25 February 2011

Dembski's Theodicy

When I first read Andrew Hodge’s review of Dembski’s “The End of Christianity” in the Journal of Creation, I regarded Dembski’s views as being arcane speculation. I did not expect them to become present in everyday Christian discourse. But subsequently to reading the review, I found that they had!

A Christian worker of my acquaintance used an approach similar to Dembski’s to answer a question as to how there could be death before the Fall. This was done in a group discussion, but did not itself evoke much comment, unfortunately. It certainly didn’t bring discussion of the logical circle that Hodge sets out in the review, which ends with God being the author of evil.

And here, I think we see the basic theological problem of theistic evolution: not that it puts death before the fall, which it does, and which is obviously a problem, it being at first counter-scriptural then making the evidence of the dissolution of relationship between God and creature come to effect before the actual dissolution; but that it makes the action of evil inherent in the creation. Thus it makes to be evil part of what God has done out of his nature, and termed ‘very good’. This is simply incoherent. It makes God the author of ‘not-God’ and therefore by nature to include his own inversion. Interestingly Barth does this very thing in this statement in his commentary on Romans 8:21, 22 “All things...observed by men are hidden in God...good and evil” (Oxford edition, p. 309). It ends up more Zoroastrian than Christian, to my mind.

The notion has a number of other effects as well.

It seems to ignore that temporal order was created by God as part of the organising structure of experience within his creation. To upend this and have his creation show the dislocation of the fall prior to the fall makes nonsense of sequence, justice and causality. Indeed, if this had been part of orthodox theology, I doubt if science and reason would have taken root as the temporal anti-causality of Dembski’s theology would remove their basis in the created world (that which God has created as Real). Such an outworking would be reminiscent of the anti-temporality of some contemporary philosophical discussion that pops up in both critical theory particularly, and some flavours of post-modernism (refer, for instance to Fredric Jamison and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s glee at the displacement of history’s ‘grand narratives’ by post-modern language games, notwithstanding the irony of their inevitable reliance on strict temporality for actual communication).

Dembski seems to have also set out to rather glibly solve a problem that his commitment to naturalist chronology creates; but glibness here leads to another theological error. The results of the fall in death and dissolution are because relationship with God is broken. God steps back from his creation, as it were (signified in his having to seek Adam, and not know him in confraternity: loss of loving intimacy and life sustaining involvement has occurred) within the temporal framework of that creation. Adam, as the steward of the creation has rejected and ejected God from fellowship in his life by particular action at a particular time (notwithstanding the interpretation of Calvinism that has God in relationship trampling over his own creation of temporality, sequence and his image in man): the creation thus cut loose from the author and source of life must experience death and decay, frustration and failure.

To have the creation simultaneously be in fellowship with God and out of fellowship with God, which is what Dembski’s theodicy requires, has to be explained, not just presented by an off-hand and illogical assertion.

The final consequence is that Dembski’s ‘effect of the fall before the event of the fall’ theology is, as I’ve touched on above, destroys the temporal structure the Bible, gives to interaction patterns. It forces the adoption of a cyclical indeterminacy that turns its back on temporality, makes chronology meaningless and runs against biblical thought. This, if it truly did emerge with any real grounds from the Bible, would align Christian (and Jewish) theology with the types of pagan anti-temporal structures that Eliade discusses in “The Myth of Eternal Return”, and would undermine revelatory historicity with dire implications for the incarnation. In these terms, Dembski’s adoption of the concept of kairology is interesting as it makes time subjective (which is quite workable in many day to day ways: 'eat when hungry' is an example), but risks melding this into a pagan package of impersonal spiritualist subjectivity, countering the highly involved personal spiritual objectivity of the scriptures.

Finally, it is simple to rebut Dembski’s parallel between the sufficiency of Christ for redemption across history, and applying the fall contrary to causality irrespective of the flow of history. The first case is an act of will: God decides, a-temporally, that Christ’s work will have trans-temporal effect, because in fact it makes life triumph over death, and so must swallow up death (irrespective of what would end up to be transient temporal effects); but the second case is a matter of an event sequence within the creation where God has provided time as the mechanism of experiential structure, causal sequence and consequential moral responsibility or, to adopt a quip: “to stop everything happening at once”, which is precisely what Dembski wants to have happened!

20 February 2011

Related

The Bible is premised on the relationship of God and his creation, specifically God and mankind, where the relationship is personal: that is, as between persons.

For the relationship to substantiated as real, it has to have a real basis; a point of connection. For example, the marriage relationship for Christians, is given a basis in reality in the wedding ceremony, where a covenental connection between man and woman is made.

A parallel to this is the connection that God demonstrates with his creation in the creation account in Genesis 1-2 (and 3 for that matter, to give in a soteriological fulsomness). The link between the two is not just asserted, but shown. Shown in terms that are part of the fabric of reality between God and humanity (the fabric created by God, which is part of the substance of the account). In both participating in the shared fabric, we and God are shown to be sharing an ontological domain that makes sense of communion (relational concourse), expectations, relationship and covenant.

If the words of the account have no connection with the reality they assert to recount (that is the account means other than it specifically states, and sets out its propositional content only to infer a vaguely stated 'real' on the basis of a clearly stated non-real) then the intersection of our and God's being is not validly given and there is no indication of joint participation in a shared domain, or 'fabric'. That is, the parameters that would show the participation are invalid. If this were so, then the creation account would be meaningless, and convey no content that was propositionally fruitful: it would tell us nothing and undercut the notion that there was a basis for our connection with God.

If God could not tell us the basis in meaningful propositions, then it would be fair to think that there was no basis in the reality that would put God and us into relationship.

15 February 2011

Enuma Elish

Many years ago I recall a discussion on the Anglican Media forum about the influence of Enuma Elish on Genesis chapter 1.

Kitchen, among others denies that there is a link, but this came back to mind when I was reading Creator and Creation by Simkins, where he says:

Certainly the Enuma Elish is the most elaborate Mesopotamian creation myth, but it is doubtful that it represents the predominant Mesopotamian view of creation. One prominent Assyriologist even characterized it as a sectarians and an aberrant combination of mythological threads that have been woven in to an unparalleled composition (Lambert, 1965). Although he perhaps depicted the myth too narrowly, he has rightly cautioned us against overemphasizing this myth in understanding the Mesopotamian view of creation. Some scholars have even argued that the Enuma Elish is a foreign import into Mesopotamia. The textual evidence suggests that there is no single tradition that made up the Mesopotamian view of creation.

12 February 2011

Dinosaurs in Eden?

In an article in the current (Feb 11) Southern Cross, the Sydney diocesan newspaper, there is an article on 'dating' (romantic, not geological), quoting:

"My father always told me that the Bible tells us what we need to know, not what we want to know.

For a child who wanted to know if Dr Who was real and whether or not dinosaurs were running around in the Garden of Eden, this was a disappointing answer to my queries"


How interesting that the connection of the Bible with the real world, at its beginning, as it creates the framework for understanding that God's word and the real world converge in God's revelation (and thus the word making sense of the world), is (a) anticipated by a child, but rejected by an adult, and that information about the grounding of salvation history in the totality of the history of the creation is something we presumably don't need to know, although we might want to know it.

The Bible, however, does seem to think that we do need to know such things; the pity is that many today think that the Bible is wrong on this and the identity of the world created, the act of creation and our experience of God expressed in the Bible is not necessary to know! An extraordinary traducing of the Bible's 'view" of itself!

Now, were dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden; of course, it is logically possible, seeing that all creatures were made on day 6.

8 February 2011

Two books

I commented on an article I saw that mentioned the 'two books' notion that is supposed to make the Bible and contemporary interpretations of the created world (note, not the created world itself, although this is hoped to be understood, but the interpretations, which are if not completely tendentious, then at least programatic).

I know it's popular in heterodoxy, but the 'two books' idea is nonsensically overdone, in my view. One book is clearly a book: the Bible, the other is a book only by metaphor. Yet, how often are books about the metaphor book used to interpret the Bible, and the possibility of the Bible: which is a real book full of propositions, doing some interpreting of the metaphorical book is rejected?

At root, I think this position entails a philosphy that at its start fails to be informed by the Bible, and has its roots in paganistic idealism, where a non-real world is the only one the Bible is allowed to occupy; its statements of connection with this world expressly denied to enable its rejection!

6 February 2011

Genesis literary?

From Al Mohler's talk at last year's Ligonier Conference:

The idea that Genesis (1-11) is merely literary has to be rejected out of hand as in direct contradiction to our understanding of the Bible as the infallible word of God.

The framework theory is one of the least defensible positions when we understand that it is based upon the assumption that there not only may be a long period of time in Genesis 1 and the sequence of days, but actually that the sequence does not matter. It simply is not credible that God gave us this text with such rich detail and sequential development merely that we would infer from it his providential direction without any specific reference to all of the direct content he has given us within the text!

Even a commonsense reading of the text indicates that it is making historical and sequential claims.


As Pipa says, it contains so many time and sequence markers that it is as though the writer is going out of his way to drive the point that this text relates events that occur in time as we experience time, and with a tempo that we can make sense of given our own experience of the succession of days.

The unitary construction of the chiasm in Genesis one emphasises the point: this text sits as a unit, self contained, and understandable within its own terms.

5 February 2011

Conflict on evolution

Al Mohler gets discussed in this Baptist article.

All the fluff that gets discussed in Christian circles about there being a non-issue between evolution and creation has to die on quite a number of verses in the Bible. For instance, Hebrews 11:3 tells us that "the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible" which is the very opposite of the evolutionionary claim that what is seen WAS made out of what is visible. QED, in my view!

I've posted on Mohler before, and will do so again.