Many of you know that I spend a week or two out of every year hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail (AT), a 2,100-mile footpath from Springer Mountain in northern Georgia to Mount Katahdin in central Maine. I’ve been doing this for about seven years now (a bit more than 900 miles), and I thought I’d post a few reflections on what the experience is like.
It’s somewhat demanding physically, but not terribly so. Yes, it helps to be in decent shape when you start (I hike a couple weekends every month throughout the year), but it’s not essential. Lots of folks start hiking the AT with no experience whatsoever — it just takes them a bit longer to get their “hiker legs”. I think that the greatest challenge is psychological — you have to be prepared to do pretty much the same thing every day: Get up at dawn, eat, pack up your stuff, and walk until the next campsite, set up camp, eat, go to sleep at dusk. And you repeat this almost every day, regardless of the conditions. Raining? Keep hiking. 95F and 85% humidity? Keep hiking. Muscles and joints yelling at you? Keep hiking. Boring section of trail with no views? Keep hiking. And most of the time you’re not even looking at the views or natural beauty anyway: you have to keep your eyes focused on the path so that you won’t stumble over a tree root and fall on your face, which I’ve done many times. The sameness can get pretty dull, so it takes some mental discipline to keep going.
But one of the things that I’ve discovered over the years is that my spiritual life improves a whole lot while I’m hiking. Not that I pray more — it’s just that it’s better. Since I spend most of my days going up and down mountains, I usually pray through several of the Psalms of Ascents (Ps. 120 – 134) every night. I start and finish each day with a recitation of the Sh’ma Yisrael (Deut. 6:4-10). And as I’m hiking — dodging tree roots, hopping rocks, and occasionally looking around to see what there is to see — I pray through a relatively short list of intercessions (basic personal, family, and church needs). So as you can see, there’s nothing special about what I’m doing, and I can assure you that I’m not having any profound spiritual experiences or anything like that. I think that the improvement that I experience in my spiritual life has mostly to do with the extended solitude. Even though I occasionally interact with other hikers over the course of the days (especially at the campsites, where there can sometimes be 10 or 15 folks in for the night), for the most part it’s just me, God, and the trail.
So consider this post a plug for solitude, particularly extended solitude. And yes, I recognize that not all of us can pull it off — for many of us the demands our current state of life may make such solitude an unaffordable luxury. But states of life don’t last forever — if at some point your schedule permits, give it a shot.
Posted by Lon on August 29th, 2007 in Hiking | 5 Comments »
“God is slick, but He ain’t mean.”
– A. Einstein
When asked what he meant, Einstein replied:
“Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.”
Our ability to “do science” — to explore the physical universe, determine how it is organized, and figure out why things happen the way they do — is dependent on the uniformity of creation. In other words, if you do something in a particular time and place and get a particular result, you can count on the same thing happening in other times and places, provided that all other conditions are the same. Scientists call this concept reproducibility, and it’s impossible to do science without it.
So what’s this got to do with theism and intelligent design? Consider what I stated in my last post about the doctrine of Creation:
“God . . . continually upholds [His creation]: every particle of matter, every quantum of energy, and every physical law governing how matter and energy interact, all of these continue to exist because God holds them in His thought.”
The God in whom we believe is an orderly, rational, consistent being. That’s one of the reason why the Bible encourages us to trust in Him. And if God is orderly, rational and consistent, then the Creation, which He continually upholds in His mind, is as orderly and rational as He is. In fact, it works both ways: the Bible teaches us that God reveals Himself in nature (Ps. 19:1ff; Rom. 1:20); thus, the order and rationality of creation teach us that the Creator Himself is orderly and rational.
The scientists of the Renaissance and Enlightenment — folks like Newton, Copernicus, da Vinci, and others — viewed the world through the lens of theism. Regardless of whether or not they were Christians, they believed in a Creator God, and they considered their “natural philosophy,” their science, to be a window into the mind of God. They felt that the only reason why they could do science, why they could expect to find a set of orderly laws governing the behavior of the natural world was that the Creator Himself was orderly and rational. Some historians of science have argued that the scientific method could not have come into existence apart from the Judeo-Christian world view. And this way of looking at things is so integral to science that scientists who weren’t even theists, let alone believers, used the language of theism to express their belief in an orderly universe. Hence the opening quotes — Einstein believed in nature, not God; if anything, he was an agnostic. Nevertheless, he had to resort to the language of theism to express his belief in the orderliness of the universe.
More recently many (possibly most) scientists and science popularizers have rejected the theism of their scientific forebears and thoroughly bought into an arrogant, atheistic materialism. And many Christians have allowed their understanding of science to become distorted. Some have accepted a kind of dualism, acknowledging that God created the universe and occasionally tweaks things in response to prayer, but otherwise has little to do with the natural world, being more concerned with the spiritual. Others constantly seek scientific evidence for creation when there’s no reason why there would be any — it’s the fact the universe exists at all that argues for the existence of a Creator. As Christians living in the early 21st century, we need to renew our faith in God as the rational Creator and Sustainer or the universe, a faith that gives us (together with other theists) a rational basis for doing science and enables us to better behold the glory of God in the magnificence of His creation.
Posted by Lon on August 24th, 2007 in Science | No Comments »
As promised, some comments on Intelligent Design and the nature of science. Of necessity, I’ll occasionally be using the technical language of science, philosophy, and theology, but I’ll try to define the more obscure terms as I use them.
Christians and indeed all theists believe in the doctrine of ex nihilo creation: God didn’t use any starting materials when He made the universe. God is separate from His creation, but He continually upholds it: every particle of matter, every quantum of energy, and every physical law governing how matter and energy interact, all of these continue to exist because God holds them in His thought. This is pretty basic stuff, and pretty much all believers who have given any thought to these matters will say, “Yeah, sure — of course we believe that.” (more…)
Posted by Lon on August 16th, 2007 in Science | 6 Comments »
