Tunnel Vision
We were thinking about Jesus the
Light of the World in Sunday's talk, and riffed for a bit on the theme of the
following quote from C S Lewis:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun
has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else...
So we thought about how we perceive
our own lives and the world we live in, in the light of that sunrise. How do we
explain anything? By fitting what we are trying to account for into the larger
context of what we believe we already know. We explain our neighbour's odd
actions in the light of what we already believe about their behaviour... Economists
seek to understand the crash of 2008 in their economic terms… Evolutionary
biologists will try to explain economics and other human activities in evolutionary
terms, while psychologists will tell us that actually it's all psychological.
For them, their particular disciplines form the larger context which validates
their explanations of the world.
This causes a problem for atheistic
and secularising understandings of the universe. God by definition will always
be the largest possible frame of reference. God is therefore always going to be
the ultimate context for any phenomena we are trying to explain. This doesn't
necessarily prove that God is real, of course, but it does have some very
interesting outcomes…
Above all it enables us to see life
whole. Do you ever feel that people who try to force their views of the world
on the public, a minority of them with a lot of ranting, are suffering from tunnel
vision? All they can see is what falls within the parameters of their own discipline,
and everything else that goes to make up the vast and complex world we live in must
be cut down to fit.
It's very interesting for example
to see the takes of Richard Dawkins and Brian Cox on ethics. Prof RD, an
evolutionary biologist, says ethics are just human adaptations for survival,
and Prof BC, a physicist, says that we don't need ethics when physics can tell
us what we ought to do. In neither case do ethics have any intrinsic validity –
they've been cut down to fit.
So instead of a vast sea of
knowledge we have ended up with a lot of puddles which don't connect with each
other. As a society, we are suffering from tunnel vision! We don't have a
connected up vision of the world, or of our own part in it. We are in fact
disintegrating in terms of our collective culture, because we can no longer see
the world whole.
Now the interesting thing is,
there's another bit of scientific explanation currently under construction
called "the Theory of Everything." This represents huge efforts by
the cleverest minds in the world to give a fuller account of the workings of
the universe. Apparently there are four different forces that make the universe
work: gravity, electro-magnetic radiation, and the two nuclear forces, strong
and weak. "Now," say the cosmologists, "If only we could produce
a theory that brings together all four of these forces, we would have the
secrets of the universe cracked." Why? Because a theory that explains lots
of things is far more powerful than one that explains only a few things.
Hold on to that last thought… "a
theory that explains lots of things…" The Theory of Everything has produced some
bafflingly complex maths describing string and membrane structures with up to
16 different dimensions, some of them curled up inside themselves and only fractions
of a nanometre long, and mostly completely undetectable. It seems to fall foul of
the dictum that a simple and direct explanation is to be preferred over one
that demands complex inventions. But it's all worth it for the cosmologists
because of the power of a unified explanation – far more powerful than lots of separate
theories that each can only explain a few things…
And the trouble is of course that,
for a theory of everything, there's an awful lot left out. What about beauty?
Where does that fit in? What about justice? What about love? We're doing all
this theorising using our reason – but where does that come from? Only the
world of physics has been allowed in. The worlds we live in, with our ethical,
aesthetic, rational and relational selves, have been cut out. Disintegration again.
But by now we who are Christians are
jumping up and down shouting, "We've already got a theory of everything!"
And this time it really is everything, not just a selection of the suitable
bits. We live in a real universe, explorable by reason and science, because
it's the creation of God. We see its beauty because He is a beautiful God. We
long for justice to come to it because He is a just and ethical God. So our
lives can be lived whole through our relationship with God. Our perspectives become
unifying instead of disintegrated. We swim in an ocean rather than splashing
about in the puddles.
We can look at a bird singing in a
tree on so many levels. We analyse its biology, we rejoice gratefully in its
beauty, we respond morally to preserve it and its environment from our era's
insane destructiveness, and we perceive ourselves together with it as part of a
web of life created in relationship by a God of love. So we're starting to recover
from tunnel vision and to see life whole. We no longer have to compartmentalise
our rational, aesthetic, ethical and relational selves.
To do this properly we need our
relationship with God restored from its current brokenness. That's another
story, about Jesus the light of the world, and needs to go in another post. In
the meantime let's take a fresh look at our Theory of Everything, where
everything really does mean Everything, and remember: a theory that explains
lots of things is more powerful than a theory that only explains a few things…
