For what is Man in nature?

For what is Man in nature? A nothingness in respect to infinity, a whole in respect to nothingness, a median between nothingness and everything.

Blaise Pascal, Les Pensees

I have just started Our Cosmic Origins: From the Big Bang to the emergence of life and intelligence by Armand Delsemme. A fairly broad range of topics to address (and I expect in a typically reductionist manner). The above quote is interesting, and reminds me of Psalm 8

4What is man that You take thought of him,
And the son of man that You care for him?
5Yet You have made him a little lower than God,
And You crown him with glory and majesty! (NASB)

Human beings are more than nothing but less than everything, well duh! Isn't every being that ever was somewhere on that continuum? Where do we sit? Is it flat? Are we privileged somehow? If so, how? The Psalm puts our significane in our election by God to be something more than the other creatures

You make him to rule over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
7All sheep and oxen,
And also the beasts of the field,
8The birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea,
Whatever passes through the paths of the seas.

Does this promote arrogance? I'd think not when the Psalm finishes

9O LORD, our Lord,
How majestic is Your name in all the earth!

Of course one may counter that it promotes Divine arrogance, but if God is the creator, well then hubris seems less likely on his account.

One wonders too that while man (i.e. humanity) is more than nothing, given that we all move towards (and will, all other things being equal as a species) nothingness, where does meaning lay? For now, the last word to Job 19

26"Even after my skin is destroyed,
Yet from my flesh I shall see God" (NASB)

Does anyone own God?

Michael Leunig is one of my favourite cartoonists. I like his politics, I share much of his philosophy. I was intrigued by some of the things that he said when he was on ABC TV's Enough Rope with Andrew Denton. He felt that he could use the word God because it was a part of a culture, and a word he thought he could own.

Ownership of religious ideas is not new. When a series of books was released in the UK featuring books of the bible with introductions by famous people - Bono, Thor Heyerdal, A N Wilson, etc, some Evangelicals jumped up and down. The response from a liberal Anglican minister involved was that the opponents did not own the bible. Does this mean that Christians don't own God either?

Leunig is right in a sense that Western culture lays claim to the word God, for in this culture this word has been associated with the Judeo-Christian (though often times not enough of the Judeo part), whether agressive Atheists (Atheistic Fundamentalists?) like it or not. Our legal system, ideas of fairness and justice and more than one or two expressions (sometimes profane) are shapped by the book called the bible.

Yet, in emptying the word of any real meaning, I wonder what Leunig is left with. In his book The Prayer Tree, it is all about what nature, and not God dictates. Nature dictates that we have to bring joy and despair together. Prayerfullness if more about survival in the wilderness than church. What is this God he then invokes? Some inner dialogue? A sense of wonder within. Ah, poor sod, he's a romantic displaced in time. Nice cartoons, often bad theology. And the prayers? Something to ponder with a duck under one's arm?

"Let us live in such a way
That when we die
Our love will survive
And continue to grow.
Amen"

A picture of Christ on the cross. However, Easter recalls his love grows still because he lives still, not just in hearts or prayers but in God's presence.

Amen.

Cancer: A gift from God?

Today I heard a sermon on Jonah, chapters 2 and 3. It is a well known tail (pardon the pun) of Jonah being swallowed by a giant fish, and the themes/sections of the sermon were on the character of crisis, the character of Jonah, the character of Nineveh and the character of God.

One of the points being made was that crises are times to cast off the peripherals of life and focus on what matters. The preacher quoted a friend who likes to say that canver can be (of was it is, I can't remember) a gift from God. My response is to say a few things.

Firstly, this seems to me to be perverse. James tells us that God is the source of all good gifts - how can cancer be a good gift? Yes, such crises can be opportunities for us to learn many things, but terminal cancer is for humans an evil thing, a painful, life ending, relationship severing disease. Even the Christian emphasis on life after death cannot fully rescue it - since there us a much stronger NT emphasis on life after, life after death (i.e. resurrection). Let's not confuse ends with means.

So what place for cancer. If you believe in meticuluous providence, then God gives you cancer. If the creation has the potential to develop - the cancer arises out of the process of evolution, and is part of it without being a good thing. Does that mean that the best of all possible worlds is one where cancer exists? Is it a soul making universe wher conscious beings get cancer? Perhaps so. However, I think a realistic view of the way God works means that sometimes things happen that we can learn from and grow from, even when it kills us or the ones we love, without that suffering, illness and death being a gift as such.

It is not a "gift" I want, I just hope and pray that if I ever had it, the gifts I would receive would be patience, peace, hope, the love of friends and family.