I have a quirky fascination with pseudoscience--UFOs , bigfoot, ancient aliens, etc. I don't believe in any of it, but it's fun to see what passes for proof on tv these days.
I have friends that take all this very seriously, though. They really do believe that there are aliens in the sky, giant apes in the woods, and ghosts in the attic. These are intelligent people --sometimes even brilliant people--but they seem ready to take extraordinary claims at face value with less than ordinary evidence.
The biggest mystery about these tales is not the what, but the why. Carl Sagan once famously said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Though there may be unexplained evidence, there is no evidence of any of it that rises to the level of extraordinary. In spite of the lack of good evidence, why do we keep looking for ghosts and aliens?
I think is because we were created that way. God placed in us the knowledge that the world we see is not all there is. There are forces beyond out imagining, and that those forces affect our lives today. Even people who have rejected religion seem to want to believe in something beyond the ordinary. They would rather believe, like atheist Richard Dawkins, that intelligent design by God is impossible, but that it is entirely possible that aliens created life.
The modern fascination with the supernatural I believe is due to the decline of a belief in a supernatural God. Much modern religious thinking discounts the miraculous, and focuses on naturalistic religion.
In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, Western culture adopted a mechanistic view of religion in which all things happen according to the laws of logic and physics. Deism is of course the extreme of this view, but that is only the far edge. Before we get to deism there are many scholastic approaches to Scripture which assert that nothing supernatural happens today.
This is unfortunate, because the supernatural is precisely what the world yearns for. That desire to touch the divine was built into us by our Creator. When we exclude the divinity from our world view, then the supernatural is all we have left. In the old days it let people to believe in ghosts and leprechauns. Today, it is bigfoot and aliens. Ether way, we are looking for something for knowledge beyond our understanding.
Our knowledge of the laws of nature is not absolute, but fluid. Newton gave way to Einstein. A mechanistic understanding of subatomic physics gave way to quantum mechanics and strange attractors. Technological advances have come so fast that what we think is of as magic or science fiction one day become commonplace the next.
In such a world, is it really so hard to admit the possibility that there is a God? Or to admit that that God can play by different rules than we know? We must go further and admit that if there is a God, then He must operate outside of nature and be by definition supernatural. I would go even farther and suggest that a real God must make himself known by real miracles, by revealing himself through breaks in the natural order.
Reduced to it's core, the message of the Bible is this--trust God. Do not lean upon your own understanding. In return for this trust, God rewards us with the revelation of His supernatural Presence, which is above time and space.
The problem with modern religion, it seems to me, is that in our effort to make religion palatable to unbelievers, we have removed from our churches the one thing that makes religion attractive to believers and unbelievers alike--miracles. We have adopted a view that supernatural manifestations of Hiis divine power and presece were for ancient times, but not for today. We may tell the stories of those times, we may even believe them, but we do not seriously expect God to repeat them today. But in ancient times, it was those miracles which drew people to Christ. In a world obsessed with the supernatural, why is it unreasonable to expect God's miracles to draw people to Him today?
We need to pray for miracles and expect them, and not just for our own benefit. The world needs to see them, too. We need to get ourselves out of the way and expect God to show Himself to our modern world the same way He did to the ancient one--by His sovereign manifestation of His power.
I have friends that take all this very seriously, though. They really do believe that there are aliens in the sky, giant apes in the woods, and ghosts in the attic. These are intelligent people --sometimes even brilliant people--but they seem ready to take extraordinary claims at face value with less than ordinary evidence.
The biggest mystery about these tales is not the what, but the why. Carl Sagan once famously said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Though there may be unexplained evidence, there is no evidence of any of it that rises to the level of extraordinary. In spite of the lack of good evidence, why do we keep looking for ghosts and aliens?
I think is because we were created that way. God placed in us the knowledge that the world we see is not all there is. There are forces beyond out imagining, and that those forces affect our lives today. Even people who have rejected religion seem to want to believe in something beyond the ordinary. They would rather believe, like atheist Richard Dawkins, that intelligent design by God is impossible, but that it is entirely possible that aliens created life.
The modern fascination with the supernatural I believe is due to the decline of a belief in a supernatural God. Much modern religious thinking discounts the miraculous, and focuses on naturalistic religion.
In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, Western culture adopted a mechanistic view of religion in which all things happen according to the laws of logic and physics. Deism is of course the extreme of this view, but that is only the far edge. Before we get to deism there are many scholastic approaches to Scripture which assert that nothing supernatural happens today.
This is unfortunate, because the supernatural is precisely what the world yearns for. That desire to touch the divine was built into us by our Creator. When we exclude the divinity from our world view, then the supernatural is all we have left. In the old days it let people to believe in ghosts and leprechauns. Today, it is bigfoot and aliens. Ether way, we are looking for something for knowledge beyond our understanding.
Our knowledge of the laws of nature is not absolute, but fluid. Newton gave way to Einstein. A mechanistic understanding of subatomic physics gave way to quantum mechanics and strange attractors. Technological advances have come so fast that what we think is of as magic or science fiction one day become commonplace the next.
In such a world, is it really so hard to admit the possibility that there is a God? Or to admit that that God can play by different rules than we know? We must go further and admit that if there is a God, then He must operate outside of nature and be by definition supernatural. I would go even farther and suggest that a real God must make himself known by real miracles, by revealing himself through breaks in the natural order.
Reduced to it's core, the message of the Bible is this--trust God. Do not lean upon your own understanding. In return for this trust, God rewards us with the revelation of His supernatural Presence, which is above time and space.
The problem with modern religion, it seems to me, is that in our effort to make religion palatable to unbelievers, we have removed from our churches the one thing that makes religion attractive to believers and unbelievers alike--miracles. We have adopted a view that supernatural manifestations of Hiis divine power and presece were for ancient times, but not for today. We may tell the stories of those times, we may even believe them, but we do not seriously expect God to repeat them today. But in ancient times, it was those miracles which drew people to Christ. In a world obsessed with the supernatural, why is it unreasonable to expect God's miracles to draw people to Him today?
We need to pray for miracles and expect them, and not just for our own benefit. The world needs to see them, too. We need to get ourselves out of the way and expect God to show Himself to our modern world the same way He did to the ancient one--by His sovereign manifestation of His power.
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