Galileo

Interesting account of how people today (particularly those unstudied in the history of ideas) probably misread the Galileo affair: too often as modernists with a modernist view of science and ideas.

Feyerabend in Against Method (quoted, of all people by McCloskey in The Rhetoric of Economics, Jnl of Economic Literature, 1983) has this to say:

Had the modernist criterion of persuasion been adopted by Galileo’s contemporaries, the Galilean case would have failed. A grant proposal to use the strange premise that terrestrial optics applied also to the celestial sphere, to assert that the tides were the sloshing of water on a mobile earth, and to suppose that the fuzzy views of Jupiter’s alleged moons would prove, by a wild analogy, that the planets, too , went around the sun as did the  moons around Jupiter would not have survived the first round of peer review in a National Science Foundation of 1632.

After all, they were Aristotelians back then (as most village-idiot evolutionists today are too).

Just a 'side issue'

It seems that there are Christians who consider the question of origin/the biblical doctrine of creation to be a less important element of the Bible's teaching than, say, the texts directly concerned with salvation.
This thinking is half-baked at best. Is it not important to salvation that we know who God is? He establishes his identity by his being creator, and not some creator that is melded with the creation, that various process theories (e.g. theistic evolution) would require, but one who is sovereign over creation, sub-contracting none of it to mediating factors.
The misconception I refer to above also misunderstands the Bible. It is not finally about salvation, this is just a way station to God's kingdom coming, and the creation sets the scene meaningfully for the great arc of scripture from creation, through fall to resurrection and the new creation. The setting fragments into meaninglessness if God's authorship of creation is other than he sets out, because then we have no idea what it is or who God is, or how he is distinguished from the creation.

Killing kids

I don't usually stray into this area, but it has become necessary.

How to kill children: it tells us that libertarians hate people and individualism is a berserk value.

Dawkins does Dallas

The splitters over in Rome gave me kind permission to link to this review of Dawkins recent film "Why Believe when You Can Dawkins".

Blind leading the blind

I saw a church bulletin today announcing a parish meeting to discuss 'governance and leadership' and a meeting for small group leaders.

Just to translate to Christian terminology and concepts:

The  parish meeting was to discuss how the church would organise its activities and ministries, with small group ministry workers/convenors/moderators meeting afterwards.

Nice that there are proper Christian ways of talking about how we come together in the charismatic community that is the church.

Pity that most want to borrow the buffoonery language of the world.

Who are you, God? 2

Further to God's identity and his activity in creation.

The view that the Genesis account is impressionistic, and that creation 'really' happened otherwise either holds that God could not have created as the account sets out (or he was unable to communicate the connection between his word and its outcome), and that it must be as the materialists say; that is, despite the information in the account, God had to create something else to bring about the creation: a mediator in 'natural law' at best. A created mediator and a mediator of his will other than Christ!

But it goes further; this view disperses God's sovereignty into his creation, and into the domain of pagan speculation that de-personalises creation, putting us in a 'world' where God is not author proximately, but is distant, vague, and un-known-about.

Who are you, God?

A young woman, trained, it appeared, in the Anglican Youthworks College said, without a hint of irony, that the creation account in Genesis was "a sort of poetic response to the pagan myths of that time".

So...let's get this straight: God's revelation is just a response to what pagans say? I don't think so. God is initiator, not respondent! He leads, is not led. He reveals himself. His mission is not to 'disreveal' paganism.

But think further: this view leaves God's chief credential for our worship and his motive for our salvation in the hands of materialism!

Still, at least she didn't trot out the empty framework hypothesis...but she clearly wasn't given any tips about Hebrew poetry either. Perhaps some time with Kugel would help.