My wife and I watched the movie, “The Invention of Lying” last night, starring Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is that the main characters live in a world where everyone tells the truth and no one lies. Part way through the story, Gervais learns how to lie and he uses his gift to reassure his dying mother that there is “a man up in the sky” and a life after death.
On one level, it could be argued that the film is hostile to religion. It is, after all, according to the film, a lie. And the description that Gervais gives of the man up in the sky to people is the worst kind of theology in many ways. Gervais himself also admits at his mother’s grave side that she is there, in the ground, not in heaven.
Now I am not yet sure how I feel about the film, but movies have the power to shape the way we think about the spiritual life, so it is worth making two observations about it. One about religion and God, the other (tomorrow) about relationships.
On God:
The film’s premise about religion is completely bogus. It assumes that for something to be true, there are only certain ways to know that they are true and the truth is all about what we can sense, that is, see, feel, hear, and smell. That’s why religion has to be a lie. But that’s a narrow construal of truth and the way we find it.
It completely overlooks the fact that many of the most powerful truths that shape our lives are truths that cannot be identified with our senses. For example, the love that two people have for one another is not something that can, as such, be sensed. All we can do is point to behaviors that suggest two people love one another.
The same is true of God’s love. For us to know something about God requires a different set of senses, a different way of knowing, and logically, while a knowledge of God has to involve human elements for us to understand it, it is also true that if God is not human, much of what it means to know God takes us into a completely different realm of being. The oldest lie about God is that what God wants for us can’t be anything but a lie.
Tomorrow…The Invention of Lying: On relationships.