Re: What do you believe?

Description: Gomes believes we live in a fallen world.

Question: Does Christianity answer all of your questions?

Transcript: Well Christianity, strangely enough, does answer all my questions. I mean, it’s the lens through which I view reality. It’s how I make judgments. It’s how I respond to others. It’s how I define reality to all intents and purposes. The Christian myth makes sense to me. It provides a world that’s as orderly and stable to me as the . . . as the Greek myths did for the Greeks and the Romans did for the Romans. I . . . I don’t live in a dark world. I mean, I don’t . . . I don’t live in the sense that everything is going to go up in flames, and we’re all destined and doomed, and terrible things are happened . . . happening. But I do believe we live in what the scriptures refer to as a fallen world. Christian theology speaks of it as a world that has not achieved its ideals. And we are struggling, and moving towards them, and trying to manage as best we can. And certain ideas and ideals have been set before us. The person of Jesus Christ, for me, is such an idea and an ideal. I believe He really existed, but that doesn’t diminish the ideological power or the . . . the sense of imagination that is employed. And I aspire to live my life in the light of what I understand that truth to be – a truth which I have received through the wisdom of thousands of other smarter and cleverer people who existed before me. I admit to being a child of the Western Christian experience, and I embrace it. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not embarrassed by it. And I don’t deny my dependency upon it. It’s the vocabulary with which I work.

When I travel, as I often do, through Western Europe and I look at those great cathedrals and those monuments, they all speak to me. They all makes sense to me. It’s describing a world in which I did not live, but which still lives for me. And that’s very important. Part of my work, I suppose, is trying to call back, as best I can, the life of that world and the people that are far removed from it. I’m much comforted by the . . . the remark G.K. _______ once said that “Christianity is not a religion that has been tried and failed. It is a religion that has been wanted and never really tried.” And my job is to try it, and to get other people to try it on for size and hope for the best.

Question: How do you reconcile science and religion?

Transcript: I haven’t found any scientific advance that explains joy, or happiness, or genuine peace. Or that has achieved perfect satisfaction in mind, body or state. I haven’t found any scientific discovery that’s done that. There was the great cynical observation that when we started exploring outer space, that we might actually find where heaven was. And the Russian cosmonauts were supposed to report back as to whether God existed. Did they find him up there? And nobody did. Or medical science, when it _____ operating on the brain, or the very interior of the human body, could never quite find the soul. They keep looking and they never managed to do it. It seems to me that science could never explain such things as joy, or happiness, or sorrow, even though they try to find the little nodes in the brain in which these emotions are alleged to reside. And thus it seems to me science is able to describe certain realities, but it has it limits. And religion goes beyond those limits. That’s why they call it faith. That’s why it’s exciting. It seems much more exciting to me to be a pioneer on the frontiers of faith, than working out my salvation in some laboratory hoping that I’ll discover something in a jar of chemical unknowns. I think that’s very unlikely.

Recorded on: 6/12/07