Can a practicing minister be an agnostic?
Evan Wycliff, the protagonist of Preacher Raises the Dead (latest and third in my mystery series), might not be a full-time agnostic, but there are days when he certainly has his doubts. In the first book in the series, Preacher Finds a Corpse, he’s just returned to his rural hometown, Appleton City in southern Missouri, because he’s given up on his studies. He earned a degree at Harvard Divinity, but along the way he learned way too much about the hypocritical and corrupt history of Christianity. Then, hoping to find better answers to the “big questions” in science, he undertook postgraduate work in astrophysics. He found those conclusions baffling as well.
As an unemployed college dropout, how can he make his way? He grew up on the farm, but these days it’s tough for farm owners to get by, let alone their farmhands. So he takes the occasional opportunity as guest preacher at the local Baptist church. And because he’s a skilled data-driller, he tracks down debtors who have skipped on their car loans (whom he tends to forgive more than he chastises).
In the second book, Preacher Fakes a Miracle, Evan helps a girl who is afflicted with epilepsy. Then the rumor around town alleges he’s a faith healer because, they assume, he must have cast out demons.
In the third book, Evan’s life gets a lot more complicated as he’s challenged with becoming a more responsible member of the community. The old pastor and his mentor Rev. Marcus Thurston decides to retire, and Evan reluctantly takes on the role of full-time minister, pastor of the church.
That’s when he finds out that not only preaching sermons, but also visiting the sick and the dying, along with officiating at weddings and funerals, is hard work. It’s a job – often a tedious one. And, some days, Evan just can’t find it in his heart to believe.
Fueling his doubts are the theories he’s studied of cosmologists who assert the increasingly accepted notion of a “godless universe.”
Physicist Sean Carroll of CalTech is one of the proponents of the godless-universe hypothesis. He advances his argument in his book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. The core of his argument is naturalism – meaning that the physical universe – encompassing everything humans can sense or measure – is all that there is. In an interview with Clara Moskowitz published in Scientific American, Carroll explains: “There’s actually a movement called religious naturalism. Religion involves a whole bunch of things — practices, casts of mind, morals, etc., so you can certainly imagine calling yourself religious, reading the Bible, going to church and just not believing in God. I suspect the number of people who do that is much larger than the number of people who admit to it.”
As I discussed in my post about Brian Greene‘s book Until the End of Time, a trending consensus among cosmologists is that the dual processes of entropy (disintegration) and evolution (integration), can explain the emergence of complexity without God as creator or cause. Physicist Brian Cox, in his recent comments on the movie Don’t Look Up, implied that the most significant role of humans may be to create meaning in a meaningless universe. The philosophy of existentialism, which arose in the mid-twentieth century, possibly in response to the horrors of WWII, holds that the universe is fundamentally empty and meaningless. But as psychologists know all too well, human beings are “meaning-making machines.” We’re prone to finding meaning and purpose even in random events. This skill is a useful survival tool, making it routine for us to take lessons from our experiences to avoid future harm. An alternative view is the prevalent New Age belief is that there are no accidents in the universe.
Existentialists might say that people who find comfort in religion aren’t wrong – they’ve found useful meaning, even if that meaning is not objectively provable. But the naturalists may assert that everything that exists is simply the sum total of 14 billion years of accidents.
