On the cosmic knuckleball and the god who doesn’t give your kids cancer

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The surest way to piss off fellow evangelicals is to comment honestly on some version of the “God must have done ____________ for a reason” meme. I try not to get into these discussions, mainly because I can’t seem to help myself once I get started, and frankly most people don’t want to hear some pretentious jackass drone on about why that’s logically problematic. However, the controversial truth is…I don’t believe that God causes anything in the conventional sense.

Cue the head-shaking and hand-wringing.

You see, there are really three options when trying to hash out what you believe regarding God’s omnipotence and omniscience:

1) God is omniscient and omnipotent in the way that Christians believe. God causes the moon to rise and molecules to move and the wind to blow.

2) God isn’t omniscient or omnipotent in the way most Christians believe. God doesn’t actively do those things.

3) God is some combination of the two, manifest in a way that can’t be logically discussed.

Most people start with option 1, but when you press default to option 3. Option 1 is a real problem, by the way. If you are praising God for your new raise or for the Cowboys losing on Sunday, then you are putting God on the hook for all sorts of awful genocides and horrific things. You can’t logically have it both ways, it doesn’t work. When you raise this uncomfortable fact, most people will go to “well, we are imperfect people with imperfect brains, we can’t possibly understand”. Option 3 is the ultimate cop-out, an intellectually lazy response. And, I think, it is unappreciative of what I think is one of the great truths about God. Option 3, in short, is bullshit.

I think the answer is option 2. That, for me, was hard to come to. I felt like the kid taking the training wheels off the bike…when you don’t believe that God is actively causally manipulating every moment of every life, you are walking around without the assurance that there is a reason for things. You’ve ripped the training wheels off your understanding of reality. That’s pretty damn spooky at first. But then you come to the moment of liberation, a God who doesn’t mess around with the way that a football bounces or screw with your memory during an important test also doesn’t give your kid cancer. That becomes comforting.

A few years ago my mother died prematurely of cancer in her mid 50’s. She was a beautiful soul who I miss all the time. I remember the first time someone said “God must have wanted her back”, I wanted to drill them in the mouth. My inner monologue would rebut “there’s no way God is that much of a dick, so insecure that my mother has more value in the afterlife than by the side of her loved ones”. As time goes on I am more convinced that my first instinct (the God part, not the violent part) was right.

God is a god that knows all that can be known and influences creation through the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) communication with those who listen. Trust me, that’s better. Instead of me trying to figure out why the hell God would take my mother, or allow genocide in Darfur, I believe in a God who comes along side me, sympathizes, and in fact empathizes. God watches reality unfold and says “son, I see you so closely, I know your pain, and I love you”.

Knowing “all that can be known” is a subtle distinction (for more about this line of thinking, check out Alfred North Whitehead) from knowing “everything”. Knowing everything first implies that there is a future that is defined, logically eliminating free will. That’s a problem. More importantly, it implies foresight into events that God has already constructed, again forcing God into a role of creating all sorts of calamities and tragedies. If you believe that the future is constantly unfolding (which is what a majority of us humans experience), it is unfolding for God as well. There is no future to know, no defined narrative arc for your life, you have choice. When God becomes the ultimate guide through the journey that is your life, you gain a compassionate advisor and friend, not a curmudgeonly monster who capriciously doles out pain and suffering. The advisor is far more descriptive of the God who sent Jesus than the God of the Old Testament, which is who a lot of us Evangelicals want to forget.

So, what the hell does all of that have to do with a knuckleball. Well, to those who are uninitiated in the world of baseball, a knuckleball is a pitch thrown by a pitcher that is notoriously hard to catch because the pitcher doesn’t have the same control as he might through a straighter pitch like a fastball. After the ball is released, it dances around through the air, sometimes rapidly changing direction. The pitcher may not know exactly where the ball is going, but he’s pretty sure it’s going to end up somewhere near the plate. He knows, for example, that the odds of that ball leaving his hand and ending up in the outfield are infinitesimal. It may not end up in the bottom of the strike zone where he wants it, but it’s not going to end up at third base, either. This, to me, is a wonderful way to think about the control exerted by God over reality. After the act of creation God released the ball of reality through space and time, having some assurance that the ball will end up where it was intended. The path that reality might take is unsure, undeveloped, but the trajectory is not impossible to understand.

2By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. (Genesis 2:2-3)

The idea of a God watching reality unfold is terrifying for some, but consider this…God has the ultimate perspective. Through passive influence on creation in the suggestive power of divine suggestion, God speaks to everyone at all times. The trajectory of creation is altered in infinitely mysterious ways on a moment-by-moment basis, but we all hurl in the general direction of the intended end. From our meager perspective, we see so much that can’t be understood, we lack the greater context. God, however, sees.

So, this God doesn’t give kids cancer, or cause genocides, or any of the other atrocities that you’d have to attribute to a classically omnipotent God. Instead this God watches, speaks, loves. This God offers sympathy to those in pain, offers wisdom to those that seek, and offers joy to those who look toward creation for a reason to hope. This God is far more awesome than the God preached from the pulpit these days, who impulsively visits fear and death and misery and disease on creation for reasons beyond human comprehension. This God is a god who you can rightfully worship in a spirit of awe due the creator of such enormous and beautiful complexity, the ultimate whisperer into reality. That is my God.

On what it means to be “Christian”

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I don’t openly discuss my faith with people. I’m sure there are scores of reasons for this that would be interesting to a psychologist, but I think mainly I don’t talk about it because it always feels like oversharing. I think it’s kind of like going up to someone and saying, “hey, how’s your day, my sex life with my wife is awesome”. You can probably only get away with that with select company.

Anyway, when these discussions do arise, I feel the need to give a dissertation on the nuances of what I believe because the American Evangelical position on many matters is fraught with problems. The discussions veer into the side of the conversational mountain with me babbling on about the challenges of an omnipotent God giving kids cancer, epistemology, and how space/time work. I’ll spare the reader all these long-winded thoughts (for now), but I’ve always thought this was very simple. Painfully simple:

34Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: 36“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’c 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’d 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:23-40)

(NIV – h/t biblehub.com for providing the content)

I think about it like this…

I’ve gotten on quite a fitness kick lately. I asked one of the trainers in the gym I go to “hey man, if I had to focus on one thing to lose weight, what would that be?”. The trainer said to me confidently “diet…work on your diet and you will be most of the way there”. Cool, I can do that.

I’m going to draw out this analogy…imagine me going to the trainer, asking the same question, getting the same response, then turning around and saying to my wife after she asked me about the conversation “the number one thing I’m going to focus on is building my latissimus dorsi…of everything in the universe I can do to be healthier I think I’m going to work on my back muscles, everything hinges on the upper-back muscles”.

It’s pretty clear. Someone asked Jesus, the Messiah (for the uninitiated, he’s the guy that should know a thing or two about what it means to be a person of faith) what THE (capitalized on purpose) most important rule is, he said love God and love your neighbors (and yourself, by the way). ALL THE LAW hang on these two commandments. All of it…all of them. That’s what this whole thing is about, those two things.

So, if you read the “About the Author” page you know that I attend church far less than most of my brethren. In fact, I’ve been to Catholic Mass far more than a church service in the past 10 years. The reasons for this are myriad, but it all started when I was finishing up my ministerial training and something occurred to me. The post-modern Evangelical church doesn’t particularly seem to embody the Message anymore. As a church we/they have been chasing the latissimus dorsi of spirituality for an awful long time, chasing away the gays and drunks and fornicators and porn addicts and blacks and etc, etc, etc. Some day I will get to writing a post on that, but the ramifications are clear to me.

In short, being a Christian isn’t about your church, your liturgical style, or your “denomination”. It’s about a simple mandate. Love. Love God (easy difficulty), love yourself (medium difficulty), love your neighbor (expert difficulty). Do those things. In fact, focus on those things before you start worrying about your spiritual latissimus dorsi. I’m fairly certain God cares much less about someone’s sexual orientation than whether you love that person. I mean REALLY love that person. Talk to them, listen to them, break bread with them, learn about them. Do those things, and you will be most of the way there. Being a Christian is, by definition, following the teachings of the Christ, whom most Evangelicals affirm to be Jesus. He laid it out pretty plainly.