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes – with a rather different but equally significant story about the Samaritans.  A little exploration of these political movements has helped me begin to appreciate what it might have been like to live through these events “in the first person”.  I could begin to appreciate why people said and did things that they did and didn’t do – what led to conflict and strife and what peace might have looked like if and when it happened – and in particular what it was like to live waiting for that peace to happen. A little reading about these matters hasn’t made me an instant scholar – I’m psychologist not an ancient historian —  but it has helped me “warm up” otherwise “cold cognitions” about the life of groups like Pharisees and Samaritans with the ongoing tension between Jews and Greeks as they went about living ordinary lives in New Testament times.

For me, reading around in the history and archaeology of biblical times has been a useful step along the way, gently nudging the biblical episodes from the mental category of implausible/ fanciful to possible/probable. 

Pharisees appear in several of the events described in the New Testament.  With time to read and reflect, I’ve tried to look beyond the division of Pharisees, Samaritans, Sadducees into “goodies” and “baddies” — which seemed to be where my biblical education in my youth and childhood seemed to be pointing.  The life of Jesus and his disciples is woven within this patchwork of human political ideals and movements – it didn’t all happen in a vacuum, and it wasn’t primarily about the Pharisees and the Sadducees et cetera – it was about God revealing himself in the lives of these human actors.  As God is revealing himself to these human actors on the page of history, he is revealing his nature not just to the Pharisees (or whoever featured in a biblical episode.) but to us and the rest of humankind.

The Old Testament is hard work.  It’s about life many centuries BCE; it can seem so remote and irrelevant.  Some people have suggested that the God of the Old Testament is a different god from God in the New Testament – even — as I will discuss in the next chapter – having a personality disorder!  In Christian education, the Old Testament is often dealt with by pretending (as far as possible) that it doesn’t exist or isn’t important.  I have tried to persevere with the thought that if I am prepared to allow the possibility that God exists, it is but a small step further to consider the possibility that God is revealing himself to human beings in the dreaded Old Testament in which …

  • “Testament” doesn’t mean an obscure book with gold lettering on a leather binding gathering dust –

and

  • “Old” doesn’t mean too old to be of interest. 

I understand “testament” as referring to a covenant or a commitment. It speaks of a commitment of God (if we allow that he may exist) to the human race – first to the Israelites, the Hebrew nation initially the focus of the revelation of God, intended for the entire human race.

Sometimes referred to as the First Testament, the Old Testament seems to unpack the first covenant between God and humankind (“you will be my people, I will be your God”).  From its better-known episodes, you may recognize the Garden of Eden, the flood of Noah’s time, the Tower of Babel, the Ten Commandments, the fight between David and Goliath and the interference of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.  These and others have been plucked loose from their historical contexts and used as stand-alone stories for children’s consumption.  No doubt many Sunday School teachers were encouraged by the hope that the next generation won’t be biblically illiterate if we teach them these fragments of ancient narratives found in the Bible.

I referred earlier to the idea of putting together a jigsaw puzzle with important pieces missing.   I imagine someone assembling half a dozen “pictures” – a building here, a country road and a mountain there — a horse here and some flowers there and let’s not forget the clouds and the forest.   Would we be happy to say that this is all valuable because it increases the child’s knowledge of buildings, animals, flowers, trees and clouds – even though they have no idea how these different assemblies fit into a whole puzzle?  If your commitment to jigsaw puzzles is as passionate as that of many of the children (and adults!!) in my extended family, you would not rest until you found the other pieces, and filled the gaps between them, and arranged everything so that the whole picture can be seen and appreciated.  Only then would you look at the clock, amazed that it was now 2 AM.

A virtual helicopter this this trip  from the garden of Eden, hovering over Noah’s flood, circling round the mountain (Sinai) mentioned with the 10 commandments, flying low over the procession of Israelites crossing the Red Sea, then zooming ahead to catch a glimpse of David and Goliath, King David and his harp and then through some turbulence to see what King Nebuchadnezzar was doing, finally touching down in Babylon beside Euphrates river – as interesting as it might sound, it still leaves us wondering why is it there in the first place and how could it be revealing anything about a God that we might be interested in understanding? This

There seems to be little point to the garden of Eden, Noah’s flood, the 10 commandments, David and Goliath, King David’s harp and King Nebuchadnezzar and the waters of Babylon unless they are viewed in context — as part of the self-revelation of a supernatural God.

I have come to understand that the whole of the Old Testament is about God and therefore feel impatient to discover how the various sections contribute to a more complete revelation.  I don’t see how what we might call the Sunday school tour of the Old Testament will lead us to stumble upon a meaningful, divine revelation.  (I’m not knocking Sunday School teachers; I’ve been there myself, usually wishing I had had much more background than was printed in the lesson manual!)

As with jigsaws, so with the Old Testament.  It helps to have an overall concept – where are the corners and the straight edges and then let’s see if we can fit the range of pieces of awkward shapes and unbelievable colours into that frame.  We will take care not to damage the corners and the edges — and we are certainly not going to use scissors to help some of the other pieces fit. No, we will continue trying to understand the relationship of the parts to the whole – hoping to better experience the whole jigsaw as we persevere.

The biblical story – particularly the Old Testament – started coming together for me and as a postgraduate student when I spent some of my spare time trying to appreciate the structure into which the story-fragments were parts of a meaningful whole.

Allowing for the possibility of God, allowing for the possibility God’s self-revelation in human history, I was more prepared to allow the bible to speak for itself rather than think that I knew what it was supposed to be saying.  I slowly understood that if I insist that I know what the Bible should be saying, then I’m going to concoct MY image of God plus a job description for which I expected God to apply.  

But how could God be revealing himself in those parts of the Old Testament, which I found very inconvenient because they made God seem rather dysfunctional.   Those sections were ignored in Sunday School and Bible storybooks.  And I realised that I needed to continue to ignore them so that God could satisfy my job description for “God” – so that I could keep that version of God on the payroll!

I invite you to continue reading while we consider in the next chapter the question: How come (as has been suggested by well qualified critics), that the God we meet in the Old Testament seems to have a diagnosable personality disorder?                                                               

[1] Helen Burns (2022) Imagining imagination: towards cognitive and metacognitive models, in Pedagogy, Culture & Society.  – PDF download from Taylor & Francis Online

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