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New address: http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/
June 29, 2007 13:19
It's official: I'm now trying using Blogger for blog entries. Please visit the new site at http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/ and let me know what you think. If you prefer the old format or the new, let me know that - your opinion matters! And don't forget to update your RSS feed to the one on the new site.
Thanks for visiting!
Trying something new
June 28, 2007 13:21
This will be the last entry in the current blog format, at least for the time being, while I try using other sites and software to see if I can make my blog more useful.
Got Genesis? Homogenized and Pasteurized!
June 28, 2007 12:52
I've already said plenty, I imagine, on the problem of homogenizing the creation stories in Genesis 1-3. But what about "Pasteurizing" them? Before this is dismissed as nonsense, let me explain. Young-earth creationists regularly refer to Pasteur's work disproving spontaneous generation, and suggest that Pasteur's conclusion that "life does not arise from non-life" disproves a natural explanation for life's origins (actually, they usually confuse matters and suggest that it disproves evolution, but I'll let that one slide for now).
Pasteur was not addressing the question of whether, in ancient earth conditions very different from those today, natural processes could lead to the origin of life. Pasteur was addressing the notion that life forms such as maggots appeared fully-formed in raw mean, mice in cheese, mold on bread, and so on. No scientist thinks that either today or in the past, living things arose in one giant leap like that. The author of Genesis, however, presumably accepted (as did all people in that period in history) idea of spontaneous generation and of the earth's generative power, since he has God command the earth to bring forth living things. So young-earth creationists, in drawing attention to Pasteur's work, have misunderstood it and its relationship to both the scientific study of origins and to the Bible.
By way of follow up to my last post, let me also provide a link to the TalkOrigins page "Quote Mine Project".
Question for Quote-Miners
June 25, 2007 10:58
This is just a brief question for those who mine scientific literature for quotes that appear to cast doubt on the soundness of the theory of evolution. Let me see if I get this straight. There is, you allege, a conspiracy to cover up the fact that evolution is seriously flawed from a scientific perspective. Yet you also claim to find in the writings of eminent evolutionary biologists quotations that acknowledge that evolution is seriously flawed. Can you not see that this makes no sense? How can both these things - that there is a cover-up and that scientists admit evolution is "a theory in crisis" - be true? Isn't this just one more example of how any evidence can be made to fit with your preconceived notions and presuppositions, no matter how incoherent the result? Just one more example of how you deny your own hermeneutical principles by taking scientists' words out of context?
What scientists regularly admit - the meaning of their words in context - is that there is still much to learn. If fundamentalists acknowledged the same thing (which would be an appropriate expression of Christian humility and acknowledgment of our human limitations), having intelligent discussions about matters of importance - whether religious or scientific - would be so much easier, not to mention more productive and illuminating.
A House Built On Sand
June 23, 2007 10:54
One major pitfall of inerrancy and related approaches to Scripture is that, in an effort to avoid any hint of possible contradictions, all symbols and images, all statements and views expressed by the Biblical get authors, all get forced into this harmonizing mold so that at least some of the diverse voices are silenced (and indeed, sometimes all of them are silenced in the process).
A good example can be seen in the children's song "The Wise Man Built His House Upon The Rock". Familiar to many people, it would be easy to miss just how different the message of this song is from the message of the parable Jesus is said to have told in Matthew chapter 7. In its original context, the wise man who builds his house on the rock is a symbol of the person who hears Jesus' words and puts them into practice. In the immediate context, there is an emphasis on the fact that not everyone who calls Jesus "Lord" will be welcomed into his kingdom, but only those who do the Father's will. The attempt to interpret every New Testament document as emphasizing "justification by faith" in the Lutheran sense, as well as the desire to harmonize this parable with the image of Christ as foundation in 1 Corinthians 3:11, has altogether superceded what this text actually says.
On Yahoo! Answers someone recently made the observation that a number of points in Matthew's Gospel seem to be responses to Paul's teaching. To a New Testament scholar, this is a well-known and quite plausible suggestion. Yet more than one person on that forum not only did not immediately understand the rational behind this suggestion, but had never encountered it before.
Fundamentalism persists only where there is a prevailing ignorance of the details of a group's Scriptures and the academic study thereof. The "interpret Scripture by Scripture" approach feeds the tendancy to flatten the Bible to a single voice, and it is not even always the most prominent voice in the Bible. Harmonizing and blending passages from different books leads us to hear what none of them has to say individually. Instead, the appropriate approach is to interpret Paul by Paul (i.e. by appealing to others of his writings), Matthew by Matthew (using other parts of this Gospel to shed light on less clear passages), and then and only then to allow these different authors' viewpoints to dialogue with each other, as we reflect on their meaning - and the significance of those points they agree on and those they do not - for our own lives and communities today.
On Believing We Are Not God
June 22, 2007 10:13
It has been said that they key idea in Christianity and in religion in general is that we, as human beings, are not God. However, I must confess to having had in my fundamentalist days, and to witnessing today among those of a similar mindset, delusions of grandeur that (without realizing) involved usurping divine prerogatives and attributes. Who but God can know all things with such certainty, that they could claim to never need to change their mind? Apparently, many fundamentalists. Just visit any discussion forum online where fundamentalists are present, and you will witness this for yourself.
Fundamentalism identifies religion with certainty of what one knows - not merely in the sense that one may feel as certain that there is a God as one is that there is gravity, but also that one knows for certain historical events, details about the divine nature, and so on. As such, fundamentalism is fundamentally antithetical at a root level to not only education and science, but ultimately (and rather ironically) to religion!
Scientific naturalism and Christian faith - reconciled?
June 21, 2007 09:49
I just finished reading David Ray Griffin's book Two Great Truths: A New Synthesis of Scientific Naturalism and Christian Faith
There is much to be learned from this book. For instance, Griffin informs us that the mechanistic view of the world as acting according to laws (which were at that stage thought of as having been formulated and instituted by God) was a response to an alternative worldview that was popular in the same time period, which can be called "magic naturalism". It suggested that miracles and the apparently supernatural might just be part of the functioning of the world - just things we do not understand yet. This view was felt to be threatening to the Christian faith, because it placed Christian miracles and other claims to the miraculous on an equal footing, and did not allow any of them to vouch effectively for divine revelation. Formulating a worldview in which the miraculous required a divine interruption of the natural was thus felt to support the Christian faith. And it did - for a while. But as we came to understand how more and more of the universe could function according to such "natural laws", there was less and less for God to do most of the time. As so often happens, an argument that is introduced to support a viewpoint ends up eventually undermining it.
Griffin essentially wants to bring back magic naturalism, and abandon the doctrine of creation out of nothing. In so doing, he is persuaded that Christian faith and scientific naturalism can be harmonized. I have a lot of sympathy with the approach of process theology, and panentheism more generally. However, there seemed to me to be a few crucial weaknesses that undermined Griffin's argument. The first, and most important, is that Griffin is duped by pseudoscience. He buys into the intelligent design movement's arguments about "irreducible complexity", and also treats the evidence for psychic phenomena as more persuasive than it is (pp.106-107).
Griffin also argues (following Whitehead) for panexperientialism, since he is persuaded that this is the only way to deal with the problem that would otherwise exist (according to him) of how non-conscious matter can give rise to consciousness (pp.79-80). But this is a non-problem. The same issue could be raised in relation to the way hydrogen and oxygen give rise to water. Does hydrogen or oxygen have some intrinsic, insipient "wetness"? Far from it. This is, instead, an emergent property, and I would argue that we should think about God in the same way in relation to this universe and perhaps to a multiplicity of universes, each of which might be a mere 'cell' in something far greater.
Science does not need to be redefined to make room for God, if in accordance with many great mystical and philosophical traditions, we allow for all that we see to exist "within" God. Indeed, one image that I find very powerful (although one shouldn't take it literally) is the Kabbalistic image of creation popularized in our time by Jurgen Moltmann, of God withdrawing from a certain space in order to create into it. Although not compatible in any literal sense with the view of God as embodied in the universe, symbols and metaphors do not need to be literally compatible. It suggests that our universe and our understanding of it does not have to "make room for God". God is all encompassing, and it is God that has made room for our universe, and for us.