A Cosmological View of the Failing West Pt. 1

Cosmological View of the Failing West Pt. 1

In the last few posts I have been, as a scientist would, putting a hypothesis, and then testing how it measured up to observed reality. My hypothesis has been that some malevolent super-human being has been at work. In every way we have found that the sort of changes occurring in the past half century (or more) are exactly what such an intelligence would seek to introduce for the purpose of sowing mayhem, increasing human misery, and destroying the benefits introduced and refined by God-fearing men and women over a very long time.

Now it is time to step back and fit this into a cosmological framework. This is made harder by one more change in our current socially constructed “web of belief” - one which again would undoubtedly suit our hypothesised malevolent being! We have largely discarded belief in the super-natural. Our forebears had no problems with belief in spiritual beings, but we have invented the idea that our “scientific” society has outgrown such infantile ideas. (Yet ironically we are simultaneously destroying the intellectual rigour and honesty necessary for real science, and forgetting that much scientific method was developed by devout Christians who looked for cause-and-effect because of their belief in the nature of God and hence of His creation.) So I may be battling on two fronts: upholding a view that science depends on the existence of absolute truth, and that as well as the physical environment which we can test scientifically there are spiritual realities which we cannot.

So let me expand my cosmology to the traditional Christian one. (this is not the same as the popular one. The “folk religion version of Christianity” is often contaminated with a good deal of the pagan cosmology endemic in places before Christianity came to them)

In our cosmology we have of course God. As philosophers have said “the un-caused cause, the un-moved mover and un-created creator”. For Christians our concept of God is different to all other religions. As regards the being of God, for instance, Moslems envisage a simple being: we see God as Triune – we can neither adequately explain nor envisage this, we can at best say that God is one, but internally Father – Son – Holy Spirit in relationship. Hindus (and hence the derivative Buddhism) see God as subsumed in the physical world. We see God as quite separate from His creation, though the Son did take human nature, and being born of a woman lived on earth at a particular place and time (which we term His “incarnation”). So the Christian concept of God's being is much richer than the Moslem, and totally incompatible with Hindu & Buddhist.

We also believe in angels – beings that are “spiritual” by which we mean not of the substance of the physical universe – although they can manifest as people. We believe that some of these spiritual beings – led by one we call the devil or Satan – rebelled against God. They are, as many other religions agree, evil. But we alone of religions say, of much less power than God (as against the common Eastern “dualism of good and evil”). Indeed it is the central tenet of Christianity that God, through the Son in His unique human-divine nature gained total victory over the devil by Christ's death and resurrection. We get into murky waters when we try to make the dynamics of this victory understandable to the society of our day, but the result is simple enough: God can because of it be true to Himself and yet forgive sinners who turn to Him, and can at a time of His choice destroy the devil and the evil spirits aligned to him.

In the meantime the devil and his angels – like many a retreating army devastating the land they once held captive - seek to hurt and destroy all that is dear to God, which most of all is the human race. Christians hold that God has set a day when he will end this and destroy the devil and all, both human and angel, who have chosen evil. Before that time, both human and spiritual agents of the devil have freedom to cause harm – but only up to a certain point.

This gives Christians a unique cosmology, and one which adequately explains the observable facts of the world and particularly of human behaviour and society. More next post.