“Who do people say that I am?” (Mark 8.27)
Last Saturday I went back to my old College, to celebrate 40 years since we matriculated: a hundred bright eyed public school boys with a smattering of grammar school boys like me.
It was the end of the 60s when, as Philip Larkin reminded us, sex was invented, although we didn’t let that trouble us in Selwyn. We wore flares, long hair and our gabardine macs.
All my contemporaries at our dinner last Saturday seem to have aged an enormous amount and most of them are now at least ten years older than me. We reminisced.
There were twelve Engineers in Selwyn College in my year, part of the 300 engineers in the Cambridge Mechanical Sciences department.
We had to work with laboratory partners, and mine was one of the two women amongst the 300 – I think they thought she would be safe with me because I was a Baptist. In fact she was safe with me for a number of other reasons...
…but why only half a dozen women among the 1000 engineers.
Even today, women are very much in a minority in the engineering faculty.
Is it perhaps because men and women’s brains are hard-wired in different ways? A lot of research would suggest that.
You probably heard in the news last week the findings of Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University. He suggests that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force already there.
We have a propensity to believe in God, or at the very least in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.
Of course this argument can run both ways.
For those of us who are theists and have always thought that it is more natural to believe in God than not to – and that does count for the very great majority of the human race - this comes as no surprise.
It was the Preacher in Ecclesiastes written nearly 3,000 years ago who said:
“God has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (Eccles 3.11)
Or the famous quotation of Augustine in the 5th century:
“Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.” (Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Chapter 1)
And so through the centuries many have argued that there is a God shaped void in everyone.
On the other hand, the hard-wired argument can also play into the hands of evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
They assert that brave atheists need to lead the way in overcoming the hard-wiring of our brains so that we are not poisoned by religion.
Humans have will-power and rationality and we must smother our inner propensity for religious belief before it destroys all humankind.
The High Mass this morning led by a bunch of militant and deluded priests is part of the mumbo jumbo that supports the destructive forces of religion in the world.
So, hard-wiring or not, there is no scientific proof of God, but the world of science generally reinforces the faith of those who do already believe.
Unless of course you set up some opposition to scientific discovery, as Archbishop Ussher unwittingly did in the 17th century. He deduced that the first day of creation began at nightfall preceding Sunday October 23rd, 4004 BC – he wasn’t willing to be more specific than that!
But very few Christians take such a needlessly confrontational stance.
So science isn’t in itself going to lead us to God.
Many others have tried to argue for belief in God from reason.
The Quinque Viae, Five Ways, or Five Proofs are five arguments for the existence of God summarized by the 13th century theologian St.Thomas Aquinas in his book, Summa Theologica.
Descartes, Newton, Pascal and many others have worked to develop this branch of apologetics.
But although, like science, reason reinforces the belief of believers, it cannot present a compelling case for belief in God. The argument is ultimately as sterile as the scientific one.
CS Lewis, a reluctant convert to Christianity in the middle of last century, is more famous for The Lion the Witch and Wardrobe now than for all his Christian apologetics; especially his influential book, Mere Christianity.
He came nearer to the crux of Christian belief by focusing not on the general idea of God, but on the uniquely Christian idea of God in Christ.
He famously sets up the argument by saying that when you consider the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels, he must be either mad, bad, or who he said he was - the Son of God.
He argues that you cannot read a Gospel like today’s and decide that Jesus was just a good man, or even a prophet.
He must have been a great fabricator of lies, or so delusional that he should have been in psychiatric care.
Attractive as this line of reasoning is, it too is ultimately sterile. A postmodern response to CS Lewis’s ‘mad, bad or who he said he was’ is a dismissive shrug and a ‘so what’!
In today’s Gospel Peter answers Jesus’ question of “who do people say that I am?” with a simple affirmation of trust in the man he is following – you are the Christ, the Messiah, the Chosen One.
It is not scientific proof, or clever reasoning, but a transforming relationship with the man, Christ Jesus, that sustains his belief and elicits his trust.
And when Thomas makes a similar affirmation after the Resurrection – my Lord and my God – Jesus says: “because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Why do people like me and many of you, believe in God, and come to worship in a service like this? Is it because the scientific evidence has swayed us? No.
Or is it that rational argument has left us no other reasonable course of action? No.
It is because we believe that Jesus loves us, and when we commit ourselves to loving God in response, it brings us an inexplicable sense of well-being and rightness.
In Kant’s words, God ‘is not an ‘it’ to be discussed, but a ‘thou’ to be met’. When we approach him in faltering faith and trust, we find he had seen us from a long way off and had run to meet us.
He prepared a simple feast for us of bread and wine, and as we rehearse his dying love, Jesus asks a further question of us as he did of Peter – not ‘who do people say that I am?’ – but ‘who do you say that I am?’
