Angels watching over my ass

About a week ago, I came across a sappy little Family Circus cartoon involving an angel. I'm not sure whether this is supposed to be cute or inspirational or what, but there it was in the paper, and thank goodness that Thel was attentive when that angel tapped her on the shoulder, or little PJ would have had a very bad day indeed. But you know, the whole thing bothered me, and it bothers me in the same way that hundreds of other stories like it bother me. I mean, even if you believe angels exist, isn't this sort of BS?

My mother, who is not a Christian, (at least in the more theologically conservative sense that I am: she's a Unitarian) had an incident in my own childhood that she attributes to the supernatural. See, one day she was making me macaroni and cheese, and I, a mere three-year-old at the time, thought I knew how this cooking thing was done, so I decided to get the noodles off of the stove myself, and in the process, poured about a gallon and a half of boiling water down my front. This is the sort of thing that would give most children a rather large scar for life, but my mother rushed into the kitchen, scooped me up, ripped off my clothes and dumped me in the bathtub under cold water. Having had no first-aid training, she confided to me many years later that the fact I am completely unmarked by that accident today is something she attributes to God. Surely, God somehow spoke to her and told her what to do. Do you see what might be lacking from this reasoning?

Well let me explain it with one more story that's truly my own, not my mother's. On a normal day in 1998, I was on my way to work. I was traveling south on a six-lane portion of Southern California freeway during rush hour at about 60 mph. There were four lanes to my left, and one lane to my right with a small concrete abutment separating it from an exit lane. In that lane to my right was a car being driven by a woman whom I somehow sensed was having trouble a second or two before anything happened; maybe I caught something in her facial expression out of the corner of my eye, I don't know.

In fifteen seconds, the following happened: Her car began to zigzag just slightly, and then spun out. One of the rear tires of her car made contact with the abutment and her car ricocheted off of it, and then her car was going straight, but at a 90-degree angle from the rest of rush hour traffic. The right front corner of her car plowed through the right rear corner of mine, and kept going across the freeway, leaving my car at a 45-degree angle to traffic, but still traveling in the same direction. As her car traveled across all lanes to my left, finally striking a pickup truck in the leftmost lane, my car resolved its contradictory momentum and position by flipping up and rolling end over end across the lane to my right, over the barrier and the exit lane, finally landing in a drainage ditch right side up. The pickup truck had landed on its roof, and the car that had started the whole thing came to a stop on the leftmost side of the southbound freeway. All three cars were demolished, but all three drivers were left without a scratch.

Later, someone commented to me upon hearing the story, "Wow, your guardian angel must have been working overtime that morning!" I responded with a polite nod, but was bewildered. It's not that I don't believe in angels. I believe in the Bible, and while it doesn't say much about angels, at does seem to be pretty clear that their existence is attested to in Scripture. It's not even that I don't believe in "guardian" angels. There's a bit of evidence for them in the Bible, and if angels exist at all, why not have them work as guardians? The problem is that if you suppose they exist and are going around tapping moms on the shoulder, delivering first aid advice and acting as divine airbags in serious auto crashes, you've got a lot of explaining to do.

Why would the Family Circus angel go tap Thel on the shoulder rather than just stop PJ, or even push the lamp out of the way? Why would my mother get a message on how to treat her son's burns rather than a message to go into the kitchen a few seconds earlier and stop me from doing something stupid? If angels can keep the accident that morning from effecting more than three cars, why not hold it to two cars, or one, or none? And what about all the children who do pull objects off of shelves onto themselves, be they lamps or pots of boiling water, and are injured and scarred for life? What of all those who are killed in auto accidents, whether they be believers in angels or avowed skeptics? I can't help but think that logically, it's all a bunch of hooey, you know?

Allow me to switch gears, though. I've been thinking about this subject off and on since I saw the cartoon, and that was over a week ago. I'd originally meant this as one of a series of posts talking about things that Christians generally believe that I find more than a bit dubious. I probably will still throw in a few things in future posts, but for some reason, I found myself rethinking this.

It's interesting to me that atheists do tend to point to religion as a practice of "blind faith". The truth is, there's not really any such thing. It's not like there are people who find a scrap of paper with the word "Jesus" on it and decide on the basis of that alone to become Christians. No, people have reasons, and one person's reason is different from another's. Some people were brought up in the culture of Christianity and never bothered to question it. Some people may have read the Bible and found it fulfilling something they thought they were lacking. A lot of people experience some sort of trauma in their life that makes them turn to spirituality to find meaning. I don't know anyone that became a Christian for no reason whatsoever.

It's that last point about traumatic experiences, though, that seems so suggestive. People who argue against God often bring up the bad things, the suffering, the hypocrisy, the disasters, etc., as a reason to disbelieve in God, but oddly enough, there are a lot of people who believe for those very reasons. A friend of mine who is a "pro-life" activist is not an activist because of her religious convictions, but developed religious convictions due to her activism. "When I saw the evil and violence that was at work in abortion, I was sure that nothing could be so evil unless there was something supernatural behind it. If there were supernatural forces at work in the world, then it made sense to me that God would be one of them." While her experience is quite different than most, I've met scores of people who decided to give their lives in service to Christ when they found they had reached rock bottom.

What is my point? Maybe it doesn't make much sense; it often doesn't to me. Still, could it not be possible that many instances of suffering are allowed by God and His angels for the purpose of a greater good? I remember years ago being at a Christian evangelistic rally at which two mishaps occurred in sequence. First, the P.A. system blew out, and those people who had gone forward to make a commitment to Christ were forced to crowd in closer to the stage in order to hear the pastor. Secondly, after the pastor was finished speaking, a technical problem occurred that would have easily killed someone who had been standing in the area many people were standing before the P.A. mishap forced them closer to the stage. Many in attendance chalked it up as a miracle that the P.A. system had gone out at such an opportune time, but I was skeptical; did two wrongs make a right? Why not have everything function properly with no mishaps at all? Perhaps for the person who had been standing on that spot, the malfunctioning P.A. system would somehow empower them to find greater faith than if they had just stood there with nothing happening.

In a perfect world where nothing ever went wrong, I doubt anyone would ever notice God.

One...

While I was away on my trip, I spent a lot of time sitting in a meeting room waiting for an appropriate time to put in my two cents worth. I always feel a little embarrassed to admit such things, but often when I'm wasting time in a meeting, important or not, I pretend to take notes on the meeting, but in reality am taking notes on whatever random thought happens to be crossing my mind at the moment.

After using up several note pages analyzing the behavior of the chaotic iterations of a rather simple function I had thought up a few days before when reading an old math textbook (which caused me to discover a delightfully odd connection between Pascal's Triangle, Fibonacci numbers, and the powers of two--don't worry about it, it was interesting, but essentially trivial), I turned my thoughts to ponder a fundamental issue of theology.

There's an argument for the existence of God that's often known as the "first cause" argument. Pretty much it goes like this. Everything that has a beginning has a cause. As it makes no sense for there to be a chain of causes stretching back ad infinitum, there must be at the beginning of the causal chain a cause that has no beginning and is itself uncaused. This "first cause" is God.

Now, if you're a theist, you might like this argument, and you almost certainly accept each part of it as being true, whether or not you accept the validity of the logic contained in it. Most Christians at least tend to believe that the Bible teaches this to be so. As for me, though, I hate to see someone purporting to have definitively answered the question of the existence of God when I see no such thing.

In preparing to write this entry, I came across this page which seems to feel it has dealt with the objections sufficiently. I think it misses the boat just a tad.

The first objection listed is actually meant to be a thought-provoking question: "Who created God?" Children love to ask this question, as well as atheists both trying to be difficult and genuinely questioning. The author of the page dismisses this question by merely pointing out that the argument applies to things which have a beginning, and God is not a thing with a beginning. Okay, fair enough, but now we are faced with another problem I think, at least if we're trying to use this argument to pursuade the atheist that God (and in particular our God) must exist. That problem is, how do you know that God had no beginning?

There's a difficult bit of circular reasoning that always threatens to creep into our arguments for the existence of God. Atheists will accuse a Christian of making this argument: Everyone should believe in God. Why? Because the Bible says so. Why believe the Bible? Because God wrote it. Hmmm... Sorry, but if you're going to be convincing to a non-believer, you're going to have to get out of this loop. While in my experience, some atheists love to accuse people of making this argument when they are not in fact doing so, in the case of the "first cause" argument, and the response to this objection/question in particular, the circular reasoning is contained hidden within it in a way that most atheists and some children immediately see. I ask again, how do you know that God had no beginning? Only because the Bible tells you that is the case. If you think you're going to use the "first cause" argument to show that God has no beginning, I don't think it will really work, both because the answer to the question "Who created God?" becomes unanswerable in an unbiased way, and for other reasons that I hope to include in this post below.

The second objection, as stated on the site, is that not everything that has a beginning has a cause. It's interesting to me that this goes into some specifics that I hadn't even considered before today. Generally, I'd always considered a major objection to be "How do you know that everything that has a beginning has a cause?" Apparently, the author of the page happens to think science has shown this not to be true. (As I said, it's the first I've heard of it.)

It's very strange to me the way he responds. "Randomness, if randomness there be, is confined to the microscopic." I ask, "So?" First of all, if there are exceptions to a rule, then there are exceptions. I don't think logically you can say, "There are no exceptions, because what exceptions there are happen to be very small ones." Maybe I'm wrong, but this is the way I'm reading the response, and it comes across as nonsense. Secondly, if we concede that exceptions exist on the microscopic level, then let us not forget the fact that the Big Bang theory essentially says that the universe started out as a microscopic particle! Really, this argument is hopeless.

But in a more general sense, I do wonder how it can be said that all things with a beginning have a cause. Perhaps with those microscopic particles, their action is indeed caused, but not in a manner we can easily understand. Even if we eventually come to explain their behavior, and this exception to the rule disappears, how do we really know that there is a rule at all? I've yet to see any proof for the claim that all things with a beginning have a cause; it seems to be stated as an obvious fact, but it somehow escapes me.

Getting back to my paper with random thoughts in the background of my meeting, I started to think of alternate hypotheses. What if it is possible for causes to stretch out to infinity? Could the universe have been created by something outside of this universe, which was in turn created by something outside of itself, etc.? Or what if cause is something that, outside of the confines of the space-time continuum can loop on itself? If you're going to suppose the existence of a being outside of space and time (God), that is separate from many of the rules that govern us, then why couldn't the universe somehow have created itself in a causal loop? What if a sentient being within the universe created God, and God, being outside of time, was able to create us in turn?

What if God was created? Does that imply we would need to worship this arch-deity that was/is the cause of God? Or maybe such a being doesn't care, and we are in the hands of God only, despite the fact that He was created. Or perhaps the God of the Bible, claiming to not be created, when in fact He was, is a liar. I don't think so, but in an abstract sense, one must consider the possibility, right?

Then again, if we suppose the existence of one non-created being, then why not multiple created beings? I remember I once suggested the possibility to someone that perhaps the "angels" are not created beings, but also are self-existent from eternity, despite being less powerful than God. "But God created everything that was created!" I was told. "Yes, but I'm not claiming that angels were created." Sure, this goes against mainstream theology, but when you talk abstractly about uncaused beings, isn't this a distinct possibility? And since we are told that angels interact with the universe, this makes multiple uncaused causes. (Sounds like a pantheon, and once again, in theory, why not?)

The universe is filled with philosophical questions that have no easy answer. Plugging in God as the one and only answer to each of these questions may be satisfying for the theist (I know it is for me!), but is it really conclusive on a logical level? Sometimes I fear that theistic philosophers miss that we're only proving to ourselves the one thing we already believe.