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For those who keep a wary, worn eye on the religious affairs columns, in print or on the web, it doesn't take much effort to have noticed that science and religion have found themselves the subject of an often venomous friction in modern times, driven mostly by radical atheists from the scientific community, questioning the very foundations of faith for many varied and often valid reasons.One of the great strengths of the scientific method is it's predictability; at it's best, understanding cause, demonstrating effect and providing the direct evidence of results. When universally re-confirmed as significant insight, it enters the public domain, rightly called knowledge. One of the primary criticisms of religion is that it's claims to 'knowledge' are not subject to this testable predictability. And religion usually stays well clear of such intrinsic accountability which comes with the scientific method, preferring the abstract obscurantism of scholastic theological exegesis and it's own idea of pure reason; claiming there are other ways of knowing?
Harold Camping, an American Evangelical, retired engineer and radio broadcaster has 'predicted' fixed times and dates for an intervention by God. By offering precise expectations for a defined result, he has unintentionally set into motion the method by which all claims ultimately come to be measured. In a relatively short period of time, a few weeks as opposed to almost two thousand years for the oldest tradition, we shall know exactly whether his 'claim' to have correctly understood insights of Biblical timing are anything other than the corrupted imagination and intellectual vanity that equal pure codswallop. For on the day, May 21 of this year, the expected result [the return of Christ and a Rapture] will either demonstrate his claim or lead to his very public and wide spread humiliation. There are no other options.
Little did he realize and few noticed, but Harold Camping might very
well have done more to undermined those foundations of faith then any
atheists could ever hope to accomplish. In effect, he set in motion what
at first appears to be a direct contest between two competing systems
for acquiring knowledge, the modern Enlightenment method of evidence
based insight against the ancient one of faith. A quarrel still unsolved
and growing ever more contentious. Yet this contest will most likely
provide another small tipping point against the religious, shifting the
balance ever more towards the Enlightenment conception of what
constitutes secure understanding and widen even further the cracks of
credibility to theological discourse as a valid means of inquiry. But
who would have hoped for such a useful and illustrative example of the
strengths of one side and growing weakness of the other?
Yet a coming humiliation has much broader implications. So worried are other Evangelicals that a conference has already been scheduled in June, assuming he is wrong, to discuss those like Mr. Camping, who caught up by an eschatological fever, are making predictions that exposing the weakness of those claims made by organized religion and bringing them into question if not disrepute. But the coming humiliation goes much further, to the very conception of faith offered by 'Christian' tradition, both high church and low, ancient and modern. For this 'faith' is founded upon the ultimate, intellectual conceit that goes by the name theology. The presumption that natural reason is able to comprehend the mind of God without having that mind revealed by God.
Whatever might have been revealed to humankind two thousand years ago has long since be lost in the sands of time and mythology. Those who practice the theological black arts and call it religion, with their illusionary conception of truth may very well be guilty, at the very least, of humanities greatest own goal. Believers have been self deceived from the very beginning of an institutional church, which without a true revelation to offer and a mass of conflicting scriptural material causing intellectual chaos and division, which continues today, provided nothing more than a contrived a set of dogma and doctrine to exploit humanities innate ignorance of that ultimate reality called God and our species natural, if too often gullible, aspirational character.
Apologists will claim the Bible is a revelation of itself! But the history of this volume has already been written, how the chapters were chosen and assembled from a greater collection of material and called canonical, in the attempt to enforce an early roman catholic orthodoxy. Given the discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi Library last century, it is highly probable that this scriptural record is not even complete; without the question of whether natural reason was ever capable of piercing it's secrets. They will also argue that there are many ways of knowing. This not the case. There are many ways of imagining that one knows. But the critical self scrutiny of ideas, that offers reason a process, a path to clearly differentiate and discover between what is authentic and just another self deception is not a part of project theology. Yet in a small but significant way, that question will be answered on May 21 2011. To paraphrase Mr. Camping, 'the Bible guarantees nothing' and whether 'we can know' or not by any process of human interpretation or theology is now on trial.
Over the weeks following this non event, we shall be able to directly observe by example, this one 'Christian' congregation in self destruct mode, it's claims and expectations in tatters. It is no wonder that the religious usually hold to untestable abstractions to sustain their illusions. And rarely venture into the real world where they face a far greater measure of scrutiny which their claims cannot sustain. For when 'their' reality, is forced to confront empirical reality, their entire 'spiritual' faith model falls to pieces. That may be because the existing faith paradigm handed down by history, theology and tradition is not in God but a very human intellectual process. And this goes to the very heart of a deep dishonesty and dichotomy within the human condition itself, about the very character of what we are as a species and the limits to our potential to understand.
My bets are obviously against Mr. Camping. This isn't really a contest between science and religion, this is about the limits of what reason is able to know and the validity of Biblical interpretation as a valid human intellectual endeavour. The tragedy is that so much sincere effort and wasted hope, particularly among those unknown thousands who are gullible enough to listen, trust and fund this wannabe prophet, has been directed towards such an empty folly for no other real purpose other than to confirm the 'spiritual' ego and intellectual pretensions of Mr. Camping. One thing the Bible obviously got right was: "All is vanity, all is chasing after wind". Yet this example provides a small salutary lesson by reminding us just how easy it is to be deceived or to deceive ourselves in the absence of hard, cause and effect evidence. That really shouldn't be a problem for an omnipotent, omniscient God. What is harder to come by is the honesty to accept, we don't yet know!
While this particular floundering of corrupted reason will fade from memory, there remain much bigger fish in the vast sea of faith still to fry, that will no doubt continue to remind us of our limits. Yet the bigger they get, these wary old bottom feeders are usually less prepared then Mr. Camping to jump onto the hook of reality and into the frying pan of scrutiny. But history will continue trolling, baiting the darkest side of human nature, waiting for vain imagination to catch itself out and whatever that may be, the judgement of history will stand final.
For humanity to ever survive with a viable future, at some point in time this 'dishonesty' will need to be fully understood, confronted and overcome. And that for me is what the nature of a true revelation is and where true religion begins. http://www.dunwanderinpress.org
