Why I Am Against ID

The intelligent-design argument states that humanity was designed. I agree with this conclusion. I think, however, the argument is woefully misguided and gives science way too much credit. I am not surprised that this argument comes from conservative circles which are not articulate in issues of philosophy. Nor am I surprised that the people these arguments are put forth against are also not educated in philosophy. Scientists rarely read the humanities.

ID presumes that science can talk about design and meaning. This is why basic disagreement. Of course, without this basic point the entire argument is useless. Science cannot talk about meaning. It can only analyze. Any analysis cannot determine whether a thing is correctly put-together or in error. It cannot determine chaos from design. That determination requires a knower. Science strictly works only in the realm of objective knowledge (otherwise the scientific method is bogus and self-contradictory). A personal knower is required to give objects a design, a meaning, the label of correct, or in error.

The first thing to realize is that a knowledge of physics and chemistry would in itself not enable us to recognize a machine… At what point would you discover it is a machine (if it is one), and if so, how it operates? Never. For you cannot even put this question, let alone answer it, though you have all physics and chemistry at your finger-tips, unless you already know how machines work.
Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi, pg 331

Therefore, what Christians should be arguing is that we do believe humanity was designed – along with everything else. And we shouldn’t be looking for the scientific analysis to “prove” it, since it cannot. What we should be arguing is that when scientists turn around and place meaning into the incredible odds of life on this earth (what they’re really talking about is not “the chance that life started here” but rather the innumerable situations by which our kind of life would cease to function) that we are just a big accident. Science does not tell us we are a cosmic accident. People are telling us that. And that is what we should be arguing against.

Paley’s watchmaker argument applies here. Science cannot say “that is a clock”. Only a person who knows what a clock is can say “that is a clock”. Recognize that the Christian problem is, in the context of the ID argument put forth, you are asking people who do not believe we are designed to admit that we are designed. Science cannot tell them, or us, that we are designed. We believe that we are. You cannot merely ask another who does not believe this to admit it. It goes against their system of belief. In order to accomplish the task you have to alter their system of belief such that the idea of our design is not foreign.

Selections From Bonhoeffer

How could one person pray the prayer of the fellowship without being steadied and upheld in prayer by the fellowship itself? At this very point, every word of criticism must be transformed into fervent intercession and brotherly help. Otherwise, how easily might a fellowship be broken asunder right here!
The free prayer in the common devotion should be the prayer of the fellowship and not that of the individual who is praying. It is his responsibility to pray for the fellowship. So he will have to share the daily life of the fellowship; he must know the cares, the needs, the joys and thanksgivings, the petitions and hopes of the others. Their work and everything they bring with them must not be unknown to him. He prays as a brother amongst brothers. It will require practice and watchfulness, if he is not to confuse his own heart with the heart of the fellowship, if he is really to be guided solely by his responsibility to pray for the fellowship.
Life Together, pg 63

This is Why I Love Liturgy

A work, a performance, can be taken as worship – even as the Book of Common Prayer says we are unworthy to give it – because God meets us there:

Thesis 4: Christian worship does not lie in a realm outside of religion. To seek a direct correspondence between leitourgia (“the work of the people”) and divine action is to forget that worship itself is a “perpetual factory of idols” (Calvin). Furthermore, such easy correspondence risks fetishizing and instrumentalizing worship. The problem is structural and runs deep; in truth, the very discipline of “ecclesiology” is prone to idolatrous self-aggrandizement. Thus the critique of religio strikes at the very heart of Christian worship.[6] The occasion for sin occurs preeminently as leitourgia—the “work of the people” to self-justify, to strive to stand aright before God. Indeed, worship is the site marking our deepest estrangement from God. But this is not the final word! In Jesus Christ, God decisively wills to be God-for-us and so our idolatrous “work” becomes the site of our reconciliation with God. Reconciliation occurs not as exchange or production, but as a gratuitous event of grace. In this event the Spirit “takes up” our “work” to stand aright before God and transforms and transfigures our prideful attempts to “make a name for ourselves.” Our worship only becomes true praise, then, as our “work” loses track of itself under the great pressure of God’s own doxa. Such doxa happens as the event of God’s grace evokes gratitude “like the voice an echo.” Indeed, “Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightening” (Barth, CD IV/1, 41).
[HT: Inhabitatio Dei

Natural Theology

I am, by and large, shocked that Protestant theology has refused natural theology a place. I’m reading De Visione Dei by Nicholas of Cuza right now, and I love every chapter. I am so taken up by this neo-Platonist natural theology. I find it so very compelling. It makes so much sense out of our experience, Scripture, and the place where both meet. I can’t ignore it’s argumentative force, I am compelled to agree with so much of it.

But Protestantism has gone hand in hand with the “Enlightenment” ideal of rational objective Aristotelian proofs. And correspondingly they’ve got no natural theology. The best they can do is the best Aquinas could do – God in the uncaused causer. Neo-platonism is capable of so much more.

I don’t understand why we’ve given it up. I really don’t.

Update

Kind of elucidates my point. Reading over that seems to be far less than what my, admittedly, cursory readings of Augustine, Bonaventure, and Cusa accomplish.

America’s God

Hauerwas is, I think, the most culturally aware theologian. Most thinkers, especially Protestant ones, could never make this kind of a statement: ” …America is the exemplification of a constructive Protestant social imagination.” Most religious thinkers in our time are either, so consumed in their shaping the ethereal they have lost the physical, or focus on hot button issues. In both cases there is an entire absence of historical grounding. This lack of historical grounding, in my opinion, creates a serious lack of grounding in reality.

Of course, Hauerwas is right. American Protestantism had no instituted and bulwarked Catholicism to guard against compared to Europe. Moreover, the lack of any sacramental influence creates the focus on the ethereal we see so often in American Protestant theology.

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in America. The god most American say they believe in just is not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty, and happiness.

That is a scathing denouncement of American theologians and churches. As we so often here, they don’t stand up for anything except the right to life, liberty, and happiness. It is strange to hear freedom being talked about in churches. It sounds exactly like how we use freedom in political conversation. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why. I almost never use the word freedom. I do use the word ‘free’. But, I use it in a much different way, the opposite of being bound – always with an inward referent. Hauerwas’ comment also explains why religious pushback against pro-choicers is so large. Their vitriol is based against the right-to-life, so they must be non-believers, heathens, pagans, backwards, and un-American.

I could go on forever in this essay finding connections. But one more stuck out to me, and it has to do with Larry Lessig’s recent TED presentation:

Tocqueville descriptively confirmed the normative point made in the Massachusetts Constitution: “I do not know if all Americans have faith in their religion — for who can read to the bottom of hearts? — but I am sure that they believe it necessary to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion does not belong only to one class of citizens or to one party, but to the entire nation; one finds it in all ranks” (Noll, 10)

The loss of this maintenance of institutions is bad thing (note: republican there does not mean right-wing Republican, think publican, citizen, not political preference). Society’s loss of citizen institutions will cripple it by creating – even more – vast swarms of individualism with no common ground or experience. Like species on the Galapagos being separated so long they can no longer reproduce: only here we’re talking about the reproduction and mutation of ideas. The lack of common DNA (common experience) stamps out the ability to relate. With no citizen groups to demand their ability to re-use their ideas the only interested groups left are corporations backed with money. And the populace loses their ability to live creatively in the world. If the world, however, is going to throw away their institutions – as it seems they are doing – perhaps the Church has a chance to step up. That is of course if churches don’t blow it. They have to realize what is happening as well. Lessig puts his finger right on all of this when he talks about how republicans understand “church” as a concept where things and rights are given away.

It all depends on if churches remember their God to be the God of the entire world. Not the god of their nation idealized in individualistic democracy.

Presuppositions, Problems in Reading

A fantastic piece by Paul Helm on the discussion of what happens when we read, specifically the presuppositions inherent in reading Scripture as Scripture.

There are various ways of articulating and defending our sensory and intellectual capacities in their role as gatherers of reliable information about the world around us. None of these is ‘biblical’ in any direct sense, of course. We cannot lift an epistemology off the pages of Scripture as we can lift a doctrine of justification off them. The epistemologies that have been used, in the history of Christianity, are at odds with each other, though parts of one are not necessarily at odds with parts of others. What matters is that we have reasons that support our belief in the reliability (though not the infallibility, of course) of our epistemological equipment. This will be sufficient to identify a book as the Bible, and to read and understand some, if not all, of what it contains. And then we are in business

The inherit understanding that the Scriptures, actually the truth contained in them, is available to us wholly, completely, and without mediation, is the primary mistake most people make when arriving. In Paul’s words “It [the Scripture] is not free from the vagaries and perils of sense-experience, something which has immediately descended from heaven and entered immediately into our souls.” It is this sense-experience contained within the Scripture that we must deal with. And we must deal without our own world and all its sense experience. Only by bringing those two pieces together can we actually approach an answer to the question of a Christian life.

As Paul again makes clear it is this experience that must be dealt with: “A person may be a disciple while not knowing even whether there be such a thing as Holy Scripture. Remember the thief on the cross. And the hymn ‘There is life for a look at the Crucified One.’” It’s great that we have a book – but the words in the book is not what this is all about. Don’t get sidetracked by it.

Talking and Listening

Fundamentalism cannot listen. And if you cannot listen you cannot speak. If you cannot listen you only speak about you, you cannot speak to someone else. You only speak at them. You leave no space inside yourself for them to exist and be considered. Fundamentalists derive their enemies of their humanity. So much for fundamentalist “humanists”.

It has become apparent to me over the last few years of writing this blog that the critical conversation is between the fundamentalists and the rest. It is the fundamentalist mindset that presents the greatest challenge, in my opinion, to open dialog between all parties
Naked Pastor

The preceding quote mentions polarization. Groups that only talk to themselves become further polarized. This is a sociological fact. Fundamentalists often define themselves by a small number of essential truths. The ultimate question is not whether these truths are “correct” or “true” – but rather to discover why it is these truths and not others which orient the group.

If someone cannot tell you why they have not performed the necessary self-reflection that is required. Such reflection is required in order to actually positively participate in a dialogue.

Re-Negotiation

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action.

But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.

Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”?

If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll.

You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS
NPR

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Fundamentalism and The Bible

Based on my last post and some conversations I am having with friends, I want to try and attempt to think through approaching the biblical text. In one sense I am trying to re-trace my own path leaving fundamentalist territory. In another sense, I am trying to clear a path for others to find their own way out as well.

We have to admit where we are coming from. Inspiration means, on a most basic level, that God is responsible for each word in the holy Scripture. It originated from God, and was not the work of men primarily. Of course, some fully deny that men had anything to do with it whatsoever. As the text has come from God directly it is therefore authoritative and inerrant.

To put it at a more practical level, the Scriptures are perceived according to a story that runs something like this:

God delivered this book to his people so they would know him. It is delievered by God for the Church to tell them what to believe and how to live. God has given it to me so I can read it and know he loves me, and what he expects of me.

I am no spinner of tales but that is close. If you have got a better way to put it please let me know. The three terms working within that storyline frame the entire issue. There is no objective reason that inspiration, inerrant, or authoritative mean precisely what fundamentalists want them to mean. However, without dislodging the story you are fighting uphill to redefine the terms, and thus the battle.

That story is flawed. Those definitions are flawed. They are not supported by the Scripture itself, nor the variagated tradition of Christianity. That tends to become the battleground on which the war is fought. To peel back the layers and understanding of the Scriptures themselves is to use critical study. And to peel back the layers of history is to use historical study. From a fundamentalist point of view this is to concede the war before you’ve even started the battle, a Catch-22. How then have I found my way out of the fundamentlist mess I was previously in?

For starters, the group I came out of has some unorthodox beliefs. And if fundamentalists are always right, someone has got to be terribly wrong and we have got to tell them about it. Scholarly sources that agreed with our positions were studied, and thus critical methods were smuggled in the back door. The methods changed slowly, while the underlying narrative in which I placed the Scripture for the Christian life never changed.

I read about the stories that the Jewish people told about the Exodus. I understood that the prophets retold Israel’s history with their own perspectives and motives. The same goes with the gospels, and particularly Paul. Is it so foreign to think that we are telling our own stories about how we got here, and what we ought to do? Of course not! That is exactly what humanity has always done to understand their purpose. And this is why the very concept of narratives and story is so intriguing to me. It contains so much power.

Mark and Luke are telling their own stories about who Jesus is. It doesn’t matter that certain details aren’t congruous. It doesn’t matter that the stories depict Jesus differently. If I were to tell a story about my parents I am certain it would be different than the stories either of my sisters tell. And if you were to put us together in a room we would recognize we are still talking about our parents. We might disagree when it comes down to our perceptions about their intentions or what have you. That is to be expected. Isn’t it?

The Bible was ultimately and remains the anchor of my faith. What changed is the narrative I believe about the Bible. And that new narrative gives much richer rewards. I am at the very beginning of understanding what goes into narratives. What makes them compelling, and ultimately more attractive than other stories. Certainly resonance with one’s own experience is paramount. How then to tell a story which undoes fundamentalism’s own story. Any ideas?

Define: Fundies

Often times I’ve struggled at defining fundamentalism to other Christians (whom I consider to be fundamentalists, or close to that line). To non-Christians, it is rather easy. I can say Pat Robertson, or Rick Warren, or some such figure that comes close enough. It conjures the necessary image in their mind. But to another Christian the same image is not conjured just by saying these names. They soften edges, make compromises, and what have you to understand these figures.

By comparison, it is becoming more difficult to define what a “fundamentalist” Christian is, potentially because the ground under his feet is more prone to cultural shift. But if we think of biblical literalism, an intolerance of “soft” forms of Christianity (often equated to a kind of mainstream heresy), the importance of conversion (in this case, evangelism), and prophetic fulfillment as the non-negotiables of fundamentalism, the following statistic is, you should pardon the expression, revealing:

Pentecostal and charismatic denominations have grown by 37% since 2001; the Churches of Christ by 48%; the Assemblies of God by 68%. (United) Methodists and Northern Baptist by 0%, Jews, -10% and Catholics, through a healthy infusion of Hispanic and Latino votaries, a mere 11%. The undeniable appeal of taking God’s word seriously is unslaked by contemporary life. A definition

And of course when I tell someone they are a fundamentalist it always makes them think I am slighting them.

HT [Eric]