Alice walks into the living room. “Why is the teapot whistling?” she asks.
Bob answers, “Water falling at the hydroelectric plant turns a turbine, which generates electricity, because a moving magnetic field can generate an electrical field, and vice versa. Through a series of transformers, that electricity is stepped up to a higher voltage, transferred across power lines to our apartment, then stepped down to a lower, safer voltage for residential wiring. There it passes through a resistive element, converting electrical energy to thermal. This heat energy excites the water molecules in the teapot until they break the intermolecular forces holding them in liquid form. As the water vapor escapes through the spout, it creates small vortices of steam that producing a whistling sound.”
Charlie looks up from his book, rolls his eyes at Bob, and answers, “I wanted to make some tea.”
Is Bob’s answer or Charlie’s answer better? Both are correct. One answer explains the how. The other explains the why. Both answers may be useful. If you’re a high school physics student, electrical engineer, or Cambridge University teakettle researcher, it’s important for you to understand the concepts from Bob’s statement. Yet, in our daily lives, most of us would be annoyed with Bob and would prefer Charlie’s response.
In Philip Yancey’s Disappointment with God, he describes his skepticism while a student at a Christian college:
Actions regarded as “spiritual” by the believers on campus seemed utterly ordinary to me. If the unseen world really was making contact with the seen world, where were the scorch marks, the sure signs of a supernatural Presence? Take the matter of prayer: the believers seemed to distort events to make everything an answer to prayer. If an uncle sent an extra fifty dollars to help with school bills, they would grin and shout and call a prayer meeting to thank God… [But] I had an uncle who occasionally sent me gifts, though I never prayed for them. And what of the students’ many requests that went unanswered? (p. 216)
To answer these questions, Yancey explores the concept of transposition, as introduced by C.S. Lewis:
Lewis suggested the analogy of a beam of light in a dark toolshed. When he first entered a shed, he saw a beam and looked at the luminous band of brightness filled with floating specks of dust. But when he moved over to the beam and looked along it, he gained a very different perspective. Suddenly he saw not the beam but, framed in the window of the shed, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 93 million miles away, the sun. Looking at the beam and looking along the beam are quite different. (p. 218)
Bob’s explanation is looking at the beam: breaking the phenomenon down into component parts, looking at each speck within it. Charlie’s answer looks along the beam: looking at the larger story into which the phenomenon fits, looking at the causes behind it — which, in this case, are personal, not mechanistic.
Modern Western society is exceptionally good at looking at the beam. Modern science excels at breaking things down into component parts: analyzing the neurons and hormones that go into our thoughts and feelings, the chemical reactions that let our neurons and hormones work, the atoms and physical forces that underlie all of that.
For example, in the centuries since the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, theories of evolution and the Big Bang have provided explanations for the origin of the universe and life, areas that were previously explained by religion. Some believers have responded with a “God-of-the-gaps” view that any shortcomings in the scientific explanation are evidence for God’s activity – and then been dismayed when advancements in science seem to lessen these shortcomings. Some nonbelievers have responded by concluding that, since they have explanations for what was previously ascribed to God, God need not exist. But both arguments are a sort of looking-at-the-beam perspective — confusing the how for the why, breaking down a phenomenon into parts and mechanisms instead of looking at what it points to. Because (without getting into the serious and substantive arguments about creation and evolution and the limitations of scientific naturalism), explanations of cosmological expansion and natural selection can no more disprove a Creator than Bob’s invocation of hydroelectric plants and stovetop resistors disproves Charlie’s tea brewing.
Similarly, studies in psychology and neuroscience, using tools such as functional MRI (fMRI) scans, have revealed a great deal about how our brains and consciousness work. Some of this research may cause us to question our understandings of ourselves. For example, our memories are much more fallible than we’d like to think; our preferences may be constructed on demand and rationalized rather than reflecting pre-existing values and reasoned choice; much of our mental processes occur outside of the control or awareness of our conscious thought; some of our mood and emotional state depends on factors such as intestinal bacteria; and so on. Because of these and other scientific developments, some researchers and thinkers conclude that free will is an illusion; that consciousness is merely a relatively late evolutionary tool for explaining one’s own actions (which presumably would happen regardless); and so on. These views are difficult to square with a Christian concept of the self as a responsible moral agent. But, again, these findings are looking at the beam: gaining a better understanding of how the mind works, and realizing that its workings are not as simple or straightforward as we Western Christians thought, is not the same as saying there’s no personal “self” to be found if you look along the beam. After all, believers have known for thousands of years that human hearts (including, presumably, memories and preferences) may be deceitful (Jer. 17:9); that we often act outside of our conscious will (Mt 26:41, Rom 7:15); that we’re not merely “brains on sticks” but are embodied beings whose bodies carry and carry out our emotions (2 Cor 6:12 KJV). Paul talks about “sin living in me“ (Rom 7:17), while a psychologist uses an fMRI to break down, analyze, and label our subconscious, subhuman impulses — but it may well be that they’re talking about the same thing, just from transposed perspectives.
This distinction can help us understand history and God’s actions in the world as well. There are numerous debates over the interaction between human action and God’s. If something happens, is it the result of human cause and effect, societal forces, the actions of those in power? Or is God responsible, such that prophets or those with spiritual insight can feel confident in describing what he’s doing and how we need to respond? Countless articles, books, pundits, and experts offer explanations and analyses of the first sort. Previous generations might have looked at good or bad events as divine blessings or curses then searched for human behaviors that elicited such actions, but that perspective has fallen out of favor – helped, no doubt, by well-meaning Christians who were confidently wrong in what they thought God was doing. Even the Bible explores this tension. The books of 1 and 2 Kings present, for the most part, a matter-of-fact history of the kings of Judah and Israel. “In the Nth year of so-and-so’s reign, someone the son of someone else became king over Israel. He reigned for some years. He did good or bad. The rest of the events of his reign are recorded in a scroll. He passed away and was buried.” 1 and 2 Chronicles, however, describe societies with direct, immediate, divine blessing-and-curse responses to their rulers’ actions: kings’ religious and spiritual actions are highlighted, and such actions immediately cause positive or negative results that are attributed to the Lord.
But this, too, is looking at the beam: God can act through the subjects of pundits’ analyses as easily as he can through lightning bolts, earthquakes, and plagues. (“The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord like channels of water; he turns it wherever he wants” (Prov. 21:1).) The Bible describes events such as the Babylonian exodus that are both sociopolitical events whose causes can be studied (internal strife within Assyria causing its collapse before the Neo-Babylonian empire) and God’s direct action against the idolatry, syncretism, and faithlessness of his people (as explained by prophets like Jeremiah). Christians’ failed prophecies and predictions about what God is doing don’t invalidate this reality, any more than someone’s ignorance of astronomy invalidates looking along the beam at the sun.
Understanding this helps us better understand God and his world. We can listen to the answers of the Bobs of the world, better understanding the complexity and wonder of God’s creation, without falling prey to reductionism and forgetting that, along the beam, we can see God.