Yesterday I discussed how science, particularly astronomy, causes moments of doubt for me because I am confronted with the fact that the God I pray to doesn’t exist, at least in one sense. But before you call the theology police, let me explain. Consider what astronomy has taught us about creation.

William P. Blair, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University scaled the awesome distances of the universe for “normal” people. He says, “imagine the distance from the earth to the sun (93 million miles, or about 8 light minutes) is compressed to the thickness of a typical sheet of paper. On this scale, the nearest star (4.3 light years) is at a distance of 71 feet. The diameter of the Milky Way (100,000 light years) would require a 310 mile high stack of paper, while the distance to the Andromeda galaxy (at 2 million light years one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye) would require a stack of paper more than 6000 miles high! On this scale, the “edge” of the Universe, defined as the most distance known quasars some 10 billion light years hence, is not reached until the stack of paper is 31 million miles high–a third of the way to the sun on the real scale of things!” We don’t know what (or Who) is beyond the universe, but astronomers do speculate that it is expanding. Doesn’t that blow your mind?

A stack of paper 31 million miles high, with the distance of each page the equivalent of 93 million miles! Two things occur to me when I consider these staggering distances. First, the God I pray to, that image in my mind, isn’t big enough to create something so incredibly awesome. As J.B. Phillips has said, my God is “too small”. Creation is correcting my theology, if only I will let it. Why is this so important? A.W. Tozer said that what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us because our worship of Him and the tenor of our spiritual life cannot rise above our concept of who God is. Perhaps that’s why we truly trust Him with so little in our lives. When we consider what astronomy teaches us about creation, and subsequently what kind of being must be behind it, Isaiah starts to make a whole lot more sense. “Woe is me!” he cries out. “For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King!”

Second, when I consider the size of the universe, it’s hard to imagine why a being who is able to create something of such magnitude would concern himself about creatures so seemingly insignificant as humans. The image on the left is called “the pale blue dot”–it’s a photograph of the Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of 6 billion kilometers. That little speck in the blue circle? That’s home.

Compared to the universe, earth itself, not to mention individual human beings, is less than a grain of sand. Why would he trouble himself to not only communicate with us, but send his son to die for us? “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers–the moon and stars you set in place, what is man,” asks the Psalmist, “that you are mindful of him?” Truly, what are humans? And why do I not savor the letter from him more?

So, these are the ways that astronomy challenges my views about God. Tomorrow, I’ll be discussing the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, “the God particle” and what it means for people of faith.

This week, in a three-part series, we’re talking science and religion in honor of science’s “great leap forward” with the discovery of “the God particle” (otherwise known as the Higgs boson)–a discovery so impressive that it surprised Stephen Hawking.

 It wasn’t learning about evolution that made my faith take a nosedive into atheism in my first year of college, though evolution was thoroughly espoused in Professor Thornton’s geology class. It was Greek myths. I spent hours each week immersed in the worlds of Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides, What rocked me to the core was that these writers wrote about the gods as if they actually existed. The Trojan War was caused by mischief between the gods, not enmity between nations. Human experiences and world circumstances are explained as the direct result of the actions of the gods. In Homer’s world, humans were mechanical puppets in the hands of ignoble and selfish gods.

“Mr. Yancey, do you mean,” I asked as I chased my English professor after class one day, “do you really mean that the Greeks believe in God as emphatically as Christians believe in Yahweh and Jesus Christ?” Surprised, he stopped to turn and face me. “Of course,” he said, “Why do you ask?” Breathless from his answer, I said nothing. As he walked away, I thought, “Greeks believed in their God as much as I believed in mine.” And for me to be right they would have to be wrong.  What arrogance to think we have the one and only right answer.” For Christians to be right, so many have to be wrong. “What,” I further wondered, “is the statistical probability that of all the world’s religions, I was raised in the one and only true faith? I didn’t know the exact number, but I knew it was probably a pretty low chance, statistically speaking.

So science really wasn’t what led me away from God; in a sense, it was science that brought me back. I spent a couple of years trying to understand how life came to be from an evolutionary viewpoint. I could understand microevolution, the small changes that occur in living organisms over a great amount of time. Two things I couldn’t sign on to was 1.) how something came from nothing and 2.) macroevolution, large changes in a species occurring over a great amount of time. One day I sat outside the classroom e in the bright sunshine thinking of these things. My thoughts turned to my Dad, and I wondered what was the statistical probability that my Dad was a biological “accident” and nothing more. Again, I didn’t know the exact number, but I knew the chance had to be pretty low. To believe that required as much faith, if not more than believing in intelligent design. In my mind, evolutionary theory could not explain my Dad, or more, my love for my Dad. It was the beginning of a long journey back to the Christian faith.

Everyone has things that instigate moments of doubt. For some, it’s the problem of pain. How can there be a God when there is so much indescribable pain in the world? But the problem of pain has never made me question the existence of God. It has certainly made me question his character, but not his existence. For where would I get my ideas of good or bad, of pain and pleasure, if not from some universal standard? For others, it is God’s intangibility, “I can’t see, hear, taste, touch, or sense God’s presence, therefore He must not exist.” But that doesn’t really get to me, either. I’m willing to accept that there is a dimension to life that is not accessible through the five senses.

It was science, in a sense, that hastened my first step away from atheism, so it’s odd that is science, not pain or God’s intangibility, that causes an attosecond of doubt. What we’ve learned about creation through astronomy and physics leaves me shaking in my boots, mainly because I know, without a doubt, that the God in my head–the one I pray to every night–definitely does not exist. Belief in an intelligent agent who created the cosmos is reasonable enough, but as astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross noted, “the immensity of the cosmos made me doubt that a Creator of such awesome magnitude had communicated—in words—to mere humans on this tiny speck called Earth.”

Graphics courtesy of NASA.

Recently, I wrote a post over on the Her.Meneutics blog in which I revealed that I voted in favor of Proposition 8 in the 2008 election season. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Proposition 8, it is a constitutional amendment that sought to add the clause “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” I explained that, like many people, it was hard to admit the way I voted because I didn’t want to be associated with far-right pastors who preach hatred and violence against gay people.

The purpose of the post was to encourage meaningful and charitable discourse between Christians on the issues of homosexuality and gay marriage. Lately, the dialogue between conservative Christians and progressive Christians has been growing particularly contentious—maybe because it’s an election year. Whatever the reason, conservative and progressive Christians need to figure out a way to treat one another with kindness despite their disagreements.

The post stirred up a maelstrom of vitriolic comments, mainly from non-Christians in the LGBT community. I will not answer the criticisms. Everyone has the right to interpret the beliefs and actions of others in any manner they choose. However, since the purpose of my post was not to defend my beliefs on same-sex marriage, I’d just like to point to others who have spoken cogently and respectfully on this topic.

Beyond that, I’d like to say three things. First, there are good people who support gay marriage and good people who oppose it. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something–probably one extremist view or another. Second, gay marriage has important implications for what kind of society we want to be. It is naïve to think that institutionalizing gay marriage will not have far-reaching implications in our educational systems and our local churches. Third, I am far more concerned about the fact that one in four children go to bed hungry every night, that every two minutes, a woman in the U.S. is raped, that every year 3.3. million counts of child abuse against six million children are reported each year. These issues, and other like, are of far greater concern to me than the issue of gay marriage.

The responses to my post do provide a sobering learning moment for concerned Christians in the following ways:

1.     Homosexuality and gay marriage have become civil rights issues, not moral issues. The LGBT community equates what they perceive as acts of discrimination against homosexuality (like voting against gay marriage) with the oppression of women and slavery. In other words, homosexuality is an immutable genetic characteristic like gender or race.

Since homosexuality is (hypothetically) an immutable characteristic, believing that marriage is intended for a man and a woman is discrimination on par with slavery. The question, for progressive Christians and non-Christians is no longer whether homosexuality is right or wrong, but whether or not gay people are being denied civil rights in the same manner as under-privileged groups like slaves or women.

2.     The movement away from the moral argument to the civil rights argument makes it impossible for Christians to say they oppose homosexuality in practice, but love individual people who are gay. The old, “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is no longer a tenable position to hold, at least in the eyes of the LBGT community. This makes perfect sense if you view it from their perspective. If homosexuality really is an immutable characteristic that cannot be changed, then 1.) God could never have been against it and therefore 2.) Any one who is against it is guilty of bigotry.

3.     Christians will have to take a stand one way or another. The issue is not going away and will have to be dealt with by the Christian community. This will be on an individual and corporate level. Last year, Willow Creek had to deal with this issue when Howard Schultz had to step down from speaking at the leadership summit because of a petition that threatened a boycott of Starbucks if he did not step down from speaking at an “anti-gay” organization.

4.    Conservative and progressive Christians need to dialogue with one another peaceably and respectfully. All Christians have a hard enough time building rapport with the surrounding culture without Christians turning on one another.

5.     Christians will have to find a place for mutual respect between themselves and those in the LGBT community. Christians have to find a way to enter into compassionate dialogue with the LGBT community in a way that honors their identity as bearers of the imago dei but does not compromise our responsibility as Christians to vote in ways that are consistent with Christian beliefs. Ultimately, this issue is about people, not principles. It’s far too easy to forget that many people in the LGBT community are people in great pain and have suffered from a lifetime of searching for validation and legitimacy. How can we point them to a conversational relationship with God?

We got Patience back in 2002. Paul and I had been searching the Southland for a dog for months when we found her, tucked away in the corner of the Pomona Humane Society. She was sleeping when I first saw her. She was the last of her litter, the runt, and I knew I had to have her. I sent Paul to get the adoption paperwork started while I stood guard at her crate to be sure no one else swept her away from me. After a few minutes, she woke, looked up at me with a bored expression and yawned.

It took me awhile to settle on a name for her because names, and the act of naming, are so important to me and because none of the usual names seemed to fit her. She was such a challenge to train that I ended up naming her Patience, saying that I either had to name her that or take her back to the PHS. For a long time she was one pair of destroyed shoes from being sent straight back. But she wore grooves in my heart, and soon there was no letting her go.

In those days, we lived on the second story of an apartment complex in Azusa, California near the campus of Azusa Pacific University. Patience and I spent several hours each day practicing walking up the stairs. Her little body shook in fear every time she took a step up or down those huge steps. But eventually, she got the hang of it and raced down those steps with unmatched enthusiasm.

Last week I took her to a vet specialist to find out the cause of her sudden blindness. On our way there, I guided her down a flight of stairs, and her whole body trembled with each step, so much like she did when she was young. My heart ached in the remembering and I thought, “It’s not supposed to be like this.” It’s the same ache I get when I plow through the news, but also the same ache I feel when I stand barefoot in the sand on Laguna Beach looking out on the Pacific or when I listen to Pachelbel’s Canon in D. It’s a longing for something just out of reach. It’s like I’m homesick for a place I’ve never seen, that I’m haunted by heaven.

Germans have a word for this longing, this desire for something we cannot quite define. They call it sehnsucht, which often translated as “yearning” or “longing”, but has no exact equivalent in another language. Sehnsucht figured prominently in the work of C.S. Lewis, who described it as an “inconsolable longing” for “we know not what”. Lewis believed that if we find in ourselves a desire for which no experience in the world can satisfy, then we must be meant for another world.

In the prelude to his book, Renovation of the Heart, a cornerstone book on the nature and process of spiritual formation,Dallas Willard points out that this desire not only allows us to peer in on “another world and another life”, but it also gives us a glimpse of what we can pull from that world into the world of the here and now. Willard says that the New Testament fleshes out what is actually possible in this life, that our life can be like “rivers of living water” (Jn. 7:38) and that we will “be able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:19-20).

Willard argues that few Christians actually grab hold of these promises because of the distance we see between our life and the life we see described in the New Testament and because we don’t approach life in the right way. “The perceived distance and difficulty,” Willard writes, “of entering fully into the divine world and its life is due entirely to our failure to understand that ‘the way in’ is the way of pervasive inner transformation and to our failure to take the the small steps that quietly and certainly lead to it.”

Spiritual formation molds us into the kind of person that will be at home in that other world we desire, that place free of death and decay, the one we see only in the corner of our eye. But change is so difficult, isn’t it? How does spiritual formation break us of the old habits and addictions that keep their firm grip on us and prevent us from moving forward, deeper in, the Christian life? Is it even possible to change? Starting this Monday, we’ll be looking at what Willard says about spiritual formation and the steps we can take towards a deeper Christian life we work through the book, Renovation of the Heart.