Science and the Sacred: Godawa, Brian
Brian Godawa is the screenwriter of To End All Wars and other feature films. He has written and directed various documentaries on church-state relations, stem cell research and higher education politics. He is the author of Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment (InterVarsity Press) and Word Pictures: Knowing God through Story and Imagination (InterVarsity Press). He speaks around the country to churches, high schools and colleges on movies, worldviews and faith. His movie blog can be found at www.hollywoodworldviews.com.
Blogs by Godawa
The Collapsing Universe in the Bible: Literal Science or Poetic Metaphor? Part 6
September 27, 2011
Jesus’ Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 is the classic reference used by futurists to point to the future second coming of Christ. I have been exegeting the decreation language about the sun, moon, and stars as referring to the end of the Old Covenant. Yet, right after those verses that speak of the collapsing universe, Jesus speaks of his “coming on the clouds”Comments (7)
The Collapsing Universe in the Bible: Literal Science or Poetic Metaphor? Part 5
September 20, 2011
The interpretation I have presented in this essay is no doubt earth-shattering for some eschatological paradigms about the end times. Such radical departures from the futurist’s received wisdom always beg plenty of questions about other passages and concepts taken for granted by the futurist interpretation.Comments (33)
The Collapsing Universe in the Bible: Literal Science or Poetic Metaphor? Part 4
September 13, 2011
God describes the creation of his covenant with Moses as the creation of the heavens and the earth (Isa 51:14-16). The creation of Israel through deliverance and Promised Land was likened to God hovering over the waters and filling the formless and void earth (Deut 32:10-12), separating the waters from the dry land (Ex 15:8, 16-17), establishing the sun and moon, and defeating the mythical sea dragon of chaos to create his ordered world (Psa 74:12-17; 89:6-12; Isa 51:9-14).Comments (5)
The Collapsing Universe in the Bible: Literal Science or Poetic Metaphor? Part 3
September 7, 2011
First, let’s take a look at the usage of sun, moon and stars in the Old Testament. In the ancient Near East, there is often a conceptual equivalency or link between stars, heavenly bodies, and deities. The Encyclopedia Judaica notes that, “in many cultures the sky, the sun, the moon, and the known planets were conceived as personal gods.Comments (29)
The Collapsing Universe in the Bible: Literal Science or Poetic Metaphor? Part 2
August 29, 2011
First, let’s take a look at the usage of sun, moon and stars in the Old Testament. In the ancient Near East, there is often a conceptual equivalency or link between stars, heavenly bodies, and deities.1 The Encyclopedia Judaica notes that, “in many cultures the sky, the sun, the moon, and the known planets were conceived as personal gods.Comments (5)
The Collapsing Universe in the Bible: Literal Science or Poetic Metaphor? Part 1
August 23, 2011
In this essay, I will argue that the decreation language of a collapsing universe with falling stars and signs in the heavens was actually symbolic discourse about world-changing events and powers related to the end of the old covenant and the coming of the new covenant as God’s “new world order.” In this interpretation, predictions of the collapsing universe were figuratively fulfilled in the historic past of the first century.Comments (14)
The Tree of Life: A Movie Review by Brian Godawa
July 25, 2011
Eventually, the movie enters into a 15-minute cinematic panorama of the universe that illustrates a Biblical concept of creation. We are introduced to a myriad of supernovas and condensing star galaxies all the way down to microbial ocean life on earth, up an evolutionary chain of complexity to fish and amphibian, through dinosaurs, including an extinguishing meteoric crash on earth and ultimately to the birth of a human baby.Comments (1)
Science and Faith at the Movies: “A.I.”, Part 4
June 23, 2011
One of the dominant views popular with Christians and other religious believers is “substance dualism” that believes spirit (or mind) and body are separate yet integrated entities that exist simultaneously yet within two different realms of reality, the immaterial realm of the spirit or mind and the material realm of the body. This view has strong Greek influences on it with its notion of a “ghost in the machine.”Comments (8)
Science and Faith at the Movies: “A.I.”, Part 3
June 21, 2011
One of the issues that A.I. the movie raises is the idea that we live in a materialistic universe and therefore “meaning” is not objectively discovered in reality, but is subjectively constructed by highly complex machines as useful fiction to satisfy an eternally unmet longing. The notion of spirituality and personhood are also ways of signifying this human pursuit of the transcendent.Comments (1)
Science and Faith at the Movies: “A.I.”, Part 2
June 17, 2011
In this movie religion and myth are reduced to natural explanations. There is no spiritual or transcendent aspect to our existence. Even the terms for the robots (“mechas”) and humans (“orgas”) reflect this reduction of life forms to mechanical or organic complexity. David seeks after the Blue Fairy to make him a real boy, which we all know is not going to happen because the Blue Fairy is a Disney construct.Comments (6)
Science and Faith at the Movies: “A.I.”
June 15, 2011
The result is a sci-fi fairy tale journey, a visually stunning, philosophically thoughtful examination of what it means to be human. But it is also a story that becomes an analogy for mankind’s quest for meaning and significance in transcendent notions like religion that demythologizes that quest into a materialistic enterprise of symbol creation rather than true spiritual reality.Comments (8)
Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography in the Bible, Part 6
May 30, 2011
Some well-intentioned Evangelicals seek to maintain their particular definition of Biblical inerrancy by denying that the Bible contains this ancient Near Eastern cosmography. They try to explain it away as phenomenal language or poetic license. Phenomenal language is the act of describing what one sees subjectively from one’s perspective without further claiming objective reality.Comments (18)
Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography in the Bible, Part 5
May 27, 2011
Seely shows how the modern scientific bias has guided the translators to render the word for “firmament” (raqia) as “expanse.” Raqia in the Bible consistently means a solid material such as a metal that is hammered out by a craftsman (Ex. 39:3; Isa. 40:19). And when raqia is used elsewhere in the Bible for the heavens, it clearly refers to a solid materialComments (0)
Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography in the Bible, Part 4
May 24, 2011
Before we ascend to the heavens, let’s take a look at the Underworld below the earth. The Underworld was a common location of extensive stories about gods and departed souls of men journeying to the depths of the earth through special gates of some kind into a geographic location that might also be accessed through cracks in the earth above.Comments (8)
Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography in the Bible, Part 3
May 20, 2011
The location of heaven being above us may be figurative to our modern cosmology only because we now know it is not literally above us, but it was not figurative to the Biblical writers. Now let’s take a closer look at each of these tiers or domains of the cosmos through the eyes of Scripture in their ancient Near Eastern context.Comments (13)
Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography in the Bible, Part 2
May 17, 2011
Something else had always haunted me like a nagging pebble in the shoe of my mind, and that was the Galileo affair. There was a time (the 17th century) when brilliant godly Christian theologians and scientists that I greatly respect considered the new heliocentric theory as being against the plain teaching of the Bible.Comments (15)
Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography in the Bible, Part 1
May 13, 2011
But something started to seriously challenge these assumptions. First, as I studied the ancient Hebrew culture and its surrounding Near Eastern background, I began to see how very different a “plain reading” of a text was to them than a “plain reading” was to me. The ancient Hebrew mind was steeped in different symbols, ideas, and language than I was.Comments (44)
Science and Faith at the Movies: “Avatar”, Part 3
April 27, 2011
I believe that the reason for Avatar’s success lies in James Cameron’s skill as a mythmaker. Avatar is essentially a postmodern pagan myth on the level of the Babylonian Enuma Elish or the Ugaritic Baal Cycle of ancient Mesopotamia. Like Avatar, these epic myths were tales of warring deities of nature embodying the claims of religious and political supremacy.Comments (3)
Science and Faith at the Movies: “Avatar”, Part 2
April 20, 2011
If you want to know the worldview that a filmmaker is affirming, look at the good guys. Look at the hero and how he ends up seeing the world. In Avatar, the worldview of the good guys (the Na’vi) that the hero ends up embracing is a pagan religion of nature worship. The Na’vi are clearly the “oppressed” and exploited third world indigenous peoples of Pandora.Comments (12)
Science and Faith at the Movies: “Avatar”, Part 1
April 15, 2011
To be sure, the movie is a simplistic tale of Manichean morality without nuance, two-dimensional characters without complexity, and thinly veiled political propaganda without subtlety. But those who attack its faults are missing a much more important point: Avatar’s success cannot be dismissed. It is resonating with tens of millions of people around the planet.Comments (39)
Science and Faith at the Movies: “Creation,” Part 3
April 4, 2011
Herein lies the fundamental flaw in assuming that death and suffering is contradictory to a loving God’s providential care of creation: it begs the question. Who says God cannot have a morally sufficient reason for why he uses death and suffering to accomplish his purposes?Comments (82)
Science and Faith at the Movies: “Creation,” Part 2
March 31, 2011
Creation depicts the intrinsic opposition between God and evolution that 19th century scientists reflexively assumed, as well as the warfare metaphor that supported it. Huxley claims in the movie that if everything evolved over millions of years, then God didn’t create it all in 6 days, as if the literal interpretation of that text was the only option.Comments (20)
Science and Faith at the Movies: “Creation,” Part 1
March 29, 2011
The discourse of imagination, though different in how it operates from the rational and empirical disciplines, is just as legitimate an aspect of our human quest for truth. In light of that goal, I thought it would be most fitting to start this column with a review of Creation, the biopic about Charles Darwin, the patron saint of evolution.Comments (28)
Science and Faith at the Movies: Part 5
March 24, 2011
It is no coincidence that the very argument of scientific paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn explains in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is described as a conversion of worldviews that is analogous to the way story persuades. Like the hero’s obstacles in his journey, anomalies build tension in reigning scientific stories of reality, until a crisis occurs.Comments (76)
Science and Faith at the Movies: Part 4
March 21, 2011
Of the themes present in Contact, one stands out for discussion in this essay: The interplay between an imminent universe and transcendent meaning or purpose. Does empirical observation of material processes reduce reality to meaningless purposeless existence? Is the quest for God and spirituality a wish fulfillment or an intrinsic aspect of a created order?Comments (60)
Science and Faith at the Movies: Part 3
March 17, 2011
But there is a richer theme at play here, because Ellie’s final battle is after her eighteen hour intergalactic journey. The teleportation occurs in such a way that it appears this journey never happened. That Ellie’s transport pod just falls to the bottom of the machine in a few seconds without incident, observed “empirically” by forty-three different cameras from different perspectives.Comments (7)
Science and Faith at the Movies: Part 2
March 14, 2011
In Contact, Ellie’s worldview is one of enlightened atheistic humanism, an elevation of intellectual and scientific inquiry that values humanity but rejects the supernatural. She sees the world through the eyes of a conflict between science and faith, and God is a myth we create to make us feel significant in a vast universe. Her antagonist is not a sole individual, but is embodied in several characters.Comments (7)
Science and Faith at the Movies: Part 1
March 10, 2011
The very structure of a story itself is an incarnation of an argument for redemption – that is to mean the recovery of something lost in our humanity. As we follow the story, we follow a concrete version of an abstract argument, lived out existentially through the characters and consequences of their choices. We inhabit the story, and therefore the argument, through our imagination.Comments (14)
Reading the Bible Plain and Simple: Biblical Hermeneutics, Culture and Science, Pt. 2
February 21, 2010
The goal of proper biblical hermeneutics (interpreting the Bible) is to understand the text through the eyes of its intended writers and readers. If we are to believe that “in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth,” we must believe what God means by that proposition within their cultural context, not what it means to us within our cultural context.Comments (75)
Reading the Bible Plain and Simple: Biblical Hermeneutics, Culture and Science, Pt. 1
February 13, 2010
In the 1980s, I picked up the book The Genesis Flood by Whitcomb and Morris. It was the first book I was aware of that seemed to maintain respect for the Bible as God’s Word yet also produced legitimate scientific arguments for its viewpoint. I was hooked. I became a fan of young-earth six-day creationism for the next twenty plus years of my Christian faith walk. It only seemed right since Genesis “plainly and simply” described creation in six literal days.Comments (6)