Christian Themes in Harry Potter: Outline

This is the first in a long series of posts about Christian themes in Harry Potter. From this point on, beware of spoilers. But before we begin, an outline of the themes that will be discussed is provided for those who wish to know what’s coming:

• Death: Harry’s journey is one on which he slowly but steadily comes to an understanding of what death means. In the end he learns that death can only be defeated by dying, and that he himself must die.
• Evil: Descriptions of Voldemort’s character and past function as a fascinating commentary on the nature of evil. Evil is inherently limited in its understanding of good, and this limitation causes Voldemort’s actions to backfire against him repeatedly.
• Love: Harry learns that there is a deep power in sacrificial love, and when he gives his life for his friends, this power protects them from harm.
• Harry’s Battle with Voldemort: In the end, Voldemort can only be defeated if Harry himself dies. Harry is a “horcrux” and bears an evil that can only be destroyed by his own death.
  

In investigating each of these themes, we will find that Christian ideas have a subtle but strong presence in Harry Potter. If you are interested in this topic, take a look at the following articles:

• "J. K. Rowling opens up about books' Christian imagery"
• "Christian themes abound in Potter"
• "Harry Potter 7 is Matthew 6"
• "Harry Potter and the Fire-breathing Fundamentalists

Before taking a look at the Christian imagery, it's important to note that none of this means Rowling is trying to convert readers or promote a worldview. Far from it - from interviews it seems that she was inspired by the idea of a boy wizard, and set out to write engaging novels. God is never mentioned in the books; they are in that sense very secular, and very unlike The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, both of which include "God" in their respective mythologies. Although Harry's story is "godless" in comparison, its imagery and themes often reflect those of Christianity.

While most of what I have written is an exposition of themes that were clearly intended by the author, some of the ideas proposed below are my own, drawn out of the text, and in all likelihood not intended by J. K. Rowling. Yet more may be found in a written work than what the author meant to put there.

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“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates

What is your worldview? What do you think the meaning of life is, or why we exist, or where the universe came from? These are big questions. “Too big for me,” you may think. “How could we possibly know the answers? Why not just live a good life and not get sidetracked trying to comprehend the incomprehensible?” A friend of mine told me “I figure that if there is some ultimate reason to everything it’ll find a way to show up sooner or later, so there's no sense worrying about it…all I know is, I can live my life comfortably enough.”

May I suggest that if you are looking at things this way, you may not fully appreciate the amazing fact of our existence. Pause for a second and think about it – you exist, this whole world exists, instead of nothing! We cannot afford to take existence for granted. It is a fact that cries out for an explanation, and the only proper response to it is to make an effort, to the best of our ability, to understand why. And it’s not just the fact of our existence. It’s that the world is intelligible to us, that we are aware of existence, that we can understand the world at all. If this is so, then we might just be able to come to a knowledge of the reason and purpose behind it all. The possibility of there being an ultimate meaning, and the possibility of knowing it, should send a sense of thrill down our spines. Don’t take it for granted.

Truth! What could be more important, and indeed urgent, than the pursuit of truth? You may think “can't I live comfortably enough without worrying about all this? How would such knowledge be relevant to my life?” It would be relevant in every way! If there is an all-encompassing meaning for the existence of the world, and a purpose towards which everything is moving, then it includes you, because you are part of existence. It encompasses your whole life, from birth to death. Do not all the concerns of your day-to-day life pale in comparison to the possibility that you could be part of something larger, something everlasting? What, then, could be of greater relevance to you than the pursuit of a correct worldview, a right understanding of what reality is all about? Such knowledge would change you. It would change your assumptions and values – it would change the way you live. And regardless of whether or not you would like that change, knowing and being changed by truth is better than living in ignorance or apathy. Truth must be faced, it must be sought.* So it’s no use objecting that you are too busy to pause and think about these things – that would be like the pilot of a plane objecting that he is too busy perfecting the positions of the air conditioning knobs to check where the plane is and where it is going. The pursuit of truth should be a foundational part of everyone’s life – it should be at the top of your schedule, of greatest priority.

If you haven’t thought through what your worldview is and made an effort to understand as much as you can of what existence is all about, then do yourself a favor and think about it. I’m not saying that all knowledge is even theoretically available to us, nor am I claiming that we can certainly reach an understanding of the meaning of existence. Perhaps years of thought will yield very little knowledge. What we can say, though, is that it might just be possible – in reading and thinking and sharing ideas, we might just find something extraordinary, that explains why the world is the way it is and what we exist for. And that possibility should be enough to get anyone thinking.

*And if there is a deeper truth behind existence, we cannot assume that it will simply "show up" someday. It may or may not be a truth that we could go to our graves without discovering, and that would be tragic indeed. So let us do what we can to understand the world we find ourselves in with the time that we have!

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Christianity and Science

Some things I've written on the subject of science (including quantum mechanics, cosmology, and evolution) and faith (theism more broadly, and Christianity in particular):

• Thoughts on Dawkins' The God Delusion, ch. 4: Complex things should be explained in terms of simpler things, but God, says Dawkins, would have to be extremely complex, and is therefore a poor explanation for the existence of our world.  But must we think of God as Dawkins does?
• Is God Physical?: Our complex universe is generated by simply mathematical laws of nature. Is there a simple nature within God that underlies his complexity?  Is it mathematical?  "Physical"?
• "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism"?: Can our ability to reason be accounted for in terms of natural selection, or must we appeal to a designer?  And what does the answer imply about God as maker?
• A Spiritual Universe: We perceive meaning and beauty in the world.  The world is made up of spacetime and quantum fields which obey fundamental laws, so is this beauty "planted" in the laws of nature themselves?
• The Tree in the Seed: The universe is planted and encapsulated in the laws of physics, so in order to understand the more "fundamental" laws, we must also understand the "emergent" realities they give rise to or generate.
• Fine-Tuning Arguments for God are not the best apologetic arguments for God.
• The Kalam Cosmological Argument also has problems - it's not the right way of thinking about God or the universe.
• Dark Energy, Cosmic Acceleration, and the Anthropic Principle: The anthropic principle has a place as a scientific explanation. When used properly, it is neither a philosophical appeal to God as designer, nor a philosophical attempt to escape from God.
• An Open Universe: How Does God Interact with the World?: How can God's detailed involvement with individual human lives be consistent with the very tight, quasi-deterministic constraints of the laws of physics? How can our world be "open," part of some larger physical reality, rather than closed off from anything beyond it?
• In his new book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking claims that science renders God unnecessary.  Is this a scientific conclusion or a larger philosophical statement?
• The Domain of Science: What things can science explain, and what things are beyond the domain of science?
• Dawkins, the "God of the Gaps," the Domain of Science, and the Question of Existence: Science, they say, has eliminated the "God of the gaps," but what kind of gaps are we talking about here?
• Can a Christian believe in evolution?  In these posts I suggest that evolution is something we might expect of God, who uses natural processes to accomplish his purposes:

• Part 1: Evolution Is Not Inherently Atheistic
• Part 2: Evolution: God's Instrument for Our Creation
• Part 3: Religious Experiences: Quirks of the Nervous System?
• Part 4: Religion/Morality as a Product of Evolution
• Part 5: Examples Summarized: God Uses the Physical World to Reveal Spiritual Things
• Part 6: Conclusion: Evolution Is Consistent With Christian Theology

• C. S. Lewis on Theistic Evolution
• Videos of Alister McGrath (biologist and theologian), John Polkinghorne (physicist and priest), and Francis Collins (head of the human genome project) on faith and science.

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Conclusion: Evolution Is Consistent With Christian Theology

…In summary, a distinction between science and philosophy must be made, and the full implications of God creating and acting within a physical world need to be better understood. I think it’s unfortunate that so many fail to see this and instead fall for the idea that evolution can make the philosophical claim of disproving God. Because of this, Christians can be misunderstood as objecting to science or more easily deceived into mistrusting science. Consequently, Christianity can be thought unscientific and irrational, when in reality Christianity provides strong grounds for the assumptions of science¹ and is a thoroughly reasonable worldview.

While our bodies may be strikingly similar to those of apes, we are, as spiritual beings, so much more than physical bodies!² And while the idea that we came from monkeys may be unappealing, we are no less in God’s image because we came from monkeys than the butterfly is ugly because it came from an ugly caterpillar. Evolution (as I understand it) is really quite an elegant process – something one would expect of the same God who causes tiny seeds to grow into majestic and beautifully intricate trees (and what a marvel it is that the tree is, in a sense, within the seed!).

In conclusion, viewing evolution as the beautiful and orderly design of God, a means for the fine-tuned perfection of the physical creature he desires to make in his image, is much more fitting than viewing evolution as part of a larger naturalistic framework in which the existence of an evolving universe is simply taken for granted.

Therefore, there is (in my opinion) no reason to freak out about evolution. It is not only a strong scientific theory worthy of our consideration and understanding, but a partial explanation for human existence that fits well within the framework of Christian theology. Indeed, many committed Christian theologians and scientists have embraced evolution; the reader is referred in particular to the works of Alister McGrath and Francis Collins.

¹Namely, the assumptions that the physical world is orderly and that we can understand it (this is true because God is an orderly Creator and wants his creatures to understand their Creator).
²One might say we are both “a little higher than the animals” (in a purely physical sense) and “a little lower than the angels” in the much more important spiritual sense.

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Examples Summarized: God Uses the Physical World to Reveal Spiritual Things

…One could identify more examples. Is what we perceive to be beauty in a sunset, or power in a waterfall, or majesty in a mountain, no more than the stimulation of something in our nervous system? It may be that, but it is NO LESS a perception of something objectively real. Is what we perceive to be elegance in mathematics merely a stimulation of some sort of “math gene”? It may be that, but it is NO LESS a perception of the very real mystery and depth of mathematics. Is the story of the dying and rising god, which was told in many pre-Christian societies, no more than a sociological phenomenon in which the same myths propagate among different people groups? It may be that, but death and resurrection is NO LESS, as C. S. Lewis says, “the very pattern of reality.” Indeed, given God’s character and given what he has already done in making the world as our environment, one would EXPECT all of these divine truths to be revealed to us through physical means (this is the essential point), and therefore that they are so revealed casts no doubt at all on their truth.

Allow me to state this general principle one more time, because it is very important. In general, given the context of the physical world as God’s creation, and supposing him to be a God who is involved with creation, one would only EXPECT him to use that creation (evolutionary processes, sociological patterns, our brains, and other things in the world) as a partial means in order to reveal to his creatures things about himself (beauty, moral truth, etc.) that are not simply physical things. After all, God made the physical world – we ought not to be surprised that he continues to make use of it in order to reveal to us spiritual, non-physical realities...

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Religion/Morality as a Product of Evolution?

…A second example: a while ago I saw an advertisement for a seminar entitled “Religion as a product of evolution.” Most Christians, upon seeing this, would have some hesitations. And indeed, many would argue that if religion is a product of evolution, then it would be only that and could not be an accurate description of reality (its claims could not be true). But is it possible that our capability for religious/spiritual thoughts and practices could be attributed both to the physical process of evolution and to a God who is using that process to reveal himself? I think it is. Our tendency as physical beings to develop religious practices and seek a greater spiritual meaning to reality may be due to evolution, but that does not mean it is not also due to God. Rather, if supposing that God exists and is a God that wants to create physical beings that seek after him, one would expect him to create beings with this inclination through a physical process. That spirituality can be thought of in biological terms does not mean that one can think of it no other way. Consequently, one could, for example, think of Christianity both as the one true description of reality and as a way of human thinking that arose due to evolution. God wanted us to understand the big picture of what the world is all about, and he gave us that understanding by means of our physical bodies and the physical process of evolution.

A third example: morality. The idea is exactly the same here. One might initially think that if our moral inclinations can be understood in terms of our sociobiological history as a species, then they are no more than sociobiological phenomena. Equivalently, one might thing that if our understanding of morality takes place within the brain, then morality itself is a biological event. But again, supposing that God exists, has some moral standard, and decides to create physical beings and reveal that morality to them, one would only expect him to cause an awareness of morality to develop in us through evolution, which is, again, God’s physical means of creating beings in his image…

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“Religious Experiences”: Quirks of the Nervous System?

…In the last post, I explained how evolution can be thought of as God’s design – his means for making human beings in his image. This idea can be generalized: God uses the physical world, which he made and which is also, in a sense, “in his image,” as a means to reveal things to human beings, who are both physical and spiritual creatures. This is not to say that God made the universe only for this purpose. Rather, the emphasis is on the fact that the universe was made by God and is therefore not just matter and spacetime and physical things, but physical things that belong to God, who may use it for many purposes, one of which is revelation to human beings.

Allow me to offer three examples of this idea. First, “religious experiences.” Last year in my Psychology 101 class, the professor described how scientists have discovered how to control the nervous system in such a way as to produce in the mind “visions” or “religious experiences.” One might be tempted to jump to the conclusion that this discovery shows that all religious experiences in history are nothing more than events inside the brain just as many have jumped to the conclusion that humans are nothing more than biological byproducts of primordial slime. But our professor stressed that these discoveries have no such implications. Rather, just as one would expect God to use a mechanism like evolution to create humans, one would expect him to use the physical human brain in order to reveal himself. And just as our existence in physical bodies does not contradict the fact that as beings we have spiritual significance, the physical brain as a means of visions does not imply that such visions are devoid of spiritual meaning.

Assuming God wants a given person to see a vision, one would not expect him to halt the laws of nature and bestow the glorious vision from outside the universe right into the person’s brain. Rather, one would expect him to make use of the brain as a means of revelation, just as evolution is a means of creation...

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Evolution: God’s Instrument for Our Creation

…Far from disproving God, evolution fits very well with theism, and in particular with the idea of a Creator who designed the physical world and used it as a means to bring into existence creatures in his image (see “C. S. Lewis on Theistic Evolution”). Suppose God exists and wants to make human beings. Assuming he is a God of order and continuity, one would not expect him to blip humans into existence instantaneously, without any created environment. Rather, one would expect God to prepare for physical human beings a physical world – without such a context, the existence of a physical being would be a jarring and ugly rift in reality. One would expect a God of order to create an entire world, into which the human being will fit with perfect order and continuity, like a puzzle piece – without the world, the physical body makes no sense. And assuming that this God values simplicity, one would not expect him to randomly blip into existence a complex world with incredibly intricate cells and organisms. This too would be arbitrary, lacking order and background. Rather, one would expect God to cause the desired world (which must, in one sense, be complex, because the desired humans are complex) to emerge in a gradual and orderly way from a simple and elegant beginning. In short, if one supposes a God like the “Christian God” to exist, one would expect him to use something like evolution as a means to create humans. And it seems that that is in fact what he has done…

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Evolution Is Not Inherently Atheistic

Most Christians (it seems to me) are not totally OK with evolution – they think that it contradicts the Bible or Christian theology, and/or they doubt that there is sufficient evidence for it. I’ve suggested elsewhere that evolution may not be as blatantly at odds with the book of Genesis as it seems to be, and I’ll defer to the biologists as far as the evidence goes. Here I want to argue that evolution is completely consistent with Christian theology.

Since Darwin, the idea of evolution has developed from a more strictly biological theory almost to a philosophical worldview. It is understood by many to imply naturalism, the philosophy that there is nothing beyond the physical world, and therefore to imply atheism. Indeed, some atheists point to evolution as if it were evidence against God – “science has explained yet another gap in our understanding; evolution demonstrates that science is on track to explain everything and thus entirely to eliminate the need for God.” Reactions to evolution like this, I suspect, cause equally ignorant Christians to take the atheist’s word as truth and therefore anathematize the demonic dogma of Darwinism.

But strictly speaking, evolution is a scientific theory and not a philosophy (the philosophical worldview into which many have stretched it may be termed “atheistic evolutionary naturalism” or something like that). It does not account for the Big Bang or explain the origin of the universe. In short, it does not explain existence, and that is a gap that science will never fill* (see “The Domain of Science”). Evolution accounts only for the development of molecules into cells and organisms – it must assume the existence of molecules as a starting point…

*While science filling one gap does suggest that other gaps will be filled (and by gaps I mean gaps in our knowledge of the physical world, that is, things that science could possibly explain), it does not follow that science will or can provide a full explanation or description of the world, and it certainly does not in the least suggest that science can explain all reality. Things such as beauty, moral values, good and evil, suffering, death, existence, meaning and purpose – these are realities that cannot be described in terms of particles and fields and dimensions. They lie outside the domain of science.

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