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