Blog Home
By Month

(Return to my home page) : Blog Home : June 2007

WWJD?
June 1, 2007 10:16

It occurred to me yesterday that the question "What Would Jesus Do?" potentially gets it just about right. It is vague and open-ended, but so were Jesus' teachings. And it focuses on what Jesus would do instead of merely imitating what he did do. Can anyone seriously doubt that, had Jesus lived on earth today, he would not have predicted that he was coming again soon, within a generation (assuming he had the benefit of knowing that roughly 2,000 years had passed since the last time)? If the New Testament authors' claims about the living Christ speaking through them by the Holy Spirit are believed, then they give an indication of precisely this: Jesus continues speaking and as he does so he revises what he said earlier in light of new things, new information, and so on. There is no indication anywhere in the New Testament that this process would end once one has a collected book - on the contrary, parts of Scripture were written, and later authors took those writings and revised them. The inclusion of such works in the New Testament should teach us that we need to go on rewriting and revising. What else could the message be of the canonization of books that rewrote earlier books also included in Scripture? Clearly it presents a pattern we are to follow.

So what would Jesus do? Would Jesus focus his attention on people with skin diseases who are forced to live outside of cities? That is what he did do, but not an issue in the same way today. But Jesus disregarded the purity laws that were considered part of God's law. Jesus himself engaged in some creative uses of Scripture that fundamentalists can scarcely make sense of. In relation to what other issues might we say "Such and such was written in the law because of the hardness of your hearts...", suggesting that Scripture itself does not always accurately reflect the divine will and perspective? These are exciting questions, to which there are no hard and fast answers, but one thing seems clear. Asking what Jesus would do is a lot more radical than many people realize, precisely for those who study the Bible critically, as opposed to reading and quoting it selectively while claiming to believe the whole thing, ignoring in the process the startling principles at work in the interpretation of earlier writings by Jesus and his followers.

What is Christianity?
June 4, 2007 15:44

I deliberately chose to read the two books I am writing about in parallel, more-or-less simultaneously, so as to better be able to reflect on the similarities and contrasts between them. Both are written by authors who are bishops in the Anglican/Episcopal church. One is John Selby Spong's A New Christianity for a New World, while the other is Tom Wright's Simply Christian. Already from their book covers one can get a sense of their different approaches and perspectives. Spong's book is subtitled Why Traditional Faith is Dying and How a New Faith is Being Born, while Wright's is subtitled Why Christianity Makes Sense (the latter being even more starkly in opposition to the title of another of Spong's books, Why Christianity Must Change or Die).

Let me say from the outset that both books reflect a profound spirituality and a deep concern on each author's part to be a Christian and relate this to the world they live in. Spong's book reflects most clearly the modern experience, of becoming aware of the fallibility of tradition and Scripture, of finding that in light of science and reason one cannot simply repeat the same old language in the same old way. Spong is deeply passionate about avoid idolatry, and already in the preface he emphasizes that "To suggest that God and one's own understanding of God are the same is not only to stop growing, it is to die to the quest to truth" (p.xviii). Theism clearly developed, from animism through polytheism and beyond, and so why should one stop at the notion of a God who is a being among others and combines all the possible polytheistic deities into one? (see p.49). We also ought to be suspicious, he warns, when the concept of God we are defending is that of a being whose primary concern is to care for us human beings in our little corner of the planet/galaxy/universe (p.61). Spong states many times throughout the book that he is seeking to continue the work of John A. T. Robinson, whose small but powerful book Honest to God raised the questions Spong also addresses regarding the meaning of God - Spong's aim is like that of Robinson, Tillich and Bonhoffer, namely to rethink our image of God as not merely a being but as Being itself.

Spong states confidently that "Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past" (p.54). Although Spong denies interpreting Jesus as merely a teacher in the manner of classic Liberal Protestantism (pp.147-148), most of the time his approach seems to be precisely that of classic Liberal Protestantism. He believes that the mythical and even the theistic components of the Christian message were additions to it and can be stripped away to reveal a core that will speak to us today. If only he listened to Schweitzer, whose unveiling of the historical figure of Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher who was mistaken about the end of the world brought the original quest for the historical Jesus to a close, and to Bultmann who courageously acknowledged that the mythological is part and parcel of the Gospel, and we must find ways of interpreting the myths themselves in meaningful ways today if we wish to preserve and promote the Christian faith (p.102).

While Spong is clearly what might be called an "old fashioned modernist", Wright speaks more to the postmodern experience, and although his name is never mentioned, it is clear that the postliberal thought of George Lindbeck and narrative theology is at least part of the framework he is working within (p.190). Wright takes an appreciative stance towards not only Christianity but theism, although his theism in which heaven and earth are separate but overlap might also fit the panentheism he mentions but dismisses (pp.58-59,61,128), since he is willing to state that God is not a being in our world (p.56). But Wright's powerfully eloquent prose seeks to tell the Christian story rather than rewrite it. But this does not mean that Wright allows certain conservative and fundamentalist readings of the Bible to dominate - far from it. Wright only rarely addresses such views directly in the sense of discussing concepts like Biblical inerrancy (pp.182-184), but throughout he is seeking to offer a portrait of what it means to be a Christian that challenges fundamentalism and other viewpoints he considers problematic by using the resources provided by the Christian tradition. In other words, the language that Spong finds no longer meaningful, Wright finds meaningful and where necessary he wants to rehabilitate key terms rather than discard them (see e.g. pp.123-124). And so, for example, Wright does not discuss the divinity of Christ, for example, in terms of modernist rationalism: since God is the light in which we see, according to Wright, rather than something we look for, it would make little sense to do so. Yet he offers ways of thinking about the portrait of Jesus in the New Testament that challenges certain understandings that are commonplace in churches today, such as when he suggests that the divinity of Christ is not so much something he possessed and was aware of as a vocation to which he was called (pp.118-119). Such an interpretation is in many ways every bit as radically in contrast to certain conservative Christian assumptions as Spong's, but Wright's radical challenge draws from the Bible rather than drawing from contemporary disdain for the Bible in certain circles.

While Spong writes for those who view Christianity from the standpoint of modernist skepticism (and shares that skepticism), Wright is addressing postmodernists who are disillusioned with attempts to bracket out spirituality and to regard reason and science as all-encompassing and all-powerful. There is an interesting contrast between stories each tells. Spong tells at one point of a deeply moving sermon preached by a student, in which floodwaters begin to rise and threaten to destroy a town, but because of a desire to cling to all the familiar things there, the inhabitants do not flee when they have the chance. The floodwaters are the creeds and other antiquated elements of Christianity that are making it a place impossible for rational people to inhabit. Its language has become meaningless, its patriarchy has become offensive, and yet when we know we should leave these things behind the voice of comfort whispers to us to just leave things as they are (pp.234-236).

Wright also, coincidentally, tells a story about rising waters and a town. In a land where there is a rational (and apparently benevolent) dictator, in response to erratic and at times dangerous springs of water in the area, the whole thing is paved over, so that the inhabitants can get their water through pipes and a system. But eventually the paved-over springs burst forth and break through. This is intended to illustrate the way in which spirituality, stifled and marginalized in the Enlightenment era, is now bursting forth again (pp.17-20). People are thirsty. They are not now always seeking to quench that thirst in a meaningful way, but they are tired of having these aspects of existence paved over and ignored as well. This is the essence of postmodernism, the rediscovery in a Ricoeurian second naivete that there was something valuable in the things the "Age of Reason" set aside as mere superstition.

How does one live within the Christian tradition? This is the question both books are attempting to address, although both leave certain fundamental questions to the side at times. Spong's book is the less satisfying in terms of his understanding of what Biblical stories mean and how to interpret them. It is not surprising that some of the best work in bridging the old and the new in a way that takes the old seriously - whether that of N. T. Wright, John A. T. Robinson, or Rudolf Bultmann - was carried out by people who had expertise in New Testament studies. At times Spong's claims (such as that the New Testament documents are merely stories composed to follow and coincide with lectionary readings) are so far from the mainstream that it makes it hard to take his other statements with which I am sympathetic seriously.

I find more helpful the approach of Keith Ward, who seeks to acknowledge both that Christianity provides a rich wealth of positive resources that can have a positive role in our faith and our world today, while also acknowledging that there are things that we simply cannot accept and continue to pass on today. Both Spong and Wright acknowledge this, in different ways. Spong wants a radical change that rewrites Christianity, while Wright wants a radical change that rediscovers precisely those emphases that much contemporary Christianity misses. Often, both are hoping to see the church move in the same basic direction, in spite of these different approaches.

Wright acknowledges that, for example, when people today latch on to Celtic Christianity and Celtic spirituality as a way of quenching a thirst with waters from these classic ancient sources, few if any of them really want to follow the practices of St. Cuthbert, who stood praying while standing up to his waist in the sea (at Lindisfarne or Holy Island in Northumbria, in the northeast of England - I lived in that area for a number of years and can confirm that the water really is very cold, although it is also a wonderful place that anyone who has the chance ought to visit). Seeking to appreciate and even inhabit a tradition does not mean simply repeating it. Wright has a helpful treatment of authority, in which he suggests that the authority of the Bible and Christian tradition is like the authority of earlier chapters in a novel: characters do not simply repeat things they do in earlier chapters, but their actions in subsequent parts of the story carry forward the directions and impetuses of what went before.

There is surely an extent to which the different visions of Spong and Wright reflect their different national contexts. England has been through the process of secularization, and in spite of its institutional church is in many respects post-Christian. Wright is thus truly addressing an audience that, having had tradition and superstition thoroughly shaken to the ground by the critical thunderstorm of rational inquiry, is ready to go back and see if anything in the rubble can and ought to be saved. America, on the other hand, still seems to be in the heat of modernity's final (or maybe not so final) thrashes of life, as the religion and science discussions (for example) continue to be carried out in the context of an Enlightenment framework, by rationalists and fundamentalists who are both working with the assumptions of modernity. It is striking that Richard Dawkins' writings tend to be most critical of American forms of Christianity and its fundamentalism and young-earth creationism. There is a danger when modernity is given postmodernity before it is ready. If one embraces the postmodern before modernity has had its full impact, it can represent a return to naivete rather than a second naivete. It can be an attempt to avoid the critical power of rational inquiry rather than to see what remains beside and beyond it.

Both Wright and Spong agree that Christianity ought not to be ultimately about some things one believes but about living in the context of a story that shapes our lives (Spong p.243; Wright p.240). Spong's aim is the admirable one of having his grandchildren be able to say "God is real to me, and Jesus is my doorway into this reality" (p.246). But I'll let Wright have the last word, "The church, for all its faults, is at its heart the community of those who are trying to follow Jesus, and in whose company those who are starting to explore these things for themselves may find help, encouragement, and wisdom. As we might say to someone starting to enjoy music: don't just listen to it, find an instrument and an orchestra and join in" (p.240).

Religion and Artificial Intelligence
June 5, 2007 12:07

I've begun working on a project that will be first a conference paper and then a chapter in a book, on the subject of religion and artificial intelligence. I've already done work previously on how religions might view and respond to the development of artificial intelligence. What I'm interested in exploring now is the reverse scenario: how might artificially intelligent machines view human religious traditions. Can you envisage how an android might respond to (and perhaps even adhere to) Buddhism, or Eastern Orthodox Christianity, or atheism? If so, then post a comment - if you tell me who you are, I promise to give due credit where credit is due! (You can send me an e-mail if you don't want to post your information in the comments box). Thanks in advance!

TV makes everything seem credible, so nothing seems credible
June 7, 2007 10:20

I just watched Man of the Year, the movie with Robin Williams. It is highly entertaining, as one might expect, but side-by-side with the levity is a drama about an attempt to cover up the truth about a computer glitch that produced an incorrect result in an election. As the probability that we will move to electronic systems for voting seems increasingly likely, the question of how to safeguard the democratic process in a "virtual election" is one that must be faced.

Although there was a lot that was entertaining in the film, my favorite moment is a non-humorous one, in which a character observes that TV makes everything credible, with the result in the end that nothing is credible. TV debate formats place side-by-side a holocaust denier and a university professor who knows the evidence for the holocaust inside and out. Placing them together in that format gives the impression that they are equals, that there is genuine disagreement between historians about this issue, and that one can simply choose either whichever one prefers. It is a tribute to the intelligence of many scientists that they have refused to debate young-earth creationists for precisely this reason. It also must be noted that one will rarely if ever find the reverse - young-earth creationists who refuse to debate scientists. This is because these creationists are using precisely this facet of the debate format to give themselves credibility through the person they are debating.

The joke that bothered me the most (and with Robin Williams' improvisational style it is inevitable that there would be something) was his character's suggestion that he might try an all-lesbian cabinet, since it would be fun to think about what they were doing behind closed doors. If you try substituting heterosexuals in the joke it quickly becomes clear that there is not only nothing humorous, but that the idea that even if one places heterosexuals who are all in committed relationships with one another on a committee and put them in a room, they will take quickie breaks instead of coffee breaks, is simply ludicrous. To treat gays and lesbians as though their sexuality is the whole of their identity, and that because this is all they are it is the only thing they will do if you put them together in large numbers, is dehumanizing and thus a major part of the problem that perpetuates prejudice in our society.

Yet Robin Williams' character is refreshingly self-deprecating even as a politician. It is when we take ourselves too seriously that it is clear we have issues with self-esteem. If we were all confident enough in who we are that we could not only allow others to make fun of us but could do it to ourselves, what a remarkably different world it would be!

You Know You're Romanian When
June 8, 2007 14:15

Evolution Science News and Resources
June 8, 2007 14:40

Let me share a few useful links that have recently been made available. The Pharyngula blog takes apart Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution. The National Center for Science Education is shown to be doing its job, since there is a disgruntled page about them and particularly Eugenie Scott on the Answers in Genesis site. It is particularly laughable when they berate her for not having appropriate sympathy for Kent Hovind's plight, and for criticizing arguments which they thankfully no longer use but probably (like other creationists) used to in the past (their web site existed earlier, but only seems to have featured a warning about not using the Paluxy tracks as evidence for dinosaur-human co-existence in 2001.

Other new and useful resources include the paper by Barbara Forrest entitled "Understanding the intelligent design creationist movement: Its true nature and goals" and a lengthy critique of Jonathan Wells' book Icons of Evolution.

Natural processes and elaborate complex structures
June 9, 2007 15:38

Imagine you are wandering through the microscopic world when you happen across a pillar with a perfectly-matching geometric shape on each end. Will you not, as in the case of Paley's famous watchmaker example, know that this has been designed by a higher intelligence? [Please do click on the link - it really is an amazing picture, too large to include in the blog frame].

You might have that impression, but in fact the structure I'm talking about, while awe-inspiring and breathtaking, is the result of natural processes. It is, in fact, a component of a snowflake, and we know a great deal about the natural meteorological processes that produce them. Indeed, in the micro-world that is currently the focus of Intelligent Design's "irreducible complexity" arguments, many more things that occur naturally seem to have the sorts of characteristics we tend to associate with intelligent human production, yet we know that they were produced by the interactions of law and chance typical of the natural world that we inhabit.

Format is everything
June 10, 2007 17:07

I tried unsuccessfully to make some formatting changes to the blog entries, so as to make it easier to find and link to individual entries. I've been reluctant to change to a different software or form of blog, since it would mean starting over from scratch. Let me know what you think of the present format, and how it might be improved, and whether the advantages other blogs have might outweight the advantages of this distinctive format and maintaining continuity.

Facebook
June 11, 2007 12:53

I've been trying to expand my participating in groups relating to my interests on Facebook. My colleagues and I have also created a facebook page for the religion program here at Butler University. If you are a prospective student or a high school student wondering about universities and majors, join the group and talk to some of the faculty and students. There is also a facebook page (just created today) for the Center for Faith and Vocation, which is the home for campus ministries at Butler.

Exposing Creationist Hypocrisy
June 12, 2007 13:03

That there is hypocrisy in any movement will surprise no one, but recently while reading Defending Evolution it struck me how certain arguments regularly used by young-earth creationists explicitly and blatantly contradict some of their other most cherished and most emphasized assumptions.

Let's begin with the interpretation of the Bible. Most creationists will tell you (and rightly so) that it is crucially important to take context seriously when interpreting the Bible. For example, simply taking the days in Genesis 1 as symbolic of longer ages without consideration of difficulties in the text is inappropriate. The text clearly mentions evening and morning as constituting a day, and so not only are these "literal 24 hour days", but they are more specifically days according to Jewish reckoning, beginning at sundown.

This does not mean, of course, that the creationists are "right" about a literal 6-day creation in the recent past. While Genesis 1 does depict a literal working-week of the Creator, surely the idea that a divine work-week must be literal is no more obvious than that the Creator's throne or arm must be literal. It depicts a literal 6-day week, but the week is every bit as symbolic as the rest afterwards, which no interpreters of the Bible that we know of, ancient or modern, takes literally. Anyone who believes God does not tire and need rest cannot argue for a purely literal understanding of this creation story in Genesis.

Returning to my main point, creationists rightly emphasize the importance of context in Biblical interpretation. Yet they constantly take quotations from scientists who support evolution out of context and present them as though they are evidence of scientists acknowledging problems with evolution. If someone treated the Bible this way, and said "The Bible says that there is no God", they would quickly point out that in context it says "the fool says in his heart that there is no God". But they themselves do the exact same thing with quotes from experts in evolution, whose words are taken out of context and made to mean something they could never be possibly be understood to mean in context.

Another example of creationist hypocrisy is their claim that evolution is not science because it supposedly cannot be observed, and they argue that anything that cannot be observed cannot be science. If so, this undercuts intelligent design immediately - if one cannot reason from currently-existing objects (such as bacterial flagellum) to past causes/influences (such as an intelligent designer), then ID is no more. And so it is that young-earth creationism and intelligent design are shown to be absolutely incompatible, indeed antithetical to one another.

Back to the hypocrisy. Ken Ham in a famous video clip advised anyone who heard scientists talk about "millions of years" to ask "Were you there?" Oh, how this question needs to be turned around on those who claim to know that God created the world in 6 days, that a flood covered the earth, and so on. Were you there? No one claims that any of the possible authors of the Biblical creation stories was present at creation, or that Noah himself wrote about the flood. If you wish to make such claims about the past, you cannot do so without allowing that artifacts that now exist can provide reliable information about the past. In other words, if creationists are right on this point, then they cannot claim to know anything about creation, flood, or anything else that is central to their belief system.

Observation is not all there is to science. Observation is important, but science has since the origins of what we think of as modern science been about explanatory theories that can make sense of what we observe and explain it in terms of underlying principles. No human being has seen the earth orbit the sun, and yet this theory is not controversial, in spite of the fact that it contradicts a literal reading of the Bible. Criminology and forensics are attempts to investigate the past (as are history, certain branches of science, and other disciplines). If creationists' claims are true, then we can save large sums of taxpayers' money by not prosecuting crimes unless there are eyewitnesses.

But it is here that the problematic character of young-earth creationist claims becomes most apparent. In criminal investigations, not only do we not rely solely on eyewitness testimony, but we are well aware that such testimony is not always reliable, even when it seeks to be (which it doesn't always). Hard data and concrete evidence trump testimony, and that is as it should be. If the creationists would simply apply the same principles in discussions of origins, biology, and cosmology, they would not allow ancient testimony to trump the masses of hard data and solid evidence we have available in the present.

The Lost Ending Of Mark's Gospel
June 14, 2007 11:41

The ending (or I should say the apparent lack of ending) of Mark's Gospel has long intrigued scholars. It provides great potential for a conspiracy theory, of course, and recently there have been attempts to suggest that the abrupt ending in our earliest manuscripts was intentional. It is difficult, however, to make sense of a book that ends with a prediction that Jesus will be seen, and then a statement that the few who were told about this, and most importantly were told where to go in order to see him, said absolutely nothing about it! The dissatisfaction of early readers is clear from the fact that not only did 2 or 3 scribes add endings of their own to the Gospel, but Matthew and Luke (who clearly used Mark as a source), as well as others who told the same story, all felt compelled to say more.

So what could possibly have followed the last verse we have, which says they said nothing to anyone because they were afraid? Presumably the disciples would have returned to Galilee, to their earlier lives, and perhaps in that setting they nonetheless had experiences of encounters with Jesus, experiences that a historian cannot hope to say anything concrete about except that they persuaded a group of Jesus' disciples that he was alive.

We seem to have remnants of this original ending of Mark in the Gospel of Peter as well as in chapter 21 of the Gospel of John. Such a meeting by the seashore as the disciples were fishing would have provided a nice inclusio to Mark's Gospel, in which the first meeting of the (future) disciples with Jesus takes place in a seaside fishing setting.

B. H. Streeter made this suggestion back in 1924, but it has not been given the attention it deserves. We need to ask the question as well of when and how the account of the discovery of the empty tomb became part of the Easter story. Did the women eventually tell? Or was the lack of telling simply a way of grafting in this previously unknown story into the better-known earlier form of the story? If the disciples went back to Galilee, how long was it before some of them returned to Jerusalem? Had the tomb already been found empty by others before this, or did they find the tomb empty some months or years later and tell the empty tomb story to deal with it? When our evidence is as fragmentary as it is in this case, it is hard for a historian to proceed, but certainly there is much more involved in a historical discussion of the rise of Christian faith in the resurrection that simply reading the New Testament narratives.

Creationists play "Whack-a-mole"...but the mole always wins
June 15, 2007 11:47

I had an interesting experience asking a question on Yahoo! Answers. I asked how creationism or intelligent design would account for the fact that moles have non-functional eyes. Moles with no eyes I could conceivably explain in terms of their being created to live in the darkness digging through the soil. But why give them eyes that don't work (and in many cases have skin and fur growing from them)? Evolution makes sense of this, fundamentalist creationism doesn't.

I was astonished that there were people who would sooner deny that moles are blind than critically examine their presuppositions, much less change their beliefs. Whatever one may think about the observability or otherwise of evolution, moles clearly are observable (in fact, this whole line of thought resulted from trying to deal with them in my garden!). Their eyesight can and has been tested. That someone would deny this blows my mind more than denial of evolution does. You may need a certain degree of education to grasp the finer points of evolutionary biology. You don't need any particular sort of diploma to figure out a way to tell whether or not moles can see.

Another person suggested this was a result of the fall. What did the poor mole do - look lustfully at other creatures? Were the ostrich and the penguin collaborating with the snake, and that is why they are flightless?! The creationists would return us to the days of creating aetiological myths instead of seeking scientific explanations. Suggesting that moles got "zapped" (perhaps by accident, being in the earth when it was cursed) by God does not present God in a more appropriate or more Biblical fashion than theistic evolution. Not by a long shot.

Intelligent Design's Informational Fallacy
June 18, 2007 09:07

Intelligent Design in the strict sense, as represented by Behe and Dembski, focuses a great deal of attention on the concept of "information". DNA has often been compared to an alphabet, and the instructions encoded in it to a language, and so that someone would take such ideas somewhat literalistically is not surprising.

What is most fallacious about the ID position, however, is that it assumes what it has to prove. Information, language, specified complexity, such as is found in human artefacts, is "not natural". But in actual fact, the very question being asked is whether we, and the diverse life forms with which we share the world, are "natural" or not. What is clear is that, by the time we got here to ask the question, the whole universe and our little ecosystem were already here, functioning, with molecules that form human beings already self-replicating and passing on their "information". And the suggestion that language, construction, computing, and other human creations are "artificial" begs the question, since it assumes that we ourselves are not "natural". But it could easily (and perhaps more naturally, if you'll excuse the pun) be argued that we can only affirm the reverse - not that DNA must have been intelligently designed because it seems to some observers to be similar to human creations in certain respects, but that we are capable of using language and processing information because we are made of "information-processing stuff". Indeed, some recent studies suggest that this may be true not simply of DNA but of matter and energy more generally.

I recently watched the movie Children of Men, which paints a bleak depiction of a human near-future in which infertility has swept the globe and no child had been born for 18 years. Scientists had not managed to explain the situation, much less solve it, and most societies had broken down into utter chaos. Rather than simply tell us that schools were now deserted, the filmmakers simply have the main characters take refuge in an abandoned elementary school, in a poignant and moving moment. The film has messianic overtones (as the one woman who has become pregnant jokes that she is a virgin, but also as the fighting stops as people see what they have not for the longest time, a baby, and with the stance of mother and child and even the lighting and other facets at times resembling depictions of the Madonna in the Catholic tradition).

Not surprisingly, one common human response to the crisis is religious fanaticism. Indeed, even characters who might not be called fanatical are more openly religious than we are used to seeing, and more of them are religious too. But while not wishing to suggest that calls to repentance in such circumstances are entirely inappropriate, we ought to recognize that "God closed her womb", the phrase found in the Bible, was the only explanation available. Today, when we discover endometriosis or other conditions that might hinder pregnancy, most of us do not assume that God has singled out the person and directly caused this condition. Instead, we seek treatment, and often it helps. If in coming decades we are confronted by infertility, plagues, famines, global warming and other crises that affect the whole planet and not individuals, I hope we will seek answers from science, and not allow fanaticism and irrationality to divide and undermine us, with the result that any hope of a scientific solution is seriously compromised. And in particular, if we find the next generations of fundamentalists saying that the heating of our planet is a warning of hellfire to come, let us not forget their unwillingness to do something about it in our time.

There are mysteries about existence that may never be resolved, and certainly there are many that will not be resolved anytime soon. Rather than stopping investigations and saying "God did it", we should let science do its best. Reason and investigation cannot explain everything, but they have done a far better job than anything else human beings have come up with, and deserve to be appreciated rather than denigrated and cast aside at the first sign of failure.

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, which is a highly condensed presentation of a perspective on religion and science from the perspective of process theology, building on and summarizing conclusions he has argued for in greater detail elsewhere.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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".

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.

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!

May 2007 «