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.

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.

Anglican minister supports atheists world view

Amazing exchange on Twitter:

Dickson has confused 'evolution' which was the point here, with a mere scientific technicality; as though scientific discourse is independent of its social setting and motivations. Now, I'm not applying this broadly to science that is objectively established, although Kuhn tells us that here too that can be the case, but to the idea of evolution which is not that.

Evolution is a summative and therefore boundless ideology that brings with it (and indeed relies upon) bundled concepts of life, relationships (ethics), the nature of the real and how the real 'works'. If evolutionists are honest, or thorough, it also brings a theory of knowledge. But that theory would undermine its credibility, so evolutionists usually employ a creationist theory of knowledge, unwittingly.

Evolution as a construct in these terms, with  its auxiliary postulates (such as a long age for the universe) envelopes and defines theism. Dickson gave the game away!

Theism is reduced thereby to an epiphenomenon of matter-as-basic and is dependent completely upon its ontology.

The world-view of the Bible inverts this. Matter is not basic, but is, as it were, an epiphenomenon of will. And not just a 'will' in panentheistic terms, but in the particular terms of the Bible: the will of God whose nature being love makes fellowship: within the 'god-head' and between himself and his creation an essential outworking. And the 'matter' is important; it is part of the intention of creation, unlike the idealism we read in modern theology that has more to do with neoplatonism than Christianity.

Wise Willy

"I was inspired by my grandfather and my father, who have championed international conservation for over fifty years.  They helped to bring about a revolution in attitudes towards our natural environment.

From them, I learned that our relation to nature and wildlife goes to the heart of our identity as human beings: from our sheer survival, to our appreciation of beauty and our connection to all other living things."

The Duke of Cambridge's speech on the illegal wildlife trade at the World Bank, Washington D.C., USA 

Our self-identity is not in the Creator, a person, but in 'nature': the 'heart' of our identity? I would have thought that the heart of our identity is our ability to reason, communicate, love, forgive, indeed, worship. But no, its our relation to wildlife. Remember that next time you see a lion tear an antelope to pieces or a pederast argue that his 'love' is part of nature.

What do you mean: "prove"?

I recently read a conservative Christian claim: “no human being will ever be able to prove whether or not God exists, as that would then make him/her superior to God.”


A friend offered this comment:


1.      That seems to be a non sequitur. How does that conclusion follow from the premiss? The only “reasonable” suggestion I can attribute to the syllogism is that a priori you believe that, ultimately, God is incomprehensible and we, ultimately, can’t reason to God. That makes Paul a confusing person (and confused?), given that he has said we can in Romans 1: “because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being UNDERSTOOD by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead”. Note the word “understood”, further note the Greek and further even still note what the understanding leads to i.e. the GODHEAD! Unless of course you believe atheists have the intellectual power to reason to the Godhead and then, well, just ignore the answer after REASONING correctly. But this would contradict your premise that man can’t reason to and prove God, wouldn’t it?

2.      Can’t prove whether God exists or not? What on earth does that mean? You completely limit (?misuse) the word ‘prove’. Of course you can prove God exists! What do you think apologetics are about!? If you can’t prove God exists, then why have apologetic organisations? Why waste your breath trying to appeal to atheists’ reason, unless your review of the DVD isn’t really an appeal to reason.

And then you go and contradict yourself by saying “this does not mean, however, that Christian faith is irrational or contrary to logic and reason”. If it’s not contrary to logic and reason, it must be reasonable and logical (The Law of the Excluded Middle applies), and thus provable. An analogy: If a man were to say, “All cats are mammals, and all mammals are animals, so therefore cats are animals” but then says he can’t prove cats are animals, a listener would insightfully say the chap’s lost his marbles or seems to not understand the power of logic and reason. This feline syllogism is no different to, say, the Argument for God’s Existence from Design or the Kalam Cosmological Argument for His existence.

Tevelyan 3

Tevelyan 2

1942

In volume 4 of his English Social History, published in about 1942 (pp 44-45 in the illustrated edition), Trevelyan writes of the 'serious' character of Victorian society:

...This 'seriousness' affected even the 'agnostics' who, in the last part of the period, challenged not the ethics but the dogmas of Christianity, with increasing success on account of Darwinism and the discoveries of science.

He goes on to write:

In the Twentieth Century, on the other hand, self-discipline and self-reliance are somewhat less in evidence, and a quasi-religious demand for social salvation through State action has taken the place of older and more personal creeds. Science has undermined the old forms of religious belief, but even now the strength and the weakness of England cannot be understood without some knowledge of her religious history.

What is 'evolution'?

Nothing more than a Victorian-era 'gross morphology' fantasy, and certainly not science!

Pushing God Away

A major concern with long creative durations: such as relied upon by 'long-agers', theistic-evolutionists and others of similar stripe is this. It pushes God away from his creation; there's something between God's creative words and their results.

The effect of this is to de-personalise the creation. One reason for the popular reliance on time to 'heal' emotional wounds is that the separation of time dilutes the personal element in the pain; it slowly ceases to have the raw personal connection that aroused the pain in the first place. Similarly, by removing God from his creation by inserting vast periods, the connection with God dilutes; it...de-personalises.  And, for a creation, a reality that is at its most basic, personal (and not material) this constitutes a fundamental assault against the nature and implications of The Real.

It goes on thereby to imply mindless factors in the production of creation. Mindless factors do not transmit or represent the love of a person...one has to question the committed love of a parent who willingly removes themselves from their child, as an example. Applying this to creation is even worse; as God becomes de-personalised, the glory and affection that should be his is transferred to the creation; which tends as a consequence to make the connection with the creation a material one, and not one that is primarily spiritual and loving.

Theistic evolution presents a barrier between us and our creator. It makes a principle stand for a person and so 'de-loves' the relationship between us and God. And one does not gain access to the 'mind of God' through a principle; a principle is not a personal relationships, after all and our access to God is by his Christ; the only mediator between us (see John's opening chapter). Shut off from the mind of God by theistic evolution God's relation to the world in its origin in his love is denied.

Kreeft on creation

In his Utube piece on why he became a Roman  Catholic, Peter Kreeft briefly sets out a description of the remarkable place that 'creation' has in biblical thought. It is unique in the history of ideas, and no 'creation' myth comes close to its intellectual originality in there being a beginning out of nothing, and one that involves mind!

Very simply put, the so-called creation myths all assume or even rely upon something being in existence as the setting for the myth.

Its a failure of intellectual reflection that allows theistic evolution to have made any headway in Christian thinking as it amounts to a reversion to a pagan way of seeing the world: that there are 'principles' that sit along side God and that these gave rise to the creation (but then, it ceases to be a creation).

On being 'puffed up'

Comment on 7 Biblical principes for evaluating Christian leaders in the church:

[the blog pretends to apply 1 Corinthians 4:1-5 to Christian 'leaders']

Interesting that just before this passage, Paul writes "So then let no one boast in men".
I don't see the concept of 'leadership' as used these days appearing in Paul's passage at all! 'Leadership' is very much not of the church of God. Sure there are teachers, pastors, elders, servants, ministers....all are ministers in some way. But none would be characterised as 'leaders'. Archons in that day.

It is concerning that the language of the 1980s in evangelical churches, which emphasised ministry: very inclusive, accessible, and directly connected to Christ's mission, has morphed into the worldly concept of 'leadership' that implies, if not promotes, separation, division, and worldly prestige over hoi poloi. It also leads to people being passivated and not participating in church life. After all, they have a 'leader' (a 'leader' other than Christ...who calls himself a servant, as well as Lord).

Indeed, even in business, where 'leaders' are created by a set of contractual relationships, scholars such as Henry Minzberg say there is too much leadership, and not enough "communityship" (google it). In the church, above all we are about 'communityship' and participation through mutual ministry. Let's reflect that in our language and eschew the puffed up distortion that the world's thinking encourages "For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God".

The most basic doctrine

In his book "The Best Kept Secret of Christian Mission" John Dickson writes:

From Genesis to Revelation the Bible makes the resounding, unapologetic declaration that there is just one Creator and Lord of the world. It begins in the Bible's opening line: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). To ancient readers, this was not simply a sensible way to start a holy book. It was a huge swipe at the entire religious outlook of the time. The opening lines of the Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish, to give just one example from the period, list no fewer than nine separate gods, each with its own part to play in the events leading up to creation. Saying that "God created the heavens and the earth" was tantamount to saying that no other deity was involved in the universe.

Now, what is interesting in this statement is that:

1. Dickson positions the Genesis account as a rebuttal of the myths of the time. He portrays God as reacting to others and making a derivative, not a primary revelation.
2. Dickson doesn't think that the Genesis account is factual, and considers (if I understand him correctly) that some form of evolution was the source of the universe and life as we know them. So he immediately relegates God to one who creates, not through the only mediator, the Christ, but through another mediator: the material world!

The Old Testament (and the New for that matter) revolve around God's being the creator. And this not in modernist terms, that see other forces or principles involved in the 'creation', but in the terms of a creation from the will of God over the space of 6 days, set firmly in the history whose flow contains both the incarnation and our own experience of a contiguous history.

When you come across references to the creation in the Bible, remember, its not some airy analogical or impressionistic conceptualisation of God's supreme authorship of the world that is in mind, but his concrete actions as revealed in Genesis. Because that tells us the the type of person God is. Any dilution of the force of Genesis 1 dilutes the substance of God.

More on Enuma Elis

As I read more of the book, I get the impression that Dickson sets God as high, as creator is. But in his terms, again if I understand him correctly from his other writings (for example), he not only pushes God away from a realist conception of the creation, but depicts God as one whose statements regarding his creative work have no credible meaning in the space time historical flow in which they are set.

So, the elephant in the room is this: what does it mean that God is creator? Is it just a rhetorical device, does he mean creator who does not create, or is God in his view relegated to labeling results that come from elsewhere?

Dirt-huggers

On one of my favourite TV shows Lewis, recently, one of the characters asked Det. Sgt Hathaway (Lawrence Fox), if he believed in God. Fox plays a fellow who was a candidate for the priesthood, which brings interesting quirks in the script.

Fox evaded an answer: good police behaviour in avoiding the personal, but the protagonist, a researcher into religious beliefs, claimed later that he therefore knew that Hathaway was a believer.

Now, if Hathaway wasn't a police officer, his inference would have been likely correct. Evade the question of Christian belief, and you are. An atheist couldn't care less, of course.

Here's how to  handle it:

Q: "Do you believe in God" [asked in a cynical or mocking tone by Eric the dill]
A: "Yes; what do you believe in? Dirt?" [stated directly, without emotion by Colin the robustly informed Christian]

Most people who would ask in a mocking tone would be materialists, either explicitly, or implicitly. If so, they believe that matter, or in our language, dirt, is basic. So go ahead and ask.

If they are dirt-huggers, then you've got to ask them why they act as though there's more to life than the dust they walk on, and why do they care anyway? If its all just dirt, then nothing really matters, because its all just a random dirt configuration, or a result thereof.

Evolution: Good Science?

I've just read Evolution: Good Science? by Dominic Statham.
Not having read a basic introductory work on this topic (or on any topic, for that matter) for some time, I was very pleased to read this, while having an enjoyable break at a place called Yarramalong, near Newcastle in Australia.
Dominic travels the territory of the dogma of evolution and picks up on the several improbable things it does before breakfast.

The chapters are:

1. What is Darwin's theory of evolution?
2. The fossil record
3. 'It is observed today'
4. Homology
5. Vestigial organs and embryology
6. Biogeography
7. 'It is recorded in DNA'
8. Evidence of design in nature
9. Is belief in evolution necessary for scientific progress
10. Why do so many scientist subscribe to the theory of evolution?
11. Is evolution compatible with Christianity?

If the paid workers at your church think that evolution is all sewn up, I suggest that you give them this book. It could help with the unpicking!

The book is replete with references to both the relevant primary and secondary literature, so a great mine of sources for high school students to use to baffle their teachers (on my experience, this is not hard. I once countered an assertion made by my science teacher from my then recent reading of Lorenz' On Aggression. He had nothing to say! Happily this teacher, back in the 1970s, was a firm sceptic as to evolutionary ideas).

One of the strengths of the book is that it compares what evolutionary 'theory' should predict with what is found in fact. The theory is found wanting.

This brings to mind a discussion I witnessed at a L'Abri seminar where a Christian physicist who was a well known evolution booster said that evolution's strength was its predictive power. Statham shows that it demonstrates very weak predictive power. This is particularly so in the area of homology where nothing lines up with evolutionary expectations.

The author refers to Walter ReMine's work. ReMine avers that this may be as a result of God's structuring the creation in such a fashion as to frustrate evolutionary explanations. This may be so, but I prefer to regard it as the creator showing diversity of effective means, and that this is what the real world is really like: diversity. It is not a 'one way' world but one of abundance of pathways of action.

BTW, here's a link to Haldane's famous paper on The Cost of Natural Selection which Statham mentions. There is also a nice treatment of the topic by Walter ReMine.

Christianity Explored and...science

I've recently participated in a Christianity Explored program at a local church and came across the so-called 'leader's guide' ('facilitator's guide' or 'minister's guide' would be more Christian terminology, but, being Anglicans they're right into the 'leader-power' thing).

Much like the Alpha course, it contains a list of Questions about Christian Belief. Being Calvinists, they have trouble answering some questions, or at best, the answers are a tad lame; but being agnostic on creation, they duck and weave on the question of science and faith.

Quite rightly they pin down the real question: "hasn't the theory of evolution replaced creation and so disproved Christianity", but proceed to go all thumbs on the answers.

Tactically the line of answers is not too bad:

"Start by asking what they mean..." [always a good idea]
"Avoid a technical discussion..." [particularly if you are not skilled in the topic; but sometimes a 'technical' discussion is necessary to undo someone's rhetorical reliance on 'evolution']
"Ask what conclusion they are drawing from evolution." [another good one]

But it goes off the rails at a couple of points:

"How God made the universe is not as important a point as that he made it."

Even the average village atheist should be able to walk through that reply. The only information we have that he made it is the information about how he made it! The two are inseparable. If you deny that the Genesis account is factual, you deny the basis for claiming that God made it!

And who are we to claim that how is less important than why? The Spirit goes into significant detail as to events and timing to inform us as to the creation. And this is not important? It is only modern Western idealism, or a maneuver of theological equivocation that could think it credible to split the how and the why. For God, both are conjoined and march together, because God is not a bureaucracy. He is a unity of being, will and action.

Sundering the content and form of the creation account re-calibrates the Bible to meet the expectations of humanism with the obvious position being that the Bible has nothing of importance to say about origins. It follows that we defer to the 'world view' settings of the (empty) claims of materialists..the people whose basic belief is in dirt!

The other derailing 'answer' is to imagine that evolution does not answer the bigger questions. Well, no; it does answer them; that, in fact, is what it is all about; the putative scientific questions are trivial by comparison.

Their purpose is to give credibility to the world view of evolution: and it does tell about design, order and purpose. It tells us that design and order are merely human constructs on the inevitabilities of material behaviour, without significance beyond this, and that purpose is not a question with any meaning at all. Thus, we have none.

Evolution's biggest 'answer' and its orientating thrust is that material is basically real, and the personal is derivative.

The Bible's teaching is quite the contrary: the personal (God in the community of the trinity), indeed, loving community is basically real, and material is a result of loving intention!

Millstone awards 2014

 

The winners are...

Roman Catholic Church (various orders and diocese...most probably)

Anglican Church (various diocese)

Salvation Army

Citation

For express and wonton behaviour

that would tend to separate

or

has separated

children 

from the experience of

the love of God 

in his church.

Matthew 18:6

See also 

The suffering of little children

The Australian Royal Commission into the Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse reveals some revolting conduct on the part of church organisations and government authorities; but what is unsaid is that the behaviour was produced in partnership with a complicit social context. There was a tendency in the 40s to 50s and even 60s to regard children as lesser people, almost as objects for the application of authority against them, to regard church groups as trusted self-governing organisations that 'knew best' as they engaged in the (public) humiliation, terrifying of and injuriously inflicting immense pain upon children. Most parents hit their children and thought that it was the right thing to do. It was not. Police acted as though children were congenitally oppositional and failed to believe them, as did other authorities, and if they didn't, nothing a child said was important anyway.

However, churches should be influenced by the Bible and not society.

Where's the starting point?

There are a few candidates, but all together the scriptures structure the way church organisations should work and provide no excuse for the godless behaviour they abetted.

Let's start with Matthew 18:6. Our lord was so concerned that children's relationship with  him be unimpaired by the actions of adults that he reserved the most grave fate for those who transgressed it. This alone should have exercised church authorities to remove the cancer of evil from their communities. But it did not.

And churches should have known, as Lord Acton observed, that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". The Spirit got there first, however in Jeremiah 17:9. "The heart is wicked...who can know it."

Knowing this and that we are all sinners, all prone to damage others, their guard should have been up, particularly as they saw people doing directly what the scriptures opposed: Ephesians 6:4 tells us how to raise children (and don't think that Proverbs 23:13 overturns this; it is a proverb, not a command; it is figurative not descriptive, just compare it to the extravagant language in other proverbs: do you really put a knife to your throat when you eat with the king, Proverbs 23:1-2?).

So what should a church organisation have done if it saw someone behaving against Ephesians 6:4, and not conforming in their manner to the vulnerable as Galatians 5:22 instructs?

Should they have kept it 'in-house'? Not at all!

Knowing the wickedness of a person who so acted, and that the corruption of power was at hand, seeing behaviour that was disjoined from a community infused with the Spirit of our saviour they should have excised the perpetrators from that community immediately (there's plenty of basis in the Bible for dis-fellowshipping evil-doers) and referred the people involved to the police, because the state holds the sword for the restraint of evil. Romans 13:3-5 and not the church.

A little Bad Science

How can you know that its Bad Science? Here's how:

Just like most urging of evolutionist authors: even Darwin was full of it...'just imagine'.

Whose beliefs?

In a local newspaper (it charges for web use, so I won't  name it) mention was made of the new NSW Premier Mike Baird's 'conservative Christian' beliefs and that these were connected with his rejection of so-called 'gay' marriage (I must say, we all felt pretty gay at my wedding...I resent a good word being stolen in a transparent attempt to legitimise sexual perversion) and single sex adoption (i.e. two blokes, etc.)

It was set as though his rejection of these touted twists to society were part of some strange 'add-on' to his thought world called 'beliefs', in contrast to those who supported such notions from somewhere else in their psyche: based on 'rights', I suppose, or 'choice' etc.

But all we have, is beliefs. Some people's are grounded in the revelation of our creator, others are secured by little more that the almost solipsistic triumphalism of the self; but this too is a belief; and, dare I point out, a 'religious' belief. That is, it makes reference to something taken as basic in reality. For modern individualistic westerners nothing is more basic than 'what I think and for no particular reason', however it is dressed up ('rights', 'choice', etc, as though these movements of the will hang somewhere in the air).

Thus, it is a contest of beliefs, not only about God or our contingent existence, but the way society works over time, the way the young are nurtured (and produced: same-sexism is, of course parasitic on proper sexual conduct that produces offspring) and the structure of marriage to provide an orderly method for providing for the welfare of mothers and children.

In these terms it is obvious that marriage of male to male is not marriage, or a play at marriage to pretend legitimacy of conduct, much like single sex adoption is a weird play at families that are impossible to produce through the conduct represented, showing it up for the sham it is.

Society has historically resisted such practices because they contain the destruction of society: in a single generation if ubiquitous, but still, it constitutes a 'death-style' to quote an American politician, in hollow parody of a 'life-style'.

Tips for atheists

On the Drum (an ABC discussion forum), John Dickson helpful gives atheists some tips about discussing with Christians.

He gets a few points for trying, looses points for being condescending and smug, but shoots himself in his foot when it gets to '6-day creation'.

Naturally, he steps around it on the 'popular vote' principle (you know, science is established by popular vote), but fails theologically.

What is hilarious is that many of the comments on Dickson's tips fell back to 'science' (admittedly, in a juvenile and superficial manner) to rebut his views that themselves start with an ungrounded creation: a creation account that has no real world connections is just like a creation account that means nothing; it is the real world as locus of our being together that counts. If God cannot make the connection in terms of the very creation that he authored, then there is no connection to be made, and the 'ground of our being' is not God, but as the materialists have it.

Thanks John, you've just thrown the race and helped more people to perdition.

Knowing nothing

I'm re-reading Stove's book Darwinian Fairytales at the moment; full of 'emporeror's new clothes' class of bon mots contra darwinian evolution, as it is.

Here's one:

All Darwinians have a remarkable asymmetry of mind where their own species is concerned. On the one hand there is the human life which, both by experience and by reading history and literature, they know a great deal about; but all of this they put to one side, as having nothing to do with theory. They have to put it aside, because of course this human life contains not a single instance of the famous Darwinian struggle, and in fact consists entirely of disconfirmations of that theory. But on the other hand, Darwinians draw endless confirmations of their theory form the lives of extinct or hypothetical or imaginary or impossible human beings, concerning whom they know exactly as much as the reset of us do: namely nothing. for Darwinians, where their own species is concerned, it's not what you know that counts; its what you don't know.

And that just about sums it up.

Evolution is for...'clever' people.

Steven Kates in Quadrant  has put it quite succinctly:

But, but … evolution based on sheer chance; on random mutations and natural selection? It simply doesn’t pass the sniff test. Only very clever people could believe it in that form without there being much more compelling evidence.

The New Atheists

Hop over to Thom. Aquinas College for a lecture on the so-called 'new atheists'.

What if Darwin was right?

The typical conversation with parents that I have at work goes something like:

"Your child has a difference in their genes that means they won't develop along typical lines (I've generalised the gender on purpose). I'm very sorry to have to tell you that they have a condition known as ARX (Aristaless related homeobox) mutation that gives rise to intellectual disability."

If Darwin was right and evolution happened as he claimed, I'd be having conversations like this:

"Your child's development has been a little unusual. We've done a genetic test and he has a mutation on one of his genes that means he will probably never fall ill."

OR

"We've run a genetic test on your child for a recently identified mutation that only boys get. If he develops like most people with this mutation, he will have a life of incredible athletic performance and social capability."

OR

"The tests on your child show that he will be likely to lead an extraordinary life. Your biggest challenge will be to keep  him intellectually stimulated because, if he is like others with this mutation, his intelligence will be extremely high."

But its not like this! We don't see beneficial mutations. We see bad stuff and heartbreak instead.

Same story at the Human Gene Mutation Database: not good news.

So, over to you, Mr Darwin...when will we see the beneficial mutations popping up?

Bernard does Richard

Nice post by Bernard Gaynor on Richard Dawkin's self obsessed ranting.

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.

The apologetics of environmental romaticism

In Christianity Explored, the opening video has Rico Tice telling us how wonderful 'nature' is and that its beauty points us to God. I wonder if he was thinking of a tiger pulling its live prey to pieces when he came out with that tosh? The creation certainly is a major pointer to God, its creator, but it has to be thoughtfully and critically done, not by mere romantic ramblings. Along this line, I came across the following in an article "The Costs of the Environmentalism Cult"

The central mistake of the romantic environmentalist is to gloss over the profound differences between human beings and the natural world. We are not “natural” creatures. What makes us human is everything that exists nowhere else in the natural world: the mind, language, consciousness, memory, higher emotions, and culture. None of these exist even in the highest primates. Apes do not craft tools, marry, name their offspring, bury their dead, live by laws or customs, or respect inalienable rights. This radical uniqueness of human identity means that we do not have a “harmonious” relationship with nature, but an adversarial and conflicted one. The natural world is the alien, inhuman realm of blind force, indifferent to suffering, death, and beauty. It is meaningless, for only humans bestow meaning on the world. And that meaning reflects our knowledge that each of us is unique, a creature that appears only once, and that each of us must die.

Most important, unlike everything else in the natural world ruled by necessity, humans are free. As French critic Luc Ferry writes, “Man is free enough to die of freedom.” And from that freedom comes morality, all the things we are obligated to do or not do, particularly in regard to our fellow humans. The nexus of consciousness of our individual uniqueness and necessary death, our freedom to choose to act against nature’s determinism, and our moral obligations to one another is what makes us unnatural––and human. Nature is our home only by dint of our alteration of it to make it suitable for such creatures, and that process is one of conflict and struggle against the brutal forces of extinction and destruction that have characterized the natural world for the 3.6 billion years life has existed.

 Like many modern evangelical activities, CE talks about God the creator, but not in a real and tangible way; from my memory the CE people are of the 'God created, but evolution was his 'mechanism' " school; so they can't connect God tangibly with his creation, and leave the link in story land. Then they are left having to avoid 'natural evil' and not place it in context of a creation that is turned against its creator.

God's "mechanism" ?

One of the hoary old stories of Theistic Evolution, often delivered with a smugness borne of unexamination, is that evolution provides the mechanism for God's creative acts, as though God needs a "mechanism" when his word is power itself!

For a counterpoint, here's how an evolutionist (Daniel Dennet) grabs for a 'mechanism' for his own evolutionary fantasies, explaining how the improbable came about:

And then, one fine day, a mutation happened to arise.

Yep, that's it...that's the 'explanation'!

Shown the door

Comment on Challies latest post on 'accountability'

Quote: "effective accountability [is]…able to function best when it occurs under the leadership..."

The American church seems to be more interested in 'leadership' than almost anything else. I can only guess that this comes from the toxic environment of American pop business writing, because I don't see it in the Scriptures. There's plenty there on ministry, but none on the modern conceptualisation of 'leadership'; which is the one drawn out and somehow superior to the others. It is an anti-community, anti-brotherhood concept which should be shown the door.

Effective accountability (another dubious concept in itself...I much prefer the scriptural characterisation of loving brotherly support) would be about...loving brotherly support; bearing one-another's burderns is not a 'leader' act, it is a community act.

Moltmann on the New Creation

Lifted from Think Theology:

“Whom does John see? He sees the infinite, eternal God coming to the finite beings he has created and to this vulnerable earth. God comes to his transitory creatures on this earth to live among them, and now finally to find rest in his creation as he once did on the sabbath. God will not seek out his dwelling place in special temples or cathedrals. He wants to make his whole creation his home: ‘Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool’ (Isa. 66:1; Acts 7:49). The cosmos is his temple; chaos is his enemy. That is why the beauty of the new creation will drive out chaos. Heaven and earth are waiting to become God’s house, for everything created has been made for love. God’s Spirit is in them all and throws them open for God’s future. God finds no rest until everything he has created has returned home to him, like the prodigal son in the parable.” (Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today’s World)

 I pick up on "the cosmos is his temple; chaos is his enemy" Hard to see how the chaos of evolution as hypothesised could be a 'means' of creation, then.

And I like his phrase "everything created has been made for love"; love is basic, as it is inherent between the members of the Godhead.

The Fake World

Quote from CREDO magazine:

We want to live in the world as conceived by the biblical authors, not the fake-world invented by the evolutionists and secularists and rebels of other stripes.

Action God

In his piece in Credo on Mark, Matthew Claridge writes as follows:

In the biblical worldview, Word and Act must never be divorced. God acts, but he is always careful to clearly and accurately interpret for us what those actions mean. Nonetheless, the emphasis on action in Mark offers a vision of Christ that is tangible, dramatic, and theologically rich when understood in the context of all God’s redemptive purposes (more on that later). Christ came to do things, not just talk about things.

 The same thoughts could easily and appropriately apply to the account of creation in G1. It tells us the mechanism by which God created: he spoke, and his speaking: his will given words, is contiguous with and comprehensively causal of what he intends.

Genesis is structured in our-world terms, terms that we can make sense of and that have meaning in our world, offering a vision of the creation that is tangible, dramatic, and theologically rich when understood in the context of all God's redemptive purposes. God does things, not just talk about them!

Those who deny that G1 has any correspondence in actual events make a God who prefers to talk about rather than act, or, whose action and words are so far apart as to be non-commutative, pushing the things talked about into an 'upper storey' 'spritual' world that only intersects with our world verbally, not really. It is the pagan philosophical idealism that dogs theology at work, distorting the relationship between God, his creation and humanity.

The focus of G1. to take Claridge's words again, is on the most critical features of God's creative mission: we are only told what is essential to our knowledge of God, the creation and us, for us to discharge our role as stewards of the creation. If merely a piece of analogy, fantasy, or make-believe (which is the end state of most non-realist views of G1), then we are left with no knowledge at all and an ungrounded state of being: that is, nothing to do with the real world that it purports to concern, but limited to a world of the mind with no necessary reference to our event-stream.

Evolution...settled science? No! Belief system

Nice piece by Albert Mohler on this topic. It reminded me a little of Evolution as a Religion by Mary Midgley.

I like a lot of Al's blog posts, but I don't really want to connect with him in my side bar, because there's also lots I don't like. But that goes for most public Christians (and private ones). At least we have diversity in the church!

One of his works that I do like is a talk at the 2010 Ligonier conference on the age of the universe. Many think this is merely an obscure 'scientific' question. It is not, it is a question about the biblical frame of reference and its conception of the world. It goes to the heart of the matter.

While you're at it, check out materialism and the age of the earth, and Geisler's 'Beware of Philosophy' in the JETS 42.1. You can find the link on theological studies.

Here is a selection of Al's work on evolution'ism'

Calvinist Revival

Scary piece on Credo:

 2. Evangelicals Find Themselves in the Midst of a Calvinist Revival: By Mark Oppenheimer - Oppenheimer notes: “Evangelicalism is in the midst of a Calvinist revival. Increasing numbers of preachers and professors teach the views of the 16th-century French reformer. Mark Driscoll, John Piper and Tim Keller — megachurch preachers and important evangelical authors — are all Calvinist.”

 As soon as you add to Scripture and its effect in the church, you subtract from it; that is to say, I am a Christian, not a Calvinist. Thus, I follow JD (Joshua Davidson), not JC (John Calvin). Calvin's views were of his time, and persona...dangerous to think that they are uncritically determinist of what theology and church should be now.

I'd prefer a theology that dealt with the entire Bible, avoiding the special pleading that Calvinists must engage in to avoid the implications of those parts of scripture that contradict their theology.

Creation Psalm

A sermon I recently heard was on Psalm 104, interestingly, described by Spurgeon as the creation in poetry (thereby indicating that at least he didn't think that Genesis 1, etc, could be so described).

I doubt if the sermon giver had given much thought to the creation account and its theological ramifications, as he led us through the half-baked framework hypothesis, which, as I've written elsewhere, does not quite work, and fails as an interpretive scheme.

He then told us that none of the information in the Bible tells us how God created, but that he did. Of course, if God needs a mediating mechanism whereby he creates, then that mechanism stands in his place and is the real creator, determining how things really are. But, not so; the 'mechanism' is God spoke...it happened. Genesis 1 is crystal clear on this.

If the creation account is a metaphor then we need to decide what really happened in the creation...taken at face value, we know, and can trace the trajectory of the creation from God's will to our lives quite clearly. It is linked all the way. But as mere metaphor, then the link is at best, only suggested...and this raises more questions (who is this God who can only suggest at our relationship, a relationship so important, by the way, that it brings us into God's ontological field), at and worst, obscures the relationship completely. Either way, not a good basis on which to build the connections that the Bible makes between creator, creation and creature.

An amusing slip that in the sermon was a reference to 'before the world was know to be round'. I don't think there are any credible documents that there was a time before the earth was thought to be round...its even mentioned, arguably, in Job 26:10, Proverbs 8:27 and Isaiah 40:22. I think he confused Washington Irving's fiction, and how things really are.

Small Groups & Ministry

I recently attended a training session for small group ministry (they called it 'leadership' but wrong concept...its ministry: service).

The session touched on some biblical material...mainly about diligence in action, and it had a little of a Brookfieldian flavour, but was fairly mechanical, I thought.

In the time available it was possibly helpful for those who were new to small group ministry, but the big omission was the theological basis for meeting in small groups. There is one, and it is about the community together in mutual service; it is also about reading and talking together about the Word of God. None of this, or the theological outcomes were mentioned.

There was far more that could have been done from the perspective of using discussion as a means of teaching. Brookfield has some material on this (more articles here). The  only problem is that lead by the Holy Spirit, discussion can go places that aren't lined up with where some remote author of study material thinks it should go...dangerous for authors who think they know where it should go!

In that connection, Jack Mezirow's Transformative Learning is worth some consideration.

American Culture to Blame

An op-ed piece in the NYT by David Firestone "Is American  Culture to Blame for Failing Schools" caught my attention with this view reported:

Canadians’ acceptance and indeed pride in their more egalitarian society contrast with Americans’ acceptance of having an underclass,” wrote Blair P., of Palm Desert, Calif. “It’s an Ayn Rand philosophy.

This hints at something that may lie beneath the weird non-biblical theology of 'leadership' that emanates from US conservative protestantism. That is, that there are 'them' and 'us' in US society. Some people born to be an underclass, and the clever ones born to 'lead'. An aristocracy as repugnant as any in Europe and the Roman church (with its fond memories of the Roman Empire).

But the Holy Spirit teaches us differently, and opposes such hierarchy as much as the early church lived out this (in a good sense) anarchism where slaves and owners were together the people of God.

In fact, the NT has little time for the powerful, and much time for the poor, the oppressed and the disadvantaged.

Blow your head off!

A very encouraging article, on Think Theology spoiled by some 'blow your head off' hubris.

I liked this comment:

Kenny, you say "who (2) is leading a church that is comprised of 50% female humans". I don't think you are 'leading' a church. You are serving one, along with all the other ministers in the church. It is the Holy Spirit who is leading.

The central concept of Christian ministry is just that: ministry! That is, service to others, service to the church, the body of Christ, service to our Lord himself, service to the broader community of and outside the faith.

Once we import the modern glam of 'leadership' we aren't talking church...the body of Christ...we are talking king pins and underlings. We are talking one active agent and a passive, 'just tell me what to do, believe and think' bunch of sermon admirers. Nothing like the conception of the church in the NT, and nothing like the Christ, who came to serve.

The language about and conceptualisation of Christian community in the NT generally and by Paul particularly is just that; community, living growing and serving together. Henry Mintzberg nicely calls it 'communityship'.

End note

The word translated 'lead/leader' in Paul's writings is subject of  range of nuances that do not come into the modern English (particularly USA 'popular business') usage of 'leadership'.

This discussion of 'proistemi' (the Greek translated as 'lead') is useful, I think, but insufficiently radically aligned with the scriptures and opposed to the worldly usage that  has flooded the church. 

Creating

I remain puzzled by the view, usually an unclearly defined one, that 'evolution' was or is God's 'method' of creating.

It's an odd method, I must say.

The creation is God exhibiting who he is: it is an act of love and it brings life. These are the impetus and outcome of God acting. He acts in love to bring life, or rather relationship.

But, to turn around and say that death, which is the single dominating feature of evolution (the less fit die while the fit survive and innovate...allegedly innovate to transmogrify 'kinds'), is the engine of creation is perverse to say the least. Death is anti-creation and anti-love.

The proponents of this bizarre theology had better get their explaining skates on.

Colemak Genesis 1:1

Slip over here to read Genesis 1:1 written on the home row of the Colemak keyboard.

Institutional Child Abuse by Church Organisations

There's only one word for the cruel and depraved self indulgent perversion that church bodies have connived at. It's here.

Yehuda is dead

I think that there should be an essay set for all Christians. It would be to respond to and/or reflect upon the death of Yehuda. It is captured in the essay My little brother, Yehuda Nattan Yudkowsky, is dead.

This young man was only 19, and his older brother posted on his website...follow the link.

Death is confronting. Having attended funerals of many relatives, including my parents, aged from 11 to 80, I know the dull weight of loss that death entials: the permanence. Eliezer captures it in his essay.

But there are a few things that are said about death, by Christians, and by Eliezer, that are both unhelpful and inaccurate: the former because of the latter.

They revolve around God willing death. God doesn't will death. It is a consequence of living in rejection of him and that we live in a world that is disjoined from God. Not his world any longer, but ours. Fellowship, family denied. We wrested from him. Death is the end of relationship with all the implicative vastness that this implies.

Yeshua wept because death was not of him, but contrary to him, the creator. His world was not like this! The warning to Adam was that the knowledge was not a thing to be sought, but a thing that would be experienced. The sentence in Gensis 2:17 is recursive. Yeshua stepped through death to undo it; because what is finally real is not material, but person-al.

University Goddess

Universities the seat of rationalism?
Sign at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia
Not that surprising, I suppose, because this university teaches...wait for it...chiropractic...witch-doctoring!!

 

Life? It means...molecules

And they think that evolution is not a religion:

“It now seems that modern evolutionary biology can answer not merely the chicken-and-egg conundrum but that it can also give some sort of objective and factually well-founded answer to the ultimate question: ‘Why are we here?’ (something to be especially welcomed, many would say, given the sort of fantastic nonsense which has been used to answer this question in the past). Today we can answer this question with brutal frankness: we are here to reproduce ourselves; we are providing a temporary home for our genes; life is ultimately only a very complex process of transmission of genetic information to future generations which is itself only a complex biochemical concomitant of the resurfacing of our planet brought about ultimately by nuclear fusion in the sun and nuclear fission in the interior of the earth.”

(Badcock, C.R., ‘The Problem of Altruism: Freudian-Darwinian Solutions’, Basil Blackwell, London, 1986, p. 25.)

What evolution is about

Darwin's god hits the mark:

Evolution is not about science. It’s about God.

Much as Darwin's biographer thought.

It's just a list

It is always both amusing and perplexing when commentators claim, against common knowledge of Hebrew poetic conventions, that Genesis 1 is 'poetry'; it is clearly not (see also Kugel's work and Barrick's review).

Most evidently, it is a delimited list, more akin to a modern computer database structure than anything else: it has repeated segments, we would call them fields: each record has marker fields, end of record fields and a count field surrounding the data field.

Nothing to do with poetry.

Indeed, it is much like the counted list in Numbers 7, and nothing like symbolic language at all

Not that fundamentalist 6 day nonsense!

One of the fascinating things about Alpha course discussions is that they so frequently end up at the question of origins; no surprise, after all, as this is the dominating question: its answer tells us who we are.

In a recent Alpha course that I attended we spent our final meeting with, yet again, someone making reference to origins: "Did God create, or did we evolve?"

The sub-text was: "Whose explanation of who we are really counts?" That is: do we listen to the naturalists, or do we listen to the Bible? People normally don't see a common ground, because unreflective common sense is a good guide on this; there is no ground between doctrinaire naturalist fairy tales and the revelation of God. Paul reminds us quite pointedly of this and it is a modern day theologically ignorant conceit to think otherwise.

In the answer though, this question is usually interpreted as being: "Do we have to accept the Bible's fairy story?" But this misses the point; it is really a question of basic ontology: who we are is set by where we came from, "So tell me where we came from."

The credibility of any answer is measured by another implied question: "Is your basic ontology grounded: does it refer meaningfully to the world we are in, or does it float off in some deracinated fictive talk-fest?" Or, in other words: "Is your spirituality meaningfully connected with the life that I confront, or is it meaninglessly off in a different world to the one that constrains my life?"

That much is obvious, I would have thought, but the answer that comes back is usually obfuscating fluff as both being right (how can two things equally explain a concretely delineated origin when they are ontologically contradictory, and without overlapping explanatory connections?)

At my most recent Alpha group, we got into a tangle straight away when one person asked about the basis for belief in God. The answer was to be found for another person in contemplating the creation. And this is where it unravelled. Someone batted that back with "what about evolution?" Then we got into the old half-baked tail spin of what the Bible is and is not, and how we can, do and/or should read Genesis 1, etc. Certainly not as a credible account of events because...well...it's 'poetry' or 'picture language' or because of 'its genre', or it depends on 'how you read it' (of course). All reader response gunk. No one suggested that one might seek what the author's intent might have been, or what the literary signals were as to how to read it...nothing so objective was entertained, or how it is referenced throughout the Bible...why do scholarship, when you can play Prejudice? that great game that grown-ups love.

And so we are left with Christianity being rooted, not in love-acts of the creator that are brought to us in real-world terms, terms that we can make sense of and have meaning in the real world we live and move in; no, we have an image of what we don't know, that is subservient to naturalist dogma which itself serves to unseat the notion of a personal creator; furthermore, one that has a basic ontology that is incoherently materialist (or spooky spiritualist); not one to which person-hood, relationship and love are basic!

Wittgenstein's egg

Speaking at the dConstruct 2012 conference in Brighton, UK, science historian James Burke told the following story:

“Apparently, somebody once went up to [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and remarked what a bunch of morons we Europeans must have been 900 years ago before Copernicus told us how the solar system worked... and to have thought what we were seeing up there was the sun going round the earth, when as anybody knows, the earth goes round the sun, and you don’t have to be Einstein to get that. To which Wittgenstein is said to have replied, as philosophers often will, ‘Yeah, yeah. But I wonder what it would’ve looked like up there if the sun had been going round the earth.’ The point being, of course, it would’ve looked exactly the same. What he was saying was that, in any given circumstance, you see what your version of things at the time tells you you’re seeing. If you’re an astronomer, and the contemporary paradigm says the universe is made of omelets, you build instruments to search for traces of intergalactic egg. And if you don’t find any: no problem. Instrument failure.”

And that's why evolutionists think its all sown up according to them!

How to read theories.

Some interesting remarks in Roberts and Pashler 2000 "How Persuasive is a Good Fit? A Comment on Theory Testing" in Psychological Review 107(2) 358-367.

The theory of evolution "appears to have successfully captured many of the patterns in the...data. This success [is] the main support for the theory"

[I've inserted the 'ToE' reference, and they go on to write]:

Why the Use of Good Fits as Evidence Is Wrong

This type of argument has three serious problems. First, what the theory predicts—how much it constrains the fitted data—is unclear. Theorists who use good fits as evidence seem to reason as follows: If our theory is correct, it will be able to fit the data; our theory fits the data; therefore it is more likely that our theory is correct. However, if a theory does not constrain possible outcomes, the fit is meaningless. [emp mine]

A prediction is a statement of what a theory does and does not allow. When a theory has adjustable parameters, a particular fit is only one example of what it allows. To know what a theory predicts for a particular measurement, one needs to know all of what it allows (what else it can fit) and all of what it does not allow (what it cannot fit). For example, suppose two measures are positively correlated, and it is shown that a certain theory can produce such a relation—that is, can fit the data. This does not show that the theory predicts the correlation. A theory predicts such a relation only if it cannot fit other possible relations between the two measures (zero correlation or negative correlation), and this is not shown by fitting a positive correlation.

When a theory does constrain possible outcomes, it is necessary to know by how much. The more constraint—the narrower the prediction—the more impressive a confirmation of the constraint (e.g., Meehl 1997). Without knowing how much a theory constrains possible outcomes, you cannot know how impressed to be when observation and theory are consistent.

...

That a theory fits data does not show how firmly the data rule out outcomes inconsistent with the theory; without this information, you cannot know how impressed to be that theory and observation are consistent.

Well, from this, I have a fair reason to be not very impressed at all with the theory of evolution!


Incidentally, the Meehl reference is a good read:

Meehl, P. E. (1997). The problem is epistemology, not statistics: Replace significance tests by confidence intervals and quantify accuracy of risky numerical predictions. In L. L. Harlow, S. A. Mulaik and J. H. Steiger (Eds.), What if there were no significance tests? (pp. 393-425). Mahwah, NK: Erlbuam.

Burden of proof

Darwin wrote:

…If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.

He's got it round the wrong way. What he, and evolutionists in general, have to demonstrate is that it could plausibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications. That might be the hypothesis; it only needs a counter to undo it, but lack of a biochemically plausible pathway renders it a work of literature, not science; and fiction at that.

And all we have is stories such as Dawkins concocts pointing to all sorts of creatures with all sorts of eyes. But that tells us nothing and is certainly not science.

Theological Death

It can be remarkable, the lengths that some theologians will go to avoid a theological impasse.
Here's a good one: when God foretold that sin would lead to death, he was talking, not about a literal death (because in this theologian's view, death had always been a part of the world), or even a 'spirital' death, but a 'theological' death.
That takes the cake! It is the last refuge of the theological scoundrel.
We don't know what a theological death is...unless its not getting published, of course...but to retreat to this distance from the real world, you are not making a study of God, but a study of make-believe.
But even to think that the impact of death could be restricted as 'spiritual' death, to save theistic evolutionary ideas, it fails to deal with the depth of death in the Bible.
The Bible understands death as being completely other than good: the 'last enemy'
And this is the clue to the irrationality of claiming that 'a bit of death is OK' but 'more is not'. That is, God would make a very good creation with 'a bit of death' just sufficient to enable evolution to operate, it would seem; without impairing the 'very goodness' he'd declared early on.
So, on this premise, God could give headway to the last enemy in his very good creation.
Irrational, to say the least, and a misunderstanding of death itself. Death is the end of relationship. It is anti-love and a dis-representation of God. To include it in a creation in harmony with God is to fracture God, at best; in fact it makes the Bible, and not just the creation account, incoherent. Death an integral part of life? No; death, by any definition, is not a part of life; but its end and its undoing. Nor is it part of God. Death represents the very antithesis of God. To think that it could exist in a non-fallen world is to think in 'crazy talk'.

Religious vision

‘Darwin’s vision of nature was, I believe, fundamentally a religious vision.’

James Moore (Darwin's biographer)

Truth, but not as you know it!

Dr. Craig Stanford, Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at USC, said,

“What Darwin showed in his work on evolution and natural selection is that we don’t need to invoke any supernatural force or power to account for the development of life through time on earth.”

At an Alpha meeting question time I recently attended, one of the course members asked about Adam and Eve...clearly wanting to know if we believed that they had existed, or how we took them.
One of our Bible teachers, a learned and godly man whom I'll call Joe, gave a multi-pronged reply that I'll summarise and comment on here.

I'll aim to be brief, as its all been well rehearsed before, for example, in my posts on Pahl's similar comments.

At the risk of over-simplifying, Joe told us:

1. I believe that God is creator
2. Genesis is picture language, like the picture language of other ANE origins accounts but tells us truth
3. When you compare Genesis 1 to other texts in the Bible, you can see that it is picture language
4. Science tells us 'how' but not 'why'. Genesis tells us 'why'.
5. The Bible is not a book of science
6. The order of events is wrong: light comes before the sun.

 Comments

1. If the content of the only direct reference to God being creator is denied, then I wonder how Joe sustains his belief that God is creator. All the biblical references to God's chief credential as creator rely on Genesis 1, and can only work coherently if Genesis 1 is grounded and shares the same event frame with those references and our own experience of the world. The alternative is that it is a story disconnected from the real and throws into question what the real is...not much different from paganism with identical epistemological challenges.

It strains credibility that God can not or would not describe his creation in terms that authenticate it in the world that resulted. There seems to be a disconnect that God created the world, but the terms of the creation account have no real connection with that very world. Absurd is the word.

2. 'Picture language' means 'imagery', I suppose, but I wonder if the authors of the pagan tripe such as Enuma Elish regarded their work as imagery. Even a rough comparison of EE and G1 shows a huge divergence; the main one that EE is a theogony, it presupposes a cosmos, and not creation out of nothing. We have to wonder what sort of world it is about, then. Moreover, it has evil as a part of the world in the 'creation phase'. This would line up with evolutionary dogma, but not the creation in G1. The difference is vast, and unbridgable. A more plausible relation between the two is that EE is a corrupted derivation of G1, rather than the other way. But then, if G1 is merely a competing story, how would an account of what did not happen persuade anyone? 'Your story...my story'; both just stories. It's like trying to stop a tank with a picture of a rocket!

3. The claim of G1 being imagery fares poorly with other passages in the Bible. It is nothing like the imagery in Ezekiel and Revelation, for example. The ordered, sequenced and delimited event segments in G1 are more like the lists that occur in other passages; Numbers 7 springs to mind.

4. The why only emerges from the how, and in this case the asserted 'how' is at odds with the 'why'. Any attempt to sever the two relies on a pagan ontology and not a biblical one, and stems more from an external philosophical idealism than the concrete-realism of the Bible and its unified approach to reality. Indeed, the flowering of modern science was brought by the approach to the Bible, and indeed the world, that the 'how' and the 'why' are intimately connected; as is sensible. To split them apart means that you reference an alternative real world to the one you are in where different aspects of the unified world we live in can only be explicated by their locus in different 'fields' of being. In fact, can't be done!

5. The Bible is the account of relations between God and his creation, specifically man, and God's work to restore us to fellowship with him. The creation is the essential and definitive starting point and it shows who God is, as loving author of creation, who we are, in this created world, and that relations are grounded in what really happened, not in some disconnected fantasy that attaches to nothing. It also teaches that the material world is ontologically continuous with God's effecting word.
But, where the Bible touches the physical world it is relevantly accurate, because it is about what really happened!

6. Light is produced by the sun, not created by it. Energy is basic to the material world and it is unsurprising that it was created early. Perhaps the order that G1 is relating is that first a basic 'stuff' was created, then it was energised. So, I read the creation of light as the formation of the general energy field: perhaps including the known forces: the strong and the weak atomic forces, gravity and electromagnetic forces; all of which must have prior existence for production of light by a particular body.

Mousetrap yanking

A friend's response to McDonald's mousetraps, kindly e-mailed to me:

Didn’t think much of the mouse traps but, probably, 25 years ago, would have really enjoyed the pot you smoked in order to dream up such nonsense.

But, I suppose, I shouldn’t be so prematurely critical. Maybe if you could intelligently CREATE one of those mechanical devices and let me see how it actually works I might be impressed.

In the mean time, inhale some more mate.

Mousetrap stories

On his otherwise wonderful website, John McDonald says:

To poke fun at creationist Michael Behe's claim that a mousetrap is a good analogy for an "irreducibly complex" biochemical system, I have drawn mousetraps in several stages of reduced complexity.

Trouble is, the mousetraps are not Behe's mousetrap and therefore have nothing to say to his analogy; they are also unworkable in the real world, as far as I can see. They thus give the evolutionary game away in that evolution works well as a story, but that's about it! Its relation to the real world is yet to be established.
McDonald has to establish how Behe's mousetrap can be reduced and remain workable, not propose completely other mousetraps...designed, of course.
To continue Behe's line, what McDonald has to do is establish how complex biological sub-systems can come about incrementally as working systems incomplete compared to the final system.
This has to be established biochemically, not story-wise in Darwinian fashion. That is, Darwin, and his followers are great story tellers (Dawkins and his 'eye' story is typical, and as easily rebutted). Their fiction is wonderful. But they establish nothing.
So, McDonald has to give us, firstly, a plausible biochemical explanation of the incremental development of a complex subsystem. Then he has to plausibly place this within a functional organism. Of course, at step two he can only fail. The putative organisms aren't around.
But even if he could do this, he's only established what could happen; not what did happen. We're still in story-land.
Then, to give evolution any legs at all, he's got to show that it did happen. I can tell that he'll point to the geological record. But for this to work as an explanation, he's got to do more than the gross morphology hoodwinking that we're used to and talk biochemistry! There's more, though. He's also got to step outside the circular non-logic of proving evolution by assuming it, and prove that the geological record is more than a sorted collection of dead creatures.

Too many problems, John, and finally we only have the superficial flippancy we've become used to from doctrinaire physicalists.

Nevertheless, thanks for the Stats text. Its great.

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.