The Church of the Redeemer

August 14, 2005

Dr. Eric T. Fossel

This morning I am going to talk about knowledge and understanding their relationship. And I am going to talk about miracles.

In the last sentence of Steven Hawkings best selling book A Brief History of Time he writes “when we finally have the grand unifying theory we will truly know the mind of God.” This is a remarkable statement. The grand unifying theory is a cohesive mathematical statement that describes all of physics, all of the physical world. Some say it will never be achieved.  Never-the-less, Hawkings who was brought up in a communist and atheist home equates perfect knowledge of physical creation with the mind of God. God is equated with perfect and complete knowledge and of everything that is,  and perhaps most astonishing, that Hawkings suggests that humans have the capability to understand the mind of God.

There are a lot of important aspects to consider with respect to this statement. Some of them deal with what is possible to know, what is possible to understand and the relationship between knowing and understanding.  Is complete knowledge of God possible? It has been suggested that it is not possible because part of the concept of God is that God is not fully knowable, and if not fully knowable, then not perfectly understandable. The human ability to understand is limited and certainly does not extend to the perfect and complete understanding of God. That is a part of the difference between God and God’s creation. The thinking goes that if God or the Mind of God were completely knowable and understandable it would not be God.  Yet, Hawkings puts forth that stunning proposition. It should be noted that apparently he is never quite sure whether he thinks the Grand Unified Theory will ever be attained.

Paul Tillich, a great 20^th Century theologian, argues that God is the absolute Ground of Being. That is that everything is a part of God. All knowledge, all understanding, all matter, all everything is God. He is talking about something different than Hawkings. Though they are related. He teaches that the Ground of Being can be comprehended, but probably not completely understood, through the threefold approach of scripture, reason and revelation.

My four year old grandson, and namesake, in a discussion with his mother, was enquiring what various things like pavement, fish and an assortment of other things were made of and after getting answers stopped and pondered for a moment and then said “God has a lot of stuff.” Asked by mother to explain he said “God made everything and there is a lot of it. God has a lot of stuff.” He equated elements of creation as God’s stuff. Did he then know something about God? Yes, he did. Did he understand God? Of course not, he is human and he is four years old.

These three examples represent three different levels of knowledge and understanding of God or the Mind of God. My friend and mentor, Jack Spong, often states that the heart can not believe what the mind can not understand. I agree with much of what Spong is about but I disagree here. Hawkings sees the possibility of knowing and understanding the Mind of God through the details of the final Grand Unifying Theory. Tillich sees the Ground of Being as fundamental but does not expect to fully comprehend the details. Young Eric sees God in God’s stuff, in the details and either through instinct or faith he accepts that God has a lot of stuff. His heart believes that without his mind understanding.

Turning to our Gospel lesson, Jesus, the Mind of God incarnate demonstrates his power over nature at a level which exceeds the knowledge and understanding of his contemporaries and even of us today. Perhaps this is the point of the miracle in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus, God incarnate, Mind of God incarnate, simply wills the girl to become well and she instantly becomes well. In the time of Jesus demons were a very real part of the understanding people had of the world. Demons caused most or all bad things including mental and physical disease. The Canaanite woman asked Jesus to have mercy on her and rid her daughter of a demon, to heal her. Jesus at first ignores her because she was not Jewish. He said that she was not of the house of Israel and he was only sent to the “lost sheep” of the house of Israel. But, that’s another sermon. She continues to engage him and finally he relents. Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” Her daughter was then healed instantly.

Miracles by definition are those things which can not be explained by the knowledge base we posses and yet occur within the natural world. We can’t explain how something happens so we call it a miracle. Jesus is reported to have performed many miracles including several healings, as in today’s Gospel, commenting that the person’s faith was responsible for effecting the healing. How did Jesus, the Mind of God incarnate, do what he did? Did he really do it? The answer to the first question is that what he did is beyond our understanding of reality just as much today as it was two thousand years ago. But the Mind of God which caused creation, the big bang if you will, to occur certainly would have no trouble casting out demons – healing.  Some answer the “Did he really do it” question by saying, does it matter? It is simply a metaphor for God’s overcoming nature in the person of Jesus. But for our treatment today we will say that it did happen, that all of His  miracles really happened and they happened by some means which escapes human knowledge and understanding at least current human knowledge and understanding. What do we suppose Jesus level of understanding of healing or casting out the demon was? Perhaps the human Jesus simply knew how to cast out demons, he understood the process in a worldly way. Perhaps the Mind of God in Jesus operated unconsciously through quantum medicine. We just don’t know. The mind of God in Jesus would likely operate on a very high level.

Let’s imagine for a moment that Jesus appeared on earth in the 21^st century instead of the 1^st. I often wonder what would happen if Jesus were living today and performed those healings, those miracles today. Would the press begin to follow him around and CNN break into programs with a Healing Update when ever Jesus healed someone? Or would he be regarded as a quack as many TV preachers who heal are regarded. We live in a world with a very different understanding of disease. No longer are demons viewed as the cause of illness. Would Jesus healings, both remote, as in today’s Gospel or in person, be better understood today?  We live in a world of evidence based medicine. Would the NIH organize a clinical trial with the real Jesus treating half the patients and the placebo Jesus look alike treating the other half? That might well happen. Even today results of NIH funded studies on healing by remote intercessory prayer are being analyzed. In one study  one half of the subjects knew that they were being prayed for the other half did not. Will there be any effect? Will it matter if the sick person knew of the prayer?

I believe that God, or the Mind of God is still causing miracles to occur in the world today. Remote healing by intercessory prayer will certainly be classified as a miracle if any of the NIH studies comes out positive. In the realm of biomedical research and healing I consider stem cells and the healing they will potentially effect to be modern miracles. There is so much about them that we don’t know and understand.

If Jesus were alive today he might well be a stem cell researcher. Actually, I often think of scientists as modern equivalents of Biblical prophets. Both uncover something of God and communicate it to the people. I don’t expect scientific papers to begin with the Prophetic preface “Thus says the Lord.”  But, we should approach science and particularly life sciences or the sciences of life with this mind set.

If Jesus were a stem cell researcher certainly the difficult hurdles to therapeutic success would have been overcome and the therapeutic benefits would be being made available to patients. But how would Jesus respond to the critics of stem cell research who feel that making stem cells out of blastocysts sometimes called embryos is taking a human life. Here is where I may get myself into trouble as I am about to play the WWJD card. WWJD is short for What Would Jesus Do? Jesus might well focus on the question of the soul. A human life is composed of a body and a soul. It would be immediately apparent to him whether or not the blastocyst had a soul.  Current thinking among neuroscientists suggests that the hall mark of the soul’s connection with the body is human self consciousness. That is consciousness of ones self. Sir Francis Crick was among the first to suggest this in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis. Recent brain studies using functional MRI have shown that at least three different cell types are required to produce self consciousness. In the blastocyst there is only a single cell type, the embryonic stem cell. That is not the same as any of the three cell types that are required for self consciousness. Would Jesus conclude that the blastocyst does not have a soul? Could he convince the critics?

What ever conclusion Jesus came to on the question of the soul and stem cells would the true conclusion as he is the Mind of God incarnate. The problem is that the critics and opponents believe they know the absolute truth as well. It is a problem of knowing and understanding. It is the question of whether any one less than Jesus can ever know the absolute truth. As we fall short of being the Mind of God incarnate we need to exercise humility in approaching matters of life and matters of the soul.  We need to carefully differentiate between knowing and understanding. And we have to approach the physical world with humility. And we need to be open to miracles.