How do you feel when you’re proven wrong about something?
Imagine you’re sat around on Christmas afternoon, chatting about a family story from a few Christmases ago. You’re insistent that you remember things happening a certain way. But when the childhood photo album comes out, it turns out you’re totally incorrect.
Being proven wrong is embarrassing, isn’t it? (Even if it’s funny for others!) Even in a trivial situation like this, it feels more weighty than just getting a simple fact incorrect. When this happens in a more serious context, it’s even more humiliating: just think of the furore if a wrong statistic is quoted in Prime Minister’s Questions.
Being proven wrong matters to us because we care that our views are rooted in facts. Despite all the talk of ‘post-truth’, we still live in in a society that values science highly. We want our opinions to be data-driven, peer reviewed, based on objective truth.
This is a good desire! A good scientist allows their understanding to be shaped by the data. The scientific method involves making hypotheses, data collection, and evaluating the hypothesis against the data to draw conclusions. Sometimes your hypothesis will be supported by the data found. Other times, your assumption, however logical it might have seemed, is proved totally incorrect. If the data shows that you’re wrong, it’s good to change your hypothesis.
In this article, I want to explore how this mode of thinking is vital not just to science, but to our theology. As God reveals himself and his will, we (as good scientists) must allow our understanding to be shaped by the data.
God’s dataset
We can know God because he has revealed himself to us. As the writer to the Hebrews says, “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways…” (through, for example, stories of rescue, miracles, the revelation of God’s law, courageous prophets, and the declaration of His glory in nature) “…but in these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2).
The claim is this: that we have not intellectually reasoned our way to understand God, but rather that there is a data set of his revelation, by which we can know Him.
In that way, Christianity has something in common with empiricism – the theory that our knowledge is based on evidence which comes from the data around us, upon which modern science is based. All hypotheses must be tested with observations and experiences. This is unlike a rationalist approach to knowledge, in which all knowledge comes from deductive reason and logic.
Rational thinking is useful but it can’t be our only (or unchecked) source of knowledge. As Christian social reformer Vishal Mangalwadi puts it: “The scientific method assumes that human logic has validity, but it must be subservient to observed facts, because man is finite, fallen, and fallible”. [1]
The claim of the Bible is that we can genuinely know things from our sensory experience, from the data set of God’s work in time and space. Jesus tells people to “look at the birds of the air” to see that our heavenly Father feeds them (Matthew 6:26).
Similarly, John opens his first letter by writing about “That… which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched” (1 John 1:1).
John’s claim is that he has real sensory experience of meeting Jesus: the Word of life incarnate, Immanuel, God the Son come to dwell with us. For John, interacting with God has been as tangible as seeing an indicator change colour when it reaches a certain pH, or hearing the squeaky pop as hydrogen meets a flame, or dropping magnesium ribbon into hydrochloric acid and noticing that the beaker gets hot. He has seen, heard, and touched God.
The coming of Jesus into the world gives us an amazing dataset which we have to understand and interact with if we’re to understand who God is. As God reveals himself and Christ is born at Christmas as a helpless baby, we have new data which might prove our presuppositions about him totally wrong. If we’re to know him, we have to look at the sensory data. We have to look at Jesus.
Second-hand data?
Now, you might say, but the Christmas story has nothing to do with my sensory experience! It's true, that neither you or I can mix two chemicals together to experiment as to whether angels did or did not appear to shepherds in Israel 2000 years ago.
But that’s true of most of our knowledge, isn’t it? The vast majority of the science we accept to be true is based not on personal sensory experience but on the conclusions of others – which have been tested and peer-reviewed.
You’ve not seen every element on the periodic table. I’ve never seen a giant panda, the moons of Saturn, or Australia (perhaps you haven’t either). But it’s totally normal and reasonable to trust others, who (like John) have had genuine sensory experience of a thing, as to the validity of a claim about it. You heard it here first: I believe in giant pandas even though I’ve never seen one.
When the data seems unbelievable: God becoming human
Even if we’re happy to accept second-hand experience, perhaps we’re tempted to dismiss the data about Jesus because it’s just too unbelievable.
A non-Christian philosopher might come up with attributes of God which we would affirm: for example, that God is eternal, all-powerful, and perfect. If you believe in a transcendent god, those are logical attributes.
Deists and Muslims would believe that God, in his transcendence, fundamentally cannot become a human. Humans are finite, dependent, and not transcendent. So is Christmas a logical disaster? Has it turned out that Christmas is an error in the data? Should we just go with those philosophical presuppositions?
To do this is to get our theology the wrong way round. We must base our conclusions about God on the data he’s given us; we don’t try and change the data to fit our hypothesis.
When we look at the gospel accounts, we see Jesus as a real man who became tired and thirsty, who suffered, was tempted, and died. That’s in the dataset of knowing about Jesus. And it’s in Jesus Christ that we can know God. Jesus says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Can a transcendent God be wrapped in cloths and lie in a manger?
There is a paradox here. That’s okay: a paradox at Christmas is not a disaster to the Christian faith. [2] Besides, things we believe to be true don’t always fit together neatly: classical and quantum mechanics being just one example! God’s transcendence and the incarnation can be another. But if the dataset shows both to be true, then both are simultaneously believable. A good scientist and a humble Christian allows their understanding to be shaped by the data – not by our presuppositions.
When the data seems unbelievable: a virgin getting pregnant
On the other hand, an objection to the Christmas story might be that it's irrelevant whether God can become human, because there's no such thing as the supernatural anyway.
The philosophical position known as ‘naturalism’ denies any supernatural aspect to reality. If you take a naturalist view of the world, then a miracle like the virgin birth is an insurmountable obstacle.
Again, an empirical approach helps us here.
Like it or not, we have the recorded claim that a virgin woman conceived and gave birth to a child. Rather than immediately writing this off as impossible, we have to investigate the data. If you’re submitting a paper, you can’t just scratch off the cross from the graph which is way out of step with the rest of your dataset. You can investigate that result and decide that it’s a product of error, but you can’t just pretend that it never happened. So the question is less “Can a virgin get pregnant?” but rather, “Is the data correct that this one particularly blessed virgin got pregnant, and it was an act of God?”
If we’re open-minded enough to acknowledge the possibility of God, we have to acknowledge that God is free to do what he wants – including making a virgin pregnant. Laws of nature are helpful ways of predicting that (approximately) always some things cause other things to happen. But it’s okay if miracles mean that God breaks those “laws”. He’s the cosmic lawgiver. [3] It’s up to him if he breaks the norm. The question is not can he? but did he? The only way to answer that question is to look at the historical evidence.
Massaging the data
So, where have we got to? Perhaps you’re convinced that it’s important to look at the data before we draw any conclusions - but there’s one more pitfall to beware of as we look at the claims of Christmas.
In the lab, and in the world at large, it can be tempting to only look at the subset of data which already fits our hypothesis. Keep the good results; the times in which your experiment produced very unexpected data can be brushed under the table – metaphorically or literally! Similarly, it can be tempting in our faith to only receive the parts of the Christmas message which we find nice, inoffensive, and uncontroversial – particularly to our modern ears.
But if we’re going to let our understanding be shaped by data, we must let our understanding be shaped by all of the data.
It's lovely that angels prophesy of Jesus that his birth brings “on earth, peace to those on whom his favour rests” (Luke 2:14). It’s wonderful that Jesus himself declares that he has not come to judge the world, but to save the world (John 12:47). These things are beautiful and brilliant!
But these things are not the entirety of the dataset. Simeon prophesied of Jesus: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own [Mary’s] soul too.” (Luke 2:34-35)
Jesus taught difficult to hear things about money and morality. He reaffirmed the Old Testament: the teachings of Moses, the teachings on marriage. But if we’re to be serious theologians, scientists, empiricists, and Christians, we must look at the whole dataset and let that shape our conclusion. We must not only look at our preferred subset of Jesus’ teaching, or of the Bible’s teaching, at the expense of the whole.
Confidence and humility
Now in all this talk about basing our beliefs on the data, it’s worth highlighting that we don’t have absolutely every piece of data about God, the universe, and everything. Sometimes in our theology, as in science, we might change our minds about something as we come across more data. Yet, in our convictions we can be confident, humble, and correctable, willing to submit to God’s word when we might be wrong.
That’s the spirit we see embodied in so many characters in the nativity story. Mary’s prior hypothesis would never have been that she’d be the mother of her Lord – but when the angel Gabriel announces that she’ll conceive a child, she humbles herself to accept this wonderful news. The shepherds couldn’t have predicted that they’d find the Saviour of the world in a stable manger – but upon seeing the baby Jesus nestled in the straw, they kneel and worship.
The miracle of Christmas might interrupt our intuition and prove wrong our presumptions about God. But the birth of Jesus into the world is wonderful. The Son of God, born of a virgin, gives us an outrageous, paradigm-shifting data point around which to reorient our understanding of reality.
Unlike that conversation with family on a Christmas afternoon where the photo album corrects you, there is no embarrassment at being proven wrong. What joy there is to be found in letting ourselves be corrected by this unique, world-changing set of data! What love there is that God would come to be with us.
In Jesus we see a God who is so much greater, so much more gracious, than we ever could have theorised. This Christmas, we can join Mary and the shepherds in the only logical response to the data about Jesus: humbly receiving him, knowing him, and trusting Him as the Saviour of the world.
[1] The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi
[2] 12 Things God Can't Do, Nick Tucker
[3] Miracles, C.S. Lewis
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