I wasn’t going to write an entry today, but a synchronicity prompted me to take this down. As I was walking I was listening to a Podcast by Roger Ray, one of my favorite pastors at the time, if not my favorite. But, I have a big problem with Roger Ray. He’s basically an atheist. He doesn’t believe in an afterlife. He doesn’t think things we cannot “know” or “prove” are even worth discussing. He’s a secular humanist (not that there is anything wrong with being a secular humanist). He really irks me when he says there is no evidence that we are more than meatsuit robots. Today, his rant (and yes he does rant) was about talking about things that are unknown and unknowable. His accusation is that is (most) religion makes claims about the unknowable and we should not do that. For example, according to him, when we die, we might grow wings, become angels, and fly away. But, what we know is we will become worm food. So, we should focus on the worm food part because that is what is knowable.
This brings up my problem with materialists and people who have fallen in love with “science” at least as they understand it. Anything that cannot be proven, repeated, and shown to them is not true and not even worth discussing. They don’t seem to understand that scientific breakthroughs come when people challenge what we “know”, come up with a hypothesis and test that hypothesis. A hypothesis is talking and thinking about the unknown. And what is knowable changes all the time. They don’t seem to understand that, while the scientific method has served us well, that anecdotal evidence, personal experience, and empirical evidence are vitally important to the human experience and to exploring the world. For example, there are literally millions of accounts of Near Death Experiences across cultures, across the globe, and across thousands of years. Yet, because there is not a materialistic explanation, they dismiss it.
I like Roger Ray’s use the the term “evidence based faith”. I have an evidence based faith myself. I am skeptical, but open minded. But, to deny the vast, and growing, body of evidence that says we will be much more than worm food (which shows an identification with the body that is also missing where science is taking us), is missing where the evidence is actually leading us.
So, right after the podcast ended, I had a few more minutes to walk. I told Siri to “shuffle all music”. I have about 14,000 songs in my iTunes library. I was curious about what the first song would be. What came up was a very old, Christian Contemporary song by Code of Ethics titled “Without Reason”, representing the other extreme from Roger Ray. The song is a prayer for God to grant the writer faith “without reason”. I’m not into this kind of faith, but I thought it was a fascinating sign- one more reason to believe there are no coincidences.
The chorus:
Show me something more
Give me faith
without reason
I know there must be more
To change my life like
The seasons turning
