How do I know who you are?

Quote from von Foerster's 1995 article Ethics and Second-order Cybernetics
(emphasis mine):

However, we do not need to go to Russell, Whitehead, Godel, or to other giants, to learn about in principle undecidable questions, we can easily find them all around.

 For instance, the question about the origin of the universe is one of those in principle undecidable questions: nobody was there to watch it. Moreover, this becomes apparent by the many different answers that are given to this question. Some say it was a single act of creation some 4 or 5,000 years ago; others say there was never a beginning and there will be never an end, because the universe is a system in perpetual dynamic equilibrium; then there are those who claim that approximately 10 or 20 billion years ago the universe came into being with a "Big Bang," whose faint remnants one is able to hear over large radio antennas; but I am inclined to trust most Chuang Tse's report, because he is the oldest and was therefore the closest to this event. He says:

Heaven does nothing; this nothing-doing is dignity;
Earth does nothing; this nothing-doing is rest;
From the union of these two nothing-doings arise all
action
And all things are brought forth.

I could go on and on with other examples, because I have not told you yet what the Burmese, the Australians, the Eskimos, the Bushmen, the Ibos, etc., would tell us about their origins. In other words, tell me how the universe came about, and I will tell you who you are.

Darwin blooper

A suprising place to find a Darwin quote:

On the Herding Cats project management blog.

I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone - well Darwin wasn't connected with the reality of the times was he?

Trinity

During a discussion at a recent Alpha course session, someone gave an illustration of the Trinity using aspects of computing:

Using a typical business computer requires that three units of software work together: the application (e.g. word processor), the operating system (e.g. MacOS) and the bottom layer of code: firmware or microcode.

To use the word processor all three levels of software are involved: they all cooperate intimately; none works without the other; all three are completely unified in achieving a system outcome. All are totally 'software'; they all have 'software nature', but each has an independent identity, yet all work in harmony.

For the user, the work between the layers is invisible: they cannot tell which layer is doing what; but all work for the outcome.

Seemed pretty good to me. Software is a 'three in one' deal.

Father Brown

The Father Brown detective series has just started on ABC-TV (21 Saturday evenings), based on the character by G. K. Chesterton.
In the first episode a character, evidently an entomologist, says words to the effect: "...evolution makes God superfluous..." To which Brown replies with some twaddle about the unfolding understanding of God's work, or something similar.
The character has it right, of course, and, of course, evolution is but a pack of pooh tickets, but the great irony is that Chesterton would be unlikely to have given such words to Brown, as Chesterton himself was decidedly averse to the idea of evolution!

Collider

In an interview on the Megastructures episode on the CERN Large Hadron Collider, Dr Dave Barney, the CMS Outreach coordinator, said:

...what we are doing is just...trying to find out what we are made of, where we come from and what the universe is like...

Or, to decode:

1. "what we are made of": science
2. "where we come from": not in the domain of science: so, religion (probably the religion of materialism in this case)
3. "what the universe is like": both science and religion. To enquire about the universe requires axioms of departure for the enquiry. These are not established by science, but by a basic ontology and the epistemology that derives from it; thus religion, broadly defined.

Theologians who bend in the wind of evolutionary speculation misunderstand point 2 and act as though they hadn't thought of point 3 and the significance of Genesis 1 as the basis of our 'first philosophy'. But that is Gen 1 as grounded event sequence; not as ungrounded idealism.

It doesn't matter...

God created; we know that. It just doesn't matter when (or how, or over how long...).
This is a common enough view amongst Anglican clergy persons. I was going to write 'position' but I don't think that the notion is well enough thought out to be elevated to a 'position'.

No, its just a view, fairly ill-formed, if not completely uninformed, at that. And, I don't mean with respect to current debates, but I mean with respect to the 'biblical data' as theologians like to say, as if the Bible is a mere theological data mine to sustain their occupations (humph!).

The trouble with this view is that it does matter when and how and over how long that God created, because all these are elements of how God's creation is communicated and defined in the Bible, and are therefore part of what God's creation means: they establish its ontology and its historical placement with respect to us. They delimit creation in the Bible, showing its attachment to the world we are in. Indeed, the world that is created, and we as a part of it.

And the time references themselves are significant. Time's constraints are universal and order our experience, giving a trans-cultural and meta-historical system of coordination of our knowledge of events and relationships, everything has a time denotation that is part of the things characterisation in respect of all other things. It makes the disparate inseparable!

However, theology that it rooted in philosophical idealism, rather than the 'concrete-realism' of the Bible will engineer the pretense of separability between what the Bible 'says' and what we take it to mean as soon as a desire emerges to blend the Bible with paganism.

The common or garden variety of modern Anglican clergy person does this all the time, and here most particularly, betraying a view of Christian faith that has nothing to do with God's created world,  or thus the world we inhabit and find the coordinates of our meaning in, but resigns the real world over to materialism and the fantasies of evolution, just to appease the intellectual power-brokers of today.

It's a pity, really, because the Biblical tradition scorns the intellectual power-brokers of any day, and maintains a prophetic witness against them!

Evolution: don't take it literally

In my previous blog post, quoting Darwin we have Darwin giving the game away: similar language is used today about evolution: I don't take it literally, of course, but literarily; because its not science, but a 'just suppose' fantasy.

Just time: enough of it and...can anything happen?

In his interesting paper “How not to reconcile evolution and creation” (2006) Alex Pruss helpfully (that is, I don’t have to look it up) provides a quote from Darwin on the eye’s (supposed) evolution. Its a completely farcical story, but will serve to allow me to make a point.
The quote:

We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a better one is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed. In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?

Richard Dawkin’s gross morphology stories don’t get much better than his level of fantasy (note the language: 'suppose', 'may we not believe', 'might'), I might add, but more to my point is Darwin’s reliance on vast time periods, as well as the number of creatures involved, to do this transformative magic, sans an actual mechanism.
Simply put; if the process is mindless, time is the necessary ingredient. Time is a marker then, of no designer. Pruss’ paper elaborates on this in terms of stochastic explanations.
So the lack of this time in the Bible’s creation account, conversely, is indicative of a designer. Darwin et al have to remove the designer, and the means they use, to hide their overall implausibility, is extended time, in the vain hope that time will allow stochastic processes to achieve what otherwise would need a designer.

Evolution vs? Christianity

Nicely put piece on Evolution vs Christianity, by an atheist or agnostic! Better put than I've heard most Sydney Anglicans able to say!

Mississippi

Mark Twain:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi  River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower  Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

And so with the puffery of evolution!

How dead is dead?

Every so often some theistic-evolutionist bright spark will attempt to contradict the Bible and tell us  no death before A&E's sin doesn't refer to animal death. This great big exegetical secret lets them off the hook and thus the supposed evidence of ancient death (pre-dating A&E) in the fossil record is not a problem for theistic-evolution. and let us in on the great big exegetical secret that this does not include animal death!

For most Anglicans that I've discussed this with, their thinking seems to be dominated by an excessively, and I think, misplaced forensic understanding of death.

They seem to hold who God is and what happens in his creation as being in two different thought worlds. If they are theistic evolutionists, this makes sense, because their theism is usually a conceptual bolt-on to their core world concept of naturalistic evolution.

Unwittingly, thought, they betray their misunderstanding of death, and fail to see it as a breach in both the fabric of the creation, and in God's relationship with his creation as a totality.

The creation per se is the representation of God's nature extended beyond himself. This has to be consistent with who God is (and that is love, if we are to follow the scriptures); God is also thoroughly alive and in relationship within the god-head.

For God, with such a nature to have the very opposite of relationship, life and love anywhere in the creation, would be to undo the representation of himself. He would demonstrate flaws a mile wide in a creation where basic anti-godness (death) was both the 'last enemy' and 'very good'.

It is simply incoherent to maintain death as some sort of inconvenience in the creation, affecting only animals, as though creation has multiple 'departments'. Some have death, others do not. But death in one department is death in all of the creation

And death is the negation, antithesis and reversal of God: it is maximally 'not-god'. It denies him, undoes creation and terminates relationship: love ceases to operate.

In Time

I drove a truck loaded with musical instruments and related hardware from our school's band camp back to the school today.

Our job in unloading the truck was simplified as we were told that the band leader would organise for everything to be put away properly the next day, by band members.

I idly thought to myself: we could just leave everything in the band room and let chance random events sort everything into its proper place.

Ah, but no! If we left it to random events, that is to the 'principle of evolution' it would be likely that we'd have to wait for an enormous amount of time to elapse before the instruments and equipment was in the correct place. Not helpful.

We would also have to rely on energy being converted to meaningful work; and the meaning would have to come from somewhere to achieve the organisation required; where, I wondered? Thus, not just energy: unstructured randomly directed energy is better known as an explosion; also not helpful; we would need structured energy, delivered to achieve an intention. From where?

What we'd have to rely upon is the directed, intelligent activity of people committed to the band's best interests (that is, intelligence motivated, at some level, by love) to achieve in a day what the universe, left to itself would not be able to achieve in a convenient, or even a practical time, or maybe any time at all.

This relates to a theme that I've heard discussed that one of the marks of the application of loving intelligence to the creation is that it proceeds rapidly: to wit, in 6 days. To extend the time to the meaningless durations stipulated in evolutionary writings merges purposeful intelligence with unpurposed randomness: hard to understand, then, how the event sequence of this type of creation bears the mark of a creator: of a loving intelligence.

What counts as a mark of intelligence is the time density of events along an outcome vector: events that in sequence lead to a specific time-space outcome, represented probably as a material change in the configuration of an element in an environment that achieves something meaningful (of course, all this needs greater definitional clarity); but that's the nub of it: the time density an event set along an outcome vector marks one event set as resulting from intelligence, and another set; with a very sparse density, as random; one tells of an author, the other of no author.

Survival

Anaximander makes a clever guess as to the origin of man. "...he further says that in the beginning man was born from animals of another species, for while other animals quickly find nourishment for themselves, man alone needs a lengthy period of suckling, so that had he been originally as he is now, he could never have survived." He does not explain--a perennial difficulty for evolutionists--how man survived in the transition stage.

Coppleston's History of Philosophy, v. 1, p. 25
(the Contiuum edition, 2003; first published 1946)

Dasein

From an essay by Roy Hornsby on Heidegger's thought:

By using the expression Dasein, Heidegger called attention to the fact that a human being cannot be taken into account except as being an existent in the middle of a world amongst other things (Warnock, 1970), that Dasein is 'to be there' and 'there' is the world. To be human is to be fixed, embedded and immersed in the physical, literal, tangible day to day world (Steiner, 1978).

I believe that H was on to something of profound importance in this concept: the significance of the concrete real world as the frame of our being (the world where you bump your nose if you attempt to walk through a wall and not a doorway). The creation account links that frame to God, the creator, in the account which must therefore also be denominated in the 'physical, literal, tangible day to day world' in its references, categories and relations. Once the creation account is un-linked from the world we are in, it is reduced to mere story (myth, fiction, or fantasy, it all amounts to the same thing); it breaks the link between God, his creation and us; and re-defines us as discontinuous with the creative will of God: no longer are we 'in God's image' linked by the chain of creative outcomes, but are linked to nothing and the materialist are right, in the grimness of the dust to which materialism reduces us all.

Evolutionists are right!

People like Dick Dawkins are right? How can I say such a thing?

Well, it's 'right' in a limited kind of way.

They are asking the right question.

Our origin is the fundamental question. Its answer tells who we are, what the world is like, and illuminates our quest for significance. So, it's a religious question!

In the case of evolution, mind you, the lamp is not working and no illumination occurs, because evolution is a knowledge-free industry!

The strangest thing happens when people attempt to answer the question of origins in two ways at once.

This is the ploy of theistic evolution, which attempts to add materialism's evolutionary dogma to the notion that God created.

But we end up with a funny sort of 'creating' that undoes the very meaning of the word: creation by non-creation (that is by random working of mindless material processes).

So what would this answer tell us about who we are, what our world is like, and how would it illuminate our quest for significance? Or would it even explain why we act as though we are significant, because at every turn whatever reference to God adds, acceptance of evolution takes away.

Impressive timing

From Peter Morris' book "The Management of Projects" (p. 4)

Projects have always enjoyed a symbolic, often even religious connotation. Some consider the Creation as the first great project - the timing was certainly impressive...

Morris is right; the timing was impressive; but if the timing was not in fact impressive; as is held by many who bolt their belief in evolution to their reading of the Bible, then it is hard to see how the creation bears the mark of an author, and it merges with the product of non-authorship. Consistent, of course, with the denial inherent in evolutionary thinking that there was and is no author.

One of the marks of authorship: of the application of persons to effects, is efficiency of means: remove this, and you remove the signature. The author soon follows.

ANE Science?

In his article "The Emergence of Creatures and Their Succession in a Developing Universe", Wolfhart Pannenberg (Ashbury Theological Journal 50/1, 1995) writes, referring to references claimed to be made to "Babylonian and other mythological descriptions of the origin of the world...":

Regarding both types of materials one is entitled to judge that the priestly document made comprehensive use of the science of its day in critically selecting and interpreting its results by relating them to the creative activity of God.

I could not imagine a more profound misrepresentation and am surprised that Pannenberg made it. The use of phrases such as "the science of its day" and "interpreting its results" is an anachronistic move designed, it would seem, to put the mythological fictionalising of pagan seers on an equal footing with the work of the CSIRO.

Nothing could be further from the truth. ANE pagans didn't have a science, let alone one that had results! Indeed, if you think that they did, you may as well talk about the 'results' of astrology. Go read Enuma Elish and see if you can see any traces there of a conceptualisation of the universe that would allow observations to be made as though (a) humans could draw meaningful conclusions about the characteristics of the universe and that (b) the universe was able to be subjected to rational enquiry. There is nothing in any ANE text outside of the Bible that suggests that the thought world of that day gives the universe a dependent and well structured relationship with its rational, orderly and loving creator. (You might have thought I would say that the universe was 'natural', but  not so; it is created. See my previous post on Methodological Naturalism).

Rather, quite the opposite. The ANE world didn't do science at all, and couldn't have as the modern scientific project is only a few centuries old and is rooted in Christian biblical theism. The concepts that we use today are as foreign as could be to the ancients.

The Genesian account doesn't critically select and interpret anything (to suggest it does renders it to be no more than an empty and ultimately meaningless polemic: an advertising gimick, no less!); no, it overturns competing accounts and makes of the relationship between the world its creator and humanity something entirely different from paganism's mish-mash of speculation, improbability and nonsense (this is what Pannenberg illogically, and ignorantly misnames 'science') and unique it its and any other day.

Apart from everything else it does, it lays the foundation for modern science, compared to the dead ends that paganism repeatedly runs into and creates the environment in which we relate to God as person to person, in trust and love.

Methodological Naturalism

Over a quite lunch today at Diethnes restaurant in Sydney (always a haunt when I'm in that city) I was reading an old review by Willem Drees in Zygon  (the journal, not the Dr Who characters) of Philip Clayton's "God and Contemporary Science". Although only a review, anything by Drees is worth reading, and this article was no exception. Plenty to think over, despite my being at odds with him over many of his views (that's like a gnat being at odds with an elephant over real estate, I know) but one thing caught my attention.

He mentioned the reliance of science on 'methodological naturalism'. This wasn't the main thrust of the review, and its a common enough claim in both philosophy and theology of science, but I wonder if it really holds the water claimed for it.

It sets out to eliminate reference to non-natural, or non-physical/material entities in explanations of relations in the material world. At one level this is unremarkable, as the project of science (knowledge of the material world) is that very thing. The phrase adds nothing particular to the understanding of the mission: the mission of science is to understand the  material world and to do this it seeks to understand the material world in terms of the material world. Gets us nowhere special!

However, it is more frequently extended to imply a certain ontological twinning, that is, that methodological naturalism works because naturalism is the only game in town. This view also tends to misconstrue general Christian understanding of the relation of God and his creation and the specific views of biblical creationists.

In setting its charter, MN has to refer to other than the naturalism that it seeks to rely upon; for instance, it holds that minds can have real knowledge about entities outside those minds, and that there are other minds that are interested in that knowledge; it also has to make reference to a framework of what knowledge is and how reliably it can be garnered by minds and through the senses. The reliability of its mission is not entailed in MN, but stands above it.

Moreover, MN is set within a frame of reference which is not, I think, naturalistic, but Christian-theistic; and inescapably so. That is because modern naturalism, and its pal practical atheism, is, in fact, a Christian heresy in my view. It, too, has its roots in the Christian world concept; despite protestations to the contrary and its evoking of the idea of an independent reality in the very term 'natural', when it really operates as 'methodological creationism'. By this I mean, its approach to the creation (the universe) as a place that operates with regularity, and in its own terms, at least at the level of our investigation, is an approach that derives, not from an atheistic/naturalist frame of reference, but from a Christian-theist one. This is not mere opinion, but a factuality of the history of modern science.

A pure naturalist position would have to contend with un-grounded randomness where anything can happen; but this would cripple scientific enquiry and put us back in the pagan nonsense of arbitrary gods doing all sorts of things for no sort of reason. Nor do we actually do science this way; we look for systematic relations and put aside any notion of the arbitrary as well as relying on all sorts of elements of methodological creationsim. This is not to say that non-material entities can be relied upon in materialist relations, but that our equipment for understanding, and the very systematic nature of the relations reaches to something beyond the material; otherwise we would have no hope of any worthwhile explanation of the material world if the only categories we had were within the material world.

Alvin Plantinga touches on this in his essays on Methodological Naturalism, although he goes in a different direction to mine.

God could have....

Occasionally I run into someone, or hear of someone (usually someone else, as it happens) who claims that God 'could have used evolution', or 'could have used long periods of time to do his creating'. They usually advertise these claims with the smug triumphalism that such speculation proves some point. I don't know what that point could be, of course, because there is no point at all made by idle speculation.

One may as well claim that God could stand on his head!

Lita Costner in a recent article in Creation magazine starts with quoting this sort of vain claim; to rebut it, of course; but I think that her rebuttal could go further.

The theological point that she makes is appropriate, with the implications for the very goodness of the creation being imperiled by the contradictory (you could say incoherent) presence of the last enemy in its basic makeup, but there are other considerations that bear on the question, in my view.

God's revelation is not only a representation of what he has done, but, because God is a unified being (but not a unity, being in three persons), that is, there is no separation of who he is, what he wills or thinks and what he does, as there is with us, his revelation is also a representation of him, when it addresses his acts or relationships.

So, to claim that God could act slowly through error-prone chance processes to produce something that is purpose rich on many levels seems absurd at best; but given that the revelation is all the other way: the creation occurred quickly in direct response to his will, and this as part of God's claim on our worship, representation of him who is love, it is more than absurd. One could say it refers to another god, if it makes any god-reference at all.

Could God have created over billions of years? Which 'god' in which 'world' would that be that you are referring to, now? Our God, who represents himself as his revelation sets out? I think not. He explains his relationship to his creation in completely different terms, predicated on fellowship, not distance.

The damage this does goes beyond events in the world, to the way the world is structured. There is an at least implicit ontology in the creation account; it tells us a lot about reality, how it is structured, and the concreteness with which it 'operates'. To set this aside evaporates the Bible's ontology that comes out of the structures in the creation account, and must invoke an alternative; but this time, not implicitly. The alternative has to be developed explicitly as it denies there is one from the will of God, as it denies that the creation account has concrete content that makes sense in the categories of this world: the world it relates to by referring to its categories, and therefore has no ontological content. Yet any alternative ends up conjuring up a different god and falls into idolatry by proposing a different kind of reality, from an ontology that is structured on other than the God who is, and who speaks.

Moral Tinkering

Christians seem to want to do this all the time.

I was reminded of it, listening to a sermon by Rob Jones, one time rector of St James Turramurra (I don't endorse the current silly sermon series title 'man up for God', by the way; puerile!). In mentioning Puritans, he observed that they generally failed in their objectives for a couple of reasons. One was that they sought to legislate what they saw as godliness.

Christians still do it today. I call it moral tinkering.

The 'debate' on 'gay' marriage (really homosexual marriage) is an example. The talk by churchmen of 'ethics' classes in lieu of scripture in public schools is another.

Now, I don't really care what the world does with its idea of marriage and nor should public Christians. For Christians its a distraction. No matter who is married to whom, for what reason or by whom, if the are not followers of Christ, they are not in his family. Our mission is to proclaim the gospel, not to encourage cute, but etermally useless moral conformity. If the ship is sinking, I don't care where the deck chairs are and neither should any other Christian.

The debate on 'ethics' was similar. No Christian churchman made the point that no end of ethics classes would not deal with people's inability to do as even they would want to!

So what happens when ethics fails?

Christians would point to forgiveness and salvation in Christ. All the world can do is shrug its shoulders, and maybe throw you in gaol.

Its a bit different when it comes to the death penalty, free access to firearms and abortion. These kill people and remove their opportunity for life and future encounter with Christ. All should be stopped. That's not moral tinkering, that's part of proclaiming the gospel and acting mercifully to seek opportunities for people to join the family of God.