You've stumbled upon the blog of Paul Malan. I love my family, I love to write, I love to ride my bikes, and I love to take pictures. Maybe someday I'll think of something clever or arresting to say right here.I’ve had a strange recurring mental image lately. It’s not as simple as a picture, but also not a full dream-quality production. You could think of it as a local community play in one scene, shown exclusively in my troubled little head.
It opens in an upscale restaurant, not so nice that there aren’t prices on the menu but nice enough that you might feel out of place wearing blue jeans. The patrons, all dressed conservatively in muted dresses and jackets, seem to be enjoying intimate conversations at every table.
There is but one exception, an aging woman wearing a shockingly bright pink blouse, whose husband speaks but little and listens intently to her every word. She’s telling an animated story, a little too loudly and with her mouth full of salad, when she begins choking. Her husband leaps from his chair, sending it tumbling behind, and yells, “Is there a doctor in the house?”
A distinguished white-haired gentleman turns from a neighboring table, and for the first time we see his face. It is my professor. He wears the face of a Jeopardy contestant confidently waiting for Alex Trebek to confirm his Final Jeopardy answer—a smug expression that seems to say, “I’m so glad you asked.”
“I’m a doctor,” he says with feigned humility, and the panicked man gestures quickly toward his choking wife. “Oh, not that kind of doctor,” my professor continues with a warm chuckle. “No, I’m an academic doctor. My dissertation explored the connection between third-world countries and the television remote control. Did you know that a great many African families still have to walk across the room to change channels? I was actually a student of the world’s leading remote control theorist at Stanford before he got famous…”
The scene ends without resolution, my professor rambling on without noticing that the husband has run to seek help elsewhere, but if you need a tidy ending let’s just agree that the woman was saved by her waiter and left a generous tip.
This little daydream came to me first while listening to a framed in-class discussion led by my professor. He asked whether society would be able to function without mass media, and though in semesters past I would have enjoyed the subsequent theoretical ramblings I just can’t seem to feign interest this time around.
As my classmates offered opinions and speculations about what society would be like without mass media I quickly lost interest and wanted to end the discussion by offering the concrete answer: If mass media didn’t exist, we would invent it.
A few days later I wrote the post about making friends with Merritt and Joani, and Merritt emailed me a reply addressing the idea that many life-changing events seem largely due to coincidence:
“The book we purchase because of the cool dust jacket could end up being the cause of a life transformation that leads to fortune, or it could convince us to secede from society and live in a yurt for the remainder of our days. The fact that things have turned out so good for (some of us) almost makes faith in God a worthwhile pursuit.”
His final sentence intrigues me, and I hope he’ll forgive my taking it out of context.
I’ve noticed a recent atheistic uprising of sorts. Richard Dawkins and the like are making the rounds on national best-seller lists, and atheists everywhere seem to be suddenly unified. The increased exposure has given rise to many circular discussions—the kind where atheists and religionists wage intellectual battle despite the fact that there is no proof of either position and no possibility for progress. Just as I had no stomach for theoretical musings in class, these theistic discussions have been unusually tiring as well.
But intellectual laziness can generate its own rewards, and my lackadaisical response to each of these debates sparked a useful thought: If mass media didn’t exist we would invent it because it serves vital functions in society. For the same reason, if God didn’t exist we would invent him.
We need the benefits afforded by a belief in God—to know that an unseen hand watches over us, presenting the coincidences that seem to redefine our lives every now and again and promising rewards in another life when this one seems unfair. We need a way to explain the inexplicable, and though the nature of what we can explain without God is rapidly changing, there is still much in life that only a belief in God can account for.
If atheists were able to succeed in convincing us to abandon belief in God, it would be mere minutes before someone, somewhere had an experience that defied explanation and stirred a belief in some greater power. Even if God were vanquished, he would immediately return to exist in the hearts of his children. Though atheists may object, God is simply too useful to be abandoned.
There is an interesting interview in Time, November 13,2006 issue that features a debate between Dawkins and Francis Collins, the delusional god Dawkins and the confirmed Christian Collins. Both men are respected scientists in their field and they cover a lot of the recent discussion concerning religion vs science.
In the last paragraph by Dawkins, he makes the following statement concerning the existence of God - "But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable - but neverless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed."
It appears to me that he is not rejecting deity with this statement, he is rejecting myth.
Is it possible to have honest inquiry about the nature of God without undermining testimony or causing rancor from believers?