Dear Seth

A recent letter to Seth Godin, of 'Seth Godin' fame.

Dear Seth,

There was an error on your post. You wrote:

"The world is not flat. Gullible actually is a word. The ice is melting. The world is not 5,000 years old. Stevie Wonder, is, unfortunately, blind."

I don't know if anyone thinks that the world is 5,000 years old, but plenty think that it is 6,000 years old. You don't clearly, along with many people, but truth is not established by vote (nor should it be silenced by opinion).

The point that you don't explore is that very long ages of 'earth life' have a long tradition stemming back to the dead hand of pagan beliefs; those who cannot locate mind as a reality in the world have to resort to great age in the hope that THAT will give mind a place. It doesn't however, because time plus material just gives us material. You will have to look elsewhere for mind.

OTOH, those who hold a short age for the world (indeed, the universe) do have a place for mind and hold that mind is the source of creative power...so the improbability of a short age disappears. Of course, once a long age is held to, conclusions will be constrained to that belief as proponents merrily question beg their way to deeper error.

One amongst many

In the film 'Superman v Batman', one of the protagonists...it might have been Lex Lother, or even Alfred (Jeremy Irons) said:

Since Darwinian evolution, we are not special, just one life form amongst many.

In the context of the indecisive good v evil of this singularly religious movie, we are dumped into the metaphysical materialism that the church fails to understand and therefore cannot bring the gospel against. The film deals clumsily with some classic topics in the philsophy of religion on the good v evil line but is hoist with its own petard; having no possible resolution, but a hopeless universe where there is no compass, and none possible; just where most Christians are as they trudge through the mire of theistic evolution, unwittingly intellectually equipped by Darwin to Dawkins.

Who's time?

From Siedentrop, Inventing the Individual, p. 54 (Penguin edition):

The Jewish sense of time was different. It was unilinear rather than cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall control and direction of events. Had he not led his people to the promised land, and saved them repeatedly? The Jewish God expressed himself in time. Nothing would ever be the same as before. That was the nature of time. Is it fanciful to trace this sense back to the experiences of a nomadic people in the desert, aware that wind blowing across the sand transformed their landscape from one day to the next?

The critical idea for my purpose is in bold: The Jewish God expressed himself in time.

Today we are immersed in the Jewish concept of time and it is very difficult to step outside it and feel what a contrast it would be to pagan concepts, so we miss the importance of the chronology markers in Genesis 1: these are profoundly significant for the sense of Genesis 1 and for its implications for our understanding of creation as God's acts in time to found his relationship with his creation.

To defer to other time-concepts, or to radically set them aside with the pretence that they merge with pagan concepts is to turn one's back on the Biblical conception of time (that is, how time really works) and with it the Biblical information about creation. Creation founds worldview, another concept of 'creation' founds another world view.

Today the worldview of choice is metaphysical physicalism (even though physicalism itself cannot give rise to a metaphysic, meaning tha the metaphysic produced falls victim to post-modern accusations of (mere) narrative).

Shamans of the day

The question of time and the tempo of events often pops up in discussions about Genesis 1. Should we take seriously the timing of events, the tempo of action, that is ostensibly in the text, or should we sideline it as irrelevant?

Those who want to make room for materialist dogma and confer credibility on the idea of evolution will typically vote to sideline the timing as irrelevant.

This is a mistake. If we take our lead from Paul, all scripture is profitable...so, where is the profit in the tempo of creation.

To answer let’s look at it the other way around. Where is the detriment in denying that the tempo is in any way related to what has really happened in our time-space domain?

If the tempo is disconnected from the real world, then there are gaps in the flow of God’s relationship with us. If evolution is deferred to as describing what *really* happened, then the gaps are immense, and the very flow of creation bears no relation to reality. On these grounds it can teach nothing: it is empty, or at least entails vast stretches of emptiness where the touch of God is absent. If the one who is love is absent, what takes his place?

The vacuum gets filled pretty quickly (which is one of the motives of materialism in ousting the supernatural): not with the one who is love and acts in love, but with myths and tales of demons who are not love in action, but the reverse. These gap fillers pave the way for the shamans of the day to use the power thus given to them against us, keeping us from knowing ourselves in relation to God.

Rowan?

A friend sent me this comment on Rowan's article:

1. Rowan Kemp said, “was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden?... but maybe they did not occur precisely as they are described to us.”

“And Satan said to the woman, “Has God indeed said,…”

Coincidence or what?

2. Rowan Kemp said, “was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden?... but maybe they did not 
occur precisely as they are described to us.”

However, the Spirit of God says, “And they HEARD the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I HEARD your voice in the garden”

The scientific explanation? Two possibilities: a. It never happened the way Satan's,  I mean, Rowan’s thought bubble said it did, or b. The forbidden fruit was actually psilocybin fungi and Adam and Eve (or maybe it really was Steve!) just hallucinated it all. Why not?

3. “What Peter has helpfully done is show how there is space within the (ultimately authoritative) Scriptures themselves for the integration of science and God’s revealed truth.”

Yes, yes, of course…but only after science, so-called, has first managed to salvage as much as it could for its valuable contribution.

We're now officially **cool**

As we approach CMS Summer School Season, I was browsing past articles on this venerable Sydney tradition, and came to a piece by Rowan Kemp.

He gushes for Peter in this piece, and distressingly, his general comments betray some huge lacunae in the education of Christians. That questions of the relation of the word of God to the world could elude a paid Christian for so long are shown in this paragraph:

Bible-honouring Christians can feel boxed in. If I embrace science and its findings I’m sometimes made to feel I’m betraying Christian belief in creation and respect for God’s Word. On another front if I suggest that there is intrinsic value in the arts, science, culture or work I run the risk of being told I’ve inappropriately elevated the merely temporal—the only thing of real value is evangelism and ministry.

 What?

This was not covered in Old Testament 1? Surely!!

But worse is to come:

Moreover, careful attention to the detail and nature of these chapters shows that we are not obliged to adopt a literal ‘six days’ or ‘young earth’ position in order to be faithful to Scripture. As Peter Jensen observed these opening chapters contain hints within them that suggest God is revealing truths selectively and sometimes symbolically. We’re not told everything that is going on everywhere: the old question of from where did Cain find a wife? Maybe there were other humans around—the text does not preclude it. Sometimes it seems the truth is being communicated to us in ‘parable-like’ form: was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden? Maybe the communication of truth in these chapters is like Jesus’ parables or the prophet Nathan’s parable to King David: it’s true, it concerns real events, but maybe they did not occur precisely as they are described to us.

 The damage done in this passage to the Biblical doctrine of creation is lived out every time a paid Christian does similar homage to the dominating materialism of our day: that is, God is, in effect, within the 'creation' and not the external author. This occurs because what really happened at creation is left to materialism: modern evolution is touted as the real 'creation' account. After all, if Genesis is not real events temporally located, then it is about nothing and can teach nothing, because its references are void. The vanity of this type of exegesis is astounding.

Careful attention to detail in Genesis 1 indicates that we are being provided a summary of events, but of events; actual real space-time events delineated by the repeated cross-referencing temporal references: I wonder how more clearly could an author communicate the passage and pace of time.

The most amusing comment is on Cain's wife. Of course there were other humans. The text does not merely preclude it; it states it: Genesis 5:4 does the job. I also refer to an article on the topic.

However, the greatest mash up is the 'parable-like' form. We have a word for this: metaphor!

At base, the escape hatch for materialism is in the philosophical idealism that allows a reality to be real in some way that is not temporally apparent. This is pagan nonsense. We need to take our philosophical bearings from the concrete realism of the Bible, with the compass being provided in the creation account as the starting point for our understanding of who God is; who we are; what the world is; and how it all relates together.

Nature...where it all starts

Quote from an article in Quadrant, quoting Camille Paglia:

Camille wrote her PhD at Yale, supervised by Harold Bloom, and in 1990 published Sexual Personae, which begins: In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem.

TE-ers fall into the Paglia's observation: God from nature; nature first, nature sets the ground rules.

But, we look at Genesis 1, and we see, no, 'tis the other way; God sets the ground rules in his identity and action.

When we reject the face reading of Genesis 1, we end up party to Paglia's world; it is not the world of Christ our maker!

Story

Letter I sent to 'A Just Cause'

Dear Scott

I am studying your booklet Boundless Plains to Share? with my home group and must thank you for your work in this topic.

It was all going smoothly until I came to the phrase 'the creation stories'. I wondered what this could imply. Generally the word 'story' is used in lieu of the word 'account' to impute some lack of factuality in the subject text. If this is the case here, then the usage undoes all the good that your book seeks.

If the creation passage (I  disagree that there are two accounts) is not directly connected to the world we inhabit, and is not sufficiently explanatory of events to allow us to invest in it, then we must go elsewhere to develop an understanding and appreciation of our world, ourselves and, indeed, of who God is and what he represents to us.

Indeed, if the account is best described as a 'story' then it is not obvious that it provides a basis for anything in fact because what is finally real is elsewhere.

The basis in fact would only come from what is really factual, and this, if the creation account is set aside, defaults to the dogma of organic evolution.

A basic premise of this dogma is that the world is constituted as a field of competition and destruction (and this is basic to the world and not the result of the fall) where inevitably the strong will outdo the weak. This puts the 'real' world in direct conflict with how God calls us to think and act.

Of course, in evolutionary terms, those who seek our help (or access to our wealth and freedom) are weaker than us and it is our vital duty to outdo them; because reality is that way, and the strong will do this. There is a grand determinism that is inescapable.

Better, I think, to take the scriptures as directly congruent with the world and factually related to it, setting aside materialist stories as pagan obfuscation.

The dogma also takes us back to the ideas of eugenics and to race selection doctrine: that some people and some 'races' are inferior. Arguably those 'races' that have produced repellent cultures are inferior to those that have produced attractive cultures, and it can only be 'right' (that is, congruent with how things really are) to oppose benefiting them.

On the other hand, of course, maybe your use of the word 'story' in connection with God's revelation of the actual setting between him and us is not meant to diminish the content of the Genesis account and detach it from the world we live in.



If so, it seems odd that you would use the deprecating term 'story' when if there is a 'story' it is the materialist story of evolution that sets us in a pagan world of a random and depersonalised universe.

G.U.T

Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere; at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore, psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time.

Wilson, E.O., The Meaning of Human Existence, Liveright Publishing Corporation, NY, p. 184, 2014.)

There you have it, theistic evolutionists, Christo-materialist syncretics and their fellow travellers are in bed with the wrong crowd.

Wilson is wrong, of course...none of this can be made sense of without the revelation of God...and the history of rationality and modern science is no my side, not Wilson's.

Challenges raised by Darwin

In his Gresham College lecture Alistair McGrath shills for Darwin, it seems:

This lecture sets the scientific and religious context for Darwin’s theory of evolution, before considering this theory and the challenges this raised for traditional religious beliefs...

Why not talk about the challenges Biblical revelation has for Darwinian speculation...?

Time makes distance

In an article in Quadrant magazine was the following:

His imagery is evocative, including his invocation of expanses of time that would dazzle anyone other than paleontologists and cosmologists.

"Expanses of time that would dazzle..." The expanse to which Noel Pearson refers is the claimed 53,000 years since the current aboriginies moved to Australia (it was not called Australia then, of course).

The vast expanse dazzles...what does this mean? Is it that a 'mere' 53,000 years is astonishingly great a period to contemplate in the span of human civilisation and relationships? Indeed it is. The vastness removes one from the period in question.

In our context, the very same effect operates when it is claimed by some Christian commentators that the world is really multiple billions of years old, and not the 6,000 odd indicated in the Bible. The vast period de-reifies both our creator God and our relationship to him. God, the person behind it all, becomes an abstract spirit, and we skirt the edge of animism, or panentheism because love with no exercise over eons is a lot like no love at all.

Art not life

Question in a study on Genesis:

5. Read Genesis 3.7-24. In these verses we see the consequences of human sin in the breakdown of relationships between people and people and God. In this highly symbolic section we see a reality that is still with us today. What area of brokenness troubles you the most?

As soon as a part of scripture is identified as symbolic, I get wary. To regard something as a symbol threatens its dereification. It makes it 'art' not 'life'. Art comments on life and relationship, it is replete with symbols and representations, but it is not, in itself real life; its a type of decorative communication about real life.

So when something in the Bible is declared to be symbolic, one first has to ask, symbolic of what? Of what concretely is it a symbol (and if we can't say, then its hard to declare it to be symbolic; maybe we should instead say that as modern Westerners we are just uncomfortable with it). Perhaps of 'a reality that is still with us today'. But if it is our reality, why would we need a symbol?

What the passage does is give to us the source of the current reality. Is the source a symbol of the source? How would we know? Has the current reality been always with us? In which case it doesn't need a source, but is inherent in the creation (as the problem only emerges when the face reading of Genesis 1-3 is denied, then the word 'creation' may be erroneous, and we should just say 'cosmos' or 'reality' as something that is unbound from God's creative acts that we've just denied).

And if it is a symbol what is the connection with our non-symbolic experience of the world as a subject? Where does symbol stop and concrete start?

I doubt that there is an independent epistemic basis for the declaration when our topic is a type of 'first philosophy' topic; that is, about the start of it all, so perhaps we are all just symbols of something else, our relationships are symbols of something else, and our concrete experience of death, pain, suffering and frustration is not due to actual estrangement from God, but is a mere symbol of some other actual thing.

No, it just doesn't wash.

So what is so symbolic about the passage? I think it is just that we have trouble with a talking snake (maybe all animals talked pre-fall...and how would we know they didn't...or did), and an actual tree being a reminder of a covenant. And what a simple gracious reminder. Nothing complicated to do, just remember the God-man relationship by your action of not taking the fruit. A fruit! Nothing to interfere with an enjoyable life, and it self demonstrating the mercy, graciousness and love of God; actually!

Theistic evolution

I was discussing with a friend the notion that God might have used evolution to complete the creation.

We were talking about Wilder-Smith’s wonderful book God: To Be or Not To Be and came to the conclusion that for God to have used evolution he would have had to make it do that which it is not able to do.

That is, he would have to use change processes not to produce chance outcomes, but purposed outcomes. He would have to inject teleology into that which is purely stochastic.

But that means he would have made a thing (chance) which could not achieve his ends (a creative purpose) and so work against the thing made (chance); which is to say, that he couldn’t have used chance at all, because chance leads to dissolution, not creation!

So God could only conceivably use chance to create by not using chance at all, but by over-riding (guiding, people might like to suggest!) it. The very notion breaks down under the weight of its own incoherence.

Chiasm

Some claim that because of the chiastic structure of Genesis 1, etc. that it cannot be history. I guess that rules out Matt 13 as being teaching, then.

Law 2

Granville Sewell has copped a lot of flack for offering this article on the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The detractors have said the usual thing: that he fails to understand that energy coming into an open system overturns the 'law'.
However, the critics beg the question and fail to explain what they assume...and fail to provide the probability-increase-engine that turns high probability states into low probability states.

What does evolution tell us?

Let Will Provine open the box:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear...There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That's the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation of ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.

in Origins Research 16(1):9, 1994.

What is evolution?

According to Michael Ruse:

Its practitioners promote evolution as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion--a full fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality...Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning and it is true of evolution still today.

Saving Darwinism from the Darwinians, National Post, 13 May 2000

How to win an argument with a scientist

From a recent Seth Godin e-mail:

The act of being a scientist is the commitment to the scientific method, a series of hypotheses, tests and re-evaluations. When you make better science, the scientist's previous opinion doesn't matter, not if she's being a scientist.

On the other hand, if you want to win an argument with someone who refuses to act like a scientist, making better science isn't going to help you very much.

The person you're arguing with now (who might be a scientist during the day, even, but is merely being a person right now) is not going to be swayed from a firmly held opinion by your work to make better science. It's more likely that it will take cultural pressure, shame, passion, humor, connection and a host of unreliable levers to make your point.

This disconnect is why it's so frustrating to encounter people with deeply-held pseudo-scientific beliefs about things like whether or not to support your project. It certainly feels like better science and the relentless power of the scientific method would be sufficient to help them get things straight, but they fail because, in fact, there's no science happening here.

Anecdotes, non-falsifiable premises and most of all, a willingness to change tactics if it helps maintain the culturally-enforced norm are all hallmarks of a non-scientific point of view. In other words, the sort of thing humans do all the time.

The easy way to tell the two varieties of argument apart is to ask, "what evidence would you need to see to change your mind about this?"

Evolutionists...they're evidentialists...aren't they?

This was written to the Administrator (note I use biblical role descriptions, not worldly job titles) of a Christian mission organisation:

Dear sir,

I was surprised by a number of statements in the most recent Prayer News in relation to faith and belief. The juxtapositions that you created were in many ways remarkable.

Take your use of the word ‘faith’. You seem to use it in two completely different senses without really distinguishing them.

You write “...this newfound (sic) knowledge is actually a great boost to their faith”. And rightly so. Biblical faith is our response to knowledge of who God is and what he has done in history. Then you go on to say that “...evolutionists, by faith, have to believe...”. But this is not biblical faith, but some other type of faith: a completely different species of faith; one that is not rooted in fact, but that finds its only ground in the vague postulations of a particular ‘research hypothesis’.

The conversation about ‘fact’ in evolutionary speculation is a very short one. So this faith is nothing like biblical faith. It is more like the ‘faith’ that a person might have in a shaman or an 'Applied Kinesiologist' [the fake 'science' of 'muscle testing'], to put it in modern western terms. It is misplaced trust in something that has no basis in this world.

But, you undo this when you write that “Evolution is a propositional belief system couched in  rationalism and evidentialism.” I detect the arid apologetic strategy of Van Til here, a strategy which is famous in Christian circles, but which has any effect only in those circles! Evolution is indeed a propositional belief system, but it is grounded in fiction. There is nothing truly rational or evidential about it at all. Indeed, there is NO evidence for it. If there were, then this would suggest that evolution is a true explanation of the world: not only in relation to biogenesis, but that extends to every corner of our being and understanding, our relationships and behaviour. However, it offers nothing in these areas either.

Oddly, the whole mission of your organisation is about evidence and its rational use, and this is right in terms of the doctrine of creation. God has given us the ability to undertake stewardship of his creation, and this requires knowledge, wisdom and understanding. We are called to examine, think and test, applying what we thus discover. That’s being good stewards. God also points to his credentials in history as the basis for belief. The Holy Spirit clearly is not a follower of Van Til.

Fangs

From Natural God by Beth Houston:

[in] Darwin's world of fangs and ovipositors, good equals harm successfully inflicted on another. In other words, benefit exists only through harm...Darwin know that his theory was dependent up on the inherent ruthlessness of Nature, not upon something reminiscent of the benevolent God of his abandoned religion (p. 167)

This type of observation, unsurprising for one familiar with Darwin's work, and the Victorian atmosphere that hosted it, one finds theistic evolutionary positions held, particularly by evangelicals (or their 'neo' cousins) completely untenable, and requiring a god most unlike the God of the Bible.

Young ages

On a website on Australian Aboriginal culture, it has this to say about creation stories:

This shortened concept of time may be universal within the origin of religions. For example, in the religions of Judaism and Christianity, the Bible’s Old Testament tells how God created the entire universe, including the four major rivers local to Babylon (now Iraq and Iran), in 6 days. It then goes to great lengths to describe many of the people who lived following Adam and Eve, the first people.

 It then goes on to explain:

The earliest bible stories may have only been in oral form, later becoming written in Aramaic and Hebrew possibly around 1700 B.C.. and read as though the time of creation was about 4,000 B.C.

But, we get the party line at the end:

However, since modern dating techniques have placed the earth’s age at about 3,600 million years, many people embracing those religions today still believe that God created mankind and the universe, but imagine this happening over a different time scale to that described in the bible. For all of us, the concept of a million years of humanity and thousands of millions of years of existence for our planet is beyond our comprehension.

A few observations: the first look at the Bible is taken, not to be a metaphor...but the metaphor has to be introduced to align belief with materialism; and that makes our attachment to our origins "beyond our comprehension". Good for materialism, not good for fellowship with our Creator.

Myth

I've rarely come across good definitions of myth. Here's one I read today:

"Myth" has many connotations, but for our purposes "myth" is defined as a  "thing existing only in imagination of whose actuality is not verifiable; a belief given uncritical acceptance by members of a group in support of existing...practices and institutions. [Myth] is...used to designate a story, belief, or notion commonly held to be true but utterly without a factual basis. In this context myth is opposed to history since it is "usually fabulous in content even when loosely based on historical events".

That's a pretty good summary in my view. So if you insist that the Genesis account of origins is not factual, then it is myth: either imaginary, non-verifiable, or without factual basis. If it has a factual basis, then it is confabulated. Not a good look for theistic evolutionists, because they are left with the theological basis for Christian belief being content free.

On the other hand it describes evolution very well: fabulous in content and loosely based on historical events. Very loose...so loose as to obscure the particular facts on which it is based.

And the source of the quote? "The Myth of Maneuver Warfare" a critique of the U.S. Marines' warfare doctrine manual FMFM-1. Just thought you'd like to know.

Self-organization

There was a phase of evolutionist fantasy that looked with forlorn hope to 'self-organising' systems being a model for the outfolding of creation: all these complex creatures, why, they 'self-organised'.

An engineering blog had this to say about self-organising systems (edited by me to clean up the English and particularise it for here):

Self Organization requires several conditions for it to occur and be observed:
    •    A high degree of structure
    •    The capacity for coordinated action
    •    A mechanism for system-wide feedback and amplification
    •    Some means to transform a small event into a larger driving force for the system to organize itself into a coherent system
Primary is coordination across boundaries and the capacity for action. This implies - quite explicitly - a deterministic response to external stimulus. The self-organization properties require structured communication channels for the systems to posses this property.
So next time you hear self organizing as the way evolution works, best ask to see what structures are identified to provide the channels for coordinated actions. What mechanisms are being used for system-wide feedback within that highly structured process framework, and what are the means of transforms small - potentially very small stimuli - into the collective actions of the whole?
In the broader sense, these concepts all live in a world governed in a deterministic manner through...
    •    Feedback - the return of a portion the output of a process or system to the input. These means modeling the transform function - usually G(S), where S is the system dynamic model, and G is the transform function. Both can be represented by non-linear differential equations
    •    System Dynamics is the next level of modeling for the structured, coordinated, system-wide feedback and amplification (both positive and negative).
    ◦    This involves state-space modeling or phase space) where an abstract space - a mathematical model in which all possible states of a system - are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the state space. Dimensions of state space represent all relevant parameters of the system. For example state space of mechanical systems has six dimensions and consists of all possible values of position and momentum variables.
    ◦    The Trajectory of the system describing the sequence of system states as they evolve.
    ◦    A fixed point in the state space where the system is in equilibrium and does not change. In complex projects and systems they represent, this is the steering signal needed to compare the feedback to so corrective actions can be taken by the system to maintain equilibrium and run off the cliff.
    ◦    The Attractor is a part of the state space where some trajectories end.
    •    The actual dynamics of the system - where the set of functions that encode the movement of the system from one point in the state space to another. This is the foundation of the mechanism for feedback and structuring of the disconnected components of the system. These dynamics are many times modeled with sets of differential equations containing the rules for the interactions.

Above all this, it must be remembered that the control system has to be at least as complex as the system it is controlling: accommodating entropic loss; somewhat along the lines of an Ashby-Conant regulator.

Of course, evolutionary speculation contains none of this detail, or even a sketch of it...

Carl Sagan

In a recent post on Lifehacker, as part of their series on people's productivity tips, was a set of 'tips' from Carl Sagan; notwithstanding that he is long dead. So I guess there's a bit of a paean to the famous scientism-ist in that.

But two of his tips collided with each other:

"Scrutinise your own beliefs" and "Remember your place in the Universe"

The latter is a belief and Sagan's notion of placeness is a direct outgrowth of his materialism. His dictum amounts to saying that we are just dust so nothing is of true value...indeed that statement itself has no value in Sagan's world as he dumbly excludes himself from his own epistemology. But it also means that the notions of 'belief' and 'scrutinise' collapse into the same self-important dust.

Another self-refuting puff from a materialist! Must we give these people air time when by their own world-view nothing is important, only momentarily diverting.

Man and Wife

Quote from The Year 1000 by Lacey and Danziger (1999):

...it does seem that the Anglo-Saxons separated and divorced when they had to, without any particular ethical complications. The only concern of the community was practical -- the proper partitioning of property and the care of the children. One Anglo-Saxon law code makes clear that a woman could walk out of her marriage on her own initiative if she cared to, and that if she took the children and cared for them, then she was also entitled to half the property.
The Old English law codes were concerned to shield women against the hazards of life in a rough, male-dominated society...

And the terms for man and woman? Men were called waepnedmenn "weaponed-persons" and the women wifmenn "weaving-persons".

But, the point of the quote?

Today, there is much ado by the social engineers to have the state create male-male and female-female marriages (whether the people are actually male and actually female). It is as though the state, the community empowered, is interested in people's romances. It is not, and should not be, and the Anglo-Saxons set the precedent: the state's interest in marriage its about protecting children (and women).

I think the sub-plot to 'same sex marriage' is to legitimise an artificial union so as to enable the exploitation of children. This might not be sexual exploitation, but forcing children into an arrangement where they are inevitably (and not accidentally) deprived of one of their parents is exploitation. Children become possessions subservient to the interests of adults. If money changes hand in procuring such children we have returned to child slavery, and sanctioned by the state!

It is that that is abhorrent. The social tinkering of pagans I'm not the least interested in, otherwise.

Changing Feet

Simon Smart opens his mouth to change feet in this article on The Drum. And without a biblical doctrine of creation, that's all he can do.

Not biblical? Not as far as I know. CPX is famous for thinking that the materialists have it all sewn up when it comes to how things really are, and not the Bible; so he can't really argue a biblical position, because he doesn't really have one. He's got a quasi materialist position if he's anything like John Dickson.

So how do you argue with a  materialist like Fry? First off, his ethical epistemology is derived from a Christian one...so let's find out what his world view really has to say....[waiting]...[waiting]...why, nothing, of course!

If material, or as I like to say, 'dirt' is all there finally is, then nothing has any significance, finally. And therefore, not at all, really. So where does his notion of bad things come from?

Then to deal with the substance of Fry's complaint, its baselessness in his world aside: God created a perfect world but mankind rejected fellowship with him: turned its back on life, and so continues to do, reaping as a result death, which by the rend from God has permeated the entire creation that was given to our stewardship. It is by God's mercy that it's not worse, and we can turn to him to join his undoing of it; but none of this death and falling apart, anti-love is his doing. It is all the death mankind brought that we are reaping: from little chln with cancer and up.

God shared our plight in Christ, so we can share his life in the same person.

Churchill and Darwin

From Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples, vol. 4, p. 73

Religious preoccupations were probably more widespread and deeply felt than at any time since the days of Cromwell. But thinking men were also disturbed by a new theory, long foreshadowed in the work of scientists, the theory of evolution. It was given classic expression in The Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin in 1859. This book provoked doubt and perplexity  among those who could no longer take literally the Biblical account of creation. But the theory of evolution, and its emphasis on the survival of the fittest in the  history of life upon the globe, was a powerful adjunct to mid-Victorian optimism. It lent fresh force to the belief in the forward march of mankind.

Keroauc

A friend and I were discussing On the Road, Kerouac's famous 'beat' novel of the 1950s. Sal and his pals madly drive about the USA, adrift, no centre for their souls, no place in the world, they are just...adrift.

They are located in a world were the personal has no real connection with being, where persons are solipsistic fragments drifting like plankton in an ocean (I'm reminded of Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being) and relationships' only parameter is proximity.

Cut life away from the truly personal ground of being (apologies to Tillich), and it drifts madly like Sal: always yearns, never has satisfaction, the soul gapes at life, but can't find the connection to truly participate in it. He never finds, and never can find what he seeks: he gropes for an integrating universal that makes the sense his mad racing around after something that will bring it all together he seeks to lift his experience above the randomness of dust blowing in wind.

Any time you like

In a conversation with most Anglican theistic evolutionists, or 'long age' creationists, you'll come to some sort of argument that the days of Genesis 1 do not mean days like we experience them, but something else. The 'something else' is, of course, indeterminate periods of time, or epochs, or some long period that correlates with modern 'geological time'.

I don't think they realise that in relying on this move to save their accommodation of naturalism they have left biblical theism and adopted a pagan approach where the truth is obscure, hidden, not amenable to any but the 'adepts'. Our world in paganism is shrouded in non-causal mystery and we are not free.

The Bible frames our world and relationship with God differently. It is open. We know who we are and who God is. It is revelation, not occult (hidden). The creation in Genesis is part of the great arc of revelation that ends in Christ and sets us free.

It's about time

There's an old saw in the world of engineering that goes like this: anyone could build a safe, efficient bridge; but an engineer will do it first time, anyone else might take decades of trial and error: expensive, dangerous and wasteful.

The application of intelligent capability achieves the objective parsimoniously. Any other approach is profligate and depletative: it wastes resources and impedes society.

I've heard similar thinking applied to biblical creation: an intelligent agent, all other factors being equal, will do something more quickly than an unintelligent agent. This works in exams: smart students get more right answers more quickly than non-smart students.

Hilariously, some Anglicans, I've been told will attempt to rebut this, saying that a really smart person might take their time to 'get it all right'. But this is an obduracy.

God is clear about the tempo of creation: it is rapid. He uses terms that are meaningful within the creation he is speaking about (i.e. "day", "evening and morning") and are unambiguous. He even counts them to drive the point.

Evolutionists seem to acknowledge this point too, in that I've heard some say that while evolution is improbable, given enough time, almost anything can happen (this omits to consider that natural randomness can only produce results that are possible. Evolution has not been shown to even be possible). Leave intelligence out of it. Given time, a non-agent can achieve an outcome that only an agent could achieve in short time! QED.

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.