A friend and I were discussing On the Road, Kerouac's famous 'beat' novel of the 1950s. Sal and his pals madly drive about the USA, adrift, no centre for their souls, no place in the world, they are just...adrift.
They are located in a world were the personal has no real connection with being, where persons are solipsistic fragments drifting like plankton in an ocean (I'm reminded of Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being) and relationships' only parameter is proximity.
Cut life away from the truly personal ground of being (apologies to Tillich), and it drifts madly like Sal: always yearns, never has satisfaction, the soul gapes at life, but can't find the connection to truly participate in it. He never finds, and never can find what he seeks: he gropes for an integrating universal that makes the sense his mad racing around after something that will bring it all together he seeks to lift his experience above the randomness of dust blowing in wind.
29 January 2015
27 January 2015
Any time you like
In a conversation with most Anglican theistic evolutionists, or 'long age' creationists, you'll come to some sort of argument that the days of Genesis 1 do not mean days like we experience them, but something else. The 'something else' is, of course, indeterminate periods of time, or epochs, or some long period that correlates with modern 'geological time'.
I don't think they realise that in relying on this move to save their accommodation of naturalism they have left biblical theism and adopted a pagan approach where the truth is obscure, hidden, not amenable to any but the 'adepts'. Our world in paganism is shrouded in non-causal mystery and we are not free.
The Bible frames our world and relationship with God differently. It is open. We know who we are and who God is. It is revelation, not occult (hidden). The creation in Genesis is part of the great arc of revelation that ends in Christ and sets us free.
I don't think they realise that in relying on this move to save their accommodation of naturalism they have left biblical theism and adopted a pagan approach where the truth is obscure, hidden, not amenable to any but the 'adepts'. Our world in paganism is shrouded in non-causal mystery and we are not free.
The Bible frames our world and relationship with God differently. It is open. We know who we are and who God is. It is revelation, not occult (hidden). The creation in Genesis is part of the great arc of revelation that ends in Christ and sets us free.
23 January 2015
It's about time
There's an old saw in the world of engineering that goes like this: anyone could build a safe, efficient bridge; but an engineer will do it first time, anyone else might take decades of trial and error: expensive, dangerous and wasteful.
The application of intelligent capability achieves the objective parsimoniously. Any other approach is profligate and depletative: it wastes resources and impedes society.
I've heard similar thinking applied to biblical creation: an intelligent agent, all other factors being equal, will do something more quickly than an unintelligent agent. This works in exams: smart students get more right answers more quickly than non-smart students.
Hilariously, some Anglicans, I've been told will attempt to rebut this, saying that a really smart person might take their time to 'get it all right'. But this is an obduracy.
God is clear about the tempo of creation: it is rapid. He uses terms that are meaningful within the creation he is speaking about (i.e. "day", "evening and morning") and are unambiguous. He even counts them to drive the point.
Evolutionists seem to acknowledge this point too, in that I've heard some say that while evolution is improbable, given enough time, almost anything can happen (this omits to consider that natural randomness can only produce results that are possible. Evolution has not been shown to even be possible). Leave intelligence out of it. Given time, a non-agent can achieve an outcome that only an agent could achieve in short time! QED.
The application of intelligent capability achieves the objective parsimoniously. Any other approach is profligate and depletative: it wastes resources and impedes society.
I've heard similar thinking applied to biblical creation: an intelligent agent, all other factors being equal, will do something more quickly than an unintelligent agent. This works in exams: smart students get more right answers more quickly than non-smart students.
Hilariously, some Anglicans, I've been told will attempt to rebut this, saying that a really smart person might take their time to 'get it all right'. But this is an obduracy.
God is clear about the tempo of creation: it is rapid. He uses terms that are meaningful within the creation he is speaking about (i.e. "day", "evening and morning") and are unambiguous. He even counts them to drive the point.
Evolutionists seem to acknowledge this point too, in that I've heard some say that while evolution is improbable, given enough time, almost anything can happen (this omits to consider that natural randomness can only produce results that are possible. Evolution has not been shown to even be possible). Leave intelligence out of it. Given time, a non-agent can achieve an outcome that only an agent could achieve in short time! QED.
9 January 2015
Dr Who
The episode of Dr Who in series 8 (reduced price DVDs at the ABC shop) "Listen" is probably the best Dr Who episode that I've seen.
It doesn't have in it creepy robots, historical figures, spooky aliens or the such. It has just three characters, or four if you count the time traveller who really is an echo of character number 3: Dan Pink.
The episode is an existential confrontation with our end-state as had by materialism: there is nothing. Ironically it starts with the Doctor musing on the evolution of hunters, and reflecting on how an organism would have evolved to be always hidden; its end objective? To listen.
Dr and his girl-pet travel to the end of time and the edge of the universe (both metaphysically interesting concepts) where there is no one. All life gone, all is but matter and about to vanish. The aching alone-ness is courted in the script, but tantalizingly avoided in the question that the one that listens may be there. This theme is played with in a run through the time travel paradox loved of science fiction writers. That the characters confront the question raises the great materialist promise: one has finally no significance and is not distinguishable from the mute matter of the universe. But no one lives this way: the characters cannot live as though this is true; they live as though there is final significance; that the personal is above matter and history.
Modern materialism has at its heart a confusion: it relies on the Christian significance of the person and the basic underpinning of the personal, but cannot deliver this in its dogma.
It doesn't have in it creepy robots, historical figures, spooky aliens or the such. It has just three characters, or four if you count the time traveller who really is an echo of character number 3: Dan Pink.
The episode is an existential confrontation with our end-state as had by materialism: there is nothing. Ironically it starts with the Doctor musing on the evolution of hunters, and reflecting on how an organism would have evolved to be always hidden; its end objective? To listen.
Dr and his girl-pet travel to the end of time and the edge of the universe (both metaphysically interesting concepts) where there is no one. All life gone, all is but matter and about to vanish. The aching alone-ness is courted in the script, but tantalizingly avoided in the question that the one that listens may be there. This theme is played with in a run through the time travel paradox loved of science fiction writers. That the characters confront the question raises the great materialist promise: one has finally no significance and is not distinguishable from the mute matter of the universe. But no one lives this way: the characters cannot live as though this is true; they live as though there is final significance; that the personal is above matter and history.
Modern materialism has at its heart a confusion: it relies on the Christian significance of the person and the basic underpinning of the personal, but cannot deliver this in its dogma.
5 January 2015
No concrete?
A lot of Christians, and even some non-Christians, regard Genesis 1 as symbolic: symbolic that God is creator, but empty of content about his creating. As one minister I heard put it; he doesn’t regard it as ‘concrete’.
Where does this leave us?
Where indeed, when on this view the act that God grounds his self-identity in has no concrete meaning in the world that he created! The world by which its meaning is established.
The proponent has to explain what it means that God is creator, when the content of the only thing he could be referring to does not refer to anything that has happened in the time and space that cirscumscribes the creation.
Thus, when God tells us he is creator, we cannot really understand what this means, particularly if evolutionary dogma is taken as the real information about ‘creation’: this has no place for God at all but turns the Bible’s world upside down placing God as a social afterthought in the minds of those who are randomly assembed dust.
Or did God guide evolution? Seeing that similar ideas were available in ancient times, it is a surprise that the writer to the Hebrews resolutely opposes them, and the ‘principles’ they imagine that operate in the world when he says: what is seen is the result of God's word, not prior visible things Heb 11:3, and the works were complete from the foundation: Heb 4:3. Together these verses tell a very different story from the retrospective evacuation of meaning from Genesis 1, which only leaves us materialism with its pagan references for what ‘creation’ means and for the dimensions of God’s identity.
Where does this leave us?
Where indeed, when on this view the act that God grounds his self-identity in has no concrete meaning in the world that he created! The world by which its meaning is established.
The proponent has to explain what it means that God is creator, when the content of the only thing he could be referring to does not refer to anything that has happened in the time and space that cirscumscribes the creation.
Thus, when God tells us he is creator, we cannot really understand what this means, particularly if evolutionary dogma is taken as the real information about ‘creation’: this has no place for God at all but turns the Bible’s world upside down placing God as a social afterthought in the minds of those who are randomly assembed dust.
Or did God guide evolution? Seeing that similar ideas were available in ancient times, it is a surprise that the writer to the Hebrews resolutely opposes them, and the ‘principles’ they imagine that operate in the world when he says: what is seen is the result of God's word, not prior visible things Heb 11:3, and the works were complete from the foundation: Heb 4:3. Together these verses tell a very different story from the retrospective evacuation of meaning from Genesis 1, which only leaves us materialism with its pagan references for what ‘creation’ means and for the dimensions of God’s identity.
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