By the same author. What on Earth? The Church in the World and the Call of Christ (1993).

Transcription

1 God s Credentials

2 By the same author What on Earth? The Church in the World and the Call of Christ (1993). Watching for the Morning: Global Chaos and Cosmic Hope (1999).

3 Critical acclaim I cannot recall when I last read a volume received for review with such enjoyment. The Reader This book is a fascinating, well-argued, well-marshalled account of so many aspects of religions and, in this case, Christian belief. I would unhesitatingly commend it. Lancing Club Magazine A wise and scholarly work... vast in its scope: not simply a catalogue of credentials but more a divine curriculum vitae. It is written with devotion tempered with commendable scholarly detachment... very rewarding. Outlook Modern orthodoxies are examined with scholarly precision, as in the case of the patchy evidence for the widely accepted and mainly unquestioned theory of evolution. Similar clinical appraisal is given to The Word, as Professor Blair turns to the Logos and early Jewish sources. Methodist Recorder It demonstrates an extraordinary breadth of scholarship... makes the polemic of people such as Richard Dawkins look very rickety indeed. Sherborne Abbey Notes What would our Doubting Thomas make of Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion? Perhaps he d suggest we read another book too: God s Credentials by Philip Blair. Church Times It is before a jury of the open-minded that Dr Blair makes his case for a Creator...What keeps me journeying? The excitement of discovery, the thrill of seeing well-worn ideas in a different light, the whiff of controversy, but also trust in this scholarly Indiana Jones, who quietly builds his case with fact after fact, be it historical, geological, or physical, whilst almost incidentally demolishing his opponents theories. This book is dangerous. www, whsmith. co. uk

4 God s Credentials Belief and Unbelief in a Troubled World Philip Blair K&M BOOKS Plas Gwyn, Trelawned, LL18 6DT 2007

5 K&M BOOKS Plas Gwyn, Trelawned, LL18 6DT God s Credentials First published in Great Britain in 2007 by K & M Books 3 rd printing 2010 Copyright Philip Blair British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN Printed and typeset by Tentmaker Publications 121 Hartshill Road Stoke-on-Trent ST4 7LU

6 For Alexander

7 Contents Preface... ix PART I: BELIEF 1 In the Beginning... 3 modern assumptions tribal religion Mesopotamia Egypt 2 Out of Ur the patriarchs: a critical question a lofty conception Moses, Jehovah, and the prophets unlike Jehovah 3 New Era Jesus and a universal faith a spiritual form of Judaism Islam and the theocratic ideal karma, nirvana and a missing dimension God the self-evident PART II: UNBELIEF 4 Death of Divinity? age of reason new approaches biblical criticism, Hegelian philosophy and God in the image of man 5 A Question of Substance seeds of doubt the fossil record and the nature of species a theory that fits uniformitarianism and the geological column the ascent of man entropy 6 Biggest Bang starting point a greater logic vacuous musings? 7 Information, Information, Information knowledge of a kind things fall apart Where shall wisdom be found? PART III: THE WORD 8 Foundations the Logos early Jewish sources early Gentile sources the gospel of John and an insecure edifice the synoptic gospels the manuscripts and archaeological discovery vii

8 viii Contents 9 The Real Jesus once in royal David s city call, testing and early ministry focus on Galilee: teaching, healing, controversy what Jesus claimed; who he was road to Jerusalem death of a king 10 He is always there Notes and References Bibliography Index

9 Preface God bless America. I have never been more comfortable with the fact that I don t believe in God. Two responses to the same fearful event: the devastating destruction and loss of life caused by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in the United States of America on 11 September The first response was that of the President, George W. Bush, concluding his address to the nation the day after the tragedy, words taken to heart and echoed by citizens throughout the country; the second was spoken by a member of the British public on the B.B.C. radio channel Five Live a week later, when the catastrophe was still the main focus of news coverage. The specific topic for discussion on the channel on this occasion was, Is religion the root of all evil? The above two statements represent contrasting reactions to the troubled world in which we live: one of belief, the other of unbelief. What, we may well ask in the light of such views, should people of the twenty-first century seriously make of the idea of God? The increasingly intractable problems facing the world are fostering a polarisation of attitudes towards religious belief. On the one hand, a fair proportion of society seems ready to accept the reality of a spiritual dimension of some kind; on the other hand, declarations of agnosticism or atheism are becoming more and more common. As for orthodox Christian belief, there is little doubt that this is dwindling. Leading ecclesiastics admit that the Church has its back to the wall. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, has declared: A tacit atheism prevails. Death is assumed to be the end of life. Perhaps his words exaggerate the situation; opinion polls have shown that belief in God in some form is still widespread, especially in America. It is undeniable, however, that in the West, at least there is a trend towards religious uncertainty and unbelief. What is driving people today to agnosticism or atheism? The purpose of this book is to examine this question by going back to the earliest period in human history and tracing the way in which belief in God has since that time developed, varied, and in modern times diminished. ix

10 x Preface From the beginnings of human civilisation (when records in some form began) until relatively recently, belief in a supreme spiritual being was normative. That is my thesis in Part I of this book. Some two and a half centuries ago, this view began to be undermined by thinkers who argued that belief in the Deity had become at the least irrelevant and at most impossible. A hundred years later, when such ideas were becoming accepted more widely as a result, in particular, of scientific research, intellectuals were confidently predicting the swift demise of the Christian Church. Up to the present day they have not ceased to do so; indeed, many are now proclaiming the death of God as indisputable fact. Part II examines the way such atheistic ideas have developed and assesses their validity. Part III then investigates in some detail the data underpinning Christian belief. The question of God and religion is being debated today as never before. Our world seems to be at a crossroads, with many not knowing where to turn. While some counsel a return to religious belief and values, a return to God as they see him, others, with equal vehemence, advise humanity to abandon the very notion of the divine as a worn-out and dangerous superstition. Few are asking the pertinent question, essentially unrelated to the issue of religion: Does human history and does the nature of the universe we inhabit demand that we affirm or deny the existence of a Creator? Facts adduced in the following pages, I submit, demonstrate that many assumptions underlying the arguments of atheistic philosophers, scientists, historians and (even) theologians are highly questionable. Philip Blair August, 2006

11 PART I: BELIEF

12 Chapter 1 In the Beginning Modern assumptions Writers on primitive or comparative religion these days usually take for granted the idea that monotheism, belief in a single Creator-God, was a relatively late development in the story of humankind, post-dating and springing from a belief in spirits (or daemons ) and gods of nature. 1 Early humanity, it is generally held, considered all nature to be in some sense alive. And since it was alive, what happened in it could only be described in terms of personal activity, in stories or myths about visible phenomena stones, mountains, plants, trees, animals, birds, the moon, the sun and about imagined spirits, cosmic powers, or gods lying behind those phenomena. Such a way of looking at life is described in the classic study of primitive myths, beliefs and speculations in the ancient Near East, Before Philosophy. The authors write, The fundamental difference between the attitudes of modern and ancient man as regards the surrounding world is this: for modern, scientific man the phenomenal world is primarily an It ; for ancient and also for primitive man it is a Thou The whole man confronts a living Thou in nature; and the whole man emotional and imaginative as well as intellectual gives expression to the experience. That expression took the form of accounts or explanations of natural happenings or individual events in the form of stories. In other words, the authors conclude, the ancients told myths instead of presenting an analysis or conclusions. 2 Perhaps the most important myth invented by the ancients, according to this construction of early religious development, was that of creation. This was often seen as analogous to the act of birth, a primeval couple being postulated as the parents of all that exists. Thus for the ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks the first pair were Earth and Sky (as in the case of other primitive peoples). Alternatively, creation could be seen as the act of begetting by a single parent whether a mother goddess, as in Greece, or a daemon, as in Babylonia, or even a male figure, as with the Egyptian god Atum. As mythmaking developed, these primeval creative agents gathered around them a crowd of lesser gods, their children or grandchildren, often corresponding to natural 3

13 4 God s Credentials phenomena. Atum, for example, sun-god and creator, begot Shu and Tefnut, Air and Moisture, and they in turn begot Geb (or Qeb) and Nut, Earth and Sky, from whom finally issued the great Egyptian god Osiris, possibly a personification of vegetation. 3 Eventually, modern scholarship has it, there emanated from the increasingly complex cycle of myths the idea of a single, supreme deity, creator and lord of all life, spiritual and physical, gods and men. The Memphite Theology (or Drama), an Egyptian text thought to date from the fourth millennium BC, is probably the earliest known written statement of such belief. This identifies the supreme deity and creator as Ptah. As the text reads, Ptah, the Great One; he is the heart and tongue of the Ennead (ninefold pantheon) of gods who begot the gods. Yet Ptah is seen by modern interpreters as a relatively late invention of man, almost a first attempt to rationalise an earlier mythology, with a pantheon of gods. To quote again from Before Philosophy, In the Memphite theology, the Egyptians, at one point, reduced the multiplicity of the divine to a truly monotheistic conception and spiritualised the concept of creation. 4 Such, very briefly, is the generally accepted view of the development of religion, culminating in monotheism. The idea of God, belief in a single, supreme, creative, spiritual being, was as with belief in the lesser gods no more than the construct of our early forbears as they sought to explain the strange world in which they lived. Even if a monotheistic faith arose earlier than was once thought, it was not an innate consciousness of reality; it was most certainly not a truth revealed to man through some manifestation of, or message from, the actual Deity. Is this view correct? Is it true that monotheism grew out of polytheism, both being an invention of man s mind? Or is there evidence that humankind has always revered a Supreme Creative Spirit, has always believed in one God? Let us look more closely at the data. Tribal religion The sun falls in the evening time, but He is always there. So a tribesman of the Ashanti hinterland witnesses to the Sky-God, or Supreme Being, assuring an inquirer that members of his tribe are not sun-worshippers. 5 The Ashanti hinterland comprises the northern territories of Ghana, West Africa, where there are a number of diversely named tribes, the majority of whom speak languages having a common base. The root of the word used by all these tribes for the Sky-God is we (sometimes wu).