Jasper Jones Against Religion

This year, various people recommended to me Jasper Jones, a novel by WA author Craig Silvey, and when I saw it on my mother’s bookshelf, I took the chance to borrow it and read it. It is an engaging story with a vivid setting and characters and a whole range of things going on for the protagonist, thirteen year old Charlie Bucktin, over a fateful summer holiday period.

I am not out to review this book, however. I just want to examine one part of a late might conversation between Charlie, and his unexpected new friend Jasper Jones. Jasper is an older, tougher boy with a broken home and a bad reputation in the country town of Corrigan, where they both live. Due to unusual and disturbing events, he turns to Charlie to be his ally and confidant.

The topic of the conversation is life, and in particular the rejection, that Jasper and Charlie both share, of a religious understanding of life. I’m interested in this conversation for a number of reasons. Firstly, I think novels are often sermons of a kind, exploring, through their characters and stories, different spiritual stances one might take in life, and, frequently, commending one, while perhaps also criticising others. This conversation in Jasper Jones seemed to me to be a very obvious example of this feature of novels.

Secondly, this novel was written in Australia and published in 2009, and it seems to me that this conversation does express a prominent and influential contemporary Australian spiritual stance. Silvey has his characters think and talk like many Australians might. I’d like to see what sense this viewpoint makes, and examine it a little.

Thirdly, I think that when you do examine the talk about life and religion in this conversation, it is pretty weak as a persuasive commendation of their views. Granted, these are the words and arguments of young teenaged boys, who basically agree with each about everything discusssed and who are drinking together late at night, and so we might not expect too much rigour of thought. Still, I do suspect that part of the reason this conversation is included in the novel is so that Silvey might have these spiritual opinions expressed, to commend them, as much as anything. Silvey certainly does not seem to have them expressed in order to be questioned or tested, but rather to show you who his characters, his protagonists are and from what springs their actions arise. I’d like to pick at the case against religion expressed here, because I think fails really to make a case.

So how does the conversation go? It begins with the perennial observation about how big the world is and how small human beings are.

Now the consciousness of how vast the universe is and how small we are is an ancient one. It is true that our ideas of exactly how big and old the universe is have expanded massively in the last few hundred years. We now have a heliocentric solar system, an earth of great geological age, and the Big Bang model of cosmology. However, the ancients did not think that the universe was small. They were in no doubt that the world was big and they weren’t. Take Psalm 8:3-4, addressed to God

³ When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
⁴ what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?

The sense of human insignificance in a vast cosmos is not new. The question is, what conclusions might you draw from the fact of such vastness? Jaspar Jones draws two:

The first inference is that it is stupid to think you can claim a piece of earth as your own, and draw lines and territories. That inference would be a fascinating starting point for a foray into political theory, but Jasper leaves it undeveloped, and introduces a second thesis, namely that it is foolish to think a big person (God) watches your conduct and cares about it.

Now I want to slow down here and think about whether it really follows from the sense of human insignificance in a vast cosmos that there is no God who cares about who were are and what we do. Jasper’s train of thought seems to go as follows:

Realising that the universe is stupendously large and old and I am incredibly tiny and shortlived in an immensity of space and time makes me feel like a speck of dust, like nothing.

Therefore, I conclude: I am a speck of dust, nothing

Therefore: there is no creator God who watches and cares about how I  live my life.

The first conclusion assumes the truth of something like: If I feel like a speck of dust, like nothing, then I must be a speck of dust, and nothing.

But this does not seem true, for it seems at least possible that I could in some circumstances feel insignificant, feel like nothing, but not be insignificant, not be nothing. I could be unaware of a significance I have even though I am so tiny and seemingly shortlived. The boy who believes he has been orphaned and is alone and unloved in the world might feel like nothing, but when his parents find him and he discovers he was loved and missed and sought  all along, he realises that he may have been nothing to passersby, but he was never nothing at all, for he was always something to his parents.

Looking at the immensity of time and space we might reasonably feel that we are nothing to the distant stars and galaxies and the generations of the far past and future. But, we may still be something to a God who made us. God might not signal that to us by placing us at the physical centre of a relatively small universe, but there may be other ways in which God shows his love for us, and the significance we have to him. Jasper Jones draws conclusions beyond what is warranted by his observations. He has not made a case here.

Christianity doesn’t imagine that human beings are at the physical centre of a cosy cosmos. Rather it marvels that God (the true centre) would invest such a mean and small creature as human beings with the honour of real significance in his vast world. The Bible tells us that we are significant because we made ‘in his image’. Part of what is meant is that we are set over the other forms of life on the earth, with powers and responsibilities to God that they do not share. Psalm 8 again:

⁴ what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?

⁵ You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.
⁶ You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
⁷ all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
⁸ the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.

The singular powers of human beings, largely connected (on a biological level) to the capacities of our particular brains, is another striking fact about our situation to lay beside our smallness and ephemerality. We may be undistinguished in terms of size, power and duration on a cosmic scale, but, being living, conscious intelligences we are still a rather distinguished and remarkable feature of the cosmos.

However, as Christianity sees it, the biggest indication of our significance to God comes from the fact the he himself has taken up our human nature in the person of Jesus. He shared in our humanity to break the power of death, which he did in his resurrection. The incarnation and subsequent career of Jesus is the greatest reason why Christians think that there is a God who cares about who we are, and with Christmas just gone it seems timely to point that out.

Jasper expresses frustration that people continue to believe that human beings are somehow important in the universe. He concurs with Charlie’s comment that people try to answer the big questions using only a part of the data available and forget about modern knowledge of cosmology.

But in many ways it is Jaspar and Charlie that want to make cosmology, the sheer scale of the universe, the crucial and deciding fact in assessing human significance. But why should physical cosmology have that much bearing on the question of whether there is a God who cares? I don’t see Jasper’s logic.

Besides, Jasper does not actually think that he is without significance – at the climax of this part of the conversation he strongly asserts ‘I matter’, and he gives a reason; ‘because I got a good heart’.

And this bring us away from Charlie and Jasper’s rejection of a religious outlook and over to his positive spiritual stance and ethic of life. I’m keen to probe this as well, but I’ll have to come back to it later.

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