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| God’s Disappearing Act I recently discovered Google Earth and typed in my home address and watched in fascination as an eye in the sky zoomed down toward the United States, my state and my city, and then my neighborhood and finally my house. I couldn’t read the headlines of The Denver Post which was laying on the back deck, but the image was incredibly sharp. Voyeuristically, I scrolled left and right, i.e., east and west, and then north and south and peered into the back- yards of my neighbors. The Koontzes have added a huge patio and barbecue pit, and Barkers, ironically, I think, have four doghouses and kennels in their backyard inhabited by yapping Rottweilers. But wait, there’s more! Google is now touting its “Street View” which captures candid street scenes in selected neighborhoods around the country including my home city, Denver, as well as San Francisco, San Jose, Miami, New York, Vegas and elsewhere. One guy could be seen in San Francisco picking his nose, while in another neighborhood a shaggy old man is passed out near a garbage can. One newspaper headline describes this tech development as putting the “ogle in Google.” Google says that “Street View” is helpful for those who may want to visit these areas in the future, or for those who want to revisit them. But others say that there are some serious privacy issues involved here. Google is not the first to do this sort of thing. Amazon.com had a service called A9.com and Microsoft had street level pics for its online maps in Seattle and San Francisco. Makes me think that the Apple is an appropriate symbol for one of the world’s most influential computer and technology giants. When I read about this stuff, it recalls the original apple of Genesis 2. The apples that hung from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eating this fruit, said the serpent, will cause one’s eyes to be opened and “you will be like God.” You know the story. The fruit is eaten, and their eyes were opened, and while Adam and Eve may have become like God, what they first realized was that they were naked. We keep eating the fruit of this tree, a tree that now seems stripped of its fruit and its branches. We’re going for it all. Omnipotence? We can obliterate cities and nations with a mere mouse click. We can blow up the planet. Putin’s not happy with the shield we want to put up in Europe. North Korea is rattling its nuclear sabers, and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is just plain scary. Omniscience? I used to thumb through the card index at Firestone Library at Princeton for hours, looking for sources. Now search engines using Web-crawling, searching and retrieval technologies can return tens of thousands of responses to my single query in less than a second. Moreover, this knowledge is available worldwide. And what we’re able to do with biomedical technology is breathtaking. I once argued on this page that in the new millennium we’d stop making bombs and start making babies. Wrong. We’re doing both. And now, the third attribute falls: Omnipresence. With satellites in the sky and new programs like “Street View,” being everywhere and anywhere isn’t something just for major television networks. We’ve been cut in on the action, too. I’m not saying all of this is bad. It’s really cool, actually, as long as proper safeguards are in place. I’m just saying that it’s easier now than ever to dismiss God as a Divine Irrelevancy. Indeed, God’s disappearing act is something we’ve hardly noticed. This hasn’t happened overnight. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, while pious, religious men themselves, unveiled revelations that led to the deification of Reason during the Enlightenment. Now, you could almost make a case that those were the good old days. Nothing seems to be rational anymore. Even Al Gore has a book out, The Assault on Reason. We live in a world where reason’s run amok, a world in which God has become a dirty word. No wonder then, that atheists and unbelievers feel empowered. And they’re writing about it more than ever, in case you haven’t noticed. Consider, for example, The God Delusion by Oxford professor Richard Dawkins. He argues that belief in God is a delusion, that is, a willfully held false belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He cites Robert Pirsig’s idea that “when one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion.” Even more controversial are a couple of books by Sam Harris, who describes the Catholic Church as an “institution that has produced and sheltered an elite army of child molesters.” He’s the author of The End of Faith, and more recently Letter to a Christian Nation, which was written in response to the notes he received from Christians following the publication of his first book. I don’t know what Dawkins and Harris are so upset about. Americans (and certainly the British) have never, ever, lived in a culture that is so pervasively secular as the post-Christian culture we are now a part of. We love the power, we love the knowledge, and we love the access. We want what we want when we want it. (Nielsen Media Research released a study in June of how Americans watch television. It showed that about 17 percent of Americans now have DVR technology in their homes and most of them enjoy time-shifting their viewing habits. Of those who have DVR, the overwhelming percentage of them do not watch their favorite shows in the hour in which they are originally broadcast.) We push buttons, we time-shift, we use keystrokes and mouse clicks, we Google earth and our neighborhoods. This is who we are. Enter the gospel. Whoever we are, we are a people in need of redemption. That’s an inconvenient truth that’s becoming harder to preach. Which is all the more reason to preach it. And when we’re done, we can all get on our knees, and recite in unison: “O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! … When I look at the heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”
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