WARNING: THIS ONE’S A LONG ONE.

It occurred to me today that our world has been shaken.

The pandemic has shaken our world, as a whole, and each of the individual worlds that we all live in. I have come to understand this through a number of changes that have been wrought in my life. While some of them have been difficult to grapple with (I’m a teacher who has transitioned to e-learning, for better or for worse), others of those changes have been welcome and –I dare say– enjoyable.

I kind of like not having to do some of the things that I am no longer able to do.

In time when things are shaking, we look for what’s solid. In an earthquake, you are told to get to an area of your house that is less likely to fall (more solid). We build our houses on foundations (more solid), rather than just on the dirt that is prone to movement.

You get the idea.

So, the question is, what have you been looking to –what solid thing– as the world has been shaking.

Weeks ago, I guess it has been now, I first saw a video that took my breath away:

THE VIDEO

Now, the reason that the video took my breath away was probably different than the reason that this video might take someone else’s breath away. It is, on its surface, an inspiriational attempt at rallying the troops and sounding the battle cry and garnering hope. But, to me, the most stunning part of the video came in its very first sentence.

“At a time when things are most uncertain, we turn to the most certain thing there is: science.”

Now, I don’t usually use this blog as an evangelical tool because I believe that the best way to evangelize people is to live alongside them and to show them the difference that God makes in my life, and, since most of the people out in the world who read this blog are never going to live alongside me, there isn’t any point in trying to evangelize them through this tool.

However, please excuse me while I wax religious for a few paragraphs (or maybe more).

When I first saw that video from Pfizer (don’t get me started on big pharma), when I first heard those first seventeen words, I thought to myself, “This commercial is exactly right. We should all be turning to God right now.” And then, the eighteenth word dropped –science– and I laughed out loud. What I thought was going to be an ad, reminding the world that the only sure foundation is a faith in God, turned out to be something else entirely. Since that first time, I’ve seen the video many more times, and I am still taken aback by what the video is very subtly saying.

I know that, in my own personal world, while science is wonderful (a God-given gift, I would say), it is not the most certain thing there is.

God is.

I wrote my Master’s Degree thesis in 2012 on the effects of post-modern society on the educational environment; in doing so, I learned some about the subject of the philosophical changes that are associated with the post-modern world in which we live. Whether or not you’ve even heard the term “post-modern” before, you have been living in a post-modern world your whole lives. And, one of the most important tenets of post-modernism is the rejection of “grand narratives”; we should strive to establish our understanding of the world around us without relying on the stories that we’ve been told (this is a thinly-veiled attack at organized religions).

So, resulting from post-modernism, one of the philosophical developments that has been sweeping the globe, especially in industrialized nations, since the middle of the twentieth century, has been a move toward atheism. Remember, since we have to reject the grand narratives that we’ve been told, we must, instead, just look around to establish an understanding of reality and, rejecting the truths of organized religion and faith, try to make sense of it all. Our attempts at doing this, without an understanding of what we are seeing around us, might send us to the false conclusion that there isn’t a God.

But, one of the problems with atheism is that people require, on a subconscious level, an understanding of someone or something above them, to help them to be comfortable with what can otherwise be a very harsh and terrifying world. It used to be, for most people, we took our solace in God. These days, in what are we to take solace?

Now, atheists, in a defensive reaction, will tell you that this isn’t true; they don’t require –or even desire– that there be someone or something above them, in charge and in control and protecting them, but talk is cheap, and if you watch them, you will find them putting “faith” in other things.

“What other things?” you might ask.

These days, for many in the post-modern world, that “power above” has become government. In case you haven’t noticed, our society is uber-political, in ways that it has never been before; I would posit that this is a result of post-modern atheism and the importance of the government as our “power above”. To the degree that people used to get very passionate and excited and emotional about their faith in God, their decendants are left to get very passionate and excited and emotional about their government. When people come to believe that the government is the “power above”, they become extremely interested in how it works, in who has power, and in whether or not that government is efficent and effective.

Or, let’s say that you’re not comforted by the idea of government as your “power above”. Where else can people turn when seeking something to help them make sense of the cruel, cruel world?

Well, Pfizer would have you believe, the “power above” is science. Science makes a great replacement for God, if you’re into that kind of thing, because science is the tool that people will try to use to prove that there is no God. So, why not replace God with his assassin?

In fact, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed before, but the war between science and religion gets a lot of play these days. This “war” leads to things like 1) religious people being thought of as ignorant by atheists, 2) religious people rejecting science because they’ve been told that they are at war with science, 3) scientists with faith having to walk around on eggshells in their professional communities, etc..

Let’s not forget, however, that science and religion have, over the long haul of history, been best friends for most of that time. In fact, a) education and b) scientific study and c) human intellectual endeavors, until only relatively recently, have taken place in accordance with each other. In fact, the only schools of the distant past were monastic schools where people of religion were the teachers and the students and the scientific researchers.

Nevertheless, should science be our “power above”? Don’t get me wrong; I have always loved science and I believe in the ability of science to interpret the inner workings of the world, as built by God, but it still feels like a second-place god to me.

In fact, government and science, and any other idol you might erect for that matter, they are equally ill-suited to the task of being our “power above”, and all for the very same reason.

We made them. And we suck.

Well, let’s be generous. Humans may not suck (consistently), but we are inconsistent (see what I did there), and that inconsistency leads to the things that we make having flaws. Science is flawed inasmuch as scientists hypothesize things that other scientists then prove to be false and insasmuch as scientists still don’t have explanations for everything. Government, another human creation, is flawed because we can’t even come together long enough to agree what government should do.

So, let’s bring this around full circle.

That Pfizer commercial, the one that I linked above, the next time you see it, think of that opening sentences this way:

“At a time when things are most uncertain, we turn to the most certain thing there is…”

GOD