Expert: Griff Ruby - 12/26/2009

Question
Hello:

My name is Paul.  I am a 40 year old male who was raised in a pretty strict Catholic household.  I did the Catholic school thing from grades 1 through 11.  I was an Altar Boy for 7 years.  I was brought up believing word for word what was taught to me.  Everything from Adam and Eve to the birth of Jesus.  Over the past ten years I have been having a MAJOR "faith crisis".  The reason?  The more I learn, the more questions I have that cannot be answered by my religion but CAN be answered by science.  What led me to write this e-mail was something I heard on the radio Christmas Eve day.  I was listening to a talk show and they had a segment about "things most people don't realize." One of those things was the "Star of Bethlehem".  Growing up I was taught that when Jesus was born, God made a star become very bright in order to lead the 3 wise men to Jesus place of birth.  Now I find out this is 100% untrue.  What actually happened was in that specific time period the planets Venus and Jupiter were only 42 arcseconds apart. At that range the pair would appear to merge into a single brilliant star which is often identified as the "Christmas Star" reported in the book of Matthew.

Now, this is just one of dozens of major events that took place in the Bible that science has proven to be incorrect.  I do understand the concept of "having faith" and / or being a "doubting Thomas" but it seems that people that do believe in God always seems to have an answer for every religious type of question you have.  If something good happens in life such as someone is cured of cancer or survives a bad car accident they'll say "It was God's work or God's will" but when something bad happens like someone dies of cancer or dies in a car accident people will say "God works in mysterious ways."  These people don't stop and think well, "John" was on radiation and chemotherapy for over 2 years.  maybe that’s what cured his cancer or maybe because Jane was wearing her seat belt is the reason she didn't get hurt in the car accident.

Believe me, as I get older there is nothing more that I would want than to know there really is a God and a place called heaven.  Death isn't what scares me, what scares me is the thought of losing my consciousness, which I won't know about anyway because I will be unconscious so why worry, right?  I just try to comprehend the thought of eternity and even if spent in a place called Heaven, it just seems so impossible.

To look at it from another angle, God is everywhere, everyone, everything.  God can do anything he wants. Make a pizza appear in front of him by just thinking it.  He can create a million galaxies with a billion different life forms with a blink of an eye. He says that he made us in his own image.  If this is all true, why he would create "man", put him on a planet we named "Earth" and let the terrible suffering take place that does so on a daily basis.  I also know and understand the concept of "free-will" but what free-will does a baby born in the jungles of Africa have? None.  That baby can't decide to go and get food for itself or defend itself.  So because of that it has to suffer for up to 14 days of hunger, thirst, pain etc until its human body just shuts down and the baby dies.  Why would a being such as "God" who created that baby in his own image allow that to happen?  I just can't comprehend how an all loving, all forgiving God can allow it.

Well, I could go on here for hours but would like to hear your thoughts, ideas on what I have said here.  Again, I do not consider myself an atheist but I just feel "empty" inside when it comes to God.  

Thanks for listening / reading.

Paul


Answer
Let's start with "the star."  I suppose anything is possible as to what the "star" might have been (and we don't know it wasn't something more specifically dramatic, such as a lantern carried by an angel, etc.) and I for one am highly skeptical when it comes to various attempts to "interpret" it with such various astronomical events that may or may not have even ever occurred anytime near then, for more than once I have seen "calculations" of this sort "fudged" merely to posit some inane "theory" either to "explain" or "explain away" some biblical event.  Some years ago I went to a planetarium and in there they "explained" the star as the mere juxtaposition, as if like some strange new constellation, of some three or more planets, and at the time it sounded as plausible as this "Venus and Jupiter being within 42 arcseconds of each other" unscientific notion has apparently seemed to you.  In my opinion, both of these stories are quite on the same level as the "missing day" story that NASA is supposed to have had anything to do with (google that if you are curious; read the snopes entry on it).
I have observed however that the interaction between "faith" and "science" often seems to be one that a number of people really seem to have some sort of trouble with, and that when they do it is the result of their having encountered distorted versions of at least one and usually both.  As a keen fan of science and an ardent believer in Christ I have no problem here and therefore sometimes have some difficulty identifying with those who do, so if my attempt here lacks the empathy or whatever that might make it more acceptable, that's why and so be it.
For one thing, the distinction between them is purely artificial.  There is a science to true theology, as St. Thomas Aquinas describes the Faith as being, and indeed Theology is the Queen of the Sciences.  That is no mere empty praise, for with theology we come to believe that the material and empirical objects that other sciences study really DO exist and exactly as empirical science thinks they do, and are not mere phantoms of human thinking or subjective opinion or feeling, and that finding something to be true thereby itself excludes its opposite from also being true (law of non-contradiction).  With the science of theology we learn that there is verifiable truth and refutable error, and that there are ways for any forum to be conducted in order for the truth to prevail over alternate notions.  Without such basic concepts, the whole of the physical sciences (which is what most people psychologically associate in their minds with the term "science") could never get started, and for uncounted eons of physically human existence on this planet it never did.
Now, when people speak of some distinction between "religion" and "scientific research and experimentation," there really is little in the way of any real intersection between those two human activities for one is concerned with Who and Why whereas the second is concerned with How and When.  "Who is responsible for the existence of all this and Why are we here?" is a religious question properly left to the theologians, but "How and When did life on this planet evolve?" is a question of empirical science.  I don't know which is more embarrassingly stupid as to be painfully comic to behold, a mere theologian attempting to declare regarding empirical science or a mere empirical scientist attempting theology.
All that is real and worth seriously learning stands the test.  In the physical sciences, the test is the science experiment.  In theology (as with history, law, or literature) the test is scholarship.  And faith equally plays a role in both, for in either case we must place our faith in those who know these things better than we do, and we trust them because they are generally trusted and also relied upon in a manner that no mere quack could ever be.
Learn theology from serious theologians.  St. Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summa in a very easy way to understand, and it doesn't have to be read from beginning to end to understand, and though it is a big book (and at first rather intimidating in size) you will find that one can start at any point and follow along quite well and easily without having to have read and remembered everything from the beginning up to whatever point one is, in a way almost like reading a catechism, especially once one gets used to the form and rhythm by which he deals with each and every theological question that he can think of (it is a little bit more complicated than a catechism's simple question and answer format).
Learn empirical science from serious empirical scientists.  Interestingly enough, the stereotype of the atheistic empirical scientist is actually quite a rarity in real life; most empirical scientists, understanding the universe around them far better than most men around them are often filled with awe at what is clearly the handiwork of God and a kind of orderliness within the apparent chaos of it all.
But a lot of people's faith is actually quite criminally set up by good scientists who are bad theologians and and good theologians who are bad scientists (and especially by those who are bad at both), for they produce a false expectation as to what either one of them is all about, and then when that expectation proves false, one's faith collapses.  For example, bad theologians interpret the Bible Genesis account to mean six literal 24-hour days, though the Bible itself provides much basis to think otherwise, as concluded by St. Augustine (who of course knew nothing of the discoveries of recent and modern paleontology, geology, or physics).  But however bad these "theologians" are at reading the Bible, they are even worse at empirical science where they must resort to actual misquotations and misrepresentations of what the empirical sciences teach in order to deceive their followers into believing that "even science supports the idea of a Young Earth."  Then when one begins learning the serious findings of science (and all the more so if they discover how "science" has been most criminally misrepresented to them), their very belief in the Bible itself is crushed, when in fact the Bible never committed us to any such claim in the first place.
One part of the problem as I can see in your case is that you have been given a false expectation as to what the Faith is actually all about.  You measure it in terms of having it make good things happen to you (or anyone), or else in preventing bad things from happening.  While it doesn't hurt to ask for such things, especially where they are really important to you, in my observation such requests are honored sporadically at best.  The real purpose of Faith is about what sort of person you are becoming.  God has no interest in making life easy for you, but He does have a significant stake in making you to be the best you that you could ever be.  It isn't enough to have some "ideal" for yourself that may or may not actually be anything like a real ideal for you, but to seek first and foremost the true ideal, and then also to be empowered to attain it over time.  That is what becoming a saint is all about, and sainthood is not merely some quixotic thing meant for the other fellow and/or some strange birds out there; actual sainthood is meant for each and every one of us.  Any father would wish their children success and honor, but to bring these things about they don't simply make things easy for them but instead give them an education with the hope that the education will empower them to make all this for themselves.  The Heavenly Father does the same, but simply on a far grander scale.
And then there is the issue of sin.  Those who really don't understand what sin is truly all about wonder why the world has so much wrong with it, as if it were God's fault for making such a messed up world.  But to understand sin is to understand why things are so horrible, and indeed to wonder how it is that anything which is not horrible could ever possibly exist (yet it does, and that is totally and always by God's own grace, and something of a miracle in itself).
Sin is not what most people think of as sin, i. e. "oops, I just did something somebody doesn't want me to do..." but a fundamental nature to fallen humanity in which we are slaves to our appetites, selfish, arrogant, and just plain stupid.  Those children in Africa starve not because God forgot to make it rain, but because of selfish and cruel governments that deliberately starve their populations, because of desert conditions created by lazy farming practices that allowed the land to die, because of human sin (and admittedly not the sin on the part of the children themselves, though they too have this same horrible nature born in them).  But really, how are such children any different from those who are killed before birth in abortions?  The latter may well be more directly the victims of particular malice of particular individuals, but aside from the directness of it there really is no difference.
"But what about earthquakes, floods, famines, fires and plagues etc.?  Aren't those all acts of God?"  Given some of the surprising findings of chaos theory, I should not be surprised to find that even these things may ultimately be traceable to human sin.  If the flap of a butterfly's wing could ever possibly have anything to do with a tornado on the other side of the world, might not a man's cheating on his wife similarly have something to do with an earthquake somewhere?  To mankind these things are hidden but to God who knows all, what a terrible record the disaster of sin has produced?  Shall we ever comprehend it all, even with a whole eternity to study it?
I hope all this gives you something to chew on for a while...