Solitude

A little while ago I published an article here about St Cuthbert, and how he drew his strength to be the amazing man of God that he was from his extended times alone with him in the North Sea. More recently I have been reading a book which mentions solitude as one of the key elements of the Christian life if we want to grow. Perhaps surprisingly, that was by a Pentecostal author rather than someone of a more Catholic persuasion. Anyway, Irene and I felt that it was right to get away somewhere peaceful and find God in the stillness. The first attempt is shown above. The salt marshes where the fens meet the wash are still pretty similar to what they must have been like in Cuthbert's day, even though the fenland field systems just the other side of the sea wall are shaped by 21st century agriculture. It was absolutely great for a while being surrounded by nothing but bird song, until we started to be buzzed repeatedly by RAF fighter jets practising bombing runs!

A few days later we had another attempt, but this time found a quiet country lane in the Linconshire Wolds with a view one way across the undulating fields, and in the other direction a glimpse of the North Sea coast near Saltfleet. This time we were disturbed only by two cars passing during the whole time that we were there. Much better!

Both of these occasions took me away from the busyness of life at home and all the pressures of outstanding tasks. Keeping on tackling the things that have to be done was not Cuthbert's approach, nor was it Jesus' way of going about things (Luke's Gospel, chapter 5, verses 15 & 16). They both took out large swathes of time to be alone with God as a priority; everything else flowed out of that. Neither did Paul dive straight into his major ministry after his dramatic conversion, but rather spent a long time in Arabia, the implication being on his own with God, maybe in the desert (Paul's letter to the Galatians, chapter 1, verse 17).

Anyway, we had had some pressing decisions to make and, despite their being pressing, it had taken us a long time to end up not sure about any of them. We had prayed alone and together, asked friends to pray for us, fasted on occasion, tried to see what God might be saying as we read the Bible, asked him for dreams, asked him why he wasn't answering, asked him if we weren't listening properly, been quiet before God to see what he might want to speak in the quietness (then he generally talked about something other than what was our priority question) and so on. We had done, I think, pretty much everything thing that you might have expected of someone with a key life decision to make that needed God's input. However, physically and intentionally going away from everything and everyone, to be alone and quiet with God, somehow seemed to break something in the Spirit and suddenly a lot of things seem to have fallen into place.

With spiritual matters you can't always sort out cause and effect in the same way as with physical ones. However, there still are cause and effect and they are still related, just in a more mysterious way. All I can say is that I've seriously learned that solitude is powerful member of the spiritual toolkit that God gives us. Perhaps we needed that in order to break open the situation, or perhaps God wanted to teach me this lesson before answering the key question on our minds; as I say, cause and effect are difficult to sort out. What I can do, though, is recommend trying being propely alone with God for extended periods as part of growing as a Christian. It wasn't just about getting the answer to the question, but also digging deeper into the character of my Heavenly Father.

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Yohanan's second chance

Yohanan Marcus was a young man, possibly of mixed Jewish and Roman parentage, living in Jerusalem early in the first century. In 33 AD he was probably in his mid to late teans and beginning to explore youthful independence, as one does. So one Thursday night, at the beginning of the Passover festival, he can be found in an olive grove, just over a mile from downtown Jerusalem. It seems that it was perhaps fairly warm, because it got round to midnight and he was there wearing just a long linen shirt.

Why he was there, we don't know. He might have had a secret liaison with a young lady. Maybe he was part of a gang lying in wait for an unsuspecting passerby, or even a lone bandit; this seems unlikely though, given what else we know about his family and his attire. Of course, there had been quite a stir in Jerusalem recently. There was this teacher, called Yeshua, who was persona non grata. The population of the city were cautious talking about him, so spoke in whispers. However, on Sunday, just four days ago, he'd entered the capital, riding on a young donkey and so fulfilling a prophecy from the Jewish scriptures. That had created a huge crowd, in defiance of the Jewish authorities, who hailed him as their Messiah and Son of David, the one annointed by God to put things right in Israel. However, things were different now: a group of soldiers and other officials had set off late that night to go to the grove and arrest Yeshua. It's possible that Yohanan Marcus had got wind of this and decided to tag along to see what would happen.

Anyway, from where he was hiding, he saw Yeshua being betrayed by one of his friends, the soliders bowing down to him for some reason, one of his other friends cut off one of the ears of a servant of the high priest and Yeshua heal it, and finally Yeshua himself being tied up and led away while all his friends ran off. A soldier noticed Yohanan and grabbed hold of his garment, but he managed to wriggle out of it and run back home naked.

This had been an interesting, exciting and perturbing experience for the young man. Yet he knew that there was probably going to be a trial, so he might well have joined the crowd later that morning who were watching what was happening. Eventually he would have heard them clammering for Yeshua to be crucified. After a long and confusing series of exchanges between them and the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilatus, he was led out of the city to be executed. There was a label nailed to the cross, stating that Yeshua was the King of the Jews. Yohanan may well have witnessed the crucifixion and seen the label, although it wouldn't have been clear to him at the time what it meant, because he wasn't one of his followers.

Then, of course, a couple of days later there was another stir in the city. Yeshua's supporters were claiming that he had come alive again, which seemed very unlikely given the beatings that he had been given, followed by crucifixion and a final test to check that he was dead by a spear being thrust into his side. On the other hand, the Jewish authorities were promulgating the official line that Yeshua's followers had stolen his body. This was the talk of the town and it was probably difficult for someone like Yohanan to know what to believe.

Almost two months later, there was yet another commotion when some of Yeshua's followers seemed to have suddenly learned a whole load of foreign languages and were preaching about him in what seemed to be every language under the sun. All very odd, but thousands of people joined them that day. Again, this was something not easily missed, whatever your opinion of it. It was perhaps sometime after this that Yohanan became a follower himself.

Eleven years later

Now the Jewish authorities started to clamp down on all this preaching, as they had on Yeshua himself. At one point in 44 AD, King Herod Agrippa imprisoned one of Yeshua's main followers, a man called Kephas. It got round to the night before Kephas was due to attend trial. Yeshua's mother, Miriam, was by this time a follower of Yeshua as well and had several friends round to her house, where they were praying together for Kephas. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. The servant girl, Rhoda, went to see who was there and came back saying Kephas was outside. Once he had come into the room, he explained that he had been chained between two guards in a locked prison, when an angel appeared and released him. Then Kephas left. Yohanan very likely witnessed these events at first hand.

At the time, Barnabas and Saul, two members of the church that had grown up in Antioch, quite a long way north, were visiting Jerusalem. They got to know Yohanan, and when they returned home he went with them and joined in with church life there. During a meeting in 47 AD, it was decided to send Barnabas and Saul out on a missionary journey. They had been impressed with Yohanan, so they took him with them. They sailed to Cyprus, where Yohanan experiened their preaching to the non-believers and their altercation with a powerful wizard. They then sailed to the south coast of modern day Turkey, where Yohanan decided to leave them to carry on by themselves, while he returned home to Jerusalem.

About two and a half years later, Saul (now calling himself Paul) suggested to Barnabas that they go on another ministry trip together. Barnabas wanted to take Yohanan again, but Paul didn't think that his reason for leaving them last time was good enough and so refused. Barnabas, however, could still see the potential in the young man and wanted to give him a second chance. In the end Barnabas, who was the senior parnter in the team, had his way, but only at the cost of losing Paul, who set up his own ministry team.

Sometimes we get it wrong, sometimes it's embarrassing, sometimes we even give up - but God is always faithful.

By now you may have worked out that this very Jewish story is that of the man known to us in English as John Mark, or Mark for short. Yeshua is the Aramaic form of Jesus, by which he would have been known in Israel, and Kephas is the Aramaic form of Peter, the chief of Jesus's disciples. Paul, of course, became one of the most famous and successful of the post-resurrection missionary apostles. Being thrown off his team was not a great career move. In fact, we don't hear anything about what Barnabas' team achieved on their second journey. Later, though, Mark reappears as a companion to Peter after he had moved to Rome. Peter was not a linguist or accomplished writer, so Mark translated Peter's recollections of Jesus from the Aramaic and gave them a structure, which became his Gospel.

Mark has gone from being Paul's quite public ministry-team reject, to Peter's scribe and interpreter. Even more telling, though, is that when Paul is in prison for the final time he asks Timothy to bring Mark to him, presumably prising him away from Peter to do so. Paul by now has decided that Mark is not just very useful, but also a great companion. He probably finished writing up his Gospel just after Paul and Peter had both been executed in 67 or 68 AD. It seems that he might have eventually moved to Alexandria, where he was martyred for his faith in Jesus.

Is this all just a religious romance, or is it the the real life story of John Mark, one of the most famous authors in history? The account above is what can be pieced together from Mark's own book, Luke's mentioning of him in Acts, some references in Paul's letters and a comment at the turn of the second century by Papias. Papias was a disciple of John and companion of Polycarp, who became Bishop of Hierapolis. His statement about Mark's authorship of Peter's memoires was later independently confirmed by other early Church leaders. The story in the Garden of Gethsemane is told only by Mark, so he clearly knew about it. Mark's Gospel is by far the shortest, because he is very selective about what he includes, so why did he write about the peripheral incident of the young man unless he had a personal interest in it, a bit like a cameo appearance by Alfred Hitchcock in his own films? Some scholars think that the evidence suggests that the young man was Mark; I tend to agree; it is the simplest and most obvious interpretation.

More important, though, is the fact that Mark has left us one of the four accounts of Jesus' life, death and resurrection. It is based on the teachings of Peter, who was with Jesus for the duration of his ministry, and probably put into a final structure using some of Mark's own first-hand knowledge of events in Jerusalem. Despite no attempt at chronological accuracy, he writes a compelling story, with a sense of immediacy. It has become the introductory Gospel for many a new Christian and rightly so, not just because it's shorter than the others, but also because it's a great read. It's so good that Mark didn't give up on Christian ministry when Paul didn't want to have anything to do with him, it's so important that he had Barnabas to encourage him to continue and help him on his way, and it's so great that God allows us another chance when we mess up.

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Do scientists do science?

This might seem a strange question: surely that's what scientists are paid to do. However, it has become a rather more controversial issue in recent years. Of course, in America, in particular, there is a big divide between creationists and evolutionists, with the former convinced that evolutionary scientists are either interpreting data out of, at best, unconscious bias, or even deliberately driving the scientific community down a route which supports atheism. On the other hand, evolutionary scientists will often say that they are the only ones who are truly following scientific method to its logical conclusions and that creationists manipulate data or use pseudoscience for religious ends. This is a lesser debate in the UK, perhaps not always for good reason, but still quite vociferous. However, even some mainstream scientists are now querying if the more bizarre ideas that many serious scientists are making their life's work can really be defined as true science.

The question of worldview

From my experience of knowing a lot of scientists, I am convinced that most do their very best to follow scientific method and seek after truth. The controversy centres on what truth they are seeking, and that in turn depends on their paradigm. Paradigms are worldviews. Science is generally conducted within the currently accepted worldview, which puts limitations on the interpretation of scientific observations. It was Thomas Kuhn who succinctly explained how paradigms change.

If we go back a few hundred years, the accepted paradigm was that the Earth was at the centre of the universe, with all the stars and planets circling it, the natural place for things to rest was on the floor (which you will know is true if you have young children) and, for most people, creation involved a god. There was also an assumption that the Earth wasn't very old, maybe about 10,000 years. Clearly not everyone agrees all the time though.

According to Kuhn, science works within the current paradigm, making adjustments here and there, as necessary, to make everything fit, until it becomes impossible to contain new observations within the old wordview, at which point there is a paradigm shift. Observations by Copernicus, Galileo and others led to growing tension with the paradigm described above. It was becoming clear that the Earth was not at the centre of the universe, but paradigms don't shift easily, so complicated schemes had been put in place to make the new observations fit into the old worldview. In the end, though, something had to give. To cut a long story short, Newton finally produced a theory of gravity, together with laws of motion, which explained the solar system as it is, with the sun at the centre, as well as why and how things fall to the ground. James Clerk Maxwell later put together a wave theory of electromagnetism which, among other things, explained the motion of light. These theories, together with other new proposals, placed physics in a new paradigm.

Theories cannot be proven though; experiments can be undertaken to verify them, but they can't ever be confirmed as definitely true, because there is always the possibility that an observation will be made which doesn't fit. The theory has then been disproven. The idea arose that, to be accepted as theory, a new proposal had to be falsifiable, i.e. it needed to make predictions which, if they were found to be false, would disprove it. The theories of Newton, Maxwell and others fitted the bill. Verification after verification showed that these were robust theories, but eventually holes started to appear. For example, the orientation of the orbit of Mercury about the Sun gradually changes, but Newton's theory couldn't explain the rate at which that change occurred. Also, it was found that light acts as a series of particles as well as a wave, both at the same time. None of this fitted the paradigm of the Newtonian era and a new shift had to occur.

The paradigm of the day

We are now in a paradigm in which everything is fundamentally built up from 81 subatomic particles and four forces. All of that is explicable through the standard model of particle physics, plus Einstein's two theories of relativity. Using these it is possible, mathematically speaking, to trace back in time to the origin in the universe in a hot Big Bang, preceded by a period of inflation. The concept is so well embedded in society that there are many popular science programmes made using this premise, and even an American sit-com. In addition, new observations in geology and biology have led to the concept of a very old Earth in which all the species of life evolved from what has by some been termed a primordial soup.

In essence the current paradigm is one of evolution: of the universe, the solar system, the Earth and life. The fundamental physics on which all of this is based is properly falsifiable, but evolution of any form is not. How, for example, can we perform an experiment to determine if the universe evolved from a Big Bang? It was a one-off event. We could potentially prove that certain required process do not work today or that predictions from the theories involved are invalid (falsifiabillity), but in the absence of that there is no way of setting up a test to verify if any form of evolution actually occurred; it is all inference. However, those inferences are indeed strong.

Paradigms come and paradigms go, but science keeps moving forwards.

The paradigm change in physics during the first part of the 20th century was enormous. It was found that space was curved, which was the underlying origin of gravity rather than Newton's force, which just happened to exist. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, which hadn't been envisaged previously. On an atomic scale, Newton's mechanics and Maxwell's electromagnetism were replaced by quantum mechanics, based on rules of probability (chance) that eventually developed into quantum field theory, which described the 81 fundamental particles and the other three fundamental forces besides gravity.

Unfortunately, this physics paradigm, linked with biological evolution and the geological timescale, has been used by many to propose that God is unnecessary and has to be fitted in ad hoc if we want to believe in one. The argument goes that we know so much scientifically now that we can explain everything and there is no room for God to get involved; maybe he is there spiritually in some way, but there's no role for him to play in creation or miracles etc. This brings me back to my starting point: most well-meaning professional scientists will work within this paradigm because it's the one that we have. Some will do so gleefully because they have a vested interest in disproving God's existance, others try to do the ad hoc fitting in of God, with varying degrees of success, but most don't think too much about the religious implications and just get on with their work. Any concept that 'Science' as a whole is anti-God is neither true nor fair - it is generally neutral.

Tomorrow's world

So what does this mean for the way forward? Do we have to accept that God isn't necessary and has just become a matter of personal faith? No! Not at all. What we aren't generally told at school, university or the media is the big holes in the current paradigm. Theories are constantly being adjusted to make them fit it, and still some discrepancies are massive. Cosmology is not all tied up with a mathematical theory that takes us back to the origin of time. The standard model explains everything that we've found (just about), but we know that it can't be the full story. Einstein's general relativity doesn't explain gravitation in a way that talks to the other fundamental forces, but we know that it would have to if we were going to understand fully the Big Band and black holes. The 'chance' element of quantum mechanics is bizarre and various theories have been put forward, at least some of which are essentially unfalsifiable (e.g. the existence of huge numbers of parallel universes with which we can't necessarily interact).

Moreover, to explain the way the universe is today we have to add in vast amounts of dark matter and dark energy, such that they make up around 95% of the universe, but we don't know what it comprises. Part of the solution could be a fifth fundamental force (as was talked about even just a few days ago on the BBC website at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/56643677). There is a number in gereral relativity (one of the best verified theories ever), the cosmological constant, which could also help, but the predicted value is out by a factor of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

(the observed value would have to be multiplied by that to get it to match the theory), one of the biggest and most enduring disrepancies in all science (as discussed yet again in the March 2021 edition of Physics World, the trade journal for UK physicists).

The word on the physics street which is being espoused by many is that physics is creaking at the seams. There are equally huge problems in other areas of science, including biological evolution. To sort all of this out it seems that we shall have to enter into a new paradigm. Perhaps things will look very different again with possibly more particles and forces, explained in a different scientific philosophy. Maybe our current idea of a Big Bang will be laughed at in 100 years' time. For now, though, most scientists continue to work within the current creaking paradigm, where they feel necessary going down routes of unfalsifiable and bizarre suggestions to make things fit. Is this really science? Where does it become science fiction? That is a question which has been raised and debated before, and is really a moot point. If the only explanations available for some phenomena at the moment are not falsifiable, does that mean that they can't be discussed by scientists? Opinions vary on that, but it seems unfair to limit what people can think about.

So, yes, I think that most scientists do real science, working within their paradigm, sometimes moving outside the border of standard scientific method, but for honest reasons. Admittedly, some are motivated by religious or atheistic convictions to an extent that leads to bias in their interpretation. How, though, can anyone, in such a scenario, say that science definitively explains so much that we should discard the notion of God? The more we know, the more we realize how little science really explains. Holes in our understanding will be identified, theories modified and paradigms will shift - but how life, the universe and everything got here and the Creator who brought it about will never change.