Engaging Contemporary Thinkers: Hollywood & Mars Hill
by Jim Walters | 31 January 2025 |
“Do you believe in God?” Vera probes Saul in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, a global epic about top scientists whose experiments contradict 60 years of settled science. The 3 Body Problem is the first major project since its creators’ blockbuster Game of Thrones. Although it’s filmed in China and England the setting is the universe. And the stakes are high: humanity’s future.
The 3 Body Problem may be science fiction, but it grapples with some real-world dilemmas:
- The United States Defense Department has established three successive units (beginning in 2007, with the latest established in 2022) to study what are popularly called UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects). The latest iteration is called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group.
- The three body problem is a genuine mathematical dilemma: current science is yet to devise a reliable formula for predicting the location of three masses that orbit each other in space.
Most importantly, this Netflix drama doesn’t shy away from raising the issue of ultimate significance: God.
The 3 Body Problem, with scientists grappling with questions about what’s out there besides us, brings to mind St. Paul’s conversation with some of Athens’ top thinkers about one of their own gods: an “unknown” god “in whom we live, move, and have our being” (Acts 17:23,28).
Existential issues
The challenge today is to do as Paul did: grapple with the huge, open-ended topics raised by society’s most creative thinkers. For example:
- Daniel Dennett, a materialistic philosopher who wrote from a very scientifically informed viewpoint, grappled with nature’s “intelligent design” (purposefully lower case)—with no less than 27 entries on the topic in the index to his From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.
- Adrian Bejan, polymath physicist, awarded 18 honorary doctorates for revolutionary contributions to thermodynamics and related fields, applies his creativity to everyday issues in books such as his Freedom and Evolution: Hierarchy in Nature, Society and Science.
- E.O. Wilson, awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, is best known for The Ants. Wilson argued that evolved, inherited tendencies are responsible for “eusociality” and hierarchical social organizations.
These leading secular thinkers see nature as intrinsically possessing astounding qualities. But they are mum on why natural laws exist that produce such qualities. More important, they seem totally uninterested in the origin of phenomenal nature’s orderly, creative processes.
In other words, where in the world—really, where in this whole blooming universe—is the origin of these magnificent developments?
Divine Spirit
I humbly suggest that Divine Spirit is the originating, pulsating dynamic behind and throughout our marvelous microscopic/cosmic universe. Perhaps this is what Jesus spoke of in describing worship of a universal, immaterial Spirit: “God is Spirit, and those who worship must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4: 24, NKJV).
God as Divine Spirit is far from our more anthropomorphic descriptions of God: the man Jesus walking the paths of Palestine, or our Edenic Father calling out for Adam in the garden. But describing God as Spirit isn’t only permissible. Today it’s necessary, as it makes confession of belief in God plausible.
To use a baseball analogy: You must get on first base before you can proceed to second and third. Accordingly, here, to accept the notion of Divine Spirit is getting on first. How can one take seriously unique Christian, to say nothing of Adventist, truth claims if widespread scholarly atheism isn’t first challenged?
Paul with the Areopagus
Probably more has been written about Luke’s account of Paul’s address to the Areopagus (an aristocratic council of philosophers) than any other passage in the book of Acts. Paul’s audience surely knew Plato’s even then famous phrase (Timaeus 28c) where he declared that the maker and father of the world is hard to find and even harder to discuss. Regardless, Acts 17 places Paul in appreciative dialogue with Athenian philosophers who see God as immanent within his created world, which was basic Stoic belief.
Significantly, Paul warmly celebrates the religious common ground of a God who is found “not far from each one of us” because “’In him we live and move and have our being’” (vs. 28). The basic importance of Paul’s invocation of the Athenians’ recognition of a Platonic god is that he claimed common ground for his own God.
St. Paul’s Athenian thinkers were the polymaths of their day. And it’s noteworthy that Paul is comfortable dialoguing with them—celebrating common ground.
Advances in science, philosophy, and religion
Fast-forward 1500 years to a Renaissance polymath, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543). Copernicus was a Catholic canon, physician, economist, diplomat, translator, classicist, mathematician, and astronomer. Copernicus (to be followed later by Galileo and Newton) ushered in a literally “earth-moving” scientific revolution: he removed the earth being the center of the universe, an idea which was literally unheard of. It upset a lot of people.
Fast-forward 1600 years to the Renaissance philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), mathematician and scientist, but primarily a philosopher. (Science was at that time still thought of as an aspect of philosophy.) Descartes is best known for the phrase “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes turned our attention inward: he introduced rationalistic modernism which reigned until the recent past.
Copernicus and Descartes led two highly impactful conceptual revolutions: the first scientific, and the second philosophical. Copernicus displaced humankind from our traditional place at the center of what was increasingly understood as an expansive universe. Descartes made thinking and doubting the first principle of philosophy, and indeed of the sciences. Science was no longer merely an aspect of philosophy but would take on singular importance of its own. Says historian James Livingston,
“Together these movements brought about a significant shift in humanity’s understanding of itself and its situation in the world.”[1]
Of course, our early 21st-century society’s view of our world/universe is radically different from Biblical times. In the ancients’ worldview the earth was flat, above which there was a star-studded firmament above, surpassed only by the heaven of heavens somewhere beyond that. (In the Adventist view, you might recall, that was somewhere in the center of the Orion constellation.)
Today we know there are are over two trillion galaxies (that’s 2,000,000,000,000), 200 trillion billion stars (add 9 more zeros to the galaxy number), and then literally millions of earth-like masses (similar climatic conditions, conducive of life) in our Milky Way galaxy alone.
“Until the mid-1920s [just 100 years ago!] most scientists thought the Milky Way was the entire universe,” says physics newsletter APS News. And now even spacetime is seen as possibly an “emergent” quality of our universe, with quantum gravity more basic.
And if these considerations aren’t enough, they apply to merely our universe—with leading astrophysicists now speaking of “multiverses” possibly accessible only through this universe’s black holes.
The point of it all
St. Paul intelligently and unapologetically dealt with the most advanced thought-world of his day. Adventist thinkers today must do no less.
Just as St. Paul proclaimed his Lord as the title of the Athenian unnamed god, so today we Christians can plausibly contend that Divine Spirit is the ultimate origin of all, including the natural laws that led to us humans’ being created in the divine image.
- James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997), 6. ↑
Jim Walters is professor emeritus of Loma Linda University’s School of Religion. This essay is the first of three—all based on Jim Walters’ Divine Spirit Both Grounds and Animates Science’s Domain, presented at the Adventist Society of Religious Studies conference, November, 2024. The second essay, Divine Spirit: Here, There, and Everywhere All at Once, expands the Divine Spirit theme by making a Christian/Adventist case for God infusing all his created world. In the final essay, The Rider and the Elephant: Emotion Steers Reason, Walters examines our contemporary scientific worldview and how reason and affect contend for priority.