As a refrigerium from the discipline of Great Lent, let us turn to last Sunday’s Easter sermon of an eminent Canadian prelate, Michael Ingham, Anglican Bishop of New Westminster (via Midwest Conservative Journal, which keeps track of the comedy of modernist theology for the benefit of the rest of us).
Bishop Michael is much impressed by “new science”, that is, by science that was new several decades ago, though he doesn’t actually seem to know a lot about science old or new. He thinks, for instance, that traveling for 2,000 years at the speed of light would not take one out of the Solar System and that the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that our universe may someday “meet up with an anti-matter
Not that His Grace is more at home in theology. At least, he seems to be under the impression that Christians have historically conceived of Heaven as a place that one can reach by traveling a very long distance from Earth. Happily, “A few brave Christians have taken up the challenge of these new ideas” and arrived at what sounds exactly like the old idea of pantheism.
Diarmuid O’Murchu in Quantum Theology: the Spiritual Implications of the New Physics says we should stop thinking of God as a supernatural Being located outside the universe. Instead, he says, we should think of the universe itself as a pulsating, vibrant dance of energy alive with benign and creative potential in which God calls to us from within, not without.
He says we should stop thinking of ourselves as created beings, and see ourselves instead as woven into the fabric of a dynamic, evolving and self-renewing universe in which we must play our part or become extinct. The damage we are doing to the planet and to other life forms may leave the universe no choice but to spit us out, as it has done to countless species before us.
Well, well, a new theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs: They didn’t play their part in the “dynamic, evolving and self-renewing universe”, so it spat them out. Is that a recent finding of evolutionary biology that I somehow missed?
The central theme of the homily is a cloudy connection between Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which “brings a new understanding of the non-predictability of events” (that’s why scientists conduct experiments, to marvel at how the results are different every time), and whatever it was that happened on the first Easter.
Easter is a kind of uncertainty principle thrust into the heart of our tidy, ordered universe, undermining all our theories about how things ought to be. It’s an event that makes everything unstable.
As Scripture says, “The people who dwelt in darkness have seen a great something that leaves them totally confused.” Certainly that is the case with the Bishop of New Westminster.
The unsettling side of this excursion into post-Christian nonsense is that Bishop Ingham imagines himself to be a serious, enlightened thinker, whereas he is in fact as ignorant and obscurantist as the most retrograde, Bob Jones-style fundamentalist. His abandonment of the good of intellect is a warning to us all.
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