From Our Archives

Debie Thomas, The Questions That Matter (2021); Debie Thomas, Living the Question (2018).

This Week's Essay

Last month the Perseid meteor shower, dubbed the "Fireball Champion" by NASA for its hundreds of shooting stars per hour, performed its annual spectacle. We have friends who travel to different destinations every year in order to find just the right spot for maximum viewing pleasure. "The more often and steadily we reflect upon the starry heavens above," said Immanuel Kant, "the more they fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe."

I still remember a chilly October night in remote Siberia near Lake Baikal, and an evening on the outskirts of Nairobi, when the ink-black sky was so clogged with blazing stars that I felt like I could reach up and touch them.

On another occasion, my wife and I visited Stonehenge, where 5,000 years ago architect-astronomers hoisted massive boulders into a circle based upon their knowledge of the summer solstice, and of how the sun's rays would strike their site at a precise time and place. At about the same time, star-gazers in Egypt noticed how one morning every year, just before the Nile flooded, Sirius lined up with the sunrise, and so they designated that day the first day of their calendar year.

I resonate deeply with the psalmist for this week: "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge." Creation praises its Maker. The world is so obviously filled with the grandeur of God, says Hopkins in our poem of the week.

Or is it? We have to admit that not everyone draws such pious conclusions from the "book of nature." In her best-selling book The Sacred Depths of Nature, the cell biologist Ursula Goodenough recalls a camping trip when she was about twenty years old.

The Perseid meteor shower above Stonehenge, by Josh Dury, August 2024.

She writes, "I found myself in a sleeping bag looking up into the crisp Colorado night. Before I could look around for Orion or the Big Dipper, I was overwhelmed with terror. The panic became so acute that I had to roll over and bury my face in my pillow… When I later encountered the famous quote from physicist Steven Weinberg — 'The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless' — I wallowed in its poignant nihilism. A bleak emptiness overtook me whenever I thought about what was really going on out in the cosmos or deep in the atom."

A worldview that's limited to the scientific method alone might be intellectually coherent, and maybe have the patina of intellectual bravery, but it doesn't strike me as emotionally satisfying.  And so elsewhere in her book Goodenough tries to "sweeten the sour apple" by embracing what she calls a non-theistic religious naturalism.

After all, it's an empirical fact that our universe is slowly but definitely dying out.  Scientists have confirmed that the energy generated today by more than 200,000 galaxies is only about half as strong as it was 2 billion years ago.

"Once you've burned up all the fuel in the universe, essentially, that's it," says Joe Liske of the University of Hamburg, one of the members of the research team. "The stars die, like a fire dies, and then you have embers left over that then glow but eventually cool down. And the fire just goes out," Liske told NPR.

If the only story that a person had was our scientific knowledge of our universe with its 100 billion galaxies, each one containing 100 billion stars, what conclusions might one reasonably make about the existence of God? Whose wisdom would prevail, that of King David or Ursula Goodenough?

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) appealed to Cosmic Awe. Einstein was decidedly irreligious in the sense that he spurned all institutional affiliations, never attended worship services or prayed, rejected all dogmatic theology (eg, miracles, the afterlife, or prayer), did not believe that God was in any sense personal, and was a strict determinist.

A Supermoon above Washington, DC on December 3, 2017.

But he found it impossible not to think of himself as religious in the sense of humility and awe at the mystery, rationality and complexity of the cosmos: "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." For Einstein, the book of nature suggested some superior intelligence: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."

Thus, Einstein repudiated those whom he called "the fanatical atheists" who tried to claim him for their cause. About a year before he died, he wrote in a letter that he understood himself to be a "deeply religious unbeliever."

In addition to the story of science, Christians honor the stories in Scripture. The readings this week remind us how the Christian story makes two fundamental claims, one stupendous and the other scandalous, and how together they go way beyond the book of nature.

The psalmist makes the stupendous claim that the transcendent God who flung the 100 billion galaxies into space is like an attentive mother or tender father who cares for each and every human being.  He hears our every cry for help, and intervenes to act for our good.

The alternate Psalm 116 for this week affirms exactly what Einstein denied, that God speaks and acts, he loves and he listens:

I love the LORD, for he heard my voice;
he heard my cry for mercy.

Because he turned his ear to me,
I will call on him as long as I live.

The cords of death entangled me,
the anguish of the grave came upon me;
I was overcome by trouble and sorrow.

Then I called on the name of the LORD :
"O LORD, save me!"

The LORD is gracious and righteous;
our God is full of compassion.

The LORD protects the simple hearted;
when I was in great need, he saved me.

Be at rest once more, O my soul,
for the LORD has been good to you.

For you, O LORD, have delivered my soul from death,
my eyes from tears,
my feet from stumbling,

that I may walk before the LORD
in the land of the living.

The Hebrew poet stakes a claim far beyond Goodenough's impersonal mystery or Einstein's Cosmic Awe.

To this stupendous claim about creation, the gospel for this week makes a scandalous claim about redemption — that God most fully reveals himself not just in the Perseid meteor shower, but in the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus is the revelation of God's love and the redemption of his world.

A Supermoon above New York City.

He is the Christ, Peter confesses in this week's gospel. The Sent One. The Chosen One. The Holy One of God. The stone rejected by builders. Paul calls this a "profound mystery," a "scandal," and a "stumbling block."  Only our modern hubris imagines that we today are the first people to take offense at this claim.

The reductionist viewpoint that the scientific method is the only way of gaining valid knowledge (positivism), or that the physical world of nature is all there is to know (materialism), has never really appealed to most people. From a historical perspective, it has been limited to the white, western world of the last 200 years. I remember hearing the British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard tell how he once asked his friend Richard Dawkins, who is a zealous atheist, if he actually knew anybody who lived the strict cosmic nihilism of someone like Goodenough, to which he admitted he did not.

I like how the Harvard Islamicist Wilfred Cantwell Smith responds to the anti-transcendent scientism (Marilynne Robinson called it para-science) of the modern west. He is worth quoting at length from his book Towards a World Theology (1981):

Rather than feeling called upon to defend the awareness of what some of us call the divine before the bar of modern sceptics' particular logic and exceptional world view, I am at least equally inclined to call them before the bar of world history to defend their curious insensitivity to this dimension of human life. Seen in global perspective, current anti-transcendent thinking is an aberration. Intellectuals are challenged, indeed, to understand it: how it has arisen that for the first time on this earth a significant group has failed to discern the larger context of being human, and has even tried (with results none too encouraging thus far) to modify its inherited civilization so. After all, the overwhelming majority of intelligent persons at most times and places, and all cultures other than in part the recent west, have recognized the transcendent quality of man and the world. To be secularist in the negative sense is oddly parochial in both space and time, and to opt for what may be a dying culture. It is important that we keep in conversation with this group; but important also that we do not fall victim to, nor treat with anything but compassion, its incapacity to see.

All human history, says Smith, has been a sacred history or Heilsgeschichte.  Gazing at the Perseid meteor shower can make you think like that.

Weekly Prayer

Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226)

Canticle of the Sun (or Praise of the Creatures)

Most high, all powerful, all good Lord!
All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing.

To you, alone, Most High, do they belong.
No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars;
in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
and clouds and storms, and all the weather,
through which you give your creatures sustenance.

Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water;
she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth,
who feeds us and rules us,
and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Be praised, my Lord, through those who forgive for love of you;
through those who endure sickness and trial.

Happy those who endure in peace,
for by you, Most High, they will be crowned.

Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death,
from whose embrace no living person can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those she finds doing your most holy will.
The second death can do no harm to them.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give thanks,
and serve him with great humility.

Dan Clendenin: dan@journeywithjesus.net 

Image credits: (1) BBC News; (2) Flickr.com; and (3) SciTechDaily.