GOLDFISH RELIGION
Romans 1:18-25
February 13, 2005, Dave Philips
Two goldfish were swimming around their aquarium. One said to the other, “I’ve thought it over carefully, and weighed the evidence, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to be an atheist.”
The second said, “Oh, really! Well, then, suppose you tell me who it is that changes the water in our aquarium every week!”
In the first two chapters of Romans Paul talks about three kinds of people who reject God. I’d like to take a look at the first of these three this morning. I called this individual “the barfly” in my sermon of a couple of weeks back. Max Lucado calls him the hedonist. But this morning I want to change his name. Not all the people of this type hang out in bars. Some are highly respectable! So, call this person “the goldfish.” And let’s take a look at goldfish religion.
The goldfish is the individual who thinks that the only thing that exists is what he or she can see. The goldfish shares this point of view with the barfly, and the goldfish may end up as a barfly. But not always.
The end of the goldfish’s world is the edge of the aquarium. There are puzzling shadows that the goldfish can see beyond the edge of the aquarium, but the goldfish can’t figure out what those shadows are. The goldfish has no evidence of the existence of anything beyond the edge of the aquarium, so, as far as the goldfish is concerned, there is nothing.
The late Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist, said, “We [humans exist] because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, had managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer — but none exists.”1
Do you get the picture? Gould, a brilliant scholar, bought into this goldfish philosophy. He figured out some things about how the world developed. He concluded that what we see is what we get. There is nothing more. The goldfish aquarium of our world is as far as he could venture. He could see beyond the edge of the aquarium, for zillions of light years, but he could draw no conclusion from what he saw. Therefore, he said, there is nothing. There is no higher power. There is no God. There are no answers.
Goldfishes like Gould often live with a lot of information but with no hope. Paul in the first chapter of Romans points out the logical course of goldfish religion. Here’s how goldfish religion progresses. First, Paul would say, all of us goldfishes have sufficient information. “The basic reality of God is plain enough,” says Paul. “Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being.”2
So, Paul would argue, the first step in the goldfish religion is to reject the obvious.
Paul would buy the famous argument from design that was popular a century ago but is out of fashion these days. The argument, briefly, is that if you’re taking a walk and see a watch on the path, you immediately conclude that someone has dropped it. You assume that the watch has been made by someone and owned by someone. You would never conclude that the watch simply sprang into being out of nothing.
And when you look at the world and the universe beyond which are so much more complicated than the watch on the path, you conclude that all this that we see cannot just have happened. Clearly, we say with Paul, clearly there is a Creator beyond all this.
But the goldfish, or in the case of Stephen Jay Gould, we might say the Gould-fish, doesn’t make such a conclusion. What seems obvious to someone like Paul is not obvious to Gould. Gould would say, “We might yearn to know the watchmaker, but none exists.”
So, the vast information that Stephen Jay Gould has in his head does not give him hope. We might imagine the goldfish saying with great sophistication, “I’ve sifted through the data. I can see nothing more in my universe than the water, the sand and the rocks that fill my aquarium. I’ve given up yearning to see the maker of the aquarium. There doesn’t seem to be one. So, I’ve concluded that atheism is my only choice.”
When we say to the goldfish, “But explain what maintains the even temperature in your aquarium that allows you to live, “ the goldfish would respond, “I’ve discovered this is because of the thermostat that turns on the aquarium heater.”
“And what,” we might say, “keeps the water in the aquarium so clean?”
And the goldfish would reply, “Our goldfish scientists have proven that the cleanliness of the water in the aquarium is maintained by the pump that pumps the impure water through the filter.”
“And what about the food that you eat? Where does that come from?”
And the goldfish says, “The food is a great mystery, but we know it comes from the surface of the water, so our goldfish scientists have speculated that it is the result of spontaneous generation that takes place when the surface of the water comes in contact with the top of the aquarium.”
We know an awful lot about the aquarium that we live in. We know how it works so much better than we did a century ago, or even a decade ago. But knowing only the mechanics of the universe does not introduce us to the Maker of the universe. The goldfish may know that the thermostat and the heating element keep his aquarium warm, but he can’t explain where these things came from. If he goes no farther than his goldfish religion, he learns nothing about the character of the one who designed that thermostat. The goldfish would never know that the reason the aquarium, and the pump, and the filter, and the thermostat and the heating element were designed and put in place was to preserve the life of the goldfish.
The next step in goldfish religion is the shutting down of the mind.
Paul says, “Although [people] knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.”3 The goldfish’s ability to think becomes damaged because he has chosen to believe a lie.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the scientist who had trained a flea to jump on command. All he had to do was say, “Jump!” and the flea would jump. The scientist then cut the hind legs off the flea and gave it the command to jump. It did nothing. “Jump!” he said again. Still nothing. “JUMP!” he shouted. Still nothing.
So the scientist wrote in his journal, “When you cut the hind legs off a flea, it loses its sense of hearing.”
Ridiculous! you say. But you who are scientists certainly know how many times in the history of science similar unwarranted conclusions have been made. And how many scientists in the history of science have twisted scientific evidence to make their theories come out right and maintain their reputations as scientists? Our sin unquestionably clouds our intellects and influences our ability to think.
The next step in goldfish religion is replacing God with idols. “Although [people] claimed to be wise,” says Paul, “they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.”4
Very few of us worship statues. I know of no shrines to Mars or Jupiter in Grants. No, our idols are much more subtle. Turn on the evening news and ask yourself what it is that drives and motivates our culture. Money, sex, and power are the unholy trinity that people bow down to in our secular culture. And the influence they exercise in our lives when we give ourselves to their worship is no less powerful than the influence the gods had on the ancient Romans.
Goldfish religion turns everything upside down. We are created to worship God, we end up worshiping ourselves. We are meant to love each other, we end up fighting and murdering each other. We are given the beautiful gift of sexual procreation, but we pervert this beautiful gift and use it solely for our own gratification.
And the final step in goldfish religion is moral collapse. There is no God, there are no rules, there are no consequences. Therefore, anything goes. But when anything goes, hope collapses. Remember Peggy Lee’s song? “Is that all there is? If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball, if that’s all there is.”
When the goldfish religion ends in moral collapse, God makes a temporary strategic retreat from our lives. As Paul puts it, he gives us up to do whatever we want to do.5 We have been taught to say to God in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done.” When goldfish religion has run its course, God withdraws. He says to us, “Thy will be done.”
We asked for a Burger King religion in which God says to us: “Have it your way.” God sadly gives it to us. He lets us stew in our own juice in the aquarium. Eventually the thermostat breaks down, the pump and the filter stop working, and our little ecosystem collapses. We have chosen to be our own god, God lets us do it. And in God’s gracious permission to let us have our own way and suffer the consequences, we see the first glimmer of hope.
How many people have given up hope — down and outers and up and outers — only to discover at rock bottom that they have landed on the rock of ages? When we believe the goldfish religion, we turn everything upside down. But God in his grace turns things right side up again through our Lord Jesus Christ.
One of my dear friends whose name is Alonzo Smalls was a down and outer of the worst kind. He was a heroin addict, he mainlined heroin for fifteen years, and he hit the bottom. He had done just about everything horrible and degrading that anyone could possibly do. He told me that at that stage of his life he was in and out of jail like a revolving door.
When he hit bottom, he ended up in a Teen Challenge center in Brooklyn, New York. He heard the good news of Jesus Christ preached, hoped it was true, gave his life to Christ, and entered the Teen Challenge program on the spot. In twenty-four hours of going cold turkey, through prayer and the encouragement of his new Christian friends, Alonzo was clean and free from drugs. Miraculously, he had no horrible withdrawal symptoms as so many heroin addicts do. He has been drug free ever since. He has seen beyond the horrible little goldfish aquarium where he was trapped. He knows that nothing else has ever helped him like Christian faith. Someone once suggested to him that his religion was a crutch. “Man,” he said, “if religion is a crutch, I’ll take two!”
Some of you here this morning could tell similar stories of your rescue, perhaps from alcohol addiction, or perhaps from your addiction to money, sex, and power. God’s powerful diagnosis of our predicament is still as appropriate in the 21st century as it was in the 1st century. The powerful cure of the gospel works today as well as it did when Paul first wrote the Roman letter.
We may worry because of the rumors of corruption in high places. We may worry about the war in Iraq. We may worry that the market will crash.
But there is hope! And what we do here this morning in worship and throughout the week in service to Jesus Christ is as important and hopeful for the future of human life on earth as anything that is going on in Washington, or in the Pentagon, or on Wall Street. The aquarium is not all there is. Beyond its walls is our God who loves us with an everlasting love and calls us all to share the greatest thing in the world: the life of his Son Jesus Christ.