In The Beginning God?

A number of things came together this week, as they often do if I'm paying attention. It started with my son asking me if I'd read Ray Kurzweil's latest book, The Singularity Is Near. When I said I knew something of Kurzweil's work and views, but had not read the book, he ordered it from Amazon and had it forwarded to me.

Then after worship last Sunday Ryan, a college student, asked my views on creation versus evolution. We discussed the topic briefly and I promised to send him a paper I'd written a few years back about the age of the earth.

Finally, I read in the newspaper that Kurzweil and Apple's co-founder, Steve Wozniak, were among the speakers here at the Houston area's first Up Experience conference in Stafford.

Finally, my copy of God After Darwin:A Theology of Evolution by John F. Haught arrived in the mail and I began to page through it. You might want to read Michael Behe's review of the book.

So what ties all this together? A number of things.

Kurzweil is an out and out materialist. The universe (or multiple universes) is all there is. And it is because it is. How it came to be we may not know, but it is and we know it exists. We can consider God, he writes, to be the universe and this universe is not conscious. Being conscious is the same as being spiritual, which is to say that you or I have an awareness that we are persons. And ultimately, if I read him right, through the process known as evolution the entire universe will move toward greater and greater complexity, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, etc. Thus the universe is on the path to becoming 'God'!

I must say that such thoughts make me weary and very, very lonely.

Oh, one more thing about Kurzweil. He says that the singularity we are approaching is that time when humans will transcend or go beyond biology. That's not to say we won't want bodies, but he claims it will be but one of many options as we move toward reverse engineering the human brain and body, depositing it into our computers. Aha! The day approaches when we'll be able to "Beam me up, Scotty" anywhere we like. Are you a Star Trek fan? We'll also be able to duplicate ourselves as many times as we may wish. Unfortunately, Kurzweil says, each clone will be just a bit different from the other.

Then, along comes Steve Wozniak at the Up Conference, saying that the days of robots that can do entire tasks on their own are far away. "I don't think we're close. I don't think we've gone one step." He was talking about artificial intelligence (AI), something that Kurzweil claims is but a couple decades away.

Well, who's right? And what do we make of all this? Enter John Haught. I've only begun to read his book, but he has some intriguing things to say. Neo-Darwinians don't need God to create life and consciousness. Life comes by chance over millions upon millions of years. Evolutionary time provides room, he says, for an unimaginable number of purely undirected genetic mutations to occur. Out of these many mutations natural selection (survival of the fittest) gradually brought about adaptive living beings. Eventually these beings included those endowed with minds and consciousness.

How's that for a statement of faith? Mind you, Haught is a creationist. He believes in a creator. However, he wants us all to be aware of what we're tackling when we take on neo-evolution. One of his major points is that a universe that evolves from "dumb matter" must be intrinsically pointless. Inanimate matter is the meaningless material under any so-called higher levels of life. So it finally is all meaningless. Like Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes, "All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. I hated all things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me."

Unless, of course, Kurzweil is right. He's been very busy taking care of his poorly evolved body so that in a couple decades he can download the whole thing into some wondrous computer and become eternal. He takes a whole handful of supplements every day to keep it functioning until the singularity arrives. He's hoping that Wozniak is wrong about AI not really even being at the beginning.



On the other hand, what if Kurzweil and his kind are wrong? What if there's more to it than the matter/energy universe? What if there really is a God who made it all and gives it meaning and purpose and directs it toward a goal? What if the human soul survives death and must stand before this God to give an answer to how he or she lived? What if?

I believe this second option is truly worth considering. Dr. Bert Thompson wrote "Creation—Will It Stand the “Test of Science?." You might want to read his article. He quotes Dr. Henry Morris: “The Second Law of thermodynamics requires the universe to have had a beginning.” That is to say that while quantity remains the same (First Law), the quality of matter/energy deteriorates gradually over time. How so? Usable energy is inevitably used for productivity, growth and repair. In the process, usable energy is converted into unusable energy. Thus, usable energy is irretrievably lost in the form of unusable energy. It's all winding down and it all had to have had a beginning. Nothing comes from nothing. What IS absolutely requires a Creator!

Well, there you have it. I'm winding down too--for today. Enough of this stuff. My energy is winding down. I need to eat something in order to keep going. And all of it depends upon the goodness of my Creator. Oh give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good and His mercy endures forever!

Why Would Anyone Ever Want To Study Leviticus?

Except in the summer, I meet with a group of Lutheran pastors to study God's Word and discuss life in the churches we serve. In August this year Pr. Carl Roth of Livingston, Texas began to lead us in a discussion of Leviticus by John Kleinig.It is part of the Concordia Commentary series. Does that strike you as strange? It should, because nobody studies Leviticus any longer, even though it lies at the heart of the Five Books of Moses (Pentateuch), is full of the Good News of God's love, and is central to the understanding of Christ's death.

To quote Kleinig: "The letter to the Hebrews, with its profound liturgical theology of Christ as both the great High Priest and the once-for-all sacrifice, would be inscrutable without Leviticus" (p.26).

Let me translate Kleinig's "inscrutable" sentence and comment upon the way we who sit in the pews and classrooms must often suffer through sermons and lectures that simply do not relate to us. That's what the word inscrutable points to. You hear or read words and you believe they have some meaning, but you can't figure out what in the world that meaning is.

Take a look at several words in his sentence: profound, liturgical and theology. Can these words be translated so they make better sense for us all?

Start with profound. The word refers to something really deep, like the Atlantic ocean. Kleinig is telling us is that the letter to the Hebrews has some deep insights and great knowledge hidden within it. We have only to dive in, dig down and explore. When doing so with the help of Leviticus we will better understand . . .what? Liturgical theology.

Liturgical theology? What's that? Let's press on.

The word Liturgical may cause you to think about liturgy. For some of us the word liturgy stirs up disgust in our hearts. The very word pulls up memories of the dull, boring, tired and useless rituals of public worship services we attended as children, together with long-winded, meaningless sermons. I recall many times in my teen years when I felt that way--even as I believed myself to be on the path toward become a pastor and leader of public worship. Not everyone feels that way, of course, but a significant number of Christians do. That's why they choose to attend churches that go out of their way -- way out of their way -- to avoid any semblance to those churches that are liturgical.

So right off the get-go Kleing is assuming that we, his readers, want to gain some deeper insights into things liturgical AND that there is a liturgical theology of Christ in the book of Hebrews we should get excited about. For those Christians among us who have never gotten excited about the rote, routine, weary, worn-out rituals of some liturgical worship services, there would be no reason at all to plow on through such a study. We don't mind learning more about what God has to tell us about Jesus Christ. We love our Bibles and we love God-talk (theology), but, please, don't get me involved with things liturgical--please!

But what if there were things liturgical that really got to you? Originally the word referred to public acts of service among the Greeks. So if I led a project to build a temple or served as a senator or passed out food to the poor I was doing my liturgy, my public service. Such acts always involved certain repeated steps, certain routines.

Let me tell you a story.

Back in 1968 I was attending graduate school at the University of Chicago. It was the week before Palm Sunday, the week in which Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered. All of Chicago was stirred up. Many predominantly black communities went up in flames as residents rioted in anger and fear. That Sunday our family attended a liturgical worship service. During the service the pastor arranged for two children to walk down the aisle hand in hand, one black and the other white. As they walked we sang "We Shall Overcome." Believe me, there was not a dry eye in the church. Memory of that occasion still chokes me up. That was liturgy with meaning, profound meaning!

What if our study of Leviticus helps us pastors to capture such an understanding of public worship, of liturgy? What if we are able to become the kind of ministers of God through whom God and God's Son, Jesus, ministers to our deep needs, our pains, fears, hopes and longings through the renewed and renewing rites of liturgical worship? Would you be interested? Think about it. Meanwhile, this group of pastors intends to carry on with their study. Pray for us.