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.

What is More Real?

What is more real? The words on the page or experiencing the words on the page?

“If that’s what he means,” says the student to the poetry teacher, “why doesn’t he just say it?” “If God is real,” says the parishioner to the preacher, “why doesn’t he simply storm into our lives and convince us?” The questions are vastly different in scale and relative importance, but their answers are similar. A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it (though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive). Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, image, which tease us not out of reality but deeper and more completely into it.
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/

300 words on Education

There is a 300-words-a-day project in which some great writers are participating. One on education caught my eye this morning:

As I was reading the paragraph, I could not help but notice the parallels between the state of education in Byzantium circa 775 and the US today. How many of our civil servants are truly wise, capable of understanding the law and applying it, understanding history’s role in shaping where we are today, and able to govern effectively? Furthermore, study after study shows that our population is getting less intelligent with every generation. What value does our education system put on philosophy, language, literature, the arts, and preserving the American culture? Scott Barstow

Now, I couldn’t care less about American culture. In my opinion, there are only a few things about it that are redeeming, the rest is mostly garbage. I do, however, lament his point about the education system. It is incredibly likely that I will not attempt to pursue (and therefore somewhat likely that finishing the MTS is a priority) a PhD because there is no where to use it.

More Mystery, More Enigma

I am coming to enjoy mystery and enigma which cannot be solved. They are tension, as such. Tension cannot be possessed, objectified, or codified by us. Tension can only be experienced, lived, related to and in.

In our time analytical knowledge is prized, taught, and sought after. This form of knowledge only works through possession. Hence this form of knowledge denies that contradiction exists. Contradiction cannot be known. This tension which cannot be possessed cannot be, and therefore is excluded from the realm.

Sadly we all are contradictions. We are all in tension. People cannot remain human and be possessed or objectified. When possessed, they become objects of analytical knowledge. They are no longer human. They become quantitative, not qualitative.

We can, however, know one another as humans: in contradiction and in tension. This is not analytical knowledge, but dialectical knowledge (perhaps even speculative knowledge). We are defined by our relations. We define ourself by our relationships. These create the tensions within us.

The analytical annihilation of mystery in our time has destroyed our faith in our ability to know in this other way. We are further from one another. And the deepest wish of analytics is to have everything objectified and possessed. This is harmful to us, as individuals and as a culture.

I need mystery, tension, and contradiction. I need to understand relationally. Only then can I find meaning. And meaning is why we are all here.

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.

More on Why I Like Rowan Williams

It is not just the eyebrows folks:

But ‘where Jesus is’ is in itself quite a many-layered notion. Jesus is in the neighbourhood of God the Father and so when we stand where Jesus is we too are in that neighbourhood and we learn his language of his relation to God the Father. But the incarnate Jesus is also in the neighbourhood of the chaos and the suffering of the world – a world he has entered to transform… To speak in those terms is really to paraphrase the epigram which I think originates with the great Irish Benedictine, Columba Marmion. He spoke about Christ being simultaneously in sinu Patris and in sinu peccatoris: in the bosom of the Father and in the bosom of the sinner. Christ is simultaneously in the neighbourhood of the Father and in the neighbourhood of the sinner, the formlessness, the shapelessness and dissolution, the dis-integrity of creation. He is in the heart of both realities, simultaneously. And that, of course, suggests that when we as baptized persons come to be in the neighbourhood of Jesus, that same dual proximity is what we have to get used to.
Lecture

Keep on reading. It is fantastic. [HT Inhabitio Dei]

Ah, Philosophy

[SMBC]

On Education

Seth Godin, as a marketer, talks about education. Education has always confused me. They told me I went to one of the best schools on Long Island. I graduated in the top 25% of my class. I slept through two of my senior year AP classes. I’m not that smart. I realize there are many people much, much smarter than I.

The commoditization of education, as Godin points out, is a massive problem. Those people who, of course, seek to consume commodities (the helicopters) they seek out what they know.

There are many in my generation, and in the next it seems, who are going around this trend. They appear to be happier. This is a present state of being, who knows if it will last. The massive difference is that they, for the most part, are not building wealth (not money, mind you) in where they are. Some, particularly the entrepreneurs, are building wealth. More than a few continue to go on (myself included) getting graduate degrees. Finding the amazing professors who can teach you is certainly the right way to go about it.

It seems to me that the answers, tentatively, is to find someone who can teach you. Whether it is a professor, a professional, whoever. Find someone who has accomplished what you want to. Get to know them. Get interested. Ask them questions. If they are passionate, and you are passionate – they will help you along. That is how you learn. Through people.

Powerful

Thus the specific morality of the gospel is not a mater of “laws.” The gospel’s moral discourse does not say “Do this and do that because you ought/must/would be best advised/will be rewarded.” It does not have the “if . . . then . . .” form. It imposes no conditions whatever, on anything at all. It does not say “Do . . . , because otherwise you won’t get into heaven.” It does not say—with a bit more religious sophistication: “Do . . . , because, although of course God will accept you anyway, that is what good Christians do.” It does not even say: “Do . . . , because virtue is its own reward.” The moral discourse of the gospel says only: “You may do . . . , because Jesus lives” (Robert Jenson, Story and Promise, 81, 82).Inhabitio Dei