My Favorite Quotes - Entry #4

“There but for the grace of God go I”

John Bradford ~1550

          According to tradition, this phrase (or something like it) was first spoken by John Bradford (circa 1510–1555) when he was watching criminals being led to the scaffold.  John Bradford was an English preacher who was martyred in 1555.  It’s not clear that he really said these words, but that doesn’t really matter to me.  The point being made is that God’s providence puts us in the situations we are in.  Or, to put it another way, we all have the capability to really mess up our own lives, and we shouldn’t feel so superior to anyone else.  We could be in their situation.

          I try to live with this kind of thinking in mind.  Specifically, when I hear about someone who did something really awful, or made a really bad mistake, I try not to think with the judgmental attitude that “well, I would never do anything like that.”  I think we all have our struggles, and none of us is perfect.  I struggle with some things that others don’t, and they struggle with things that I don’t.  That doesn’t make either one of us better than the other – we are all equal.

          Personally, I think you will be a better, kinder, more understanding person if you understand the depth of the meaning of the Bradford quote.  Too many people in this world are harsh toward other people.  They are too judgmental.  The world can benefit from a little more graciousness.  

I’m not saying that we should excuse the wrongs of others.  And we certainly shouldn’t excuse our own wrongs.  But we are all in the same boat:  guilty and helpless.  To be helpless is to be helpless.  Does it really matter whether some are more helpless than others?  I don’t believe it does.  

          Christians are sometimes the most judgmental people around.  I think that is wrong and tragic and sickening.  Of all people, Christians should be the most compassionate and kind.  Why isn’t that always the case?  I don’t know, but I wish it weren’t so.

          This does not mean that we should relax our moral standards to accommodate our failures.  This does not mean that we should reward everyone equally or that we should stop punishing those who make bad moral decisions.  Evil people should be punished for the evil they do – but that includes those of us who just haven’t been found out yet!  The problem is, when we recognize our general human tendency to fail, particularly in moral situations, it often results in a bit of compassion on our part.  But it’s kind of a false compassion:  we want to forgive others because we know that we do, or might do, the same wrong thing and we don’t want to be harshly punished for it.  Eventually, as we follow that path in its downward spiral, we start pushing the boundaries of what is morally acceptable because, deep down, we want to feel acceptable when we stray a bit.  Although it’s nice to be forgiven, it’s even better to be told that what you thought was wrong is actually ok.  Eventually, if nothing is wrong, then we can all feel good about ourselves.  That’s a tragic end, in my opinion.  But that’s a topic for another conversation.

          Jesus is reported as saying “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” as a crowd gathered around a woman caught in adultery.  In Jesus’ day, no one cast a stone – they all walked away.  Today I feel that there would be those who would still pick up a stone and start throwing with all the anger they could muster.  But there would also be those who would look Jesus in the eye and say “how dare you call her a sinner.”  I don’t want to be part of either group.  I don’t feel I’m perfect enough to put others down, but I also don’t feel I’m smart enough to redefine what is right and wrong.

          I think we all have moral blind spots and need help.  But when the morally-blind lead the morally-blind, we are all in trouble.  And, in my personal sampling of the human race, none (0%) have been found to have 20/20 moral vision.  Therefore, in my opinion, our only hope is to gain help from outside the human race.

          Well, I’m sure this quote will spark a few more discussions down the road.  But, for now, consider what it really means:  “there but for the grace of God go I.”

My Favorite Quotes - Entry #3

 “If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1669

          I thought I would pick a quote from the book I just recommended – Pascal’s Pensées.  Blaise Pascal lived in the 17^th century (1623 – 1662) and was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and philosopher.  The quote above is one of many from his book that I could have picked, and I’m sure there will be more from this book in the future.

          I’ve had friends who would say “make sure you don’t check your brains at the door” when you enter a church.  They were making the point that you should use your brain when it comes to your beliefs.  They didn’t want to be swayed by some fast-talking or manipulative preacher.  I agree with them and I’ve always felt that it was important to keep your mind and reasoning abilities as a Christian.  I never wanted to be tricked or hood-winked into believing something that wasn’t true.  When someone sends me a story on the internet, I immediately check it on Snopes.  Then I try to check up on Snopes to see if they can be trusted.  Then, if it passes all of those tests, I put it in the bin marked “probably not true” – that’s the best I’ll give it.  So I agree:  to have faith doesn’t mean that you dump out your brains.  Believe only what is reasonable. 

          But the great thing about Pascal’s statement is the recognition that there are two sides to this issue.  I believe that Christianity is reasonable, but that does not mean that “reason” is the whole sum of my beliefs.  If your beliefs are against reason, then they are “absurd and ridiculous” as Pascal states.  But the balance to this is that there are some aspects of faith that go beyond reason.  They are supernatural.  If absolutely everything you believe is totally explained by reason, then what does God do?  Why do you even need God in that case?[1]

          You can’t prove Christianity through reason alone.  The best you can hope to do is show that it is reasonable.   I do believe you can show that it is reasonable.  However, having done that, it doesn’t get you to the true meaning of Christianity.  You have to go beyond where reason alone can take you.  Don’t give up on reason.  Follow it as far as you can.  But just don’t stop there.  [By the way, if you want to see where I go with that, check out the #1 Crazy Thing Christians Believe.]

Miracles fit perfectly into this kind of thinking.  A miracle is not “reasonable”, necessarily, but it is also not unreasonable.  I think Paul shows an excellent combination of reason and miracle when he says that Christ’s resurrection is the central point of Christian faith, and if Christ has not been raised from the dead, then faith in Christ is “in vain” (I Cor 15).  There is a logical aspect to this belief.  The historical aspects of Christ’s resurrection can be subjected to reason.  The centrality of Christ’s resurrection to Christianity can be subjected to reason.  But the resurrection itself is a miracle.  It is beyond reason.  You can’t sit in the corner of a room and reason your way to the resurrection.  It has to be revealed to you.

Don’t believe anything that offends reason.  That’s not smart.  But don’t confine your beliefs to reason alone.  That is dry and boring.  There’s more to life than that.  Not everything can be explained by science.  Music and art are not arrived at through reason alone.  There is a beauty to nature that is surely beyond reason.  Human emotions are surely real, and just as surely they are not always based on reason!  Allow yourself the opportunity to wonder and marvel.

I know that many will say “you don’t have to bring in the supernatural to experience wonder and awe at nature.”  That is true, and there are plenty of examples to support that.  All I am suggesting is that we not require of the supernatural something that we do not require of the natural:  that it must all bow to reason, and reason alone.  If the supernatural is there, do not miss the opportunity to experience it because you artificially confined it to a box that it can never fit in. 

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[1] Some of course will say “exactly – why do you need God?”  But this particular quote from Pascal is written to those who already have a belief in God.  There will be more to come from Pascal for those who have already put belief aside.

My Favorite Quotes - Entry #2

 “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

Isaac Newton, Feb. 5, 1676.

          The quote above is from Isaac Newton.  I think it is important to learn what you can from the past.  Actually, the more I read what has been written in the past, the more I realize how many things have already been well-thought out by people much smarter than I am.  I can’t tell you how many times I think I have come up with a new idea or a new way of thinking, only to find that someone already thought it up decades, centuries, even millennia ago!

I don’t know if it is true that “the past repeats itself”.  I think it is just that we forgot what we learned before and have to re-learn it all over again.  There is no reason for us to repeat what has been done – if we can learn about it and learn from it, then we can build on it and go further.  That is the meaning of the quote above from Isaac Newton.  If we learn from what people have done in the past, we “stand on their shoulders” and therefore we can see farther.  The only way to make significant progress is to build on the past.

          I have found this principle to be true in my own personal and professional life.  In the late 90’s, I began embarking on a new area of research that was related to, but not directly in line, with my previous research.  Therefore I had a lot of learning to do.  Before I did anything else, I spent many many months reading the literature.  I spent many hours at the Allen Library at Case Western Reserve University, up in the dark creaky stacks (it is my favorite place on campus), searching through journal articles from the 1920’s and 30’s.  I read everything I could find, and then eventually went back and began categorizing the results to try to make sense of it all.  Eventually I began to understand what people had already discovered in the past and where they had left off.  I found that a lot of what I thought was unknown had actually been explored pretty extensively about 80 years earlier.  But I was able to understand their results even better because of the many other discoveries since that time.  I could put their work in the context of what we know now.  This allowed me to build directly on what they had discovered.  As a result of that fairly straightforward literature review, a whole new research area was jump-started for me.  It was truly “building on the shoulders of giants.” 

          One of my favorite writers, CS Lewis, talks about how we have a kind of modernity snobbery.  We think that we are smarter than those clueless ignorant people back in the Dark Ages, or the ancient Greeks, or the ancient Egyptians.  We consider them to be full of superstitions and not as smart as us.  That’s snobbery on our part.  Read what they wrote.  They were geniuses!  Learn from them.  We are not smarter than they were.  In fact, we prove ourselves to be much more foolish than any other generation if we think we can move forward without building directly on what they have done!  So…learn your history!  And for those of you who are in research like I am:  read the literature – even the ancient stuff.  Dust off those old journals, crack them open, and read.  Just because you can’t find an electronic copy of the article doesn’t mean that it isn’t important!  Read read read!

My Favorite Quotes - Entry #1

“Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves.”

Confessions, Augustine, 398 AD

          The quote above is from Augustine, who was a very famous Christian theologian who lived 354 – 430AD in the Roman Empire.  The early part of his book “Confessions” is definitely worth reading – it tells the story of his early life.  I’m sure that will show up in a book review somewhere in the future.

The quote is about the uniqueness of human beings and how we sometimes forget how unique we really are.  I’ve always had a strong interest in the uniqueness of human beings, particularly the uniqueness of the human mind, so this statement by Augustine really stood out to me.

I love looking at huge snow-covered mountains.  I used to ride my bicycle in the mountains in Oregon and there was one particular place along the road in the Cascade mountains that was the most spectacular.  It was a winding road with big trees on either side, going uphill.  On a bicycle you were going pretty slow.  You really couldn’t see anything that was ahead except the next bend in the road, and the tops of trees.  But around one particular bend the trees and hills kind of opened up and all of a sudden you could see a huge mountain right in front of you.  As you rode slowly around the bend in the road, you just kept looking up and up.  And then, there it was, this huge mountain, snow covered, and just majestic!  It was almost like it snuck up and jumped in front of you.

I like the ocean too.  I could sit on the rocky coast in Oregon and just stare at the waves for hours.  There is just something fascinating about them.  I always tried to figure out if you could predict when the biggest waves were coming in by how they swelled up further out, but I never could.

I was never that much into astronomy, but the pictures of faraway galaxies are quite fascinating.  Just to try to imagine how huge they are.  How big is the sun really?  How big is a galaxy?

What Augustine is pointing out is that there are a lot of cool things all around us.  He is not saying that we should not be amazed by everything around us – just that we shouldn’t forget to marvel at how unique we humans are.  The sun is powerful beyond anything we can imagine.  If we got too close to it we would vaporize.  Yet, the sun doesn’t know anything.  The sun doesn’t even know it exists.  The sun can’t learn anything.  The sun can’t have plans.  The sun can’t dream up new ideas.  But we can do all of those things.  We are no match for the sun when it comes to pure power and energy, but in the end, the sun is just a big dumb rock – although a really hot rock - just like all the other big dumb rocks in the universe.  As far as we know, we are the only creatures in the universe who can think and reason and even marvel at the universe.  The universe can’t marvel back at us.  It doesn’t know anything.  We might be puny creatures compared to the vastness of the universe, but we are the most unique and, in many ways, the most powerful. 

This will be the primary theme of my blog (though I will certainly stray from my main topic).  I just think that human beings are more than just bags of chemicals.  We are not just really really really complex rocks (i.e. computers).  I believe there is more to us than that, and I think that any honest unbiased assessment of human beings will come to the same conclusion.  But that’s just my honest highly-biased opinion!  The key difference that I single out in my own observations is that we human beings can make choices about things and then carry them out.  We can get up in the morning and decide to go left or go right…or go back to bed.  The sun can’t do that.  The oceans can’t do that.  Mountains can’t do that.  They are all slaves to the laws of physics.  But we make decisions all the time.  We can create things that didn’t exist before.  For example, we can come up with an idea that has never been thought of before, or a new work of art or music.  To me, that is the real marvel in this universe that we find ourselves in.  The capacity of human beings to think, create, and make choices is something that no one has been able to adequately explain (more to come on that!).

So, go create some new idea that the universe has never heard of before – and don’t forget to marvel today at your own uniqueness!