I was just reordering some of my computer files — in particular, notes taken on books read, which are easily added both to a bibliography and to a searchable database in the academic word-processor Notabene (available at notabene.com — and no, I don’t get a commission) which I have been using for years — and which is now in the process of getting a major upgrade which is going to make it un unbeatable research tool — when I came across a note on Carl Sagan’s Gifford Lectures which were published by his wife Ann Druyan as The Varieties of Scientific Experience. Let me preface what I read in that note with the observation that Carl Sagan often reflected on the smallness of the earth, and the relative insignificance of the existence of life on earth, and, in particular, the relative insignificance of human beings. He does this in Pale Blue Dot, for instance, making much of the fact that, looked at from the Voyager spacecraft as it left the solar system, the earth becomes just one pixel in the picture taken from that point of view.
In the text surrounding the note that I had jotted down ages ago, Sagan reflects that the god of the theologians is a small god, reminding me of the book published by J.B. Phillips long ago, Your God is too Small, only Sagan is making a different point. It also reminds me of Scott McKenna’s point, made in his response to my response to his speech to supporters of assisted dying in Edinburgh, where he says:
God is bigger than that. It is precisely because God is compassionate that we have nothing to fear. [my italics]
This concern about the “size” of God is interesting, because it suggests that our gods are our own creations, and we can edit them as we will. If one account of God does not measure up to expectations, we can transform it into something more comprehensive, a being who can take into consideration much more than it had been given credit for. God is bigger than we imagined. But, as Sagan says, the god of the theologians
is a god of one small world, a problem, I believe, that theologians have not adequately addressed. [30]
This is a problem of considerable importance, because, in fact, knowing, as we do now, how vast the universe is, the supposition that the “Creation” has been brought into being expressly with us in view seems ridiculous and self-centred; and yet this is the kind of god that we end up with. No matter how big we make our gods, we end up with one that is concerned about a form of life on what is, from many other points of view within the universe, a small suburb in a marginal galaxy. How do we get to pick ourselves as, in some sense, the purpose of the whole?
Thus even Scott McKenna’s god is, by any standards, a fairly small, tribal deity, no matter how much “bigger” it is compared with the gods of other tribes. Scott McKenna’s god is, without a doubt, “bigger” than the gods of those who think that the god with which we have, as earth-bound humans, to do, cannot accept the free moral decisions of morally responsible parts of its creation. That indeed may be seen as an improvement on gods which are thought not to leave any moral discretion to its creatures, but still, we have to wonder, why we should think that there is any god which, out of all the planets in the innumerable galaxies that comprise the universe as we know it, is concerned about the moral choices of insignificant specks of life on this planet that we call earth?
But now we come to the quote for which all this is a prelude. Let’s begin with a quote, as Sagan does, from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, from the last book, “The Passing of Arthur” (I include words which Sagan denotes with an ellipsis) — the dying Arthur is speaking:
I found him in the shining of the stars,
I mark’d him in the flowering of the fields,
But in his ways with men I find him not.
I waged his wars, and now I pass and die.
O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would … [my italics; the passage is very early in the twelfth book of the poem]
Sagan takes exception to the first line:
To me personally, [he says,] the first line, “I found Him in the shining of the stars,” is not entirely apparent. [29]
The Victorian habit of capitalising pronouns referring to the deity is not, to me, anyway, an appropriate usage, so I have simply dropped Tennyson’s capital aitches, while Sagan preserves them. (This is, by the way, a bad habit which many atheists have picked up, but has not been the rule amongst all except fundamentalist theologians for over fifty years.) As Sagan says, “It depends on who the Him is.” And then he continues:
But surely there is a message in the heavens that the finiteness not just of life but of whole worlds, in fact of whole galaxies, is a bit antithetical to the conventional theological views in the West, although not in the East. [29]
And then we get, at last, to the point that I want to emphasise here, for this, says Sagan,
suggests a broader conclusion. And that is the idea of an immortal Creator. By definition, as Ann Druyan has pointed out, an immortal Creator is a cruel god, because He, never having to face the fear of death, creates innumerable creatures who do. [29]
And then, he might have added, people come up with the idea that, despite this incongruity of an immortal creator creating mortal creatures who are destined to die, this immortal god has objections to the way these creatures may opt to die, rather than face the full fury of their dying years or moments.
But of course gods are creations of the human imagination, and they are, all of them without exception, limited by the minds of those who create them. And theologians have particularly small, unadventurous minds, for the simple reason that, if there is to be a god who is somehow personally involved with and concerned about our doings, it is bound to end up looking a bit like a schoolmaster dictating to children, rather than an adult dealing with other adults. God may have gone slumming in Jesus, as Christians suggest, but that Jesus, sadly, ended up as the stern, forbidding authoritarian Christ, indeed, the Christos Pantokrator, Christ the Ruler of All Things, whose picture adorns many Eastern Orthodox churches, having apparently forgotten all that he learned in the slums. Or, as many theologians suggest, he came to the slums to rescue us from them — for we’re all in it together, and need rescuing. And this can only be done by furious self-denial and self-loathing for the perfidious, loathsome slum-dwelling beings that we are, until we can measure ourselves by the full stature of Christ.
And just remember, it took the torment and torture of the slumming god — that is, as a human sacrifice – to release us from the prison-house of our humanity. If the human sacrifice of the slumming god is necessary in order to free us from the slums, and if we must constantly advert to his righteousness, because we have nothing of our own to offer — do Christians really attend to what they are doing when they are pleading Christ, or offering the Eucharistic sacrifice? — it is because we are truly nothing, and must subordinate ourselves to Christ, so that, as Paul said in First Corinthians, God might be all in all:
When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all. [1 Cor 15.28]
There’s the smallness that Sagan was looking at, but it is a deceptive smallness, because, subordinate to Christ, and Christ subordinate to God, we get to be part of the all in all! And it’s all done by means of repression and sacrifice.
Of course, this great ”drama of redemption” is all pretend thought, for there isn’t an iota of evidence that any of it is true. Couldn’t be, because it all takes place on a plane that is not of this world at all. But, as Sagan reminds us, using Ann Druyan’s suggestion, there is something not only incongruous about this, but cruel. The god who sent Jesus slumming, is the god who imposed upon its creation something intolerably cruel. If it was responsible for our being, it either had no moral imagination at all, or had a demonic one. For what kind of being would create, though itself immortal, beings who had to face up, not only to finitude in every respect, but to the finitude that means that they would, in the end, cease to be, and know that that was to be their fate?
Moreover, that finitude meant that they would often morally go wrong. It is ridiculous to suppose that any god who created us by means of the processes of evolution would not know that any being resulting from evolutionary processes would tend towards cruelty and self-centredness. Evolutionary processes are about survival. Wouldn’t it have entered the creator’s mind that the result of producing self-motivating agents by this process would not only be tempted, but would necessarily often act in such a way as to ignore the consequences of their acts on other such agents? But then, to top it all off, for their creator, who had made them finite, with limited intelligence and limited compassion, and with an irrepressible drive to survive, to hold them accountable for its failure to create beings prone more to good than to evil, is absurd. One can only sympathise with Omar Khayyam’s sentiment:
Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin*
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou will not with Predestined Evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!
The problem is not sin so much as finitude, not evil so much as natural selection. The whole Christian drama of salvation is not only speculative, but perniciously so. Instead of recognising, as it must, that we are the products of evolutionary forces, and that our morality, such as it is, is a latecomer on the scene, it pretends that our very thoughts and feelings, even unexpressed, are of the greatest significance to the little creator god who has nothing better to do than to invigilate the spoken and unspoken thoughts of billions of individuals, and writes them all in a book of remembrance, where, if we fail in our religious duties, they will be held to our account, despite the fact that it was this creator god who set up the context in which, of course, there would be multiple failures in this respect.
Human beings are, broadly speaking, morally better than the gods they imagine, and it is time for us to recognise that it is our moral vision that needs to be addressed and understood more fully, rather than trying to imagine the kind of god that can underwrite lives of goodness and compassion. In Ireland we see religious morality at work, trying to hew to a straight moral line ascribed to a god, and finding out how deeply unsatisfactory morality carried on in this way really is. Certainly, we can, with J.B. Phillips or Scott McKenna, or other imaginative people, try to conceive of a god who would somehow be a sufficient ground for a full and free humanity, one which expressed itself in loving and humane actions. But what is the point of doing this? The gods so far conceived of tend to constrict our actions, and make us far less caring than we might be. Why don’t we simply recognise that there is no god, there is no ultimate meaning and purpose of our lives, and therefore we need, not only to make the most of our lives in the short period during which we have to live them, but to do the best we can to make the lives of others, whose lives are fated, like ours, to be short and often full of trouble, the best that they can be, without adverting to gods at all?
Gods simply get in the way, and are an imposition on natures that can, with thought and consideration, be much better than our gods ever dreamed it possible for them to be. After all, we create our gods, and then imagine them giving laws to rule our conduct. It would be much better to recognise ourselves for what we are, and on that basis try to discern how it is best to live. Perhaps — who knows? — in such a world my wife Elizabeth, despite her pains and indignities, might still be alive, knowing that, when it became simply too unbearable for words, she could be helped to go in peace, surrounded by her family. Imagined gods determined that she should die when she did. I do not intend to let people forget that. But for those gods, she might still be alive, for our gods are always too small, and are soon outdated by events, and cannot possibly compass the full spectrum of the goodness of which human beings are capable.
——————-
*The word ‘gin,’ by the way, is an archaic word meaning trap, not the rather tasty beverage enjoyed by the British in malarial outposts of the Empire.
I like to suggest (as a thought experiment) that gods created the world in order to produce dinosaurs. Once the gods got fed up playing with them they smote the Earth with a huge meteorite. And we are just the results of theoactive fallout…
Seems a lot more coherent than the Adam and Eve fable.
If God was actually doing a halfway decent job of running the planet for the benefit of human being — or even just his Chosen People — then it might be possible to overlook his excessive interest in personal details like what we do with our genitalia. But since he’s already stuffing up badly at the macro level, clearly he needs to back off and get his priorities right. Micromanagement and omnipotence just don’t go together.
Our gods are too small and our gods are too simple. Their stories are told in great sweeping themes of love and sacrifice and redemption, betrayal and loyalty and courage, and endings in sweet justice. Such themes make the hairs rise on the back of my neck in the cinema – but the cinema is a happy diversion from real life. Real life is complicated. Our world and the human minds interacting in it constitute a huge non-linear system, and actions, moral or not, do not necessarily have simple power to succour or wound. Often, the reasonable wishes of decent people conflict, and often, one has no course of action available to one that does not cause or fail to alleviate suffering in some form. Eric, I have been painfully moved in the year that I’ve been reading this blog by your account of how you and Elizabeth came gradually, with mutual respect and compassion, to an agreement that when life became intolerable to her she should not have to endure it. Your situation is an exceptionally anguish-laden example of the problem of conflicting interests, but poignant examples abound – consider for example the increasingly common choice that must be made by the middle aged between giving the time and energy that they have available for caring to an elderly relation with dementia or to children who still need extensive support. And such dilemmas plague life on all scales, from day to day. Who is to decide unambivalently between the rights of nomadic and sedentary groups in West Africa, or between the desire of one person to preserve a pristine heath to admire from afar, and another to use it for a communal leisure activity? What of the agonised arguments over military intervention during the uprisings of the Arab Spring?
Yet from religions, which have such pretensions to moral authority, we receive moral laws of often puerile simplicity. Surely, even in the most violent and lawless parts of the world, only a small proportion of human decisions concern whether or not to murder, steal or bear false witness against one’s neighbour. The Sermon on the Mount takes us a good deal further than the Ten Commandments, it is true – forbearance and tolerance, love and a wish for reconciliation, all of these, when coupled with a healthy self-respect, are genuinely helpful guides in our efforts to move through the world together with as little mutual injury as possible. Unfortunately such teachings are undermined by the underlying moral simplicity of the New Testament. Good and evil are ultimately treated as simple, as we well know that they never are, and they lead to a clean distinction between salvation and damnation, eternal bliss and eternal torment. Righteousness can still be attained by following rules – or so says Jesus, with little in the way of elaboration, even if many sophisticated thinkers and innately decent people have sought to claim more subtlety for those teachings since. So Jesus comes to his great and heart-twisting dilemma – whether or not he can bring himself to undergo his part in the Father’s plan, that will torture and humiliate him, though ultimately ending in glory. And we sympathise, and are glad that this cup will not come to most of us and we will not have to dredge up such courage from our depths – but nevertheless his dilemma is not a moral one that he must make and remake every day as he sees the inevitable ill consequences of it, and balances them against the inevitable ill consequences of changing his course. It is a question of courage only, Hollywood stuff, stirring, but not ultimately bearing on most of our suffering, most of the time.
The title of your post recalls the musical line from Terry Pratchett: “The small gods chittered and whirred in the wilderness places, and the cold places, and the deep places.” We would do well to leave them there.
The incompatibility of what I learned, as a child already, about the deep time and deep space of the universe with the idea of all of that having been specifically created for our benefit was perhaps the first, but definitely now is the most important observation that makes it impossible for me to believe.
The best rationalization I have ever heard from a believer was that all the universe outside of our solar system was created by god to impress us with how awesomely powerful he is. Did not really convince, although at that age – I was a teenager then – I was not experienced enough to counter that he must have really gone out of his way to create it in a way that is indistinguishable from a non-created universe then. At the moment, I was simply overwhelmed by the inanity of said rationalization without being able to precisely formulate why.
god has been playing dice for a long time, it seems to me he forgot us minions after creating so much suffering down here. The title of this post is both fitting and appropriate. Gods become bigger and smaller in a direct relation to our vocabulary
The paragraph before the last one just says it all for me: “Human beings are, broadly speaking, morally better than the gods they imagine, and it is time for us to recognise that it is our moral vision that needs to be addressed and understood more fully, rather than trying to imagine the kind of god that can underwrite lives of goodness and compassion.”
I read this blog for these nuggets of wisdom. Thank you for this.
It is stunning how woefully short religion comes up when compared to legitimate forms of inquiry.
A long time ago I was tasked with drawing both the earth and sun to the same scale. This is not frequently done because page sizes make it impractical; you need essentially an entire wall. To think that at one time people thought the tiny blue dot was the center and the enormous yellow wall was beholden to it becomes absolutely laughable.
Try this handy Nasa approved format. Fun!
@M’thew
Eh, I must have mis-remembered it somewhat. It was more than 20 years ago. Still, the size difference is staggering to think about.
Thanks for the link.
I’ve thought this to be the case for a long time.
Back when the Earth was the only “big” thing, then gods were a reasonable explanation. Sun, moon, stars — also things made by gods, but only in service to the big thing.
As soon as it was determined that Earth was very very very very very small indeed compared even to the sun, not to mention the rest of the universe, the jig should have been up.
You can’t maintain intellectual integrity and posit an enormous universe and a god that built the entire thing (including the parts we will NEVER SEE) just for us. That’s evidence for a small mind, not a big god.
Skyhooks v. cranes as Dennett put it. Theists think consciousness is a product of a conscious being. If this were true, that being would in no manner resemble the gods of organized religion. Everything we have learned from biology, geology, astronomy, archaeology, anthropology, history, etc shows the recorded descriptions of gods and their actions to be fictions.
“But of course gods are creations of the human imagination, and they are, all of them without exception, limited by the minds of those who create them. ”
I love this. As a fantasy novelist, I couldn’t agree more. Gods are a very fun thing to create! Less fun to apply to real life.
With regards to the power of considering the smallness of “god” via the fact that the planet itself is just one very small, small bit of the entire universe, I’d go even further. Yahweh was not the god of a planet, he was the god of a mountain. Isn’t interesting that as the religion has spread, “god” too has become bigger and bigger to the minds of believers? Will “god” one day be the “god” of the Solar System? Milky way? Universe? Sad to say, if humanity stops shooting itself in the foot and we do actually get off this planet, I think we can safely say humanity will do this to itself. In the funny course of history we’ll see a vengeful mountain god in the fertile crescent become the “god” of Mars not because of some evidence that he was there, but because his believers have willfully expanded their notion of what “god” is to include new understandings of the universe.
I think some of the best evidence to this fact is by looking at “new” religions. Mormonism, Scientology, I am sure there are more but these are the main ones. In Abrahamic religions, the concepts of “us” and “the other” consisted of our tribe versus those other tribes. In Christianity the scale was elevated to clusters of nation states. For the first time in human history we have religions speaking directly to the concept of foreign planets as taking the role of “other”. Suddenly, “god” or “anti-god” comes from the other and has a supposed direct impact on the “us”. If god truly was a being that existed, why were there now religions detailing how other planets had a direct impact on our formations?
To sum up, great article. Sadly, it is more of preaching to the choir though.
Eric, I remain deeply appreciative of your blog. It is a revelation! The comments of your fellow bloggers are a delight! One states, ‘It is stunning how woefully short religion comes up when compared to legitimate forms of inquiry.’ I must reply, ‘It is stunning how woefully short atheism comes up when compared to legitimate forms of inquiry.’ I find the appraisal of religion leaves a lot to be desired. The caricature knows no bounds. There are many aspects of religion and the churches I do not defend but, come on, theology and biblical scholarship can be a lot more nuanced and penetrating than the above comments allow for. Do we judge 21st century chemistry by the alchemy of the ancients or astronomy by astrology? Of course, the religious worldview of the ancients is different from our own and of course theology, like every other discipline, needs to evolve and take account of new insight. I have no doubt that concepts of God are conditioned by human understanding but that is hardly a knockout blow! How else are human beings to understand God? I have no doubt that if life forms, particularly intelligent life forms, were found elsewhere in the universe, that would require the Abrahamic faiths to re-visit their understanding of their creation narratives but so what? What is surprising about that? One final point: the universe is vast and beautiful and, while I do not make an absolute claim, as far as we know, humans beings are unique in that they have consciousness. I know the universe is there; our star does not know that we are here. What is staggering in the above comments, with due respect, is the ignorance that is put forward as if it were knowledge. How do we move forward?
Scott, I was just responding to another of your comments when this one came in (#13). Very nice irony to start with. However, in all fairness, while I agree with you that biblical scholarship can be very nuanced, just as all literary or textual criticism can be, and I can even agree that some theology is very penetrating in its understanding of being human, I do not think this takes the sting out of religion’s tail. This is one thing that Richard Holloway so nicely points out in some of his “post-Christian” books. The problem is that, for all its nuance and profundity, there is no reason to think that theology genuinely has a subject matter. geology is an earth science, Vulcanology studies volcanoes, but what does theology study? You say:
Well, I guess, in answer to that I would have to ask whether there is a god to understand? Of course, this is assumed in theology, but the diversity of answers to the question about god or gods is simply too great to allow us to say, without raising unanswerable questions, that anything is really being spoken of. I’m sorry, but that is the conclusion that I am led to. I know that, so long as you stay within a familiar theological world, it all seems to make perfect sense, and you can think and argue and produce justifications, in perfectly rational ways. The problem is that Jewish and Muslim, Sikh and Parsi (or Parsee, viz., Zoroastrian), Hinduism, as well as the ancient Greek and Roman polytheisms, and the religions of the Druids and the Vikings: all of them had their “theologies” and spoke about their gods, and worshipped, and swore by them, pilgrimaged to places a peculiar holiness, and acted from a sense of moral obligation based on their gods’ commands, just like Christians, and those worlds were self-consistent too.
The problem is that, to use the philosopher Philip Kitcher’s language, there is a perfect symmetry here: what you believe depends upon what you were taught, where you were born, what the people around you believed. But they’re all different. So religion is dependent on imagination in a way that geology is not. Certainly, it takes imagination to come up with the idea of tectonic plates, but once you have come up with it, you can make predictions to see if your imagination is running true to the way things are. But Christians differ from Jews who differ from Muslims who differ from Hindus who differ from … Well, you get the point, and the point is: Is there anything more than imagination here? That was Carl Sagan’s point, and he answered in the negative. The fact that we are conscious and that in us, if you like, the “universe” has become conscious, is a remarkable and even puzzling fact, no doubt. But it doesn’t serve to single us out for special or universal significance. Indeed, it seems to me, as Sagan says, that, if there is a god who produced us by the means used to bring us into being, then that god is unquestionably cruel, and that seems to me just as nuanced and penetrating an observation as many theological ones, and it seems to me that we can say, with a certain amount of reason, that it is true.
Read some of the comments above again, and see if they are quite as simplistic as you take them to be, and whether they deserve to be dismissed with quite the degree of sarcasm that you use. Some of them, if you read carefully, are quite perceptive and thoughtful. I’m not going to pick them out for you, but they deserve a fairer hearing than you give them. Well, I will pick out one. Take the following from Kay Jay, for example:
And it’s true, isn’t it? Gods are fun to create. Even people like Philip Pullman has a ball with the idea of spirit companions, C.S. Lewis creates a whole fantasy world rather richly populated with “gods”. That’s a fairly nuanced observation, and quite penetrating too, if you give it a moment to sink in. And there are some others that deserve a bit more than a shrug of the shoulders.
One of my problems is that I grew up amongst Hindus and Muslims, in a missionary family, and I saw how people of other religions were caricatured. I once saw my father, quite unintentionally, crush a very kind Hindu gentleman who only wanted to honour my father and his religion, by refusing, because it would have been idolatry, to place a garland of flowers around a nicely framed picture of Jesus. The poor man, who was a professor at a local university, had invited the family to dinner, and I can still remember how crestfallen he was by my father’s uncomprehending refusal to “do puja” before a picture of Jesus (as my father would have regarded it). The assumption at the heart of that refusal said more than words could ever say about what my father thought of this truly gentle and kind man’s religion. Though much of my childhood is simply a blur, that is indelibly inscribed on my memory.
I guess that I am suggesting that you are doing something very similar. You are taking remarks by people, many of whom have been hurt by religion, and making slight of them, repudiating their insight because, you think, your Christian perception is sharper and more finely honed. But is it? One of the theologians that I admire the most is Don Cupitt, and yet most Christians, I think, would regard him as not Christian at all. Theo Hobson, in today’s Guardian, basically dismisses Roger Scruton’s more nostalgic, conservative Christianity. Roman Catholics, quite deliberately created an Anglican ordinariate to attract disaffected Anglo-Catholics at a time when it was well known that there were stresses and strains within the Church of England as well as within the worldwide Anglican Communion, an opportunistic grab for more bums in catholic seats. And your own Church of Scotland went through all the trials and travails of the dissenting Free Church of Scotland, as well as a number of other dissenting bodies, resulting from successive attempts to unite Presbyterians in Scotland under one banner. The same thing happened in Canada with the United Church of Canada in 1925, uniting Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, so now there are four churches instead of three, though of course, as in Scotland, the largest is the uniting church. My point, if it is not clear by this time, is that what is truth in religion (as I suggest in my next post) is very hard to determine, because it simply is not clear that there is any secure basis upon which it can be said that any claim to religious truth can be grounded. So, forgive us if we are not overwhelmed by the claims of the religions, and if, like you, we are sometimes tempted to make slight of the beliefs that Christians defend, just as you did with the beliefs of those who commented above.
My own disaffection with religion and with belief in gods, as reading my blog will make clear, is precisely because religion was so bad for my wife Elizabeth, who died before she need have died if assisted dying had been legal here in Canada, and whose life would have been lived with less anxiety had she been assured that, when things became unbearable, she could ask for and receive help to die. I was, however, forbidden to be a very active supporter of assisted dying while she lived because, as she said, if I had taken a very strong pro-assisted dying stand, then, when she had taken her own life, as she intended to do, and did in fact attempt to do, I might have been subject to suspicion and to the sanction of Canadian laws governing assisted suicide, which are the same as those in England. But as the days wound down to my retirement, I found less and less that was good that I could say about Christian belief and its follow on effects, and now that I can say what I want, I jump to the defence of Elizabeth and oppose the forces that made her life not only more difficult, but shorter than it need have been. I am amongst those who have been wounded by religion, and so I oppose it. If I am blunt sometimes to the point of pugnacity, I have my reasons, and those reasons have to do with the continued opposition of all the churches in Canada, except the Unitarian Church, to assisted dying, and to the well-organised and heavily funded campaigns that they continue to run to make sure that assisted dying is not legalised here. So, you must not expect me to treat religion with velvet gloves. It does not, in my opinion, deserve it, and but for a few sane voices, religion is a blight on humanity, and needs the most strenuous opposition. That does not mean that like-minded people both religious and non-religious cannot work together, but, so long as the church remains in the dark ages, and imposes its benighted views on those who do not share them, religion does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, however quixotic such opposition might seem.
Scott can you give us an example of a question that 21st century theology has answered? A new insight that it has had? And tell us how it came about?
ssmckenna,
If there were an underlying reality behind religion, which humans could apprehend, then the different religions would grow closer together over time, and eventually unite as one. But if “religious truth” springs from the human imagination, rooted in the experiences and biases of different cultures from different regions and times, then we should expect religious expression to evolve over time, and to become increasingly diverse. Which, obviously, it does.