Reason and Faith

During the Easter break I had the opportunity to read some thought-provoking online newspaper articles and their associated comments, on topics connected with religion. It's interesting that around Easter it becomes more acceptable for newspapers (including The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and some overseas papers) to allow Jesus to be discussed publicly. I'm thankful for the persistence of the folk at the Centre for Public Christianity (this time it was Simon Smart, John Dickson and Justine Toh getting a piece of the action) to make sure Jesus is not left out of public discussion, especially at these times.

If the truth be told, sometimes the comments are more thought provoking than the articles (not necessarily in this case). Two things particularly interested me about the comments, neither of them new phenomena. Firstly, I was appalled by the lack of respect for others shown by individuals on both sides of the divide. It must be the relative anonymity of the online comment platform that makes people feel they are free to treat others with such disdain. Would they do the same face to face?

Secondly, there is a very persistent argument from atheists that the natural consequence of education and intelligence is a break away from religion. As someone who has had the opportunity to receive many years of solid education and earn a doctoral degree, I find that a baffling claim. There are many intelligent, highly educated people who are also followers of Jesus. I meet with a group of them every week at one of the universities I work at, to read the Bible, pray, and participate in seminars about the intersection of faith and academic disciplines or academic work. There is a growing nationwide network of us who meet each year in Canberra for a national conference.

Education/reason and true faith are not mutually exclusive. The Christians I know have not been brainwashed but have spent considerable time and effort inquiring into Christianity, the evidence for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and questions of the origins of life. Some have turned from atheism to Christianity after lengthy periods of enquiry. Some have grown up in Christian families but have still had to make their own decision to continue following Jesus, and for many this involved a lot of soul searching. I did not make the decision to follow Jesus lightly, and neither did the other Christians I know. Why would we blindly choose to follow such a costly faith?

Those of us in the academy (and those in other sectors) who are followers of Jesus need to take a bold stand for Christ, making ourselves known as rational, intelligent people who put our faith in Jesus. We must be prepared to explain our reasons for the hope that we have, in order to dispel the myth that belief in God is a result of brainwashing and ignorance.

An itinerant linguist

It's now week 5 of teaching and I have more or less got used to the routine of being at a different university teaching a different subject virtually every day. Sometimes I actually find myself teaching very similar lessons but for different subjects - not because I'm recycling the same tutorial for 11 different classes, but because it happens to be relevant!

Image © Images.com/Corbis

Thankfully, I am enjoying this period of being an itinerant teacher. In that sense, it's a bit like what Jesus was doing when he was bodily on earth - travelling around primarily to teach. Of course I can't claim divine powers of healing or exorcism (that would look interesting in my tutorials...), and Jesus' teaching priority was about the kingdom of God rather than grammar, academic writing, or semiotics (although he did talk about signs a lot...). But it reminds me that moving from place to place for work is ok - if it was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me! At least I have the same place to go home to each night.

There is a lot of temptation for me to be discontent in this role. Tenure is, of course, the holy grail of academia, and it would be nice to be 'secure' in a job that does not rely on students numbers and universities being in teaching session. Note I said 'nice', not 'essential'.

In my home group last week we worked through 1 Corinthians 4:1-13 together, and were reminded of the stark and often uncomfortable contrast between Jesus' leadership (and Paul's, following him) and the kind of leadership the world values. The world looks up to wealth, physical strength and attractiveness (or at least good grooming), nobility, worldly wisdom, reputation, stability, and distance from the 'dirty work' of manual labour. Jesus and his apostles were weak, held in disrepute, seemingly foolish, poorly dressed, homeless, and involved in manual labour.

I can see this period of unstable and almost mercenary work as an opportunity for humility and sacrificial service. It's not 'beneath me' to work as a casual tutor, especially if Jesus didn't consider it 'beneath him' to wash his disciples' feet. I can think of the exposure it gives me to students from a range of backgrounds whom I can love and encourage and point to Jesus, my Saviour and King, when the opportunities arise. And I can see it as an opportunity to be light and salt, encouraging colleagues who are walking the same uncertain path as casuals but who don't have a great heavenly King as their hope and strength.

Work is a verb (and a noun)

Teaching started in earnest at the three universities where I am teaching this semester. When my temporary full time contract finished last year I didn’t really know what work I would have this year, and I just hoped I could pick up enough tutoring to pay the bills. But in fact I have an abundance of classes to teach and in the end I had to turn some down. It’s just as Jesus said when he was speaking to the crowds and disciples on the mountain one day (Matthew 6:25-34; ESV):

²⁵ "Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? ²⁸And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ³⁰But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? ³¹Therefore do not be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' ³²For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. ³³But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

³⁴ "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

And he was right about each day having enough trouble for itself! First year students and new casual tutors will know how difficult it can be to negotiate admin, IT access and online learning systems at your new institution, and in my case I'm trying to negotiate them at 3 unis all with different systems! But I think I've got it all sorted now.

Yesterday I witnessed one of the greatest student epiphanies I've ever seen in one of my classes. This being the first lesson in a first year grammar course, I was trying to lay the foundations by introducing nouns, verbs and the like. I asked them to give me some examples from the text we were looking at, and then asked them to tell me how they were able to identify that is was a verb just from looking at the text. Was it a wild guess, or a feeling about the word, purely intuition, or some other way?

One student, who had earlier indicated that she was at a loss to understand the subject so far, said 'I think it was just that the rest of the sentence seemed to be about that word and so I thought it might be the verb'. Wow! I got really excited at that point and gave lots of encouragement.

And then I tried to build on her observation by make a transition to a more technical version of it, i.e. that each clause needs a verb and the verb is like a nucleus that all the other elements in the clause revolve around. But the other students wanted her to repeat her version because that was a bit more accessible! So I think I misjudged their readiness for technicality at that point.

Anyway, the thing that thrilled me was that I had an opportunity to show this student, who had said she was anxious about grammar and ‘couldn’t do it’, that actually she was able to ‘do it’. She seems to have even been able to ‘feel it’, and not only that but to articulate how she came to her conclusion. Exactly the kind of outcome I’m hoping for in my grammar classes!

On 'Mother Nature', 'big brother', and God

My country has been suffering from a range of catastrophic natural disasters in the last few weeks: floods in the states of Queensland, NSW and Victoria of a combined scale never previously recorded here; a category 5 tropical cyclone in northern Queensland, Cyclone Yasi, the tail end of which also caused torrential rain and flooding in Victoria, over 2000km south of where Yasi made landfall; and then bushfires in Western Australia.

My unfortunate sister chose last week to move from flood-stricken Brisbane to Cairns, so having miraculously escaped flooding at her house in Brisbane she then had to live through Cyclone Yasi in an evacuation centre, which lost power in the cyclone along with the rest of the city.

Understandably, this kind of unprecedented disaster, which can't be blamed on terrorists or inadequate legislation or any of the other human causes that inevitably have the finger pointed at them, causes people to wonder. Why all this at once? Is there any reason?

Many ordinary Australians who have had the opportunity to give their opinion in front of the TV cameras or in the newspaper have asked 'what has Australia done to deserve this?', or have attributed the cause to the whims of 'Mother Nature'. The language reflects a state of confusion about supernatural responsibility. Is it some detached, capricious being/spirit/force (?) people like to call 'mother nature' who causes such events at whim? If so, she gives us no way of understanding them within a bigger picture. Is there some dictatorial, sadistic ‘big brother’ who holds people and whole nations responsible for the things they do and metes out punishment as wrongdoings are noticed (but equally without giving instructions for how to avoid such punishment)?

Those two views are not mutually compatible, and if we think about it, they don’t reflect reality either. We know that people do bad things without getting punished for it at the time (does that mean the punishing being doesn't see? Or is a bit slow? In either case, they’re not really worth worshipping). And science tells us that there is order in nature, and although events such as floods and cyclones may occur unexpectedly (although we usually have some warning), the reasons for their occurrence as phenomena in general are no longer a mystery to us. Is it just that we are bothered by not being able to predict the times and places of such events over the whole trajectory of our lifetimes so that we could plan better and ensure we are out of the way when they come?

The idea that Australia has done something 'to deserve this' from mother nature also assumes an entity who punishes nations for wrongdoing, though somewhat capriciously. But at the same time the question ‘what has Australia done to deserve this’ assumes that our nation is really without fault and doesn't deserve such treatment. And what guidelines has 'mother nature' given us for knowing whether we have gone wrong or not? None that I know of.

But there is a God who created nature, including us (we are part of nature, after all). He has revealed himself to us through his creation:

¹ The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
(Psalm 19:1, ESV)

The apostle Paul made a similar appeal to the people of Athens after he had walked around the city and seen altars absurdly dedicated to ‘the unknown god’:

What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. ²⁴ The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, ²⁵nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. ²⁶And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, ²⁷ that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, ²⁸for "'In him we live and move and have our being'...

(Acts 17:23b-28, ESV)

Unlike ‘Mother Nature’ or a mysterious ‘big brother’ figure, God has also revealed to us how we are to conduct ourselves within his creation, through the Bible (which is his word spoken/written through prophets and historians and poets and apostles). I'm not saying the recent floods and cyclone and bushfires in Australia are necessarily punishment for some particular corporate wrongdoing of Queensland or any other state, or indeed the whole nation. The God who created this world has told us, through the Bible, that the problems we face in living in this creation are a result of original sin. Again, Paul writes to the Romans explaining this:

¹⁸ The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, ¹⁹ since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

²¹ For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²² Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools ²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. (Romans 1:18-23, ESV)

So we are 'without excuse' for failing to recognize him and rather insisting on this 'mother nature' who cares nothing for us at all, unlike God. We won't see an end to natural disasters, disease, or conflict until this world ends and the new world begins - which will happen when Jesus returns to judge the world once and for all. God loves us so much that he sent Jesus, his only Son, (John 3:16) to live on earth as a man and die a horrific death so that we who believe in Him would not have to face the punishment we deserve for our own sins.

Mother nature does not ask anything of us, and I suspect that’s part of the reason Australians are happy enough to invoke her in these kinds of situations. But Jesus calls us to know and obey Him, and when we come to him his light exposes our darkness and sinfulness (John 3:16-21). But rather than condemning us, he gives us new life and teaches us how to live in his light, and promises us that we can share the glory and wonder of heaven with him.

New Year's Post

I returned a week ago from spending Christmas in The Netherlands. It was a beautiful white Christmas and I returned feeling like I'd had a holiday, which is unusual for overseas trips in my experience. Staying with people and not having to pack up and move on every couple of days certainly helped make it restful!
I don't speak much Dutch, although I did try to learn a bit before I went, using a book and CD combo I got on sale earlier in the year. According to my Dutch informants, Dutch is like a cross between English and German which the Germans think is more like English and the English speakers think is more like German! Whatever the case, I picked up a bit more in the two weeks I was there so there are certainly things that are similar to English and to the tiny bit of German I learnt in high school.

On a few occasions I was listening to a conversation in Dutch and would then contribute something in English, without thinking, and what I said was relevant so I must have been able to understand enough to do that. My receptive language skills were definitely better than my productive skills, though! I also had a go at reading the newspaper and was able to get the gist of the story.

What this reinforced to me was the usefulness of an understanding of register probabilities for understanding language (particularly foreign language). In the case of the newspaper in particular, I could make predictions about the likely structure and content of the language, particularly in the first paragraph. (The pictures also helped.) Once I had picked out the most easily recognisable information I could ask my informant (thanks sweetie!) what the other bits meant, and that way I could learn something about clause structure and clause relations in Dutch without making anyone go through it word-by-word for me.In the case of conversations, I think it was always when they were talking about something that we had done, or something that had happened while we were there, so I was relying on an element of shared recent history and picking up on the words I already knew in relation to that event. So now I have some experience and confidence to pick up a bit more Dutch - I just have to keep practising...

Education and morality

There is currently a trial going on which is getting a fair bit of coverage in the Herald – about a neurosurgeon (Suresh Surendranath Nair) standing trial against allegations of the murder of a prostitute who overdosed on cocaine while she was engaged for services in his apartment in November 2009 (see e.g. this report from today). The stories are horrifying to read, and I think the thing that disturbs me most is the cool way in which the events of the evening are described: as if engaging a number of prostitutes is pretty run of the mill, but the use of large amounts of cocaine is a bit dodgy and the fact that the woman died is really problematic.

Sure, the guy is blamed for failing to recognise the lethal symptoms of cocaine overdose (and especially as he has medical training), as that's what he's on trial for really, but where is the recognition that ordering prostitutes to your apartment, encouraging them to take huge amounts of drugs, and paying them extra to dispense with STD/contraceptive protection demonstrates moral depravity? Of course newspapers are supposed to provide 'objective' reports and avoid passing explicit judgement on people, but in reality this ideal of objectivity is not always upheld. I've seen it in, for example, a report of a housefire in Wyong in 2005 in which a number of children from the same family died. There were some subtle (and not so subtle) expressions of judgement of the adults in the family involved, e.g. these descriptions of Wayne Shepherd, the boyfriend of Lisa Forde, the children's mother:

"Mr Shepherd - who was outside the house yesterday drinking a long-neck as reporters milled around - said Ms Forde had gone to check the children when the fight ended."

"Mr Shepherd, who said he had served two years' jail after being convicted on drugs charges, said Ms Forde had children by four men, two of whom were in jail."

In this case, the details about the Mr Shepherd and the children's fathers' are quite irrelevant to the fact that their house caught on fire and the children were killed. They are presented as observations or 'factual' information, but since they are most likely irrelevant to the occurrence of the fire, the function of their inclusion is to guide the reader to lay blame on the mother, Ms Forde, by suggesting a link between her choices in men and her ability to care for her children properly and preserve their lives.

But back to the original story... Being a neurosurgeon, Nair is a highly educated person insofar as he has completed one or more degrees of tertiary education. Once upon a time, universities were an institution of the church, following on from the monastic traditions of learned enquiry. Going to university didn't just involve learning knowledge and skills for vocational application, but it also (in theory) prepared students to think constructively about the world and develop at least some degree of moral awareness. Macquarie University's Vice Chancellor, Steven Schwartz, has written a number of blog posts touching on the role of universities in delivering holistic education rather than vocational training, e.g. these posts on idealism, practical wisdom (also this one). I don't agree with everything Schwartz says (for example, in another post, it's clear that he thinks most people are fundamentally good) or does, but I'm glad that, at least in his public persona, his view of the university includes more than just vocational training.

As a Christian, I know that good morality (or righteousness) is the fruit that grows out of salvation in Jesus Christ, through the internal work of the Holy Spirit and through knowledge of God's word, the Bible. It's not something that secular institutions can bring about in and of themselves. But I think there is a role for Christians working within secular education to help people to think constructively about the world and eternity, and point them to the one who is Lord over every idea, every molecule, every cell, every language, every people group: Jesus (Matthew 28:18). This is something I think we all agreed on at Cite in the week just gone. More reflections from Cite to come in the near future. I have resolved to update this blog more often in the year to come!

Long time no blog

Wow, I am shocked to discover that my last post was in August! On second thoughts, it's not that surprising. I have been burning the candle at both ends all session, but I'm about to finish up at UOW (tomorrow) and then I'm off to Cite (find out more here and here) on Saturday and then I'm unemployed for a little while and plan to do a bit more blogging from then on.

So stay tuned!