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Faith, Reason and Common Sense

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Contents

Introduction...................................................viiPreface........................................................xiiiChapter 1. Mind and Meaning....................................1Chapter 2. In the Beginning....................................14Chapter 3. The Blight of Heresy................................28Chapter 4. Multicultural Canada................................59Chapter 5. Charity in Canada...................................93Chapter 6. The Aesthetics of Religion..........................122Chapter 7. Perception, Passion and Reality.....................141Chapter 8. Controlling the Faithful............................164Chapter 9. Good and Evil.......................................203Chapter 10. Seeking Salvation..................................219Chapter 11. Faith in Life and Religion.........................232Chapter 12. A House of Many Mansions...........................256Chapter 13. Creation versus Evolution..........................283Chapter 14. Conclusion.........................................298Acknowledgements...............................................311Bibliography...................................................313

Chapter One

Cogito, ergo sum. I think; therefore I am. Rene Descartes

The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates

The entire problem of the mind is of enormous interest. And yet it demands a superhuman courage to dwell on. The mind considering itself - I shudder; it is too vast, a space without dimensions, filled with cosmic events that are silent and immaterial. For one's sanity it is preferable to track God in the external world. E.L. Doctorow (City of God)

i

Whence comes religion? If by religion we mean theology, there can be only one answer - by revelation, from God. But do we listen to the voice of God directly calling to us to raise our eyes to the heavens and to hear His one clear message, that we humans - the pride of His creation - can hear (as we might say in our barbarous way) straight from the horse's mouth?

Oh no. We receive our revelations by way of the Bible and the Qur'an, the Torah and the Talmud, from rabbis, mullahs, priests, Papal Encyclicals and catechisms, and for the scholarly inclined, the Dead Sea scrolls

Like the Wizard of Oz, God stays behind the curtain. Whatever the source of revelation, it is man who delivers the message. Man speaks for God. God never speaks for Himself.

Perhaps, if we are so bold as to harbour such heretical thoughts, to understand God we should begin our reflections on religion by looking inwards, to understand ourselves.

The eloquent accounts of the nature of the gods, and of their prescriptive and proscriptive declarations of good and evil, have always been articulated by man, in language created by man. It is no accident that as man and his language evolved, his gods have also undergone an evolution.

Without language our ability to communicate with one another would be comparable to communication between animals. Without language I could not write this book, and without language you could not read it. Language is a medium created by man to explain the world (and himself) to others. Without language there would be neither gods nor God.

ii

The necessary foundation for all activities of the human mind, including those activities that produce revelations, is information. From birth to death the human mind absorbs, stores, processes, retains and discards immense amounts of information. But, however important information is to understanding, it never speaks for itself. We, with our human minds, must assess information, interpret it, apply it, and speak for it.

Military intelligence is a small section of information. But all information is a lot like military intelligence. What is apparently true is not necessarily true; and what appears to be false is not necessarily false. Martin Luther understood this when he wrote: "Faith does not require information, knowledge and certainty, but a free surrender and a joyful bet on His unfelt, untried and unknown goodness." Luther could have been reporting on the rules of evidence that U.S. president G.W. Bush and his advisors used in establishing the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The human mind's capacity to store and process information has changed little in fifty thousand years. Yet, the amount of information it must deal with has grown exponentially, especially in the last millennium, and more particularly, in the last century. What began as a gentle snowfall has become a blizzard, an avalanche. We are overwhelmed.

In the ancient world the storehouse of information grew very slowly, and with discouraging setbacks. Until the invention of alphabets and written language, circa 1000 BCE, (i.e. before the current era) information was transferred from one generation to the next orally or in pictographs. Prior to the invention of the printing press (in the fifteenth century) information was recorded by scribes and preserved in scrolls or codices. The most famous and voluminous library of ancient times was at Alexandria in Egypt. Unfortunately, over a period of five hundred years it was destroyed in whole or in part a number of times, by earthquakes, tidal waves, fire and conquest.

Today, what is known about anything and everything is almost immediately accessible in the language of your choice. Like food, information is now packaged to suit every palette, although like food, not all is of the same quality. For example, there are tens of thousands of published essays, articles, sermons, theses and books, learned and less learned, explaining and interpreting the Bible - a single volume (of an uncertain age) that can be held in one hand.

We are justly proud of the way in which we have accumulated information in recent centuries and the techniques we have developed for storing and accessing it. The first library to which I had access consisted of three shelves of books (including Black Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables and a Webster's Dictionary) at the back of a one-room school in Northern Alberta. How different it is today. In the small city of Kingston, Ontario where I now live, there are several well-stocked public libraries I can access with a single library card. If they do not have the title I want they will usually track it down and acquire it for me - sometimes from Queen's University. Queen's has been accumulating books since it first opened its doors in 1842 (with two professors and sixteen students). It now administers six libraries containing more than two million titles.

Then there is the Internet, a magical kingdom I can access in seconds with my mouse "wand", and never leave my chair. It can provide me, for example, with scholarly essays on the evolution of the Semitic alphabet, Pope Pius XI's 1930 Papal Encyclical, Humanae Vitae or a full-colour reproduction of Michelangelo's...