In the wake of the preceding blogs, which have emphasised the importance of fact for faith, I will write of some important contemporary facts and how I deal with them in faith.

The pandemic

A virus which is of the Corona virus group, named Covid 19 has infected people in every part of the world, causing serious harm to its victims’ ability to breathe, leading to death in a significant proportion of cases. Treatment has been similar to that given for flu, with a number of drug interventions in the more serious cases. Vaccines are mow available to prevent or weaken infection, and may yet reduce its rate to permit society to resume normal life. Churches along with others, have been active in trying to ameliorate some of the consequences of the pandemic: extreme poverty, including inability to pay for food, isolation, bereavement, depression, fear. During periods of lockdown, Christian people, along with others have tried to keep in touch with family, neighbours and fellow church members, to provide mutual support. In addition to all other forms of support, Christian people have prayed, individually and together. Does prayer make any difference or is it merely a pious custom?

Perhaps I can start an answer by noting what prayer is not:

1. It is not bringing God news. Even if we imagine that God has universal responsibilities – there may be terrible famine on a planet of Alpha Centauri- we do not think that like a busy emperor he may need reminding about events in a small corner of the empire. “Your heavenly father knows what you need before you ask” Jesus said.

2. It is not an attempt to change God’s mind. We assume God’s love and desire to help people in trouble. When it seems, as it does in the pandemic that help has not been given, we should not jump to conclusions. God has already inspired the setting up and continued life of the NHS. Doubtless God’s blessing will have been upon all employed in the healing professions. Many of them have spoken of knowing this blessing in the course of exhausting and dangerous work. The scientists who have produced vaccines in record time may be seen as carrying out God’s work. What more help were we asking God to give?

3. It is not, at least in my case, a request for supernatural intervention. Some believers think that of course it is. My experience has been that God has not offered supernatural intervention in so many deserving cases, that if he were to offer it at all, I should turn from him in disgust, in the name of Marise who died of cancer a month after the birth of her first baby, and of David Haining, charity worker executed by ISIS, and many others. It is reasonable to ask, if I don’t expect supernatural intervention, what the hell I’m praying for, and I will try to answer that question in this blog.

4. In view of all the above, it is not a campaign. Sometimes churches set up prayer chains and other forms of mass petition as if God is the more likely to respond the greater the numbers are. Often this involves many public displays of fervent petition. It seems likely that this goes against Jesus’ criticism, ” They think they will be heard for their much speaking” and his instruction to pray “secretly to our father who hears in secret.”

So then, what is it?

1. It is in “The Spirit.” Paul says we don’t know how to pray but that the Spirit pleads for us in groans that words cannot express.” The Spirit according to Paul is shared life, the conviction that we are not closed in our egos but open to the lives of our fellow believers, out fellow human beings, our fellow creatures, and to God. We do not come to God without them, and in that shared life we are all children of God, swept up in that movement of God’s goodness in which we shall all be set free from “our slavery to decay.”

2. It is however also freedom of speech. Paul is especially impressed with the unexpected permission to speak frankly to God. He uses the word “paresia”, by which the Greeks meant a kind of democratic boldness. There may be particular issues that have to be raised with God, and we should not hold back. Our needs as people affected by pandemic are like this.

3. In the end it is not what we say, for our grasp of what is good is limited, it is our openness to God and our brothers and sisters. If we imagine this shared life as a place and time where God is present along with people from all the charities in the world, we may have some idea of its effect upon us. This is the “the secret place” of Jesus, where we meet his father.

4. It is not that we cannot speak; our words are precious to God; but that we must also listen intently. Prayer should not be separate from Bible reading, and the use of the meditations of others, through which our minds may be made ready to hear God’s words to us. God always listens to our concerns but she asks us to listen to hers.

5. The Jewish adage, that our individual prayer should always also be the prayer of Israel, reminds us of public prayer, especially in the worship of the church. There are many styles of this. I favour an honest formal style with space for contributions from the congregation, and with silences which permit inward prayer and meditation. However it is done, this prayer should be openly shared and inclusive.

6. Our private prayer however, should never be revealed to others. It is like intimacy between lovers. The German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it the secret discipline which fuels our discipleship, and guards the holy place of faith.

7. The Lord’s Prayer in both its forms should be used, as Jesus suggested, both as a prayer and as a model for prayer. It is the prayer of God’s son given to God’s children and is infinitely precious and down-to- earth.

8. In prayer believers are expressing their sorrow at the suffering of the world, their hope that God’s goodness will be done in the world, through the natural world and through human beings, and they will not be “brought into hard testing but delivered from evil.”

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Whitehead sums up the creative activity of God in two ways:

1. In her eternal wisdom God provides the initial aim for every existing entity.

2. In her engaged love she includes the actual relationships of every entity, transforming them, by persuasion, for new life. This engagement causes God pain, but she is faithful. She accompanies her creation, and suffers with it. She is the companion who understands.

There are elements in Whitehead’s account of God, which relate easily to Christian belief, and others which don’t, for example, his statement that it’s just as true to say that God is made by the world, as that the world is made by God. Even this heresy, however, is driven by his rejection of images of domination and his insistence on images of persuasion and love. God is affected by the world because love is affected by its relationships.

There are endless subtleties in theologies based on Whitehead’s work. JS regards himself as convinced by a view of the world as process and relationship, and of God as a creative partner to it, as envisaged in the book of The Acts, “in God we live and move and have our being.”

From this vantage point he sees the process of evolution as provided with initial aims by God’s wisdom, and persuaded out of unfruitful dead ends by God’ subsequent engagement with it. This allows JS himself to engage with evolution as one of its products, trusting that he is also a product of God’s wisdom and love, along with viruses. But just as he cannot blame God for all his imperfections, he cannot attribute all the activity of viruses to her. He can imagine that the initial aim of God with viruses is for them to explore the wisdom of symbiosis as a form of life, while admitting that their relationship with human beings has so far not been very positive. What sort of adjustments in human beings might be necessary to improve the relationship? It may be that we are not adapted to viruses at all, in which case we should design our environment to limit their access to us. Or maybe viruses can adapt to cause us no more problems than say, than ordinary flu’. Or perhaps our immune systems, encouraged by vaccines, have to become more efficient in attacking them. It’s hard for JS to imagine a fruitful relationship between humans and viruses, but then he reflects that there must have been a time when the same might have been said about the many bacteria that now live in his gut and are essential to his welfare. Beyond all this, he knows that we do not understand all the relationships within our ecosystem, and must beware of destroying what may be essential to its functioning.

He believes that God remains in relationship with all parts of the universe. “Not a sparrow falls to the earth without your heavenly father” God shares the joy and the pain of all creatures, and will remain faithful until they all relate harmoniously.

He does not think that Whitehead’s thinking is the only way of bringing the facts of evolution and faith together; but he does think that simply banishing or distorting fact in favour of faith is the work of the devil, no matter how pious the people who do it. A certain kind of fundamentalism encourages the believer to dismiss facts in favour of what the Bible is said to say or what the pastor insists is true doctrine. The habit of ignoring facts in favour of what you believe, once learned, will turn a decent person into a raving denier of electoral defeat, who may also think that the corona virus vaccine will change their sexuality. The God who is opposed to facts is the God of the Inquisition, of the Mother and Baby Homes of Eire, of Franco, of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, the KKK, ISIS and thousands of other killers. If beliefs are fact-proof, they will be dangerous.

This does not mean that faith cannot challenge alleged facts. When the idol – worshippers challenged the prophet known as Isaiah 2, he challenged the fact of their Gods, detailing how they are made by human hands and cannot stand with the God who makes the heavens and the earth: out of his faith which incorporated facts, he challenged a faith that ignores them. Jesus challenged a fearful belief in the deadliness of leprosy by touching a man who suffered from it. He knew the facts were friendly because God is in the facts.

Alfred North Whitehead, unlike most 20th century philosophers, wrote extensively about God, and incorporated him/her/it into his view of the world. He especially valued the late works of Plato which imagine the creator of the universe as persuasive rather than determinative. He admits that Plato never developed this crucial insight in logical detail, but he credits him with a fundamental understanding which strips the creator of notions of power derived from human tyrannies: God is not Trump determining his own reality, but rather a decent democrat who leads, but remains in partnership with her constituency.

Whitehead saw Jesus as the practical exemplar of Plato’s insight: he comes to persuade and convince, even to the extent of accepting suffering and death in order to do so. In that sense he is the incarnation of the persuasive God. He goes further and argues that a truly persuasive God must be open to persuasion, and therefore change, because she cannot determine the response of the universe and must therefore adapt to it. If this seems utterly heretical to some believers, JS finds it curiously similar to the story told of God in the witty and imaginative book of Genesis. The Hebrew “yehee”, meaning “Let (there) be” can be seen as persuasive rather than as an absolute command. God is depicted as having to adjust his intentions because human beings are not persuaded that his command is good for them. And even when he shares with Abraham his intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, he is subjected to an argument which forces him to hold his hand if he finds ten decent citizens. If Bible readers try interpreting the scripture in the light of Whitehead’s view of God, they may ask how they were ever persuaded to think it witnessed to an immutable, omniscient, omnipotent tyrant.

Whitehead realised that divine persuasion could not be limited to human beings, or animals or even viruses, for if the ultimate constituents of living things are totally determined then living things will also be. He therefore boldly insists that the events which are smallest elements of the universe are also persuaded by God rather than determined by imposed laws. The laws of physics are descriptions of what usually happens rather than prescribed behaviours. The persuasion of God is addressed to molecules and men. JS has benefitted from Whitehead’s radical description of what scientists have often treated as inert matter, which invites him to accept that all elements of the universe no matter how small are capable of responding to God and each other. He begins to see how much theology, philosophy and science has been distorted by an authoritarianism derived from our political institutions. Why are we so keen on commands, obedience, imposed laws, submission, not to mention the forms of flattery called prayer books? When the prophet Ezekiel abases himself before the appearance of God, he is told, “Son of Man, stand on your feet and I will speak with you.” (Ezekiel 2:1). JS gives God a round of applause.

Whitehead’s originality is his seeing the universe as composed not of clumps of matter and bits of mind, but of events which relate to other events in ways which are more like the relationships of persons than the collision of snooker balls.

– JS reflects on his morning walk as being very eventful: The sun shone brightly but the temperature was sub-zero, as he tackled the path alongside the potato fields. It was mainly ice with just a narrow strip of grass at the edge to provide grip for the walker. The constantly changing relationship between his feet and the ice made for sudden slips and frequent grotesqueries of balance. His attention was distracted from his own safety by the sight of three roe deer browsing some bushes on the other side of the field. As he watched one of them caught his scent, looked up, located him, and jumped over the bushes, followed by the others, into another field, where they were no longer visible. Another slip on the ice recalled him to the path, where he was immediately aware of a robin, flying upwards almost at his feet, disappearing into a hedge then performing the same routine again, clearly hoping for a relationship in this frozen environment that might bring it food. All these events of relationship were only the ones he noticed; the constantly changing relationship between his eyes and his surroundings happened so quietly he was able to ignore it. Similarly with the functioning of his lungs and heart. Similarly the encounter of the ice and the surrounding milder air which produced the deadly skin of water on top of the ice. –

Reality consists of events whose relations with each other create and recreate the world in the present.

But why bring God into all this? Because in a world of inter-relationships we can see God as the supremely – related one who persuades events into the harmonies which we call law, beauty, justice, and peace. Some people, conscious of this persuasive harmony, attribute it to “One who is not the universe” because they know it does not arise wholly from the elements of the universe, or from themselves. That is a leap of faith, but at least for Whitehead, not an irrational leap, since such a God supplies a beginning and an end, a stimulus and final adjustment to all the events of the process of evolution.

It’s a neat trick of evolutionary process, but difficult to imagine as the act of an omnipotent and beneficent deity.

Then the volcanic activity and the asteroid impact that ended the lives of most dinosaurs does seem a little like carelessness or even deliberate malice on the part of the omniscient and omnipotent One. John tries offering the excuse that the death of dinosaurs led to the flourishing of mammals, and hence to human beings, but then he realises the omniscient God could surely have bypassed dinosaurs altogether as they contributed nothing to the human genome.

No, the fact is that it makes no sense to attribute the process of evolution to an omniscient, omnipotent and beneficent God. So how can he believe that evolution is evidence for the existence of God?

Because he doesn’t believe in an omnipotent and omniscient God. He believes God is wise and loving, but rejects any words beginning with omni.

But is such a being worthy of being called God and worshipped as such? If he/she/it is not in complete charge, surely they are merely a demi-God, a pathetic excuse for a deity, and certainly a big disappointment compared with Jehovah in the Old Testament bringing floods and smiting the Egyptians? JS is a little impatient with this Old Testament stuff as anyone ought to be able to see the Bible as the story of a God who blunders in creating disobedient humans and tries to bring them to heel by mighty acts like the flood, then learns that the only way to sort his world is by patient persuasion of one family. Yes, there are still some miraculous outbursts but basically he sticks to persuasion. And if we add the New Testament, it’s all persuasion. So, in fact, there’s not much omni- about the biblical God. The omni- bits are because the bible authors inherited images of God as similar to the despotic monarchs of the ancient middle east, but the main story is all about persuasion. In JS’s view this truth is fundamental to any decent religion.

Is it possible to see God’s role in evolution as also persuasive rather than determinative, that God has to persuade the elements of the universe and its life forms to move towards perfection, rather than enforcing his own blueprint?

In fact, JS knows, this is the fully argued view of one of the greatest 20th century philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead.

Rev. John Smith, upbraided by his wife for having gone out for exercise and forgotten the fish van, asks in exasperation, “Do I have to remember everything?” This is not a good response, but had the Christian God been upbraided for the same offence he could not even have asked this question, as being omniscient and omnipotent, he is naturally expected to remember everything. This example points to one of the problems of epithets beginning with omni- they leave very little wriggle room for any failure or mess-up.

This problem is immediately evident to John Smith when he envisages making God responsible for the course of evolution. Development of new species by the mutations, one of which proves the most adaptable to new environments, may be a respectable mechanism for biological process, but it looks bad in the hands of an omniscient, omnipotent, and beneficent God. What about all the mutations that led nowhere except to seriously inadequate creatures? What about the changing environments like ice-ages which killed off many creatures? And what about the parasitic wasp mentioned in his scientific text-book?

” It lays its egg inside a caterpillar. The tiny larva lurks in the flesh of the caterpillar soaking up its nutrients and drinking its blood, all the while being careful to keep its host alive, until it is ready to eat its way out and pupate.”

East Haven Beach 6th January

Rev. John Smith is thinking about a conversation he had with Sarah Thomson, a young mother with learning difficulties caused by birth trauma. She had told John that she was managing well during the lockdown, and that she was not fearful. “I think people are afraid of the virus because they can’t see it. They might deal better with a pandemic of tigers.” He now was struck by the wisdom of this observation. Tigers and humans go back a long way. Perhaps when hominids first descended from trees and lived on the plains, they had to deal with tigers – and of course, other large predators. They didn’t waste time asking why God had made tigers; they watched tigers and learned how to avoid them, mostly. Later, they developed weapons to defend themselves, and later still weapons with which to hunt them, almost to extinction. As soon as we rid ourselves of the childish idea that God had to create a world perfectly adapted to humans, he thought, we can leave behind us a lot of miserable whining against the creator of ecosystems whose members must learn how to live with each other; indeed they are members because they are learning to live with each other.

So we’ve learned how to live with tigers – as long as we can kill them- but not with viruses. The modern habit of living in close proximity to one another in cities, obtaining our food in cramped supermarkets, travelling in crowded vehicles is really an offer to be sitting ducks for a virus that wants to move from host to host. If we had been as inept at dealing with tigers we would have been extinct long ago. Moreover if we took viruses seriously we’d have created a health service with stand-by resources which could be speedily called into service in an epidemic. And when we talk, as I have done, John thought, about the human suffering caused by the pandemic let’s remember that for most of us that has consisted of restraints on our work, our leisure and our pleasure, which bears no comparison with the holocaust we impose daily on millions of chickens.

Maybe, he thinks, the key to thinking about the pandemic is ridding ourselves of the notion that the world is made for us. The bible (Genesis 1) in fact says the opposite: we, human beings, are made for the world, to look after it and keep it in order. And another bible story ( Genesis 3) tells us that the ecosystem is made tough for us, to keep us from becoming too dominant. So, yes, before we blame God for making viruses, let’s recognise that God is not responsible for our ignorance of them and our ineptness in living with them. And while we sympathise with those who have suffered illness and bereavement, and show gratitude to those who have risked their lives to provide essential services, let’s not exaggerate the problems we have encountered. Above all, let’s remember that we are part of a web of life which has no overriding concern for our welfare. When in the Bible, God looks at creation and sees that it is very good, he does not mean that it is very good for human beings only. But also for viruses. And tigers.

He suddenly finds himself saying the words of a poem he learned at school:

William Blake was tempting his readers to see that in the ecosystem of the universe God plays both the roles of Tiger and Lamb, and that limiting God to the single role of lamb is a distortion of divine reality. In disarming the rebel angels, the “stars,” God needs to be tiger as well as lamb. A lambish tiger or tigerish lamb.This truth is celebrated by Bach in the St. John Passion, where the dying of Jesus on the cross is immediately followed by the triumphal chorus, “The Lion of Judah fought the fight and has prevailed!” He says Lion, but it could just as well be Tiger, or Virus. Of course, this is poetry, in which animals are symbols of the action of God in the universe, but they remind John Smith that the Creator is just as honoured by her creature the virus as by her creature the tiger or her creature the human being.

Indeed, he knows that if God is real, she is the God of the entire process of evolution, with its marvellous developments and its terrible extinctions, its rabbits and its dinosaurs. Either this imperfectly known process is the process of creation, this is what Genesis is talking about, or God can be safely relegated to the realm of folklore. When he judges that the new atheists are not talking about his God, he means they are talking about the God of folklore rather than the God of evolution.

“There are more viruses on earth than there are stars in the universe.” (Katherine Wu)

That astonishing fact was unknown to the classic evolutionary biologists, who informed the young John Smith that life was divided into three domains: archaea (single celled creatures; bacteria (single celled also) and eukaryotes ( having cells with a nucleus, often multicellular,as fungi, plants and animals including homo sapiens). This was incomplete, because it ignored the strange life of viruses, which are unable to exist independently and must therefore find hosts. There is a finicky argument that anything unable to live independently is not really life, but many biologists now teach that life exists in (at least) four domains, including viruses.

This discovery means that viruses cannot be understood as an obscure corner of life, whose existence might have been limited to animals other than humans. (Some pious souls have defended the creator God on the grounds that he intended viruses for “animals” only but sinful human gluttony and carelessness, such as found in Chinese meat markets, or worse, in human sex with animals, transferred them to humanity.) No, it’s clear that viruses are a major domain of life, and that some classic diseases such as smallpox were caused by them. The common cold and various influenzas are common evidence of their use of human beings as their hosts. The so- called Spanish flu of 1918, which may have killed a quarter of the world population, indicates how significant their activity has been.

As if we needed that indication when we are in the middle of a pandemic which we are only just beginning to control by vaccination, he thinks. We know only too well what suffering an unregulated expansion of viral life can cause. Clearly a successful virus cannot be too successful, for if it kills its host species, it kills itself. In fact, once a virus has penetrated a cell of its host, it compels it to produce viral cells according to its own DNA or RNA., which may be compatible or not with the host’s continued existence. The host’s immune system will recognise and attack these cells, and may succeed. Vaccination boosts the host’s capacity to do so. If the virus only kills “weaker” individuals in its host population, it may be interpreted by evolutionary biologists as a “culling” process which in fact strengthens the host population, as for example, early statistics seemed to show in the case of Covid -19.

From an evolutionary perspective viruses are credited with spreading genetic information contained in their DNA with other creatures, “horizontally” that is, not by generational inheritance. Modern biologists rightly refuse to ascribe any purpose to any life form, other than that of the continuation of its species. Viruses are good at their way of achieving this, the way of symbiosis. Clever human beings have already worked out ways in which certain viruses called phages can be used to assist the survival of patients suffering from bacterial infection or cancer. The phages can be positioned to “eat” bacteria or cancer cells, either by training or gene editing. It may be that with the growth of antibiotic -resistant bacteria, these techniques will become more and more important.

John realises that these are some of the most general facts about viruses. They are of fairly recent origin because virology is a young branch of biology, which offers exciting scope for research. All this tells him that while the existence of viruses is a problem for humanity, understanding them is not problematic in principle, but proceeds by a mixture of established scientific disciplines. They can kill us, but we hope that as we gain more knowledge of them, they may help to keep us alive.

All these facts come from human sciences and common sense.

But add the conviction that viruses like everything are made by a benign creator God, and immediately there is chaos:

1. The most obvious theory is that the God uses the viruses and epidemics in general as an instrument of punishment of disobedient mortals. This theory is displayed in the Hebrew bible and in ancient Greek story and is only rational if we see all victims as sinful and God as a vengeful killer. Some believers are happy to do so: “God’s an awesome exterminator and you must have done something to offend Him.” Others however would see such a God as made in the image of Adolf Hitler and refuse allegiance.

2. A less obvious theory, is an expansion of the one set out in Job. It is certainly better to question a God who permits the suffering caused by viruses, than to make him a tyrant as above, but let’s remember the limits of our knowledge and understanding. The known universe is vast, and there may be more than one. Who can know the role of any living species in the story of the whole? Who can know the role of human suffering in the ultimate perfection of the creation. We are right to question but we should not expect to understand the answers. “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?” God asks Job, who says, “Before I knew you only by hearsay, but now I have seen you with my own eyes. I retract what I said and repent in dust and ashes.” This is a profound theory but it rests on Job’s encounter with God. For those who lack such an encounter, like John Smith, the questions remain.

3. Another theory is to do with our sources of information about God. These are the sacred writings and writing is a human activity, so these writings are by human beings. Humans make mistakes, so it’s probable that there are mistakes in the sacred writings. Perhaps God is not as all-powerful a creator as the writings suggest. Maybe the materials of the universe are more recalcitrant, and God’s desire for perfection has not (yet) prevailed. This view recognises that “God” is a human invention, which may or may not point to a reality. When we are dealing with facts, like viruses, for which evidence is available, maybe we should ask about the evidence for God.

4. We can dismiss the issue as unscientific and therefore not worth consideration. The modern philosophers called logical positivists held this view, and the “new atheists” led by Richard Dawkins think something similar. In a world where beliefs without evidence have done much harm – think of Donald Trump and his cohorts- decent people should be rigorous about excluding nonsense. John Smith finds himself sympathetic to these angry atheists, because he is of a scientific cast of mind which demands evidence for the assertions people make. But he thinks that often the “God” imagined by them is a travesty of the one he worships; and that their view of what constitutes evidence is much too narrow. He would want them to look at the best expressions of faith in God, and to accept a greater range of human experience as evidence.

Still, for his own faith, he continues to find the activities of the corona virus very troublesome.

Rev. John Smith, a character invented by me, is sitting in his study on the second day of the year 2021, gazing out at the dimming sunset of a very beautiful day, during which there have been only a few clouds in the sky, enough to draw attention to its deep blue, which in the last half hour became pinks and oranges and greens and yellows, and now a fading red. This beauty reminds him of the beauty behind his head, namely, a print of Rembrandt’s St Matthew and the Angel, in which an old, wrinkled yet vigorous disciple listens to the whisper of an almost feminine angel, as he composes his story of Jesus. His consciousness of these different beauties does not answer the nagging question in his mind as to whether his faith in God is not merely a received myth, which complicates his response to the facts of life, and ought to be ditched.

For without God, understanding the world would be easier: he would see himself as an evolved animal on a planet in which life has evolved, which is in turn part of a cosmic evolution of stars and star systems, all of which have beginnings and ends, like the living creatures which inhabit this earth. In such a scheme only human beings have ideas about beauty, goodness, evil, justice, love; glorious ideas, which are however not shared by the planet or the stars or the universe, because these are not alive, but only a stage on which lives make a temporary appearance.

In such a world, it would make no sense to protest the recent death of his daughter, or the continuing pandemic which is pruning back human life rather severely. As thinking creatures we can try to protect our children from harm, and our population from disease, using the knowledge we have gained about ourselves and our environment, but we would have to accept that our efforts often fail. That might make us lapse into fatalistic acceptance or redouble our efforts to impose our will on nature, but we would not be overcome as he now is, by a suspicion that the beliefs which have informed his almost eighty years of life, are as his fellow Scots like to say, mince. That is, nonsense, untruths, stupidities, unrealities, because they are not compatible with the facts of life.

Now of course, John Smith is not altogether stupid. He knows that intelligent believers have faced these doubts throughout history, providing ingenious answers, although perhaps none of their answers are better than that provided by the book of Job, that mere human beings have no chance of understanding their creator. He knows that rationally a case can be made for Christian belief, but at present he feels that such thinkers simply do not give the same weight to ordinary facts as he does. The virus is a fact. Its interference with the human breathing system is fact. Its increasing tally of kills worldwide is fact. To maintain in the face of these facts, the fiction of a loving creator, seems perverse. And if we add the fiction of another world beyond this one where there is no suffering, we deserve the question, “Then what the hell’s the point of this one?”

He knows, yes, that even those issues can be resolved in favour of faith, but he doesn’t really want to do the heavy lifting any more. Rather than lifting the facts away, he would like to appreciate their solid presence, accepting rather than denying their reality. Given his habits of belief it will be hard for him to do this honestly, especially because at present he is still engaged as a minister of the gospel in preaching to a congregation. He accepts that in the past he has trimmed his thinking to suit these responsibilities. Can he in any honour continue to preach while genuinely living with facts? He enjoys preaching,which makes him want to continue, but he has at least to be willing to do without it.

He decides he needs some rules for his thinking.

1. He should not assume that his Christian beliefs are right.

2. He should not assume they are wrong.

3. He should deal with facts, being careful to establish what they are in particular instances.

4. He should cherish the facts because “the facts are friendly.” (Carl Rogers)

5. Although there is no guarantee that facts are meaningful, he should ask what they mean.

6. He should invite scrutiny from others.

Just a reminder to readers that the continuing story of Rufus can be found in the blog, CONVERSATIONS WITH RUFUS AND OTHER CREATURES

Although I have not made a new blog, I have continued the story of Rufus the pig, two blogs back at “Conversations with Rufus and other creatures…”