The Matrix and dialog with persons of faith

We in the west have a Weltanschauung that we are pretty cocky about. We know that we are still learning things about physics at the micro and macro boundaries of the universe, but the stuff in the middle- earth round, no such things as flying spaghetti monsters- most of us are pretty confident about stuff like that. And those who aren’t are derided as lunatics or Christians / or members of other religions.

To outsiders, people of faith seem like a queer bunch- how for example could any person of science believe in events that defy the laws of physics? The polite thing is to simply not talk about it. Well here were are on a blog, and we are free to talk about it without the social constraints. You won’t destroy a friendship, if the discussion gets to uncomfortable you can walk away, and so on.

The movie “The Matrix” introduced to many the notion that it is at least scientifically conceivable that we are living in a world that is vastly different in nature than what we currently believe. For example, what if instead of the machines controlling the sensory inputs for human beings that God does? We would be in a world pretty much exactly as everything appears to us today, but where so called miracles really do occur- where men could survive inside a fish for 3 days, that the waters of the Red Sea could part, that a man could raise another from the dead, and so on.

My conception of such a Christian Matrix does not happen to follow such a radical science fiction conception of reality. But it does have the same effect of bringing what we know of science and religious world views into accord. I develop the Christian perspective here, but a similar perspective could be applied to other faiths. My views are founded on currently thinking in the fields of epistemology, theories of perception, and the philosophy of Owen Barfield who conceived the notion of a Christian’s “directionally creator” relationship to the world.