Monday, March 15, 2010

Starting from nature

“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is God from of old, creator of the earth from end to end.” (Isaiah 40: 28, JPS)

It is a good idea, sometimes, to remind ourselves of the distance that separates our thinking from that of the people who wrote the Bible. This evening’s Old Testament lesson is a case in point. The writer, whom we know as the second Isaiah and who may date from the sixth century BCE, is encouraging the people of Israel after the trauma of their exile in Babylon. Having been dragged away from their homeland, they suspect that God has forgotten them, that he is ignoring their sufferings as they return to a wrecked and desolate land. Isaiah assures them that God forgets nobody, that he is in charge of all the processes of history. But his argument is not historical or political: it has to do with God as creator. He points his hearers to the natural world; there, he says, you see the unquestionable evidence of God’s power. The one who shaped the heavens, raised the mountains, made every living thing, is obviously in control; so he asks, ironically because the answer is so obvious, how can you doubt his control of history and his care for you?

This is not an argument that we would be likely to use in our own time. Looking at the much greater disaster that overtook the Jewish people in the 20th century, would anyone think it an adequate response to point to the natural world, to the evidence of God in creation? Not only would it seem like avoiding the issue; we don’t see the natural world in that way. Whereas Isaiah points to what is for him a public fact, God made visible in his work of creation, none of that is obvious to us. We know the history of the cosmos; we know how the mountains were formed; we have a pretty good idea of how living things came about, and none of that involves God. Nature speaks to us of its own laws, not of divine intention and control.

This may be why, in our age, when we look for evidence of God, we tend to point people inward; not to history or creation but to their own experience, to what it is like to be a human being capable of giving and receiving love. We offer God less as Creator than as the Lover, the Affirmer, the one who accepts what we are and sustains us toward what we shall be. But have we wholly parted company with Isaiah, with the Old Testament mind that saw God not just as private sustenance but also as public reality, displayed for all to see in the unquestionable act of creation?

A closer look at Isaiah may help. When he tells his hearers to look at the created world, two distinguishable things are going on. The first answers the question, how did things come to be the way they are? Why is the sky as it is: blue, radiant, apparently a dome, the source of rain, snow and lightening? Why are there plains and mountains? Why are some things alive and others not? All these questions must have occurred to human beings over tens of thousands of years; and in the absence of science the only plausible answer was that some greater being had made them that way, giants or gods acting out purposes that human beings could only guess at.

The Old Testament God, Yahweh, is to an important extent that kind of being: a supernatural maker and destroyer, a largely incomprehensible shaper of things, to be obeyed by human beings if they know what is good for them. So it is natural for Isaiah to ask, in the earlier part of this chapter, “who measured the waters with the hollow of his hand, and gauged the sky with a span, and meted earth’s dust with a measure, and weighed the mountains with a scale and the hills with a balance?” There could be only one answer, and it was an obvious one: Yahweh did all that.

Here the distance between our thinking and that of the fifth century BCE is most apparent. We still ask the question, how did things come to be the way they are; but we don’t answer it in the same way. For us the Yahweh-god, as supernatural mover and fixer, is redundant; the ‘how’ question is for us a question for science, not for theology. That is what science is about: the ‘how’ of the universe. How were the stars formed? How far does genetic inheritance determine personality? How do microwaves affect the brain? Because we already have good answers to many of these questions, and know where more can be found, we have gotten rid of the army of invisible agents, gods and spirits and nameless ‘forces’, that were once thought to explain the ‘how’ of the universe.

To that extent Isaiah inhabits a different world from ours, a world that we cannot re-enter; a world, one would have to say, grounded in and limited by ignorance; and ignorance is no kind of virtue. If that were all Isaiah had to offer, we would be reading him only for the beauty of his language. But there is something else going on in these chapters. Isaiah is grappling with a question much harder to formulate: the question raised by the very existence of the universe. What prompts that question is not how things came to be the way they are, but that they are at all. Isaiah is full of amazement at existence itself, in all its grandeur and diversity; he is struck with astonishment that all these things should be. He points us to the richness and multiplicity of being itself; he says “lift high your eyes and see: who created these? He who sends out their host by count, who calls them each by name: because of his great might and vast power, no one fails to appear.” He is filled with amazement at the endless flow of being, of things emerging into the light, of the unimaginable generosity of existence as it takes on all possible forms.

This is no longer the ‘how’ question; indeed, it is hardly a question at all, in the usual sense. Whereas asking ‘how’ can lead to a precise answer, can point us to some matter of fact, Isaiah’s amazement before the actuality of the universe can’t be answered by any simply factual statement. Which is to say that Isaiah’s further question, if we can call it such, takes us beyond science. Because even if we were able to answer all the ‘how’ questions, we would still find ourselves standing before the panorama of being that so amazed Isaiah and wondering what it means that there should be any of this at all, and ourselves there to be amazed by it.

Here we reach a great parting of the ways in human thought. On the one hand there are those like Isaiah, for whom the amazing reality of the created order is the ultimate question, the question that preoccupies them above all others. For them the amazing fact of being calls out to be set in a larger context, a context adequate to the miraculous event of existence. On the other hand there are those who see this as no question at all, as a pseudo-question. Being just is. Being needs no larger context than itself. The natural world is simply a given; there are no further implications. Any further question is spurious because there can be no conceivable answer to it; it is not the kind of question that science can answer. And science is the only kind of knowing that human beings have.

But the point is that Isaiah, in his amazement before the universe, has moved beyond the territory of science. He is no longer asking how; he is being amazed that. To him it seems obvious that this astonishing panorama of the infinite diversity of existence cannot be context to itself. Some of us will share that reaction; others won’t. But it is at that point, if we go along with Isaiah, that we can begin to talk again about God as a public reality; not only an inwardness in the depths of our being, but a reality that can, like Isaiah’s God, be pointed to, that can be shared with the whole community of humanity, that can become once again, as it was for the Jews returned from Babylon, the ground of confidence for the history of the human race. Amen.

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