Broken Cosmologies
Schizophrenic Worldviews
You can’t undercut your religion’s cosmology and still cling to its eschatology.
Repeat.
You cannot dismiss the entirety of your religion’s cosmology, and still believe that its prescriptions for “going to Heaven” are correct.
You can’t.
You might think you can, and maybe you fake it good and hard for a while…
But. You can’t.
Simply doesn’t work.
I’ve long been puzzled by the “Apostolic” Traditions of Christianity because they seem so ready and eager to jettison the worldview of the very same Apostles which lend to them their name. It’s never made sense to me that one could claim to derive one’s authority from somebody and yet, also, deride that somebody as a misguided simpleton. Self-defeating as that sounds, that is, more or less, the situation The Church currently finds itself in.
Oh, yes, certainly there might be a rouge priest or a bishop here or there, but, by and large, almost 100% of the clergy (and, by extension, the laity) in either the Eastern or the Western Church live in a completely different mental landscape than the Apostles did. Not only different, no. Frankly, I would say outright contradictory. For the Apostles themselves, you know, Philip and Bartholomew and James and so on, believed, to a man, things that basically no one on earth believes now. Things that, really, most people today would consider stupid. They believed that the earth was “young” for example, around 4000 years old in their time, and that the first man and first woman were literally created, fully formed, out of dirt and ribs. They believed that that same man and woman were placed, literally, in a garden of perfection, where nothing ever died, and stayed there until a talking snake (an angel, see here) convinced them to transgress God’s commands by eating a specific fruit. They believed Death entered the world through the eating of that fruit and that, prior to, all of the Earth’s creatures were more or less immortal, and that lions didn’t eat zebras, nor spiders moths. They knew also that fallen angels had long ago impregnated human women, creating a race of giants, The Nephilim, that ruled over Mankind and corrupted the world so thoroughly that God had to kill everything with an actual, literal worldwide flood. They thought that, after that, the survivors tried to build a tower to the sky and God, wanting to frustrate that attempt, caused some of those people to randomly start speaking Chinese.
…
You know, or at least early proto-Chinese.
…
That’s what they believed.
Really.
While they were palling around with Jesus, those were the background thoughts running through their heads.
In exactly the same way that you, a modern person, walk around with the vague sense that all the canyons and mountains you see are the result of millions of years of erosion and that the moon came about because a hunk of molten rock spun off from the primordial earth a few billion years ago… they would’ve walked around referencing the same geologic phenomena to a cataclysmic flood and believing the moon was made on exactly the same day as the sun, more or less at exactly the same time. And that would’ve made sense. They were, after all, to the apostles, exactly the same size.
Again, whereas you might watch female behavior at a nightclub and conclude, as you’ve been taught to do, that you are simply watching mammals engaged in various forms of evolutionarily selected for mating behaviors, Peter or Paul would’ve observed the same in their day and concluded that the feminine soul had suffered a fall from grace and been corrupted by demons.
You go to the zoo and see a rhino and uncritically read the description on the plaque outside its pen that shows you artistic depictions of all of the beast’s evolutionary ancestors. They went to the colosseum and saw the same animal, and discussed how marvelous it was that God had created such a creature, fully formed, on the universe’s sixth day.
If all that’s not enough, the Apostles were almost certainly also geocentrists, believing, as most everyone did until Galileo, that the Earth was the unmovable center of the cosmos. Moreover… there’s not a small chance that they might’ve been flat earthers too. I mean, the globe model was, after all, primarily of Greek origin, not Jewish, and, at the time, it was a theory that was hardly fully accepted anywhere outside of the Greek academic elite.
See… your worldview and theirs are radically different.
Radically.
And so if you, a modern person, tend to think that more or less everything the founders of your religion thought about how the universe works and the world began is stupid nonsense…
How are you trusting those same founders to be right about how the world is going to end?
How are you trusting them to know what God is like?
How are you trusting them when they tell you how to save your soul?
Doesn’t make sense. At least, not to me.
And yet, as I say, near 100% of the clergy and laity of the Apostolic Churches are stuck in this position. Believing, as fully modern people, in the Big Bang, Heliocentrism, Darwinian Evolution, and an Earth billions and billions of years old, they are forced to kind of hand-waive away the problem and just not talk about it because they are, in essence, calling the founders of their own religion stupid, while also wanting to use those founders as the cornerstone of their present authority.
Quite the pickle.
And yes. I know. I know. There’ve been all kinds of attempts to square these circles. Reams of books about “theistic evolution” and so on. But, as I’ve hopefully well illustrated, the question of the origins of Man and other species is but one piece of this large and problematic puzzle. Even if you accepted a theistic evolutionary model (frankly, I find them mostly to be begging the question), all the other issues around the shape, position, and importance of the Earth, the literality of The Flood, Giants, Angels, Man made from dust and his previous immortality and then fall… those still all remain, and really, all attempts to mash them together with a modern scientific worldview just smack of desperation. Again, we arrive at this curious position where The Pope and the Archbishop of Moscow and even your local priest are telling you, on the one hand, “Yes, well, The Apostles and the Bible got pretty much everything wrong”, but, on the other, “And we, their successors, are carrying on that infallible flame.”
Doesn’t wash.
Of course, I know that the retreat into metaphor and allegory is a popular solution but, A) the Apostles give no indication they thought any of the above was allegorical and, B) once you allegorize the entire foundational cosmology of your religion… on what logical basis do you ever stop? How do you say, “Well, here in the Bible you see God was speaking metaphorically about… mmm… pretty much everything. Just not X, Y, and Z. Those are literal.”? How do you say that? What rationale exists for such a thing? Why would you not also allegorize Christ’s talk of a future resurrection of the dead, or his ascension into Heaven, or even his real presence in the Eucharist? This entire schizophrenic line of thinking has created an upside-down world where millions of Catholics are able to believe Mary appeared to peasant children in Portugal and made the sun dance, but think Evangelicals are nuts for building an ark in Kentucky, or questioning evolution, as though somehow that was a bridge too far. A world where Eastern Orthodox Christians are fully committed to the idea that a miraculous fire descends from Heaven every Easter yet look at you like you’re a yokel fundamentalist for believing the first man was literally made out of dirt. It’s all completely incongruent, and incongruent because, fundamentally, the Apostolic faiths have thrown their own Apostles under the bus.
It’s silly.
Okay. Cards on the table, yes, I do believe American Evangelicals in this regard hold the most rational position. They have their own nonsense, of course, we all do, but on issues of cosmology, issues of basic religious worldview… they have less circles to square. A stance of “The Bible says the earth was made in six days, so it was”, requires a heck of a lot fewer mental somersaults to square with their belief in going to Heaven than something like,
“Well… it’s actually billions of years old, and we come from a monkey-thing that came from a fish-thing, but, you know, somewhere in there, the monkey-fish did something immoral and we mythologized that as the eating of a fruit and, um, see, the first man, Adam, that way, brought death into the universe, allegorically… I mean, he wasn’t a man yet then… probably… definitely bipedal though, um… anyway, so yeah, then, later Christ brought life back into the universe though the reverse process. And, uh, this one was literal though. Like, that one was literal so that it could… reverse… the… um… metaphor….????
…
Mary makes the sun dance sometimes.”
I just want people to think about it.
I want them to stop the hand-waiving.
Christianity is bleeding out because most of the laity is presented with a schizophrenic mash-up of two or three or more contradictory creation myths and cosmologies and the people supposed to shepherd them have largely just thrown up their hands and said, “figure it out yourselves.” I would like to challenge the leadership of both East and West to maybe sit down and try a little harder. It’s important. You’re not going to win on abortion, for example, if the world we live in was the result of a cosmic accident. You’re not going to win on LGBT issues, if, you know, you and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals, doing it like the do on the Discovery Channel. You’re not going to win on A.I. if people can’t conceive of Christ ascending into an infinite void of blackness above their heads as somewhere he could plausibly one day come back from. They’re going to try and make their own, all-knowing, digital gods instead.
See, Christianity doesn’t make sense to the average man or woman on the street. It can’t make sense. The cosmology of modern science and the cosmology of The Apostles do not go together.
They just don’t.
And, if you can’t defend the latter…
Should you really keep calling yourself “Apostolic”?
I’ve come to my own solutions about all this but I’m not going to tell you what they are because, even if you agreed with me (unlikely), this isn’t the sort of problem you can resolve for somebody else. Certainly not something you can resolve on behalf of an entire institution. Me telling you how I think to best square the circles wouldn’t help because, ultimately, this is a question of looking hard in the mirror and asking yourself, very honestly, who you actually believe.
Peter? Or Darwin?
Moses or Galileo?
Jesus Christ? Or Sigmund Freud?
And, like… actually be honest with yourself here. I know you want the answer to be Peter and Jesus but… is that true? Is that how you act? Push come to shove, rubber meets the road, which cosmology are your decisions based on, and, if so… why not have the courage to go with that cosmology all the way, and stop straddling the fence?
Are we, really, just all spinning on some granite, that we’d like to call a planet.
Ascended apes born from an accident.
All of us floating in an infinite Black. Going nowhere.
For no reason?
…
Or, do you think it’s something else?
And which is Apostolic?
Modern science considers all previous worldviews ignorant at best, with zero willingness to believe themselves misguided. A true scientist would consider his worldview tentative because there is more to be learned than the most erudite can imagine. What future man will 'know,' if the Malthusean global warming reactionaries don't kill us off first, will unquestionably look back at the early twentieth-century account of origins and trends as cartoonish as the materialist humanists think of first-century thinkers.
First, on what scientific basis do you glibly describe the thinking of the Apostles? If Jesus was who he claimed to be, who is to say what he taught his disciples? Might he even have withheld information about how he created because they could hardly understand what he taught them about his mission?
In the same vein, when God revealed his creation in Genesis, how many volumes might it have taken to specify his methodology? His audience of three or four thousand years ago, nor even an audience of twenty-first-century scientists, most likely could not comprehend a presentation of actual events.
The Dunning-Kruger effect operates on twentieth-century scientists in exactly the same way as on ignorant peasants. No one is immune to hubris.
There is only one reality and it is beyond words and human understanding. All our cosmologies are just human attempts to account for the ineffable. If our faith is built on a cosmology, rather than direct experience of the divine (the Holy Spirit, the Tao, Sat Chit Anand, nirvana) it is as vulnerable to doubt and contradiction as anyone else’s. And I see very little “cosmology” in Jesus’ teachings - he simply took the understanding of his time and place as a given, and pointed out the way, the truth and the life, of the Kingdom. Arguing about cosmologies is as futile as discussing the number of angels on the head of a pin (see medieval scholasticism).