I am a customer of the Teaching Company, a great place to continue learning about the world. One of their courses is entitled “How Jesus Became God.” I was struck by the implication of this title. It is clear that the underlying assumption of the history professor giving the lectures is that Jesus was not God. The problem is that the discipline of history requires that assumption, and it is the hidden nature of this requirement that makes it troublesome.
Historians deal with “facts,” which is to say things that the historian counts as a fact, e.g., the historical record, archeological data, etc. The historian then makes reasonable surmises to fill in the gaps using certain protocols. For example, if early Christians said Jesus was killed in a degrading way, it is more likely true than if they said he died a noble death because normally people don’t brag about degrading things. This is particularly important in discussing the “historical Jesus,” because if Jesus were divine, the whole project would fail because anything becomes possible; surmises become untethered to “facts” because the true story is outside of history. The same problem arises in the natural sciences. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist was known to disfavor the “god hypothesis” because he felt that it left him nothing to do scientifically and therefore he assumed that there was no god because his love of scientific inquiry forced him to make that assumption. Again, the problem is that the god hypothesis forces one outside of the natural, which is the subject matter of the scientific project.
Thus, the entire modern version of the Enlightenment project necessarily begins with the assumption that we are no more than material creatures living in a purely material world. This assumption is perfectly reasonable, in that it has great utility, as long as it is clearly advertised. As discussed in Part 1, however, we know more certainly than we know anything that there is a supernatural, i.e., more than material aspect to our natural existence. This fact, a supernatural reality outside the natural world of cause and effect (combined with the modern physicists’ problem saying exactly what “matter” is) leads away from empirical and toward Art as a necessary means of knowing what it means to be human. This is not to denigrate the sciences in any way; it is just to put them in their proper place. Science is a powerful tool, but it is just a tool to discover how the natural world operates, not to answer all or even many of our most important questions about our supernatural experience of life.
Blog No. 55: The Supernatural in Art (Part 2)
I am a customer of the Teaching Company, a great place to continue learning about the world. One of their courses is entitled “How Jesus Became God.” I was struck by the implication of this title. It is clear that the underlying assumption of the history professor giving the lectures is that Jesus was not God. The problem is that the discipline of history requires that assumption, and it is the hidden nature of this requirement that makes it troublesome.
Historians deal with “facts,” which is to say things that the historian counts as a fact, e.g., the historical record, archeological data, etc. The historian then makes reasonable surmises to fill in the gaps using certain protocols. For example, if early Christians said Jesus was killed in a degrading way, it is more likely true than if they said he died a noble death because normally people don’t brag about degrading things. This is particularly important in discussing the “historical Jesus,” because if Jesus were divine, the whole project would fail because anything becomes possible; surmises become untethered to “facts” because the true story is outside of history. The same problem arises in the natural sciences. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist was known to disfavor the “god hypothesis” because he felt that it left him nothing to do scientifically and therefore he assumed that there was no god because his love of scientific inquiry forced him to make that assumption. Again, the problem is that the god hypothesis forces one outside of the natural, which is the subject matter of the scientific project.
Thus, the entire modern version of the Enlightenment project necessarily begins with the assumption that we are no more than material creatures living in a purely material world. This assumption is perfectly reasonable, in that it has great utility, as long as it is clearly advertised. As discussed in Part 1, however, we know more certainly than we know anything that there is a supernatural, i.e., more than material aspect to our natural existence. This fact, a supernatural reality outside the natural world of cause and effect (combined with the modern physicists’ problem saying exactly what “matter” is) leads away from empirical and toward Art as a necessary means of knowing what it means to be human. This is not to denigrate the sciences in any way; it is just to put them in their proper place. Science is a powerful tool, but it is just a tool to discover how the natural world operates, not to answer all or even many of our most important questions about our supernatural experience of life.