The Modern Relevance of God
Finding Meaning in an Inverted World
Welcome to Episode five of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.
In our last episode, we looked at some of the scientists responsible for modern science’s turn to materialism. Something that sought to make God irrelevant in the creation of life. English biologist, Richard Dawkins, perhaps best epitomises that point of view, opining in The God Delusion that God is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. And then swinging from the heels with a brutal list of negative adjectives describing God that to my mind, simply substantiates the discoveries of the early explorers of the psyche who showed that sickness lies in projecting our evil qualities outward onto others.
That dismissive view of God is more than obvious in countless modern art, too, that looks at the mess in the world created by man as proof that God doesn’t exist. Well, I’m struck hard by that modern conceit because … well, I’m a product of it. Moving to Brazil 20 years ago with my wife at the time, Madalann, began a process of change inside me, a gradual opening to a theological reality that had simply not been part of my life …the spirituality I delved into in the New Age movement, notwithstanding. That had been insufficient to feed this quest for truth I hungered for. It was the certainty of the existence of God that marks Brazil that began to turn the tide in me from disdain for God, picked up through modern science and art, to a budding belief in something concrete. A real God in place of that vague and simplistic notion of cosmic energy coming from New Age spirituality.
It was when I began to study Norberto Keppe’s concept of inversion, which we talked about in our second episode, that I began to think, “Well, wait a minute! If we’re inverted, we must be inverted from something. What would that be?” That’s what we’ll begin to explore in our podcast episode today with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Who Is this God We’re Talking about Anyway?