OutsideTheBox

God Vulnerable

2011-12-25T09:24:00.000-08:00

Sometimes my atheistic friends display spiritual insight beyond many of my believing friends. As I reviewed some of my Christmas related files this morning, I encountered this 4-year old exchange between my friend Tom and me, consisting a post he wrote on his own blog, and my comment. The exchange inspired me to build the graphic below, and to reproduce a portion of our conversation ...

"Why the need for a vulnerable God?"

The Christmas season is a bit peculiar for atheists, especially de-converted ones like me. Choirs and the songs they sing are especially poignant. "O Holy Night" is beautiful and "Silent Night" is so wondrously simple. However, the religious pomp is no longer part of my life.

When I recollect the nativity story, it begins with a weary Mary who has traveled so far to Bethlehem, and a penniless Joseph who is panicking to get his wife somewhere where she can deliver a baby. There is no hospital, home, or quarters available, just a barn. Then there He is. Between runs from Herod and the life that is to follow, there is this moment where all has stopped and the universe looks on at God incarnate, this tiny, needy baby on a bed of straw. While "Hallelujah's" are part of the scene, it's really overwhelming peace that is iconized in the nativity.

Christianity is strong on symbols and the two biggies are the cross and the nativity. The cross is violent and the nativity is peace, but both exhibit a vulnerable God. It is this God-made-feebly-human characteristic that ironically makes the Christian God so attractive and able to yield strong convictions in followers. No wonder the broken hearted, lonely, and strung out reach out to Jesus. But what about us suburban upper middle-class kids? What is it really about the vulnerable-God story that hooks so many and can even make a formerly religious, now anti-religious atheist like me nostalgic? posted by Tom at 11:29 PM on Dec 23, 2007

My comment:

Wow, Tom. You preach a better Christmas sermon than most believers I know. But you raise a valid and significant question. Indeed, we could let Jesus answer it himself: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:17) Jesus often said that he did not come for the “suburban middle class kids” of his day, but for the lost sheep. Yet, even though they were not the target of Jesus’ ministry, many of those healthy, righteous, together people did choose to come along for the ride. And, so long as they could stomach the throng of whores and addicts surrounding Jesus, they were heartily received. The Zacchaeuses, the Matthews, and the Nichodemuses were not turned away! But others, like the rich young ruler, found Jesus attractive but wholly inaccessible on their own defined terms.

Why such vulnerability in God’s “self-presentation”? Perhaps, as the above paragraph would suggest, it was an appeal to the lowest common denominator of mankind; God knowing that any other approach would slam the door of relationship in the faces of the bottom half of humanity. But for me (also a suburban middle class kid), the picture of the Almighty in kenosis (self-emptying), utterly vulnerable, unconsumed by self-importance, humble, serving, is what attracts me to him. And are these not the qualities we look for in our very closest friends? I am only free to reveal my deepest inner core to another who has made himself vulnerable to me.

It is, in fact, what draws you and me to each other. You are one of those rare human beings who is not consumed by self-importance, an atheist who does not demean believers, who is not afraid to mention your own “atheistic doubts” to believers. In short, you have readily presented yourself to your readers as vulnerable. And I hope I have done the same. I do not wish to pretend that my faith is all so secure and air-tight that I have no room for your penetrating questions and challenges. It is my desire to present myself to you as a vulnerable human being, sharing with you a sincere quest for truth, for the ultimate answers that are, at times, elusive for me also.

When I only present myself in my strength, I drive people away. My strength is never grounds for intimate friendship, for deep relationship. It seems I often come across this way. I am naturally self-assured, proud, “together”, successful in business and life, etc. But when I freely open up my weaknesses, when I own up to my own failures, when I lay out the frailties of my humanity – that is when I find people strangely drawn to me, drawn to deep friendship with me, opening the secrets of their own hearts to me. It is remarkable. I am most “winsome” in my weakness, in my vulnerability. I define intimacy as “into-me-see”.

But what of God? He has no “real” weaknesses. He has nothing we could call “failure”. And, in his self-presentation to us, he admits none. Still, he takes on all the weakness inherent in human flesh. He absolutely humbles himself at the nativity and at the cross. He leaves no barriers of exaltation, of perfect strength, of free divine prerogative, to bar our access to him. One of my favorite verses is Proverbs 3:32. One translation says that he “takes the upright into his confidence”. Another has it “He is intimate with the upright.” The original language has hints of pillows and couches, as though God is inviting us into his parlor. God wants to share secrets with us. He wants intimacy with us. This absolutely blows me away! And if it is true (even if there is but a remote chance that it is true!) surely there can be no greater quest than our pursuit to enter into such a relationship with the Creator of all!

Personal: Thanksgiving 2011

2011-11-24T09:24:00.000-08:00

When Ginger, my late wife, was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2006, I began a series of email updates which were sent to a number of friends to keep them informed on Ginger's battle with cancer. After her passing in the Spring of 2010, I have continued to send out these updates, the focus shifting to a sort of journal of my own experience of loss and grief.

Today's post is an excerpt from one such email sent this week. I hope you find it useful as you think about thankfulness today!

~ Cliff

The Thanksgiving holiday is one of the better inventions of our American culture. Thanksgiving was Ginger’s favorite holiday. She loved to gather her family around one essential principle ... the power inherent in a thankful heart. Of course, gratitude is not the unique commodity of Thanksgiving Day, nor should it be. But this holiday does provide us with an opportunity to pause and consider its importance, and the dynamic capacities released through thankfulness.

Consider with me the transforming dynamic of thanksgiving. In the first century, opinions varied among believers over which foods were morally safe to eat, and which we should avoid. Paul often addressed this issue. Rather than being a matter of religious legislation, Paul set the matter into the realm of personal conscience. In one place (1 Timothy 4:3-4), he teaches that the key to eating otherwise verboten foods is thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, it seems, actually has the power to transform food, and make it acceptable to the eater! Questionable foods become beneficial foods by the application of thanksgiving! From this teaching comes the Christian habit of saying grace at our dinner tables.

But this principle also serves as an analogy for life: “nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving”. Nothing! Thanksgiving changes things! The Bible suggests that we can transform anxiety into peace with the application of thankfulness (Philippians 4:6-7). The way out of confusing and troubling circumstances is opened by thankfulness (Psalm 50:23). Thanksgiving can alter life’s bitter experiences, reshaping them into growth stimulants! Author Shauna Neiquist puts it this way: "When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow."

My life has no shortage of opportunities to test this theory! I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what it means to be thankful for cancer. I won’t pretend that I’ve arrived at a place of offering thanks for Ginger’s passing. But I am reminded of the frequent references in the Bible to the discipline of thankfulness. It is sometimes placed into the category of sacrifice. Personal thanksgiving must at times be pushed through the steady resistance of our own sorrow, even anger. In such circumstances, thanksgiving is offered without full understanding; it is offered in faith, and in hope.

Recently, I was handed another occasion to test the operations of thankfulness! My account on a social internet site was hacked. I was able to shut down the account before serious damage was done. But nevertheless, I got a taste of I.D. theft. It is not pleasant. Aside from feeling personally violated, and having my reputation drug through the gutter, I was left feeling vulnerable on many fronts. I have since secured my computer, and my other online dealings against future attack, and this is a good thing. But I have also been forcibly, and permanently blocked from many friendships. My initial reaction was one of unbridled anger! I was livid! But as I have considered the net gains and losses from this experience, anger has given way to a strange and unexpected gratitude. Accepting our circumstances, even finding those elements for which we can offer thanks, is so much better than stubbornly resisting them. This experience has given me opportunity to reevaluate some of my personal goals and priorities, a process which has strangely given me a new sense of contentment; and a growing thankfulness for the services of an internet intruder.

As you gather with friends and family today, my wish is that your holiday will be filled with happy thoughts, great food, and closeness with your loved ones. But take a moment or two and review those circumstances in your life which naturally create sorrow, anger, or anxiety. Find a place for them in the kettle of gratitude. And watch as thankfulness works its transformative magic!

Human Evolution and Theology

2011-09-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

It’s been over six months since my last entry on this blog. My apologies to the many who continue to check in here, only to find the well still dry! There are many reasons for my writing hiatus, most of them personal. But I hope to resume writing, and today I offer this summary of a recent Biologos article, together with a brief facebook exchange from yesterday.

My friend, Dennis Venema, is an Associate Professor of Biology at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C., and a Senior Fellow of the Biologos Foundation. Yesterday, he posted a fascinating description of early human speciation at the Biologos site. Evolution doubters confused about microevolution versus macroevolution would do well just to read Venema’s opening paragraphs about how new species develop, and when they cross that invisible line demarcating a “new species”. Venema’s main thrust is how genetics is showing the way to a deeper understanding of how the very early Hominid species spread out across the globe, and how they interacted, and interbred. But Venema’s driving passion, much like my own, goes beyond elucidation of our distant past; he longs for the conversation which evangelical Christians must engage which is less about natural history, and more about its theological implications. Venema closes his article with this:

"Even as I stand amazed in what God has revealed to us about our origins through science, I know that this new information will be difficult for some within the evangelical community to accept. Moreover, it is almost certain that some Christian groups, unfortunately, will misrepresent this data to their constituents (whether intentionally or not), and thus spread confusion that hinders the needed theological conversation. Still, I have reason for hope: God has seen it fit to reveal this information to us, and that suggests that He believes the evangelical Christian community is ready for this conversation to happen. As [Biologos President] Darrel [Falk] mentioned at the end of his recent piece, we at BioLogos want to assist our evangelical sisters and brothers in this conversation in any way we can, in full confidence that it can be done in an edifying way ..."

I posted a link to Venema’s article yesterday, and one of my facebook friends commented with several questions. My friend, Tim, is an unbeliever, and puzzles over how or why believers who understand our evolutionary past persist in efforts to reconcile “the biblical narrative from Genesis” with “what science has discovered.” Tim writes, “I just don't get this insane drive to keep believing something that is completely contradictory to the facts.” He goes on to quote Venema’s amazement “in what God has revealed to us about our origins through science.” Tim is incredulous, even infuriated, at such a statement. He writes, “God didn’t reveal anything. Man looked around observed tested and discovered. What God supposedly revealed about the natural world in Genesis is in short a fairy tale. Simply put when it comes to explaining how why things work the way they do or are the way they are its Science a whole whole lot and God zero.”

My answer to Tim’s concerns follows:

“A lot of really good questions, Tim. I'll try to answer succinctly, though each of your questions is worthy of an essay!

“People like Venema and myself make little attempt to align current understandings of natural history and science with the narrative of Genesis in the way you presume. (Some believers do, e.g. Hugh Ross, and his organization "Reasons to Believe" <www.reasons.org>.) Rather, Genesis appears to us to be an ancient text that provides a wealth of early theological insights within it's contemporary cosmological framework, but which contains little or no supernaturally supplied information about science, origins, or natural history.

“But what you are really asking is why maintain faith in any Biblical revelation in light of the Bible's lack of historical/scientific preciseness. I cannot presume to answer for Dennis, but I can tell you that for me, this is a choice that is rooted in my faith in the person of Jesus, who is called in the Bible the "Word of God", and as such is the ultimate expression of God, the ultimate divine revelation. And the Bible, in my opinion a substantially accurate source of history concurrent with its writing, tells us much about Jesus prospectively in the O.T., concurrently in the Gospels, and retrospectively in the rest of the N.T. When I couple together the things we are learning from science about origins, evolution, physics, etc. with what is revealed in Jesus and in the book about him, the results are exciting, refreshing, and captivating (you can read some of my observations on my blog, OutsideTheBox).

“Your question about "God revealing through science" is a fair question. There is a verse in Proverbs that says "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings." That is, God's revelations in nature are concealed, below the surface, awaiting discovery. Science (which you may know was largely driven by theistic belief for much of it's history) is man uncovering the secrets of the Creator. The Biblical presumption is that all of nature is God revealing, and we call this "Natural Revelation".

“So your score card ("science a whole lot, God zero") presumes that God spoon feeds information to us, or that Christians believe that he does this. While some Christians may think that way, I assure you that Venema does not. Nor do I.”

Your comments are welcome ...

God: the Author of Chaos?

2011-03-12T15:09:00.000-08:00

When I share my views about open theology (that God might not know details about the future) or about God’s noninterventionist ways (that God is mostly “hands-off” with respect to Creation, our individual lives, and the flow of human history), some believers get noticeably anxious! They worry about a world not tightly supervised by its God, a world which is not controlled, and micro-engineered by God. More than once have my views been characterized as deistic. But I am not deist. I believe in, and base my life hope in, a God who is personal, vitally interested in us, and highly purposeful! Nevertheless, it seems that, for some, conceiving of God as the “blessed controller” provides a level of comfort and security they are unwilling to give up. And they often wonder out loud how a universe ungoverned could ever accomplish the ends of a purposeful Creator.

I believe that science can help to solve this mystery! Throughout the natural order, we see a confluence of randomness with design and purpose and ultimate predictability that is fascinating to me; and which may be instructive as we seek to understand the ways of God. Three examples are chaos theory, quantum uncertainty, and evolutionary convergence. I’ve written on some of these in the past. Here I bring them together for your consideration.

Chaos theory, originally explored as a mathematical phenomenon, has been observed and studied in a variety of fields from meteorology to economics to philosophy. Chaos theory tells us that very small, seemingly insignificant variations in initial conditions may result in enormous alterations to the long-range outcomes. The familiar example is that of the “butterfly effect”. A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can, according to chaos theory, set off a disturbance in air patterns which could ultimately cause a destructive hurricane to strike Texas, or Indonesia! Chaos theory deals with causes and effects that are, by some measures, completely unpredictable. But there are corollary principles to chaos theory, called fractals. Examples of fractals include the principle of “self-similarity”, and the “Lorenz attractor”. These principles bring a level of order and predictability even to chaotic systems. That is, while initially, effects may splay out in totally unpredictable and chaotic ways, on larger (or smaller) scales certain patterns emerge. And these patterns become predictable, and stable.

In Quantum mechanics, the principle of Uncertainty speaks of the utter unpredictability of the movements and behaviors of subatomic particles. And yet, while the physicist may be unable to predict how a given quark or other quantum particle will behave, when observed as a mass of collective particles, the sum of the behavior of such particles becomes predictable with a high degree of accuracy.

Biology bows to a similar pattern. The competing principles of contingency and convergence don’t actually compete at all. Both principles are operating throughout evolution. Contingency suggests that mutations and adaptations are unpredictable. Thus the evolutionary trajectory of similar organisms isolated geographically may vary widely even within similar biomes. And yet, convergence suggests that certain ultimate effects are quite predictable, as evolution will self-guide into preexisting, or developing ecological niches. Together, contingency and convergence are the opposing sides of the same coin. They tell us that God could create life just as he willed it by allowing it to move along paths that appear to be totally random. Simon Conway-Morris has theorized that the evolution of man, substantially as we have seen on this planet, was inevitable, and would occur on any planet given the same set of initial conditions, even though the paths might vary widely.

This pattern — this phenomenon of random, unpredictable movements and processes ultimately coalescing into long-range outcomes which are foreseeable — provides us with illustrations from nature: natural phenomena which mirror and typify spiritual phenomena. But might they be more than that? Might they suggest a continuity of patterns built into the structure of the cosmos that extend from discernible physical and biological laws to spiritual laws? Do they identify a divine rubric, God’s chosen M.O? I believe they do!

And if so, they suggest that the purposes of God can and will be accomplished through his Creation even as he restrains his hand.

Why Science Matters!

2011-01-15T06:54:00.000-08:00

Frequently, certain friends seem troubled by my exploration of the sciences, and my willingness to accept evidence which at times runs contrary to earlier theological assumptions. A friend recently wrote to me expressing her concern over my interest in what she regards as “the religion of science.” Below is my response to this friend:

I do not share your view of science. You indicate that science is a religion unto itself, that is it merely "possible" for a scientist to believe the Bible, and that science (or what you call "worldly knowledge") is something that will eventually fade away.

I have a much higher view of science, and of its usefulness to faith, to understanding God, to understanding spiritual things, etc. Without question there are those who wrongly worship science, just as some worship sports, others worship cultural icons of Hollywood, and some (dare I say it?) worship the Bible. I know people who would define their entire relationship with God as a pouring over the Hebrew and Greek, searching out the minutia of the text for hidden clues about God, while they have little personal knowledge of or walk with the true "Word of God", Jesus. They have fallen into bibliolatry. But we have these two great sources (or channels, more accurately) of revelation: Special Revelation, and General Revelation. We learn about God in the pages of Scripture, the person of Jesus, and the illumination of the Holy Spirit; and we also learn about him by paying close attention to Creation, to the works of his hands. If indeed the heavens declare the glory of God, then we have a much fuller understanding of God's greatness, magnitude, and glory post-Hubble than before. The intricacies of the living cell are clueing us into the infinite wisdom and creative genius of God. Quantum mechanics is helping to dismantle the unhealthy notions of strict determinism ... that is, we now know the universe is not a static Newtonian predictable set of causes and effects; that helps to correct our theology! Paul tell us in Romans 1 that we can not only learn of God's existence in nature, but we can even learn about his attributes, perhaps even facets of his character. Knowing the Bible, and personally knowing Jesus, helps us to properly "read" the data from science. But it is equally true to say that science helps us to properly read the Bible. It did so in Galileo's day; it continues to do so today. Technically, of course, you are correct: all knowledge will fade away, including science, and including (in my view, at least) the Bible. But for now, science is an amazing tool for looking deeply into God, how he structured the cosmos, how he created the universe. These profound data give us clues to his purposes, and why he responds (or at times does not respond) as he does. The more I understand from science, the more I come back to the Scriptures and say "Aha ... now I understand that!"

I read in your tone almost disdain for science. That makes me sad. It is true that secularism has hijacked science to a large degree over the last 100 year or so. And, in my view, history reveals that we, the people of faith, are utterly responsible for that hijacking! Through the early centuries of the western scientific enterprise, the primary impetus of science, the motivation for scientific inquiry and study, was God! It was a bottom-line belief in a good and orderly God that gave rise to science, and that fueled its progress for hundreds of years. But when the early fundamentalists of 100 years ago (not all of them, to be sure), tied science (particularly evolution) to the attacks upon the Bible in the late 19th Century, believers abandoned science en masse. Secularists picked up the sciences and ran with them. And the Christian fundamentalist leaders began a century long campaign against science. "Don't trust it" they told us from their pulpits. "It is evil, filled with atheistic lies!" This fundamentalist mantra continues right down to the present day. When I read your comments about science, I fear you have bought into this polemic. I cannot agree with it at all. Not only do I learn about God, understand better his actions in my own life, through peering deeply into nature, but I want Christians everywhere to listen to what we are learning from science; yes, to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff; but to stop the travesty of a church turning its back upon the honest study of our Lord's ingenious and creative works, and deeding it over to atheists and secularist. Christians, of all people, should be the most interested in science. I find it a deplorable tragedy that so many are not, and that we continue to allow atheistic thinkers to set the agenda for science by simple default. Thank God for scientists who are outspoken believers! Thank God for Francis Collins! Thank God for Kenneth Miller! Thank God for Simon Conway-Morris! I thank God for dedicated followers of Jesus who are reassuming positions on the cutting edges of science, who are not denying obvious facts, but who are instead moving science in its proper (and only true) direction: toward God!

Christmas Day: "And the soul felt its worth"

2010-12-25T15:06:00.000-08:00

"... he appeared, and the soul felt its worth ..."

This morning, as I prepared a pancake breakfast for my expanded Christmas morning family while listening to a Scott Simon interview of the The Puppini Sisters on NPR, I was struck by a lyric from their favorite Christmas carol. I’ve heard this lovely piece hundreds of times, sung it myself scores of times, but this morning the words fell upon my ears with fresh power: “'til he appeared and the soul felt its worth.”

The birth of Jesus, the song reminds us, forever raised mankind’s view of himself, lifting his lot from pining in sin and error to a thrilling hopefulness, to the dawning of a new and glorious morning. “ ... and the soul felt its worth.” By invading our material reality, and permeating earth with his transcendence, God forever ennobled life on this plane! By clothing himself in the flesh of humanity, God upped our stock, setting a new baseline value on what it means to be human! Nothing can impress upon the soul its eternal worth like the nativity scene, the humble babe housing infinity, the suffusion of man-flesh with unimaginable transcendent greatness.

The French wine merchant Adolphe Adam, and the English version translator John Sullivan Dwight merely assume this elevation of human dignity accompanying the divine visitation we commemorate on this day. David Bentley Hart builds the case methodically and potently in his brilliant work, Atheist Delusions. At the very core of what Hart calls the Christian Revolution is what he labels as nothing short of “the invention of the human.” As he traces the development of human worth through history, he argues cogently how effectively Jesus, the central figure in history, redefines what it means to be human. “ ... and the soul felt its worth.”

He also brings his readers face-to-face with the stark and terrifying prospect of a humankind delivered of its Christian influence. “If, as I have argued in these pages, the ‘human’ as we now understand it is the positive invention of Christianity, might it not be the case that a culture that has become truly post-Christian will also, ultimately, become posthuman?”

The chilling day when humanism has followed the path of a discarded Christmas, the day Hart sees looming on our horizon is not yet upon us. Nor is it inevitable. For now, the essential message of the Incarnation still rings clear. And Christians should boldly herald its powerful implications: Jesus appeared! “ ... and the soul felt its worth.” every soul! every color! every gender! every age! every ethnicity! every culture! the value of every person has been forever elevated by the event we know as Christmas. This revaluing of humanity is at the heart of the mega-joy implicit in Bethlehem’s child! This is the good news. It is this gospel that should be in our hearts, upon our lips, and lived out of our lives.

“ ... and the soul felt its worth.”

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

2010-12-02T10:53:00.001-08:00

By now, last month's surprise Hallelujah Chorus at the food court in a Welland, Ontario shopping mall has spread all over the internet. If you have not yet, you must view it! As I watched it today for the sixth or seventh time, finding my smiles yet irrepressible, and still wiping tears from my eyes, I wondered ...

The popular Antitheists of our day, and cultural icons like John Lennon, insist that the world will be a better place when all religion has been eradicated! Ah yes, “Imagine” with me a world forever cleansed of George Frideric Handel!

I tried in vain to think of a single cultural contribution that comes close to Handel’s Messiah which has been inspired by thoughts of a god-free cosmos. I could not think of anything that stirs the heart and soul. I did think of John Lennon’s ode to a world delivered of the joys and hopes of faith. Ah yes, Imagine! The words and music are, admittedly, mildly arousing. A bit mournful. Kind of like dry toast. Or old black and white photography. But still, I’ve sung along and (genuinely) tried to catch Lennon’s fervor (if indeed we could call it that). But listening to Lennon I have never felt the exhilaration, the sheer unquenchable joy flooding my whole being, mind and soul, which arise involuntarily during these five minutes of Handel in the Mall.

But I must admit to a faith-induced predilection to experience such a high! My atheist friends will no doubt find themselves yawning in boredom. And surely they can point me to works of art, music or visual arts, that stir their souls, that inspire them profoundly, that awaken deep emotions of joys rising to overwhelm their senses. I would love to hear about them!

Now I know that there is a certain sense of awe and excitement that is energized by our discoveries in physics and biology. I share those! They are wonderful. But, if I may be so bold to say so, they do not even fit into the same category with the sheer transcendent delight aroused by countless examples of faith-inspired art and literature.

Nevertheless, I am assured by those who seem to know, that the lot of mankind will be greatly improved when the vestiges of faith and religion are but fading memories. The Antitheists will no doubt breath a huge sigh of relief knowing that their lunch in the food court will never again be so rudely interrupted.

Testing the Eyesight of the New Atheists

2010-11-29T14:05:00.000-08:00

There have been many worthy responses to the spate of New Atheist books which sold in the millions a few years back. (I have reviewed a few of these responses here, and here, and here.) But perhaps the most succinct response I've read recently was written by an atheist, the conservative social commentator, Anthony (A.M.) Daniels, aka Theodore Dalrymple. Below are a few excerpts from his regular City Journal (Fall, 2007) column, "Oh, to Be in England", entitled "What the New Atheists Don't See".

Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing.

________________

...however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we should not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath its reasons that reason knows not of.

________________

Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.

________________

For Dennett, to prove the biological origin of belief in God is to show its irrationality, to break its spell. But of course it is a necessary part of the argument that all possible human beliefs, including belief in evolution, must be explicable in precisely the same way; or else why single out religion for this treatment? Either we test ideas according to arguments in their favor, independent of their origins, thus making the argument from evolution irrelevant, or all possible beliefs come under the same suspicion of being only evolutionary adaptations—and thus biologically contingent rather than true or false. We find ourselves facing a version of the paradox of the Cretan liar: all beliefs, including this one, are the products of evolution, and all beliefs that are products of evolution cannot be known to be true.

________________

...how can reality have any moral quality without having an immanent or transcendent purpose?

________________

Harris tells us, for example, that “we must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. Given the present state of the world, there appears to be no other future worth wanting.” I am glad that I am old enough that I shall not see the future of reason as laid down by Harris; but I am puzzled by the status of the compulsion in the first sentence that I have quoted. Is Harris writing of a historical inevitability? Of a categorical imperative? Or is he merely making a legislative proposal? This is who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-priest language, ambiguous no doubt, but not open to a generous interpretation.

It becomes even more sinister when considered in conjunction with the following sentences, quite possibly the most disgraceful that I have read in a book by a man posing as a rationalist: “The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live.”

________________

It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.

________________

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy.

________________

Read the full article, here, in which Dalrymple takes each of the popular New Atheist authors to task. No doubt Dalrymple could build a case for his own atheism which might be worthy of consideration. But, as others have noted, the case built by the popular authors (including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) is at times poorly constructed, and at times completely fatuous. Were they merely catching a wave of unsophisticated public sentiment, and thus scoring big in book sales? Or were they really giving it their best shot?

Do Atheists Possess Special Courage?

2010-11-21T09:57:00.000-08:00

Well, it happened again this week. Another of my atheist friends (Nick, this time), claimed the high ground with regard to courage. “It takes courage to abandon faith,” I hear over and over. “Atheists must face reality with courage!” I’m not not impressed.

Atheists insist that belief in God is commensurate with belief in The Flying Spaghetti Monster, or in Leprechauns. So let me see if I have this straight: denying the existence of soaring pasta or fantasy imps requires courage? Really? How can atheists, with straight face, tell us that belief in God is vanishingly trivial, and then speak of the abundance of courage necessary for their denial?

No. Atheism requires no courage at all. Walking into a lions den, suppressing your natural fears by pretending lions do not exist, now that requires a semblance of courage (mixed with extreme folly). But atheist are careful to claim that they are doing no such thing. Their “courage” is the kind required to acknowledge that the sky is blue, that fish swim, or that 2 + 2 = 4. Courage?

I responded to my friend’s claims of courage on facebook with this comment:

Nick, I've been thinking a lot lately about that oft repeated mantra, "it takes courage to be an atheistic materialist." I'm not so sure. I often feel it would be much easier for me to let my naturally skeptical mind drift into complete unbelief. And for me, quite honestly, holding on to faith requires the greater effort, and the greater courage.

I'm not saying atheists have wimped out. But I am saying that continuing to believe, maintaining hope that our existence is not futile, that there will be ultimate justice, that there is profound meaning and purpose threaded throughout this universe—for me, this involves determination and courage.

.... How is courage involved in a world-view that has abandoned hope? Sometimes I fear unbelievers mistake "whistling in the dark" for courage.

The Pragmatist, William James, understood (as do I) that faith is a choice. And likewise, for the atheist: disbelief is a choice. Atheists like to assert that non-belief is the default position for an empirically non-verifiable claim. But this assertion holds no water; it begs the question: for the very notion of faith acknowledges the absence of the sort of evidence they consider necessary. James comments,

"To preach scepticism to us as a duty until "sufficient evidence" for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what ... is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?"

So this is how James saw it: Unbelief is grounded less in courage than fear. Fear of making the mistake of believing without “sufficient evidence”. We can derive from James that faith is grounded in fearlessness, courage, as well as hope.

So the next time an atheist asks me how I can believe what I cannot empirically prove, I will respond, “It takes a lot of courage! do you have enough courage? or have you settled for the safety of resignation?”

Still Your Soul in Silence

2010-11-13T07:36:00.000-08:00

It is not often I encounter an artist whose faith walk parallels my own such that similar experiences create several significant touch points. For me, such an artist is Don Francisco. The lyrical artistry of his songs has delighted me for over 25 years. He is an inventive wordsmith, but he is also a troubadour to my soul. There have been particular times in my life when the poignancy of his music, especially his autobiographical songs, gives profound expression to my own heart. Such has been the case recently, as I have been enjoying a personal revival of Don Francisco music. I've chased back a few tears when I listen to ...

Still Your Soul in Silence

Don Francisco

In the lives of those that follow there is going to come a time

When rhythm starts to stumble and singsong swallows rhyme

When imaginations crumble, false foundations turn to dust

Towers fall to piles of stones and girders into rust

Til you let the blood of Jesus wash the rubble from your mind

And your eyes again can see the one you almost left behind

When theology's in tatters and reason is absurd

Still your soul in silence and listen for His word

So many turns, so many ways, so many voices cry

Standing at the crossroads watching time go flashing by

Indecision paralyzes, it's the fear of choosing wrong

But waiting is a step itself, and your wondering too long

So again you search the scripture, and again you ask your friends

But last of all the One who knows the beginning from the end

In the clamor and confusion and the blindness of your choice

Still your soul in silence, and listen for His voice

Rome is full of ruins, Babylon is gone

The temple's just a memory that some still dwell upon

But deep within a place that sword and veil had once denied

A tree of life is growing, living waters flow beside

Far beyond all human reason and words upon a page

His glory lightens all who fret their hour upon this stage

To know Him is our freedom, to hear Him is release

To fix your heart and soul on Him is rest and perfect peace

The “Why” Question ... and why I don’t ask it.

2010-10-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

My family just passed the six-month mark. Do you ever get used to mom and wife gone permanently? Perhaps not, but most certainly not in six months. For the believer, such an untimely death always raises questions about the purposes and intentions of God. We are prompted to ask "Why, God?"

Often, as they envision a loving God, a provider of good gifts, a healer, and a keeper of promises, believers will ask why he allows such things as cancer, and untimely death. Why doesn’t he answer our pleas for healing? Why didn’t he? Some will respond glibly that he did answer, but that his answer was “no”. Somehow, I never understood how this helps. If I were struggling to trust a God who fails to answer my prayer, I’d sooner believe that he didn’t hear me than to believe my request earned his intentional and unequivocal refusal. Then again, of course he answers “no”. And that is precisely the problem. Why not, God?

The “why” question, of course, presumes that God could heal, that healing is always on the table, always an option for him; and that when he fails to heal, he must surely have good reason. After all, he knows what is best for us. But what if it's not like that at all? Oh yes, in the simplest of Sunday School formulas, the doctrine of divine omnipotence rightly informs us that God can do anything. But what if his failure to heal is not the result of his choice at all? What if he does not heal because he cannot heal?

If yours is a theology similar to mine, then you will understand that we are caught up in a battle of all the ages, a conflict of cosmic proportions between good and evil. The cosmic version of this battle is not unlike the skirmishes in which we find ourselves in this life, skirmishes for which we are given specific instruction. Jesus both taught us, and demonstrated for us, how the battle is engaged, and how the victory is won: Evil is overcome by good, which involves the strange and counterintuitive battlefield tactic of turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, offering blessing for cursing, and praying for — even loving our enemy. Evil is never overcome by the display of greater force. It is subdued, disarmed, and overwhelmed by the consistent application of nonresistant love. And this tactic often involves a very high price, for it often involves suffering. For Jesus, the cost was his very life. Paul teaches us that all of creation has been thrown into a state of suffering in this conflict; and he constantly calls us to enter into the sufferings of Jesus. And so, Peter admonishes us not to think it strange when we suffer. It is part of the plan. Always was.

Such a tactic often appears to be a losing one. Love and nonresistance strike scant fear into the hearts of an opposing army. But the long story of history will prove this immutable truth: there is no force anywhere that can withstand the mighty arm of love. Love will win.

Thus this battle has rules of engagement, set by God himself: self-imposed rules which severely limit his freedom to intervene at will. But Jesus gave us deep insight into the heart of the Father when his own heart was overwhelmed with grief over the untimely death of his friend, Lazarus. Jesus wept. Rather than envisioning a wiser than I grandfather God who sometimes must say “no” lest we be spoiled by his doting, I envision a God whose heart was broken, moved to tears, profoundly saddened over Ginger’s death, and that he grieves with me and with each member of my family to this day, and will continue to do so until that promised coming day, the day of the restitution of all things.

Bibliolatry

2010-10-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

Bibliolatry n. an extreme devotion to the Bible itself. (from the Greek biblion "book" + latreia "worship")

In his regular Monday feature, Stephen Douglas posted a short George MacDonald piece on the purpose and limits of the Bible. Excellent quote. Drop by and read it!

The quote prompted me to think about this question, “Christian Faith: is it about a book? or is it about a person?”

For some time now, I find myself cringing every time I hear some good-hearted Christian refer to “the word of God.” They are nearly always talking about a book! which totally distorts the term, and misrepresents Christianity.

I have never found a Biblical reference to "the word of God" that does not either expressly refer to the person of Jesus, or to revelations of God ... specific, in the moment, revelations (in which cases, we have Jesus speaking via the Spirit). Among the 60 or so Bible references to "the word of God" or "the word of the Lord", I have yet to find one that refers to a book, (though it may be possible to construe a couple in this way). Since the Bible itself clearly declares Jesus to be THE WORD OF GOD, the quintessential manifestation and revelation of God to man, the term ought surely to be reserved for him!

Makes one wonder how we got from this simple and profound truth to preachers wielding their embossed leather-bound Scofields far above their heads and, in their most sonorous, quaking voice, shouting out something about "THE WORD".

Where did the Stephen Hawking post go?

2010-09-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

... I took it down.

Yesterday, I posted a short piece on Stephen Hawking which included this quote from A Brief History of Time:

"It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us."

I am embarrassed to acknowledge my quote mining error, the very sort of quote mining so often used by the Creationist camp (I should have been tipped off by the frequent siting of this sentence in Creationist literature.) No one pointed this out to me. I merely reread the paragraph. I'm glad I did.

When Hawking wrote the words "in just this way", he was referring to one of the problems with early Big Bang cosmology, and its inability to account for such things as the evenly distributed microwave background radiation (the "echo" of the Big Bang) which we observe today, without the imposition of a Creator. He goes on in the same paragraph to explain how the problems have been solved by more recent understandings in cosmology which allow the possibility of various nonuniform initial conditions.

When Big Bang cosmology first came on the scene in the 1920s, it was viewed as a bane on cosmology and physics by many scientists who concluded that such a "start" would almost certainly necessitate a Creator. Various work-arounds have since surfaced which make it possible for science to conceive of a cosmic beginning moment sans an almighty hand at work. Hawking was merely referring to this development of science.

It will appear to some that science is constantly "running for shelter" from a God. And that may well be the case for some. From what I have read of Hawking, I do not believe he is doing this at all. He readily allows the possibility of a Creator. But his search for natural laws keep leading him to rely less and less on science that appears to demand such a Creator.

Christianity & Science: Are they Compatible?

2010-08-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

It seems that most of my on-line conversations now happen on facebook pages. From time to time, I may republish some of those conversations here to reach my blog readers.

The following is an exchange which occurred when a friend posted a link to an article which posed the question,

"Can You Believe in Christianity and Evolution?"

"Josh" gave his answer,

christianity and science can be reconciled... but it has to be good, true science for the reconciliation to work! :-)

... to which I replied,

I found Josh's earlier comment interesting:

Josh, would you also agree with me if I rephrased that?

"Christianity and science can be reconciled... but it has to be good, true Christianity for the reconciliation to work"

From my perspective as a follower of Jesus and a follower of science, science is more often "true and good" than many versions of christianity. Conclusive, objective, and empirical evidence should not be asked to bend to align with subjective, debatable interpretations of the Bible. Would you agree?

When apparent conflicts appear between hard science and our version of Christianity, which should give way?

Shibboleth

2010-08-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

Forty-two thousand. The number of retreating warriors of the Israelite tribe of Ephraim slain because they couldn’t pronounce the S-word. Well, not that S-word. But it might have worked just the same. Thirty-four hundred years ago (or so), the in-fighting between Israelite tribes came to blows, and the Ephraimites invaded the lands of their brother tribes living across the Jordan River in Gilead. They lost the war, and the surviving troops, forty-two thousand of them, retreated. But the Gileadites cut them off, securing all the river crossing fords. But a Jew is a Jew, and they could not tell an Ephraimite from a Gadite or a Manassehite; they all look the same! How could they determine whether a traveller was a member of the retreating invasion force? Well, it just so happened that Ephramites were afflicted with a mass speech impediment, and they could not say sh*t worth sh*t. So the Gileadites picked a word, any word, starting with SH. They happened to choose “shibboleth”, a word which means nothing particularly interesting, but was impossible for the poor tongue-tied Ephraimites to pronounce. They used the word as a password, a test for any would-be west-bound crossers at the fords. When anyone attempting to cross the river answered the password request, “sibboleth,” he was put to the sword then and there!

There may be a lesson here about teaching diction to our children. But more to the point, this word, “shibboleth,” has been passed down and still to this day it refers to those group-think words or phrases, those passwords of practice and speech, which distinguish the insiders from the outsiders. Shibboleths are like badges of belonging. Pronounce them just right, and you are “one of us!” Mispronounce them, and watch out.

Funny thing about shibboleths. Their usefulness in identifying insiders often outlives any connection to the veracity, or the importance of the actual identifying issue. That is, the shibboleth functions to maintain group-think, despite overwhelming evidence that the shibboleth is a based on mistaken, or false assumptions.

The insidious power of the shibboleths of American evangelicalism is something that many free-thinking, analytical, and informed Christians experience first-hand. Those who have encountered (whether by choice or not) the irresistibly compelling evidence behind the science of evolution, or who have encountered (whether by choice or not) the insurmountable logical and evidential problems with Biblical inerrancy, find it increasingly difficult to go on pronouncing their shibboleths correctly.

I’ve been corresponding on the web with a Christian, a wife and a mother of young children, who just so happens to hold a PhD in science. Put simply, she just knows way too much to go on pronouncing all her shibboleths in the accepted form. Many of the things she knows with clarity are at odds with the beliefs of her church leaders and friends. That she struggles with doubt is not surprising. I know of few evolutionary evangelicals who do not. And many of us who have come to understand that the Bible is not the magical word-perfect book it is hyped to be, deal with doubt, at times heavy and oppressive. This is not the fault of our acceptance of evolution, or good textual study. It is the result of the false dilemmas created by the stark contrasts between the group-think of our evangelical friends, and reality as we have come to see it. Nevertheless, we are evangelical! We seek to follow and obey Jesus. We choose to remain with those believers with whom we identify. We just cannot seem to get our shibboleths to come out right anymore.

So my friend is in the violent throes of painful doubt. At a time when she most needs the support of her faith community, when she needs to be embraced and accepted by her pastors and friends, she is instead “preached at”, she is told that her doubts must be the result of some secret moral failure. She is haunted by the pulpit finger-pointing which identifies doubt as sin. She fears being punished for her doubt. She is told by her Calvinist friends that faith is a gift, and those who doubt incessantly must not have the gift; in which case there is little hope for her. She finds herself increasingly isolated, turned out, because group-thinking Christians are taught to fear, as part of an invading force of evil, those unable to pronounce “shibboleth”. How can my friend, or my other evolutionary friends, be accepted in a community which is currently being assured by that trusted source, Focus on the Family, that evolution is lie from the pit of hell?

My experience is similar to my friend’s. As I take a few steps back from the accepted traditional theology of the evangelical church to which I belong, that very church keeps nudging me to step further away. I am asked to keep my concerns to myself. When I try to warn my friends that the edifice of Christianity is supported by pillars of styrofoam, I am told things would go better for me if I would just keep it to myself. I am told that the personal rejection I endure on so many fronts is my own fault. I come on “too strong”, they tell me. The fact is, I haven’t found any polite way to tell people that the survival of evangelical faith will require the shedding of many cherished shibboleths.

I recently wrote the following words of encouragement to my friend:

Please, do not be deterred by the many Christians whose faith is based upon illusion, and blatantly false suppositions. Who wants that kind of faith, anyway? You seek a faith that can stand up along side volumes of data, data which most believers have never encountered, and from which (sad to say) they are sheltered by their Christian leaders. You didn't ask for the evidence for evolution. You didn't desire an understanding of the historicity issue surrounding the books of the Bible. These are empirical data, brute facts, of which but a small minority of Christians are even remotely aware. You and I are aware ... and this leaves us with the huge challenge, but also the wonderful opportunity, to build a faith that is truly durable, robust, and reality-based. My friend, this challenge is not insurmountable.

What is Heaven like?

2010-08-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

I apologize to the many readers who keep checking back at OutsideTheBox only to find the well still dry! It has been difficult for me these last several weeks. I miss my lovely wife more now than ever. I thought it would get easier by now. Not so. And so, writing has taken a back seat to other personal business. However, my friend, Regina, recently asked me to describe my current thoughts about Heaven (obviously, I would be motivated to think about Heaven and the after-life!). I answered her earlier this week in an email. That portion of the email is reproduced below.

Re. Heaven:

Of course, I think about this often. But not so much in the terms Christians typically use. It is one thing to glibly recite our standard beliefs about heaven, the afterlife, etc., when it is all theoretical and distant. But when someone as analytical as me is dealing with these questions up close, and so utterly personally, directly impacting the most significant of relationships, it is a little harder to maintain a simple belief. My thoughts have been all across the spectrum, to be honest.

Whether we like it or not, the state of evolutionary psychology today tells us that those things we once attributed to the soul (or spirit, or any immaterial part of man) are increasingly finding material explanations. That is, where we once thought that our own experience as a human necessitated some immaterial part of us, the "real me", the executive director of the mind, emotions and will, we now understand that no such immaterial reality is necessary to explain human behavior, thought, altruism, guilt, love, etc. We understand things like memory: our memory is stored in the massively complex meshwork of cells in our brain via electronic charges, not at all unlike the memory storage on our computers. The scary (really scary) thing for me was looking down at the sweet face of Ginger after she died, and thinking that, when she breathed her last breath, all of her memory literally ceased to exist. No need for a soul to "depart" her body. Even if such a soul did go somewhere, it left behind all those cells, all those strategically placed electrons, all that patchwork of axons and dendrites, all those synaptic interfaces. I began then to construct in my mind a picture of the human built upon the computer model ... one involving duplicate ROM and RAM memories, one in which the actual soul mirrors the material aspects of "soul-like" functions. More recently, I think of it in different terms.

Now, I conceive of God "recreating", if you will, Ginger (or any of us) based upon our unique genetic code, and with a stored (or resurrected) ROM memory. My faith in the resurrection, now, is built more upon God's love for me. If he really loves me (as we presume) and if he really wants relationship with me (as we presume), then he will not just let my body rot and my personhood cease to exist. He will resurrect me! If, alternatively, we were mistaken, and God (if he exists at all) doesn't really care for me or about me on the level we had assumed, I have no wish to be resurrected. I won't be resurrected, and I'd just as soon never be conscious again.

Does that make sense? I don't want you to think that I doubt the resurrection, or the after-life. I believe. But the reasoning has changed. It is not based upon some immortal part of me, an immortal soul. Rather, I believe (first of all) in the character of and the inherent goodness of God. (If we're wrong on that count, who wants everlasting life anyway?) And believing that about him, and believing in the extreme value of every unique human being, I am convinced such a God will call us to himself at some point after our death.

As to what Heaven is like, I'm sure I have no clue. It is beyond our imaginative scope to even come close. I don't mean this in terms of the gushy "Oh, Heaven will surpass all our wildest, most wonderful dreams! It will be better than anything we can imagine." Rather, I mean that the dimensionality of Heaven (or God's reality) is so multi-faceted with facets for which we have no calculus, that Heaven is unimaginable. Not unimaginably good. Just unimaginable.

For example, when we speak of Heaven as a place of unremitting joy, we only fool ourselves if we think of joy in the terms we now experience it. Joy, as we know it, is related to things like conquest, overcoming resistance, winning the battle, success (which implies resistance.) Life itself for us, in our current condition, contains potential for joy precisely because it also contains potential for sorrow. Take away suffering, resistance, struggle, pain, sorrow, and I submit that "joy" has no meaning. And yet, for most believers, Heaven is a place devoid of those things, but full of eternal bliss. Within our current frame of reference, that is craziness ... but most Christians never give it much thought.

More than anything you can possibly imagine, I hope to see my Ginger again.

Thanks for asking,
~ Cliff

Personal: Lunch today with Stephen!

2010-07-17T14:24:00.000-07:00

It is not often that I meet someone whose thinking aligns with mine in nearly every respect across a broad spectrum of topics. Is this because I have so many opinions which are out of the mainstream, or is it just because I have so many opinions? Whichever the case, I've known for sometime that Stephen Douglas, who authors Undeception, a blog site I highly recommend, fits that bill. (In those times when you want to know what Cliff thinks, and I'm not offering enough for you here, you can safely go to Stephen's site; chances are about 98% that you will learn more about me!)

Stephen lives in Georgia, where I happen to be for business. Today he and I met (face to face for the first time) in Macon for lunch (authentic Southern Cuisine, if that be not an oxymoron) and a delightful three hour visit. Here is my public "thank you" to Stephen for breaking away from his doctoral studies and his family to carve out those hours! It was like a breath of fresh air. Thank you, Stephen.

(Just kidding about the Southern Cuisine. I've been loving it!)

A Facebook Exchange

2010-06-30T12:38:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting exchange this morning, facebooking with a Christian-turned-atheist young friend. Because it dovetails into some of the current discussions here, I asked the friend if I could post our exchange here. He agreed, and it follows:

John 30 June at 08:52

So. I'm sure you more or less remember me, I used to go to your church. Well, a lot has changed since then, I've lost my religious side, and became atheistic. I realized that maybe I shouldn't just listen to what everybody has told me was true, and so I started first not with evolution but with the history of the bible. I started reading that the writers of the bible weren't even eye witnesses, let alone within decades of eyewitnesses. I started reading the bible more, Genesis 30:27-30 anybody? There were stories that we know are false that people just believe. It gave me reason to doubt. Now, I may be only 15, but I know I shouldn't just believe in a talking donkey. Since then, I've read. I've read a lot, I've studied evolution in and out, from the bad design of the recurrent laryngeal nerve to atavisms to the evolution of DNA, sex, death, movement, everything. I've found a passion of it. I've studied the laws of physics, mostly quantum mechanics and relativity. I've studied the fossil record in and out, looking at transitional fossils such as tiktaalik rosea, and I've looked at our own embryonic state (we develop a tail and an embryo sac..)

All this lead me to believe that there wasn't, couldn't be a god. What I had been raised believing was true, I realized wasn't. I started debating evolution with a pastor from Toledo. Honestly, I've never been more saddened by a person in my life. He's a pastor and he doesn't know anything about his own religion. He says everyone were eye witnesses. He says we have no evidence for macro or micro evolution, he brings up arbitrary ideas such as the laws of entropy, and then he questions me, he says that because I'm 15 I have to copy/paste all my answers to his questions. I met with him in person, and we went over carbon-dating. He says that the formula for half life, (y=ae^kt) must be wrong. He wouldn't tell me why. He told me I was going to hell for not believing in his god, and that his god was the only truth, and that I wouldn't be happy without him. I'm a lot happier now, without a god, than I was with one.

I've been reading your blog, and you seem like quite the intelligent person, who is interested in the same topics as I. It'd be nice to talk to someone as intelligent as you, who won't just say that we should believe in talking donkeys because the Bible tells us to.

Cliff Martin 30 June at 11:29

Thanks for writing, John. I enjoyed visiting with your mom yesterday.

I tracked with your first paragraph. Since you listened to me teach at TCF (I must apologize for passing along a lot of misinformation ... but that is all in the past), I too have developed a deep interest in DNA, sex (well, I've always been interested in THAT!), death, movement, quantum mechanics and relativity, even evolutionary psychology, etc. I understand how the recurrent laryngeal nerve drives the last nail into the coffin of "Intelligent Design". But when you write, "All this lead me to believe that there wasn't, couldn't be a god", I have to say that I have come to radically different conclusions. Surely the findings of science today, which are largely trustworthy, alter the ways we must think about God, and how we define him, and how we understand his involvement in the cosmos, etc. But how do they rule out the possibility of his existence?

I probably think more like you than your pastor friend. But I have not even come close to abandoning my hope that humans have infinite value, that suffering is not meaningless, that justice will prevail in the end, that we are more than chance chemical assemblages moving futilely through an ultimately inconsequential universe. In a way, I reject atheism because I reject its inescapable nihilistic despair. I choose hope. And such hope is, for me at least, richly rewarded and more than worth the risks involved!

But we all must choose. And our choices ought to be intellectually viable. That is why I say I have more in common with you. Fundamentalist Christians are either uninformed of the current state of science (and willfully remain so) or they live with a cognitive dissonance that would for you or me be unbearable. But is this the result of TRUTH, or the result of religious constructs designed in fear and maintained for the manipulation and control of the religious masses? It is clearly the latter, in my opinion.

Before you discard the bathwater, I highly recommend that you reconsider the baby!

As for the debate with your friend; Christians who reject carbon dating do so because they feel they must. They do not understand carbon dating. But they find great comfort in the relative few anomalies in the process which are well understood by scientists, but appear ridiculous to the lay-person. Such people will typically say things like, "no one knows what happened 200 million years ago because no one was there!" So I use a different tack with friends who reject ancient evidence:

I ask them to consider the same basic evidence that first convinced Darwin (and many of his contemporaries) of evolution in a time before much fossil evidence had been discovered, and we knew nothing about carbon dating, radioactive dating, DNA, etc. Darwin (if I'm not mistaken) was convinced by two things: 1) The newly developing understandings of Mendelian Inheritance (which no one denies), but even more so by 2) Biogeography, or the consistent patters of distribution of the flora and fauna throughout the earth, particularly on the islands of the world. These patterns are everywhere consistent with the predictions of evolutionary theory, and are weird to the extreme if we postulate special creation of the species. And this evidence is available to anyone today, requires no dating methodologies, no reliance upon the "witness" of “biased” paleontologists, and can be analyzed by anyone willing to THINK, without the huge learning curve on the front end of DNA evidence.

Ask him what logic can explain why a creator went out to all the islands of the world and proceeded to create life so as to make the earth look exactly as it would if it had been populated by living organisms over 100s of millions of years through the very process Darwin describes.

I have a limited respect for the few (very few) Creationists who actually understand the evidence for evolution and explain it this way: God made the cosmos to appear as though it had evolved (à la the Big Bang) and life appear as though it has evolved (à la Darwin) to find out if we would believe him when he declares that it all happened in 6 days, a mere 6,000 years ago. They make God into a trickster and a deceiver, an insecure person who so fears rejection that he actually sets it up (some sick people actually do that, you know).

Let's talk sometime.

Personal: Thank you Michael!

2010-06-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

I've just returned home from a delightful morning spent with a new friend, Michael Banks. Michael is a research professor at Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Science Center (in Newport, OR) specializing in marine population genetics. We enjoyed a two-hour visit over breakfast, after which Michael treated me to a tour of his offices and laboratories at the Center, where I met several of his students (one of whom gave me a really cool baseball cap!), and got a feel for how geneticists do their work. What a treat!

Michael is a rare find in this little outpost of Lincoln County, Oregon. Christians who truly understand and fully accept evolution, and maintain a deep belief in and love for God, are few and far between here. Michael is a delightful conversationalist, a deeply insightful believer, a leading scientist in his field; and he is a man who recently lost a brother (in his native country of South Africa) to cancer. He walked alongside Ginger and I through the final months of her battle. So when we are together, the list of topics for conversation is lengthy indeed.

This is my public "Thank you" to Michael for the gift of his valuable time. And here's to many more similar visits if the Lord has that in store for us!

Suffering: Is there a deeper truth?

2010-06-21T08:28:00.000-07:00

Everyone suffers. We all experience pain, physical, mental, or emotional, in lesser or greater degrees. Most believers look for, and usually find, some redeeming personal benefits in suffering experiences. For on a personal level, suffering, that unwelcome tutor, perfects and refines faith and character. Romans 5 and James 1 teach this idea; Peter in his first epistle seems to be almost stuck on the theme. He must have had impetus to think long and hard about the sufferings Christians endure.

However, my thoughts about suffering go more to the abstract. Suffering can perfect our souls, that is clear. But both Peter and Paul speak of suffering accomplishing something beyond personal refinement. There is something "out there" that is directly effected by our suffering. And there are direct eternal consequences both personal and cosmic which cannot simply be understood as a silver lining on the cloud.

Nor does our acknowledgment of personal benefit from suffering address the philosophical and ontological questions about pain, evil, and suffering. Why is there so much suffering? The suffering that we humans have experienced in our relatively short history, horrifying as it is, even monstrous, is but a tiny fraction of the massive quantity of animal suffering which has accrued over our evolutionary past. When Tennyson speaks of nature, "red in tooth and claw", the context is his own effort to make sense of an untimely death, of his own personal loss and suffering, but even his very deep sorrow is but a whisper against the deafening roar of pain and (seemingly) senseless torment in the ages-long story of life. Such considerations shook his faith to the core. Most believers I know never go there. Sadly. Because when we fear to ask the questions, we'll never see the answers even when we stumble over them.

I am convinced that we can find, just below the surface of the scriptures, a rich lattice of understandings about suffering. There remain some unanswered questions, to be sure. Scripture does not speak to our curiosity. But there is, I think, enough information to suggest that suffering, perhaps all suffering, is profoundly meaningful, imbued with dignity and ultimate purpose. I do not believe that any suffering is senseless, unaccounted for, or lost in the economies of the cosmos, or in its ages-long clash of good pitted against evil. Exactly how suffering shapes this cosmic battle, or why suffering plays such a central role in it, I cannot say. But that it does so is a salient concept in both testaments of the Bible.

The Jewish people, from O.T. times right up to the present, have viewed themselves as the "suffering servant" of God. They exhibit a faith that no suffering is in vain; that their national history, marked by injustice and suffering, serves some divine purpose. They may not understand how, but it is enough for them to view their collective pain as service to Jahweh. Christians have failed, I believe, to carry this idea forward; and that to our great loss. Perhaps this is due to the Christian notion that Jesus paid the final debt in full, that he suffered and died to save us from suffering and death. But this is the case neither in N.T. teaching nor in our experience. The drumbeat of human suffering is unabated, even in the lives of the faith-filled followers of Jesus. And the N.T. is replete with warnings that this will be the case. Paul goes so far as to say that we, in our sufferings, complete something that was unfinished in the sufferings of Christ (Colossians 1:24).

Clearly, the sufferings of Jesus were efficacious toward some cosmic goal, some large-scale overriding purpose of God. The gospel writers paint the death of Jesus as a (literally!) earth shaking event. Some of the powers of the enemy were perhaps permanently depleted that day. The evil one was, in a symbolic way at least, utterly defeated in the sufferings and resurrection of Jesus. But Paul makes it clear: even the sufferings of Jesus did not finish the work. Thus are we offered the exceeding high calling of "sharing in his sufferings" (Philippians 3:10). And thus Peter instructs us to get ready, to arm ourselves with the "mind to suffer" (1 Peter 4:1) and to rejoice when we "participate" in his sufferings (1 Peter 4:13).

Paul and Peter both link suffering to future glory. In fact, they use language that suggests some fixed ratio in which future glory is directly proportional to suffering. I have heard preachers who merely understand this as a kind of compensatory reward, glory being handed out as a sort of heavenly "atta-boy". But Paul paints a far different picture. In 2 Corinthians 4, he describes the processes whereby sufferings work in us toward eternal purposes. Sufferings, he declares in verse 17, actually achieve glory for us, fit us for glory, ramp up our capacity for glory. Glory is not some commodity that God divvies up amongst his followers. Glory is organically linked to our sufferings. And this gives me pause to ask why that might be? Is it merely an arbitrary principle, some divine edict, written into the constitution of the cosmos by the creator at the Big Bang? Or do sufferings link to future glory in some requisite way, driven by some hidden, intrinsic reality? I believe it is so.

One way that I think of this is in respect to the price that Jesus paid with his blood (his suffering). He bought, or more correctly we might say, he made a downpayment upon the Kingdom through his sufferings (Acts 20:28, Revelation 5:9). When we are then given opportunity to suffer with him (Romans 8:17, Philippians 3:10, 1 Peter 4:13), this is but another way of saying that we are given the opportunity to purchase stock, to invest in the Kingdom by paying part of its price. If this be so, then there will be eternal stake-holders in God's Kingdom enterprise, stake-holders of varying degrees.

I sometimes let my imagination run into the deep future, where I envision encountering a soul who bears unspeakable glory; a being of immense light, a person with a staggering capacity for brilliance and beauty! I will immediately observe that this being, this person, is one of those major stake-holders in God's kingdom, that his personal investment must have been exceedingly costly, but the dividends which have accrued to him more than outweigh the price he was once asked to pay long ago. As we visit, I learn that this magnificent person was a 2 year-old Jewish boy from Austria, in the middle of the 20th Century, now a distant memory. He and his family were, for a short time, interned in a cruel Nazi concentration camp. After his parents and siblings were disposed of and this little boy's life served no useful function for his captors, he was loaded one night into the bed of dump truck along with a score or so other children of varying ages. the truck was dispatched to a nearby field where some half-drunken partying Nazi soldiers had readied a huge bonfire. The truck backed to the edge of the inferno, and the dump-box was raised, depositing the frightened children into their fiery grave. This brilliant being now standing before me might describe how desperately he tried to escape, screaming in abject terror, only to be corralled and tossed back into the flames by the waiting pitchforks of the laughing soldiers. Mercifully, his flaming death came in but a few short minutes. He will then ask me about the days of my early life, and I will offer him a brief summary of my 70 or 80 years of work and play, vacations, overseas trips, the joys of marriage and fatherhood, years of teaching and leading, finding some fulfillment in operating a business, etc. And he will say that it all sounds nice -- but that, thank you very much, he would never dream of trading his 2 short years for my 80.

It is in this light that I believe all suffering is elevated and dignified. But why should suffering play so central a role? Why is suffering the means by which we buy into the enterprise of God?

Jesus teaches us, in the Sermon on the Mount, the keys to unseating evil from its place of power. Evil is not undone, Jesus tells us, buy retributive justice. Evil is not overcome by the exertion of greater strength. In fact, evil cannot be defeated by resistance at all. Evil is slowly, steadily, and irrevocably overcome by steps, sometimes small steps, often what appear to be futile steps of nonresistance. "Overcome evil with good" Paul says, echoing the wisdom of the Old Testament. This method the Bible gives us for defeating evil necessarily involves suffering. The greatest human beings have noted this principle and proved its power. Men like Gandhi, Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr., who assured his white adversaries, "We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer." If indeed, suffering nonresistance is the way to defeat evil in our lives, on the plane of earthly human existence, why do we suppose that the cosmic battle would be waged any differently? The traditional Christian concept of Jesus riding up powerfully on a white horse, or God coming in fiery anger consuming his enemies with his outpoured wrath, the picture of God triumphant over his foes because, after all, he always was more powerful! -- these images stand in stark contrast to the very tactics Jesus offers us for overcoming evil. They are based, I'll acknowledge, upon Scriptural imagery: but I suggest a second look at those images. For me, they are all but metaphors. They speak of the ways of God as powerful, and triumphant, yes! But perhaps they conceal the underlying story. For God was never more powerful than when he hung upon a cross, silent before his executioners.

These insights may provide but meager comfort for believers who suffer, and who long for but fail to experience God’s affirmation and reassurance. In those times when we experience a vast distance between our pains and our Father’s comforts, we need only consider Jesus upon that cross; how he was utterly forsaken and turned aside. The Father is not hard of heart. He is no cool spectator, merely watching "from a distance." On the other hand, I assume some greater value is to be gained through the process of suffering when it takes its course without his intervening hand, without even his comfort and reassurance. I do not understand that fully. We do not like it. I choose to believe it is with some difficulty that God restrains his hand, and withholds his compassionate comfort. In those moments, it may help us to reflect upon his own Son who received no more or less from the Father in his hour of deepest suffering.

Your comments are welcome!

Approaching Belief Naturally (Part III)

2010-06-04T14:25:00.000-07:00

Alfred Lord Tennyson was the son of an Anglican clergyman; he grew up with a sturdy faith in God. But his earlier idealism crumbled under the weight of life’s disappointments and disillusionment. The untimely death of his close friend (and his sister’s fiance) Aurthur Hallam (which gave rise to what was perhaps his greatest poem, In Memoriam A.H.H.); the staggering quantities of human and animal suffering; his observations of corruption in the church; these and other experiences tested his faith. Some would argue they destroyed his faith.

But no one will argue that Tennyson lived much of his life in the twilight regions where faith and doubt intersect. Much of his philosophical poetry found its source in these shadowy lands.

One such poem, my personal favorite, is The Ancient Sage. Penned in 1885, toward the end of Tennyson’s life, the poem decries certitude, and extols the virtues of healthy doubt. But the real theme is hope. Hope that does not demand certainty at the outset. Yet, hope that, in the words of the Apostle, does not disappoint. Hope that sets its bearer upon a search that will, in Tennyson’s view, prove fruitful.

The Ancient Sage speaks a profound message to me, particularly in light of my two previous posts on Natural Theology. I posted this poem in its entirety last year; today I reproduce only the final stanza:

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,

Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:

Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no

Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,

Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,

Am not thyself in converse with thyself,

For nothing worthy proving can be proven,

Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,

And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith

She reels not in the storm of warring words,

She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’,

She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,

She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,

She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,

She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,

She hears the lark within the songless egg,

She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!

The seeds of faith can prosper in the ground of doubt. Their germination requires no certainty of persuasion. I accept a starting place for faith which demands no proof. Cleaving ever to that “sunnier side of doubt”, clinging to a faith “beyond the forms of faith”, I choose to seek rewards the skeptic has already ruled out. I choose to hope that what looks like an oasis actually is. I choose to savor the promise of fruit, to listen for the lark not yet hatched.

Wail “Mirage!”, if you will, and linger in the waterless waste. I’m off to find the fountain!

Approaching Belief Naturally (Part II)

2010-05-30T07:43:00.001-07:00

Some time ago, I wrote this essay outlining the rational basis for a belief in God. And while the late notorious atheist Antony Flew (whose recent death came just days before my precious wife’s) found similar reasons adequate to change his mind about God’s existence, I have more recently reconsidered the basis for my belief. It is not, in the end, those “reasons for belief” that give rise to my theism. Nor is it the testimony of the Bible. My approach to belief, as I explained in the earlier post in this series, is along the path of Natural Theology. As I whittle away at my own lifelong assumptions, shedding presuppositionalist and, for the moment, my own a priori thinking, I have arrived at a somewhat surprising basis for my personal belief.

I am a believer in God, first and foremost, because I choose to be.

I have not abandoned those reasons for belief. I still value the rational approach of the Thomists (the Natural Theology espoused by Thomas Aquinas), but I recognize that my belief does not begin there. Nor can it logically stem from the Presuppositional approach favored by many Christians (who claim that belief must begin with the presupposition of divine revelation contained in the Scriptures), a view which I completely reject. My belief in God must, at its inception, be a matter of choice. I believe in God because I wish to.

Belief does not end with a choice. Those who choose to believe can (and likely will, in my view) find ample confirmation of that choice, a stream of rational and experiential evidences more than suffice to validate belief. And though my faith is bolstered and reinforced by observation, reasoned consideration, spiritual experience, etc., my faith begins with this simple admission: I believe in God because I choose to believe in God.

Each of us faces this choice. In this most important of existential questions, every human being has the same set of options: God, or no God. Some will claim the convenient “middle ground” of agnosticism. But the agnostic merely acknowledges that we cannot know, a fact with which thinking theists and atheists alike will all agree. And that is why we are confronted with a choice. We cannot, at the outset, know. We all choose. The agnostic chooses to live his life as if there is no God, or as if there is. No one can evade this choosing. We all line up on one side or the other, and we do so as a matter of choice.

And this choice will color all subsequent observations and experiences, predisposing the theist to see evidence for God’s existence everywhere he looks, while predisposing the atheist to see none.

So my theism, at its outset, is a preference. I prefer to believe that this cosmos has ultimate meaning. I prefer to think that my existence is intended, that it has purpose and profound significance. I prefer to believe that human life is something more than a very brief flash in the pan of accidental cosmic existence. I prefer to think that there will be a meaningful consummation of human history. I prefer to believe in one to whom I owe my very existence, even with the personal accountability implicit in such a choice. I prefer to live my days in a constant search for that ultimate reality, for transcendent truth, as opposed to shrugging off the possibility and abandoning such a search. (My search, by the way, has been more than sufficiently rewarded!)

All of which leads to this question: why would anyone choose not to believe these things?

Personal: Life without Ginger

2010-05-18T21:58:00.001-07:00

I will get back into writing about topics like Natural Theology. I promise. But it seems unnatural right now to write about anything other than that one who still occupies most of my thoughts. I wrote a letter to a friend earlier today. Below is an excerpt.

The days string together in an unabated tempo. It doesn’t seem like they should. There ought to be some “stop action”, or “pause” button ... but no, life goes on. I’m actually doing better than I thought I would, at least on some levels. Those who look on probably think I’m doing just fine. It might appear that way, but I usually feel like I’m just going through the motions, doing all the things that demand doing – eating, sleeping, working. Almost everything I do has a hollowness, a strong sense of diminished purpose. I now know how much Ginger was at the heart of everything I do. Everything! When I salt the eggs, I do it to suit her taste. When I pull the weeds, it’s to win a smile (always more than enough reward!!). If I shave, its for her touch. When I drive to work, its for her. When I shop, I’m filling out her list, her way. While I wash the car, I’m imaging my pretty lady getting into it. If I sweep the kitchen, take out the garbage, clean up the dishes ... its always all for her.

So, this is my adjustment. I must find new reasons to be. Ginger left me an incredible family, for the health and beauty of which I give all the credit to her. It is her parting gift to me! And I do find much joy and comfort in our children and grandchildren. Tim is amazing. More the executive, take-charge person than I ever was, ever could be. And his strength through this whole process, his leadership in the family, is a unique and wonderful blessing to me. Charis has amazed me too, with her willingness to cook, tend to the house, show initiative in the garden and grounds. Luke, Kirsty, and Amy are all still at home for now. What a blessing to have a full house! Lisa has made special effort to be with us a lot, and her husband is very supportive. Surely my family is all the earthly motivation I should need. Without doubt, this will become my reality, in time.

Approaching Belief Naturally (Part I)

2010-05-11T14:16:00.000-07:00

Explore with me two launching points for Christian Theology. Natural Theology builds upon a foundation of observable nature, mixing reason with common experience. Understandings about God derive from reason and insights gleaned from nature. In Natural Theology, science informs the search for transcendent truths, and human reason, though far from infallible, becomes a useful tool. Natural Theology may make use of Scriptures, even come to rely upon them, but it will do so in the course of its reasoned search for truth. Though Natural Theology is an accepted starting point for many Roman Catholics (beginning with Thomas Aquinas), it has been looked upon with suspicion by many Protestants dating back to the Reformers. Revealed Theology begins with Scripture and religious experiences. Revealed Theology rejects nature and reason as starting points. Truth about God, it contends, can only be discerned from special writings, inspired by God himself, and given to man to be the basis for our understandings about him. Theologians who rely upon Revealed Theology often have a deep distrust of both science and human reason. The Fallen state of humankind, it is argued, predisposes us to error, and so we must not trust our own rational processes, our own observations.

For most of my Christian life, I was taught to rely upon Revealed Theology. My belief in God, and all my understandings about him, were sourced in the Bible texts. This was the only “safe” approach. I regarded the Bible as God’s message to man. My own Reformed background instructed me that we could know nothing about God except what he chose to reveal to us through the avenues of special revelation: The Scriptures and our personal spiritual experiences (the Holy Spirit).

All of this changed for me when my study of the natural world began to turn up data which was often at odds with the story told in the Scriptures. Big Bang cosmology, entropy dating back to the beginning of time, billions of years of evolutionary struggle and massive quantities of death and species extinction all preceding Adam and Eve, powerful geological evidence that the earth was never inundated à la the world-wide Flood of Noah; these things, and many more, demonstrated that the Bible must be read differently than I was accustomed to reading it. They touch directly upon the historical narrative; and by extension, they effect many traditional theological assumptions. They strongly suggest new understandings about the Creator of this Cosmos. Most of this data, unavailable to previous generations, results in understandings which, when placed alongside the Bible, alter, enhance and expand upon Christian Theology.

Thus, my personal journey lead me to rely heavily upon Natural Theology. My thoughts about the nature of God, what he is doing with this created order, the narrative of which we are a part ... all of these things are informed as much by observations of nature and the application of reason as by Scripture. Michael Dowd calls this “Public Revelation” (that which can be known by all) as opposed to “Private Revelation” (that which can only be learned through special revelation.) While the Reformers might have allowed for some input from nature, such input would merely supplement a full systematic theology derived from Scripture alone. On the other hand, Natural Theology advocates may include the “private revelation” of Scripture and spiritual experience, but only as they are guided to do so through their reasoned approach to Theology.

In my next post, I want to describe the starting point for my own Natural Theology. In the meantime, I invite your questions and comments.

Defeat circular questioning with the wheel of power

2010-05-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

This graphic has been making the rounds on the internet:

Atheists, of course, love it! Why do I post it here? Quite simply because it identifies a huge fallacy at the foundation of many a Christian's faith.

Sometimes, in order to set a structure on a solid foundation, it is necessary to first dismantle the old, unstable one. Comments?

(Tip of the hat to Mike Beidler, who in turn credits James McGrath. But this thing is all over the internet.)

Agree / Disagree

2010-04-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

Agree / Disagree

"If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded—or even if it suspects—that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe."

The quote is from Irving Kristol, the late neoconservative social commentator. He was explaining why neocons often reject Darwinism. Of course, I would take issue with the presumption that evolution = nihilism. But apart from the context, Kristol claims this to be an indisputable social principle. Is it?

Return to Blogging ... Soon

2010-04-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

Thank you for the many kind words left here or sent to me by email over the last few weeks. The support of blogging friends is very meaningful to me.

One of the less anticipated after-effects of losing my life's love is the motivation factor. Motivation for everything. Until now, I did not realize the degree to which Ginger provided motivation for everything from washing dishes to pulling weeds to keeping a fire on the hearth to going to work in the morning. She was my raison d'etre. Finding my way without her will involve reordering purpose and motivation in my life.This is nowhere more the case than in the writing I do here at OutsideTheBox. She may not have always been my most avid reader (her life was usually far too practical for my metaphysical wanderings), but Ginger was unquestionably the reader about whose response I cared most.

Thus, returning to the discussions here, which I have missed for these last few months, will not be easy. But it is something I am compelled to do. I hope to post soon on the necessity of grounding Christian faith in natural theology, a statement some might consider self-contradicting. Stay tuned ...

Personal: Ginger

2010-04-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

Following is an excerpt from an email update I sent out to friends on Thanksgiving Day, 2006, about the time my wife, Ginger, began her battle against colon cancer.

Family and Friends,

In our circumstances, this year, Thanksgiving takes on a new significance. I woke up this morning with a determination in my heart to choose thankfulness, to celebrate God's predictable goodness, even in the face of adversity. But I also woke up to the 90 second intermittent noise of the pump sending the poisonous chemicals into my wife's body. They kill tissue. Hopefully, they kill cancer tissue. But in actuality they do not know how to distinguish invading cancer cells from Ginger. So their attack is indiscriminate. I woke up to the realization that, whether successful or not, the financial drain of all this medical care upon our family resources will be enormous. I woke up to the plain and simple fact: a piece of this decaying, death-driven cosmos is visiting us personally, and our lives will never be the same. And yet, I choose thankfulness. I am reminded of the oft repeated Old Testament concept: being thankful involves sacrifice. Thankfulness does not always spring naturally from our hearts. Thankfulness is often a sacrifice, and must be driven through pain, through sorrow.

Times like this test our faith; they test our concept of God; they test our theology. A theology that does not work in times of adversity is a theology that does not work.

I am not thankful for this cancer, though some of my Christian friends tell me I ought to be. I do not accept the mantra that God, in his wisdom, brought this circumstance to my wife. This cancer is a manifestation of decay, of death. It is a reminder that this entire universe is governed by a principle of death, and that there is no escaping its reach. I do not thank God for decay, for illness, for the works of darkness, for the overflow of evil.

I am thankful for every good and perfect gift. Those come from God. But not cancer.

I choose to be thankful, not for the cancer, but for the marvelous redeeming skills of our God. He is amazingly adept at redemption. I am thankful because thanksgiving, David reminds us, opens a channel for the revelation of God's deliverance. I am thankful because I know that, though God does not cause all things, he never-the-less causes them to to work out only for the good of those who love him, those moving in his purposeful callings. I am thankful because thankfulness in adversity is the ultimate vote of confidence, it is the ultimate expression of faith, it is the way in which we transform things, altering them somehow, actually sanctifying them, Paul says, so that all things strangely and wonderfully flow right into the purposes of God. And his purposes are always excellent. They are always wonderful. Always good. So I say, thank you, God.

No, God did not bring this cancer into Ginger's body any more than he caused the premature death of his friend, Lazarus (if he had caused it, the tears of Jesus were bogus!) But for those who walk in faith, there are no setbacks! God can be counted upon to use the adversity as a springboard to launch his children forward in his purposes. And one essential key to releasing his hand to do just that? Our thankfulness!

~ Cliff

Ginger, with her hand in mine, breathed her last on Monday, April 12.

The most remarkable thing about my wife over the last three and one half years is this: She never complained about her life being cut short. Not once did I see sadness cross her brow. Occasional anger might flare against her unwelcome invader. She grimaced in pain more than once. But never sadness. Never did I hear “Oh, this is so unfair”, or “I wish I could live to see all my children start their families”, or “I so wanted to see my grandsons grow up.” Throughout her battle, Ginger exhibited courage and strength, incredible peace and joy. She did not cry. Not one time. Once, in a vulnerable moment as I held her weakening body, I started to sob in front of the children. She brought me up short and implored me, “You must be strong!”

In the days ahead, in times when that strength is no longer a virtue, I will know my share of darkness and deep sorrow; tears will be my frequent companion. But finding my way through them will be eased by the memory of her unfading joy, her sweet smile. She has imparted to me the gift of her courage, and her amazing peace ... peace which she knew could only come from the eternal source of undying peace ... our heavenly Father. The same Father who sustained Ginger will sustain me.

Theodicy discussions ...

2010-03-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

I received two communications this morning, one in an email from a friend, another in a comment on an earlier post here. Both writers dealt with the subject of theodicy (the problem of evil), each of them from a unique vantage.

First I opened an email from long-time friend, Laurie Burke. She was returning to Tennessee (where she is pursuing a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Memphis) from an APA conference in Baltimore. The conference was on the Psychology of Spirituality and Religion, and she had presented a paper on bereavement distress and complicated grief, her subspecialty. She wrote to tell me of the role theodicy played in many discussions at the conference. One’s ability (or lack of) to reconcile faith in an inherently good God with personal suffering, bereavement, and grief has a profound effect upon one’s ability to process personal loss. This is the practical, intensely personal side of the otherwise philosophical and sometimes dry discussion of the problem of evil.

Second, Mike Gene (author of Design Matrix which I discussed briefly here) commenting on my post entitled “Retroactive Curse?”, accepted my challenge to discuss theodicy from the standpoint of a believer who accepts the findings of modern science and recognizes the centrality of the apparent dilemma which persistent evil poses to Christian theology.

As I have often found it difficult to engage the Christian community in this discussion, I was greatly encouraged to receive these two communications affirming that theodicy matters, and that believers ought to be engaged in coming to terms with the problem of evil.

I had planned to write a more comprehensive detailing of my own theodicy views, but personal challenges in my own life have curtailed my own writing for the present. Then, along come these two writers with some distinct thoughts on the subject. Perhaps they can be persuaded to offer guest posts here. I have asked them to do just that!

Personal: Ginger's cancer

2010-03-22T21:52:00.000-07:00

The colon cancer against which my wife has battled for the last three and one half years seems now to have the upper hand. We have not lost hope, but the reality is that the tumors are growing, and treatment options have been exhausted. For the last few months, and continuing on into the foreseeable future, my attention is turned toward caring for Ginger. For this reason, I have not posted here now for several weeks, and it may be some time before I do. Please feel free to comment on any existing post, and I will respond as I have opportunity.

Many of you are praying for us ... and we are thankful! Please continue!

Nature's Dark Side

2010-02-14T11:57:00.000-08:00

The Ichneumon (ikˈnyu-men) mother wasp carefully searches the leaves for a juicy, well nourished caterpillar. Upon finding just the right fat, food-processing machine, the wasp will with her long ovipositor deep in the flesh of the unsuspecting caterpillar, leave her eggs, and fly away. But just before inserting her eggs, she will carefully locate the critical bundles of nerves inside her womb-host, stinging those nerves in such a way that the caterpillar is paralyzed, but remains alive. In this way, the wasp larvae will have a constant supply of fresh meat to feed on until they are ready to dig their way out of their hollowed-out host. But there is more! Some innate intelligence working in the wasp larvae instructs them to take care to postpone consuming critical caterpillar organs ... they want their meat alive! So, carefully, they consume the internal parts of the caterpillar in reverse order of importance, leaving the heart until the very end!

An imagined scene from some horror movie? Or the cruel hoax of a sadistic story-teller? No, this is one of a myriad of such regular occurrences in nature. And we who believe in a wise and immutably good God must account for a plethora of seemingly diabolical schemes strewn across the landscape of biology. Did our loving Father create these species to interact in this way? Are these the dirty little secrets of Special Creation? or are these horror-filled anomalies the work of an “Intelligent Designer”?

Some Christians choose to ignore this darker side of Creation. They speak freely of the beauty of the natural world, the grandeur of the mountains, the majestic power of the crashing sea, the glory of the soaring eagle, the elegant beauty of the Stargazer Lily. But they avoid the endless stream of agony, suffering and brutality implicit in the natural order: the parasite, the predator and prey, Tennyson’s nature “red in tooth and claw”. The standard Christian response, that these are but manifestations of the curse, the consequence of Adam’s sin, are hackneyed and obsolete. We now have an endless trail of irrefutable fossil evidence: these brutal horrors of nature precede man by hundreds of millions of years. It has been thus from the beginning!

Richard Dawkins, in his new defense of evolutionary science, The Greatest Show on Earth, retells the habits of the Ichneumon wasp in his chapter entitled “Arms Races and ‘Evolutionary Theodicy’” (page 395). I found the chapter absolutely fascinating. Even the renown atheist recognizes how an understanding of the requisites of evolution offer at least a measure of resolution to the age-old theodicy problem.

It has been my contention for sometime that evolution, properly understood as a part of God’s master plan for the cosmos, actually helps the believer find his way through the thorny issues of the problem of evil, and its corollary, the problem of pain. In building my case, it becomes my burden to confront believing friends with aspects of Creation they’d sooner not think about. It is not a popular thing to do. Some friends are enraged at what they perceive me to be: an agitator, a faith-challenging troublemaker. They fail to see my long term goal: to solve problems of faith.

In truth: evolution, the powerfully-supported science which believers often reject, actually helps to solve theodicy, the #1 stumbling-block which believers typically choose to ignore. But before we can proceed down that path, believers must lay down their resistance to undeniable science, and abandon their denial of the dark underbelly of life. When Christians face these two realities, and consider them side-by-side, they will soon be free to explore fresh answers in the full light of reality!

The sooner this day comes, the better!

Evolution: God's Idea?

2010-02-06T14:16:00.000-08:00

"Aren't evolution and faith in God incompatible? Can a scientist believe in miracles like the resurrection? Actually, I find no conflict here, and neither apparently do the 40 percent of working scientists who claim to be believers. Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things. But why couldn't this be God's plan for creation?"

~ Dr. Francis Collins

Few Christians I know are even trying to understand how evolution might play into the big picture plan and purpose of God. Many Christians are just straining to get used to the idea of evolution, and many more reject it altogether. When believers get past their initial aversion, get comfortable with the new paradigm, and attempt to look at evolution through the eyes of the purposeful Creator, new and exciting vistas open up on a very large, cosmic scale. Francis Collins, the world’s leading geneticist and an evangelical believer tells us that evolution is clearly true. He accepts it as “God’s plan for creation.”

Where are you on this scale below? Please comment!

o Evolution is not compatible with Christianity.

o Evolution might be true, but I’m not convinced.

o Even if evolution is true, it would not effect Christian theology.

o The evidence for evolution is powerful, and I am trying to adjust my thinking, to understand how it fits into my faith.

o I am comfortable with evolution and common descent.

o I am comfortable with evolution and common descent, and actively exploring how this truth impacts Christian theology.

Human Suffering in Haiti ~ and my Faith

2010-01-17T11:38:00.000-08:00

The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake is iconic in the philosophical and theological discussions of evil and suffering. The Hatian earthquake threatens to surpass Lisbon in death toll, perhaps rising into the top ten earthquakes in the category of human casualties. We are confronted once again with the age-old theodicy problem: How can we account for such incredible suffering in a universe purportedly created and governed by a God who is loving and good.

It has been my contention that no world-view, whether theistic or non, can skate on this issue. No philosophy, no theology, has integrity if it ignores this elephant in the room, the problem posed by suffering and evil. Today, as I view dump trucks discharging their faceless, nameless loads into mass graves, I am sometimes amazed at the indifference of some believers who claim this huge affront to faith does not faze them. The comment threads on this site are littered with such cavalier dismissals. Many other believers are guilty of a greater atrocity, blaming the victims of tragic disasters for exciting the Posieden-like anger of a vindictive God. Still others take the easier hand-in-the-sand mentality: what I don’t think about can’t threaten me!

Lisa Miller, Religion Editor at Newsweek, commenting on the suffering in Haiti, has raised the question again in her column, Why God Hates Haiti, The frustrating theology of suffering. Read it. Ask the hard questions.

Some Christians react defensively when I call them to consider the problem of evil. They perceive me as attacking their faith. Of course, they are correct. A faith which does not take into account the horrors of evil and suffering ought to be attacked. But my purpose is never to destroy faith. Rather, I seek to build faith that is rational, robust, reality-based. Arriving at such a faith may involve a good deal of illusion dismantling. Is it worth the risk? For some, such an examination may result in the complete crumbling of faith, as it did for Bart Ehrman. It is my experience, however, that most Christians who engage is this perilous work of critical thinking, asking the hard questions, emerge on the other side with a faith that is more vibrant, more reliable, more defensible. For me, it is the only kind of faith worth possessing.

Retroactive Curse?

2010-01-12T11:55:00.000-08:00

I’ve been involved in an interesting discussion over at Undeception. In this post, Steve discusses how William Dembski, one of the foremost proponents of the Intelligent Design movement, has embraced Old Earth Creationism. That is, he understands the incontrovertible evidence for the age of the earth. And he knows that such evidence includes a history of suffering and death on our planet before the dawn of man. While he still rejects evolution (acceptance of evolution in Dembski’s case would apparently spell the end of his employment at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary where he is a philosophy professor), his acceptance of the geological and paleontological records creates a conundrum for his theology: billions of years of suffering and death on our planet prior to the dawn of man. More importantly, all of this death occurs before the Fall of man. And Dembski’s theology posits that death and suffering are included in the curse which resulted from the sin of Adam and Eve. No problem, according to Dembski. God merely set a curse upon Creation in anticipation of the Fall.

This is like blaming that the man who struck a match at 3:30 in the afternoon for thereby causing an early morning fire on that same day. Except that God is all-knowing, and apparently therefore it is perfectly rational that the curse resulting from Man’s sin might extend backward for billions of years. And thus does Dembski solve the theodicy riddle (how can evil exist in the creation of a good God?) in his book, The End of Christianity. Blame the extinction of dinosaurs on Adam! Eve eats an apple, and trillions of preexistent bacteria die over billions of years. Of course, such a view wreaks havoc upon common sense notions of cause and effect, which lie at the foundation of all science. If God plays such a huge cosmic trick with the sequence of events, can a scientist like Dembski really trust anything in the natural order?

Dembski has effectively rewritten Genesis 2:17 to read, “For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely set into motion a whole set of retroactive physical, spiritual, and biological laws including the eventuality of death, laws which will not only henceforth govern your lives and all Creation, but actually have already been governing Creation for 13.7 billion years. So, verily, don’t eat thereof. On second thought, maybe you should eat because if you don’t you’ll really screw things up.” And he has altered the grammar of Genesis 3:14-19, effectively replacing a string of straightforward future tense verbs with past perfects. Exactly how does this solve anything for a man who has so much invested in literalism and inerrancy?

Dembski’s commitment to a literal reading of an inerrant Genesis 1 compels him to reject evolution (God created each species “according to its kind”). His insistence upon a literal understanding of Genesis 2 and 3, (and thus a literal Adam and Eve) lead him to reject common descent. But unlike other Biblical literalists, he cannot square the geological and paleontological record with six-day young earth Creationism. The resulting theological dilemma has Dembski contorting Biblical literalism beyond recognition.

Christians who take seriously their faith must deal with the issue in some way. It won’t go away anytime soon. So I am asking my believing readers, How do you solve this dilemma?

o I avoid science, thus shielding myself from all the potential difficulties of squaring my chosen beliefs with hard facts.

o I avoid the philosophical issue of the problem of evil. If I don’t think about it, it doesn’t effect me.

o I avoid the theological issue of death before the Fall. If I don’t think about it, it doesn’t bother me.

o I accept Dembski’s logic. It is the only way to hold together my acceptance of Biblical inerrancy in the face of the vast fossil record showing a long history of death and extinctions prior to man.

o I reject Dembski’s solution as irrational. I accept Biblical inerrancy, but have another solution to the dilemma.

o My view of reality compels me to redefine how God reveals truth, and I do not read the Bible as the literal, inerrant “Word of God”.

Or do you have a different approach than one listed here?

Our Default Setting? (Part Two)

2009-11-22T07:06:00.000-08:00

“The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!” It’s all many Young Earth Creationists, and other Fundamentalists need to know! They are completely satisfied with the simple statement of faith. I am not.

Michael Spencer keeper of the popular webblog, Internet Monk, recently entered a post on the meaning of “post-evangelical”. In describing his own post-evangelical approach to belief, Michael writes,

“I reject any notions that Christian belief falls from the sky as a magic book that exists apart from other components of human experience.”

I’ll leave it the reader to decide whether or not I qualify as “post-evangelical”, but I do resonate with with Michael on this point. For many believers, the Bible is the starting point and the ending point for their belief in God; I find it necessary to consult those “other components of human experience.”

Thus, when I ask the ultimate questions about whether there is a God, my starting point is the evidence in creation, that place where the Apostle Paul declares that the invisible things of God can be clearly seen (Romans 1:20).

But if anything is clear, it is that not all see those “invisible things of God” with equal clarity. Hence, the question of my previous post about whether we are intrinsically theists or atheists, or whether any such default setting exists. The responses were mixed, as I expected, and made for some fascinating reading for me. Thank you to all who participated.

No one denies that God-consciousness is wide-spread in humankind. But the explanations for religious belief vary.

Commenting on the previous post, Psi suggests that a tendency to see purpose and intention in our world was a survival tool, perhaps necessary in the early development of our species. Thus, religious belief is a product of evolution, though less genetic than memetic. He cites Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief in which Wolpert traces religious belief, like many such superstitions, to our tendency to assign causation to phenomena.

Isaac points us to the work of British psychologist Bruce Hood who believes that humans are hard-wired for religious belief:

“Humans are born with brains designed to make sense of the world and that sometimes leads to beliefs that go beyond any natural explanation.... We are inclined from the start to think that there are unseen patterns, forces and essences inhabiting the world ...”

This intrinsic human inclination lead to superstitions of all kinds, including (in Hood’s view) belief in God.

Of course, in order to be evolutionarily explained, the human tendency to believe in God must have adaptive value, and those evolutionary scientists who doubt God’s existence have gone to great pains to explain how fanciful notions about gods could have helped our species in its evolutionary struggle. We hear about things like hope and purpose, necessary to drive us forward, even if they were false to the core! “Belief in a supernatural Being served the species well (it must have!)” they tell us, “but of course now we have outgrown its usefulness.”

But when the dust settles around the skeptics’ evolutionary explanations for religious belief, what emerges is this salient observation: religious belief is so universal that it demands an explanation. And of course, the skeptic rejects out of hand any suggestion that this ubiquitous inborn belief in the supernatural might be borne out of supernatural reality.

But the Hebrews had a simpler way of viewing things. The Creator himself, Koheleth instructs us, has “set eternity in the hearts of men”. I cannot say that I’ve never experienced doubt about God. But neither can I deny the reality of Ecclesiates 3:11 in my own experience: eternity is solidly set in my heart, and it is unshakable.

These two competing ideas, 1) the contention of the Bible, that God-consciousness is inborn, irrepressibly written upon the human soul, and 2) the notion that religious belief is merely an adaptive step in our evolutionary history are not mutually exclusive constructs. When we understand evolution as the Creator’s chosen mechanism, it ought not surprise us that an awareness of God would arise developmentally. RBH points us to evolutionary anthropologist Justin L. Barrett, who traces belief in God through its evolutionary stages, finding “adaptive value” in our own evolutionary history along the way. And Oxford researcher Barrett is a professing Christian, one with whom I think I would get on quite well. Together with others, he has helped to establish “the Cognitive Science of Religion” which seeks to study and explain the phenomenon of near ubiquitous religious belief. He writes, “CSR is often associated with evolutionary science and anti-religious rhetoric but neither is intrinsic nor necessary to the field.” Evolution provides little shelter for the atheist in his contention that belief is passé.

Pervasive religious belief remains for me evidence of a default human setting. It appears to me that people widely believe in supernatural causation based upon the witness of nature, and the witness of their own heart and mind. To be sure, many of the forms of this belief, and the early rationales, appear quaint and strange to us today. For me, this is no justification to abandon the implications of God-consciousness. Rather, it compels us to allow our understandings to be refined. Early beliefs were often based upon mysteries in nature (weather, astronomy, etc.) now more fully understood. But the witness of nature today is no less compelling.

And thus the starting point for my personal theology, the launching pad for my exploration of God, is this inner witness, this deep inclination formed by observation of nature and listening to my own heart. I find belief in God to be natural and irrepressible. I experience its renewal every time I step out on my front porch and breath in the fir scented air, and gaze upon the Oregon sky, and the dazzling array of living things that greet me. Yes, eternity is indeed set upon my heart.

Our Default Setting? (Part One)

2009-11-15T11:11:00.000-08:00

This is a reader participation post, please weigh in. I've been thinking about the following question for the last few weeks. And now I want to hear what my readers think. So ...

The default human setting:

is it theist or atheist?

... or does any such default setting exist?

Regular contributors here are about half atheist, and half theist. But that may or may not dictate your answer. Offer an opinion only, or support your answer from psychology, history, evolutionary science, sociology, logic or experience.

Genesis 2-3 ... Literally?

2009-11-07T10:42:00.000-08:00

Was Adam an historical person? Is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden intended to be understood literally, or allegorically? (see this earlier post on Adam in which I explore various possibilities.)

When a 21st Century Christian reads early Genesis, it is difficult to do so without bringing along baggage, preconceptions. Christians who accept the evolutionary framework will generally conclude that the story as written is allegory. Anti-evolutionists, perhaps in fear of giving space to evolution, will generally conclude that the story is literal.

Many fundamentalists cite their tried and tested principle of hermeneutics which says we ought always assume a literal meaning unless there is overriding evidence within the text itself compelling us to do otherwise. Despite the obvious logical flaw in that principle, someone please explain why we are not so compelled by the text to understand Genesis 2-3 allegorically. When I read a story that includes talking snakes, magic trees, a human being formed from the rib of another human being, I see many not-so-subtle hints that we are reading an allegory. Yet, what seems patently obvious to me is vehemently denied by anti-evolutionists and fundamentalists, who are utterly convinced this is a literal bit of history and that there is no reason to read it otherwise. Perhaps we are all guilty of superimposing our preconceptions upon the text.

It may be impossible for any of us to approach this story with an open mind, uncluttered by personal bias. I am coming to believe that genuine, unbiased exegesis is actually impossible for human beings to do. In the case of the story in Genesis 2-3, wouldn’t it be great if we could erase from our minds all the contemporary squabbles over the science of origins, and simply let the story speak for itself?

Ah! but we needn’t do that. It has already been done. We can journey back to an earlier time when evolution did not color a reader’s response. In a recent comment here, frequent contributor Isaac offered the following quote from Origen. When Origen, the respected 3rd Century church father, read Genesis, he did so without the baggage we moderns carry; and he asks ...

"Who is found so ignorant as to suppose that God, as if He had been a husbandman, planted trees in paradise, in Eden towards the east, and a tree of life in it, i.e., a visible and palpable tree of wood, so that anyone eating of it with bodily teeth should obtain life, and, eating again of another tree, should come to the knowledge of good and evil? No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that some mystical meaning may be indicated by it." (Origen de Principiis, Volume 4)

It is true, not all early theologians shared Origen’s view (although Augustine, at the very least, maintained a quite flexible view regarding the literalness of the Garden of Eden story [see this comment by Rich]). There have always been some perceived theological reasons to favor a literal reading of this story — a discussion for another time. But my point here is simply this: the great early theologian and Bible student, Origen, unencumbered by issues of science that haunt our minds, when he read Genesis 2-3 in his Hebrew Bible came away unequivocally asserting that the text is patently allegorical.

A Friendly Discussion about Evolution ...

2009-11-03T16:39:00.001-08:00

... which is, of course, most often an oxymoron.

C. Michael Patton recently opened a discussion on evolution at his website with a quote from John MacArthur (see my earlier post John MacArthur: "The evolutionary lie ..."). The last three posts here at OutsideTheBox grew out of that discussion. I quit reading and interacting in the thread of comments when they numbered 530. By that time, the discussion had become heated, at times, with the traditionalist/anti-evolutionists demanding answers to many questions which, quite frankly, underscored how poorly they understand evolution. They kept demanding that evolutionists make every aspect of evolution fit into traditional evangelical theology, reveling in their “aha” moments each time they found our answers less than satisfying.

Fellow Evolutionary-Creationist Greg (who is still going strong as the comment thread nears 600), at one point (comment 509 and 511) became, shall we say, slightly agitated, and waxed eloquent! Because his comment so profoundly reflected my own thoughts and feelings, I asked Greg if I could repost his comment here; he consented, and it follows:

My Father in Heaven has blessed me with an unquenchable desire to know. To seek out and understand, to teach the glories of his Word and world to those less fortunate than I. Ignorance is bliss, maybe, but in the wonderful wisdom of His will, I have been denied this common curse.

I cannot unsee what I have seen. I do not have the luxury of ignorance to guide me in my life anymore. The church is the greatest sustainer of ignorance I have yet to encounter. As I walk through it I am struck by the childishness of the people, the simplicity they exhibit. At times I long to have again what they have now! Only to fit in, to be of a simple mind again, and not walk this road alone. But in the end, that would be like a man who can now see preferring instead his blindness. I prefer the color of the empty road.

The world is an amazing and complicated place. The Word of God is an amazing and complicated book. Both will confuse you to death. Those who do not see burn one in favor of another. That is not an option for me. Who am I to condemn a work of God to the fire? As God is the author of both, I have to hold one in my right hand and one in the other. I have to accept both no matter how confusing it may seem or how much guessing I may have to do. I am sure in my heart that my God is faithful and true, not one prone to duplicity, as those who do not see will have me believe.

The Word and the world are complicated. I embrace the challenge. I will glory in the magnificent creation my Father has put me in and pity those who do not see what wonders my God has created. Any who wish to see I will gladly help them. Those who refuse, I, ever praying, will leave them to their unrealized misery.

If you are an anti-evolutionary Christian, please, please do not take offense. Wear the shoe only if it fits. And ensure that you understand evolution before you criticize those of us who have become convinced that it must fit into revealed truth, because it is revealed truth.

Inerrancy: some further thoughts ...

2009-11-02T21:12:00.000-08:00

I have two simple questions for my Inerrantist friends. I have posed them on numerous occasions. So far, no one has even attempted a response. If inerrancy is important, there simply must be a meaningful answer to these questions. They are based upon the following premise:

No one holds an inerrant Bible today.

... that is, unless you subscribe to the King-James-Only concept. King-James-Onlyism declares that God directed not only the original authors, but also the transcribers of the New Testament Greek Textus Receptus and the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament, and the translators of the King James Version. This view is ridiculous, easily refuted, and the only way Inerrancy can make any practical sense today! Putting it aside, we are back to the premise:

No one holds an inerrant Bible today.

Rather, we have thousands of original language manuscripts with thousands of variant readings. In fact, no two manuscripts agree! And we do not possess a single original manuscript. When I open my Greek New Testament to any page, the footnote section is filled with variant readings, which are graded according to manuscript evidence. But the simple fact is, we do not know what Paul, or Luke, or John actually wrote. Some of our Bibles contain verses, even entire sections, which are of questionable origin.

As a Bible teacher who understands textual criticism, I have always downplayed these textual variants. They actually have minimal impact upon the teachings of the Bible. Nevertheless, it is the contention of most Inerrantists that the Bible was carefully inspired by God word for word. This is known as “verbal (word for word) plenary (absolute and extending to all) inspiration.” In the view of those who espouse inerrancy, it was important that the Biblical authors get it right down to each and every word. I have two questions to ask of this view, based upon our premise:

No one holds an inerrant Bible today.

1) Why, if God deemed it important to supernaturally inspire this written revelation, if it was vital that the authors get every word right ... why is it that within 100 years of the original penning of the New Testament the texts were corrupted with innumerable copyists’ errors, omissions, and additions? If God could ensure a word-perfect revelation, and such a revelation mattered, why would he not superintend the transmission of that revelation? Wouldn’t safeguarding the revelation be equally important as giving it in the first place? And wouldn’t such safeguarding be just as easy to accomplish as the inspiration of the original authors?

2) Perhaps more to the point, since no one holds an inerrant Bible today, how important is the doctrine of Inerrancy really? If the Inerrantist must rely upon tools of textual criticism, and if he must allow for doubt about what was contained in the original manuscripts, and if he must therefore exercise intellectual judgments upon the text, how is his reading of the Bible different from the non-inerrantist? None of us holds an inerrant Bible. So what practical difference does a doctrine about some original manuscripts now thousands of years old and which no one today possesses—what practical difference does it make in how we approach the Bible?

When an Inerrantist reads the Bible, 1) he/she makes thoughtful judgments about what the text actually says, 2) he/she makes thoughtful judgments about what the text means, and 3) he/she might ask for Holy Spirit illumination as he reads.

When a non-inerrantist reads the Bible, 1) he/she makes thoughtful judgments about what the text actually says, 2) he/she makes thoughtful judgments about what the text means, and 3) he/she might ask for Holy Spirit illumination as he reads.

What is the difference? In short, what practical difference does a doctrine of an inerrant Bible make if nobody, in fact, possesses an inerrant Bible?

An Orthodox View of the Bible

2009-10-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

Over the last several years, I have frequently found myself on the defensive, apologizing for or attempting to explain my view of the Bible, Inspiration, Inerrancy, etc.

[My views are expressed in the following posts: My original post on Progressive Revelation; a later post responding to Richard Dawkins’ caricature of God; and a recent post detailing my view of Inspiration.]

Whether on evangelical web blogs, or within my own local circle of friends and comrades in the faith, my take on the Bible is seen by many as liberal, as “compromised”, and certainly as inferior to the fundamentalist stance of inerrancy. My friends who read the Bible as if it were the very inspired words of God see themselves as standing on the solid high ground of Fundamentalism, and see me as skidding down the slippery slope of that dreaded disease of Liberalism.

My detractors consider their beliefs to be orthodox, and mine to be aberrant. They are correct, of course, if by orthodox, they mean “traditionally accepted”. But orthodox (ortho = right, doxa = opinion) simply means “the correct view.” To claim that only a verbally inspired–inerrant–infallible–literalist view of Scripture is orthodox involves a good deal of presupposition. That is, it must be correct before it can be truly orthodox.

What if the correct view of Scripture is that it is not the inerrant, verbally inspired “Word of God”. What if the orthodox, correct view, is that it is an accurate journal of an historic people of faith, written by human beings, subject to their errors and misconceptions, but recording for our benefit their quest to know the Living God? If that is the case, then we should expect to find within its pages a rich heritage of growing, developing understandings about God; but we should also expect to find mistakes, discrepancies, contradictions, and a variety of other inaccuracies. And this is exactly what we do find!

Perhaps it is time for those of us with a less rigid view of the Bible to boldly declare our view to be orthodox! If my view is, in fact, more orthodox (as I believe it is!) then the less orthodox view of Inerrancy is both dangerous and misleading. This, I believe, is the case.

Inerrancy leads to distortions of the character of God. Sometimes, horrendous distortions. A few examples should suffice: In an inerrant Bible, God becomes one who endorses the practice of selling one’s daughters as sex-slaves (Exodus 21:7-11). The God of the Inerrantist commands that children who sass or stubbornly disobey their parents are to be killed for their transgressions (Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21). If God were speaking through Moses in the pages of Numbers 31:9-18, then God followed the pattern of many military conquerors, rewarding soldiers with virgins for their sexual indulgence (or please, Inerrantist, explain what else is going on in these verses!). The God of the Inerrantist was, on occasion, confused about biology, as when he identified rabbits as ruminants in Deuteronomy 14:7. Furthermore, an Inerrantist must view God as sometimes raging out-of-control, one who had to be talked out of venting his rage upon the Israelite nation by the cooler-headed Moses (Exodus 32:7-14). This list could be expanded. We haven’t even ventured beyond the first five books! But my point should be clear by now. Inerrancy is dangerous to a healthy view of God and his character. It leads to theological confusion and distortion.

On the other hand, if we understand these stories to be of human origin, expressing the views of Moses and his contemporaries, we understand these misconceptions to reflect an understanding of God in its infancy; we can excuse Moses as a human being who was in the process of getting to know his Creator, and who was inspired to record what he was learning, complete with theological misconceptions and factual errors. Of course, this requires that we actually think about what we read. And this, according to some, is dangerous because we become arbiters of what is true, and what is not, in the Bible.

But even the most ardent defenders of Inerrancy, such as John Piper, readily admit that errors and misconceptions abound in the Bible. Piper acknowledges “hundreds and hundreds” of apparent “disparities”. This admission is addressed to fellow preachers; one wonders how often Inerrantist preachers say such things from the pulpit; or if they secretly hope that few of the folks in the pews discover blatant contradictions such as the two descriptions of the death of Judas in Matthew and Acts. When the mantra is repeated over and over that the Bible is flawless, the perfect inerrant revealed Word of God, what happens when a young believer discovers these disparities. Sadly, the dissonance can unsettle the faith of young believers. James McGrath recently commented on the blog, Exploring our Matrix:

My strongest reason for opposing these misleading claims about Biblical literalism and inerrancy is that they are a fast track to atheism. Many preachers say one must choose: "Either the Bible is the perfect, inerrant word of God, or it is a load of garbage and should be thrown out". This sets up anyone who decides to study the Bible seriously and has been told this to either pretend the problems aren't there, and thus compromise on honesty, or to do what they were told and throw out the Bible. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So Inerrancy is not only dangerous because it leads to distorted views of God, it can potentially lead to apostasy among believers who seriously study the Bible.

Thus is was that James Orr warned that the teaching of Inerrancy would be suicidal for Christianity. Orr was a leader of the budding Fundamentalist movement in the early years of the 20th Century. He took exception to Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, and others who were contending that Fundamentalism must include an unwavering belief in inerrancy:

It is urged...that unless we can demonstrate what is called the inerrancy of the biblical record down even to its minutest details, the whole edifice of belief in revealed religion falls to the ground. This, on the face of it, is the most suicidal position for any defender of revelation to take up.

Suicidal, in Orr’s opinion, because he viewed inerrancy as impossible to defend. And thus, the Inerrantist inevitably paints himself into a corner.

A correct view of the Scriptures – that it is something less than literal, verbally inspired and inerrant – does not mean that we must hopelessly abandon the Bible. I have appreciated the following statement on the Bible contained in an early version of the Mars Hill Narrative Theology:

We believe the Bible to be the voices of many who have come before us, inspired by God to pass along their poems, stories, accounts, and letters of response and relationship with each other and the living God. These words have been used to describe God and his character for thousands of years, and we call this theology. Theology is one of the best ways we can come to know and love God; it is also how we understand who God calls us to be and what he calls us to do. Theology comes from the Greek words "theos" and "logos." Theos means God, and logos means word. Words about God.

We believe God inspired the authors of Scripture by his Spirit to speak to all generations of believers, including us today. God calls us to immerse ourselves in this authoritative narrative communally and individually to faithfully interpret and live out that story today as we are led by the Spirit of God.

While I might use slightly different verbiage, I can endorse this statement which carefully avoids fundamentalist buzzwords such as Verbal, Literal, Inerrancy, and Infallibility.

Questions for my readers:

1) What constitutes an “orthodox” view of Scripture?

2) What is your opinion of the Mars Hill statement on the Bible?

3) Should non-inerrantist evangelicals, like me, point out the errors in the Bible? or is it too unsettling for some believers?

John MacArthur: "The evolutionary lie ..."

2009-10-23T14:16:00.000-07:00

An interesting discussion at C. Michael Patton’s website, Reclaiming the Mind has ensued from the following citation. The words are those of John MacArthur from his book, The Battle for the Beginning:

“The evolutionary lie is so pointedly antithetical to Christian truth that it would seem unthinkable for evangelical Christians to compromise with evolutionary science in any degree. But during the past century and a half of evolutionary propaganda, evolutionists have had remarkable success in getting evangelicals to meet them halfway. Remarkably, many modern evangelicals . . . have already been convinced that the Genesis account of creation is not a true historical record. Thus they have not only capitulated to evolutionary doctrine at its starting point, but they have also embraced a view that undermines the authority of Scripture at its starting point.”

Wow! If MacArthur represents a broad swath of evangelicalism, it is no wonder my views on evolution have garnered for me rejection from so many of my friends. On the other hand, I am encouraged that MacArthur has apparently discovered “many” evangelicals who are convinced of evolution. I wish he would introduce us to each other. I find such evangelicals to be quite rare!

Well, Dr. John, count me among those evangelicals who have “been convinced that the Genesis account of creation is not a true historical record” (more on that later ...). But I absolutely repudiate your misguided contention that I have “compromised with evolutionary science” any more than the Christians of an earlier age “compromised” with Copernican cosmology. (But of course, they were also accused of heresy and compromise by the Fundamentalists of their day, and even excommunicated.) When one is confronted with irrefutable evidence for some bit of reality, his acceptance of that reality is hardly a “compromise”. My acceptance of evolutionary science is based firmly upon hard evidence, the likes of which, I’m confident, Christian’s like you have never encountered. Do you wish to win me back to the fold, Dr. John? Then try presenting a bit of evidence that I am mistaken, rather than clobbering me over the head with insinuations that I have “capitulated” to “propaganda”. If you are looking for a perfect example of propaganda (which is unsubstantiated, highly biased misinformation), try reading your own book. The writings of evangelical scientists like Francis Collins, Kenneth Miller, Owen Gingerich, et. al. hardly fall under your “propaganda” category. Have you even read them?

The likely answer is that MacArthur, along with the countless evangelicals who stand with him, have not read such authors. Are they so filled with fear that evolutionary science may prove to be factual, and thus trap them in a new set of baffling dilemmas? Or do they genuinely mistrust science in the first place, and avoid it like the plague?

That would be sad! MacArthur, and some of the commenters to the Parchment and Pen post who defend him, believe that 1) Biblical revelation trumps all other sources of information, and 2) Biblical revelation must be understood literally (unless there is, as they would say, strong internal reasons to understand it allegorically). Thus, their theology is impoverished by their ideology. They reject volumes of natural revelation which science has uncovered in the last few centuries. How valuable is this natural revelation? Paul, in Romans 1:20, makes the case that we can know and understand much about God, including his “invisible qualities” (NIV) without ever cracking open a holy book, but merely by examining the work of his creative hand. Science, good science, is nothing more nor less than the close examination of the handiwork of the Creator! Christians, of all people, should embrace science with heart and mind! and when then do, they will discover that evolution is the most likely framework for the history of life. And they will find, as I have, that our vistas upon the mysteries of theology are expanded, and that Biblical theology is not “undermined”, but greatly enhanced.

And what of MacArthur’s lament that "many modern evangelicals . . . have already been convinced that the Genesis account of creation is not a true historical record." I wish MacArthur were more specific about which "true historical record" in Genesis is important to believe: the one in chapter 1, or the one in chapter 2. Both, of course, cannot be "true historical record[s]" since they give irreconcilably contradictory accounts. But if we read them as allegorical literature (as they were surely intended), the result is that both accounts are “true” in the sense that they convey truths. Far from “undermining the authority of Scripture”, a proper view of the Bible sets us free to understand its profound truths unencumbered by some felt need to defend the indefensible notion that it is literally “true” scientifically and historically. A proper view of the Bible, coupled with a healthy view of scientific discovery, will set us free to explore our Creator in ways earlier believers could never do. What an adventure! It is sad that so many intelligent minds, such as that which John MacArthur possesses, refuse to set out upon this adventure.

So what is your view? Is MacArthur correct? Am I a compromised Christian?

Atheistic Fundamentalism: Ridicule Them into Unbelief!

2009-09-10T16:22:00.000-07:00

Anyone who doubts the evangelistic nature of certain fundamentalist atheists ought to pay attention to the musings of Richard Dawkins on his own website. This from a comment (comment #16) he wrote to a Jerry Coyne post at RichardDawkins.net earlier this year:

Michael Shermer, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott and others are probably right that contemptuous ridicule is not an expedient way to change the minds of those who are deeply religious. But I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are – irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven’t really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt.

And so Dawkins advocates the use of ridicule and belittlement. How is this unlike a political party, fearing defeat on some policy debate, issuing a talking-points bulletin encouraging members to just make fun of the other side. Would anyone take such an approach seriously? Where I come from, such tactics are considered clear indicators of a lack of meaningful persuasive argument: “If I can’t rationally convince you, I’ll bludgeon you into agreeing with me using mockery and derision.”

Maybe he is right. When I read his book, expecting to encounter some meaningful challenges to my faith, I was utterly disappointed. I found no such arguments. Maybe he can shame me into apostasy with ridicule. Ah, but, if I find his arguments less than compelling, and I am also unmoved by his wisecracks, then of course he has a handy category for me: I’m just one of the “irremediable”. Nice.

Hey. Maybe it works the other way, too ...

Dr. Dawkins, wherever you are, look at this cartoon.

Listen to the masses of Christians laughing at you. Are you starting to believe yet? Keep looking; feel all that shame and embarrassment washing your atheism into oblivion. Is it working? No? Oh, I see — you're irremediable, too.

Book Review: Atheist Delusions, The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies

2009-08-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

Following is my review of Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, by David Bentley Hart (Yale University Press, April 2009). Hart (who also wrote The Doors of the Sea which I reviewed here) is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher who is currently a professor at Providence College. Those who read into the subtitle a dismissive tone (“its fashionable enemies”) do so correctly. Hart sets out to dismantle the underpinnings of today’s “New Atheist” authors, showing how their works rest less upon rigorous scholarship, and more upon the ethos of our age.

The Dismantling of New Atheism

In Atheist Delusions, Hart raises a powerful polemic against contemporary unbelief popularized by the so-called “New Atheists”. It is also, perhaps, the most formidable defense of Christian faith I have ever read.

I am a Christian skeptic. I tend not to believe things because someone told me it is so. I prefer to test everything, weigh everything in the balance of reason and evidence. I believe that God gave us minds to use! The result of all this is that I sometimes call much of what passes for Christianity into question. When I read what atheist skeptics are saying (as I often do), I find them to be correct in many of their assessments of belief.

Within this context, I found in Hart's book a powerful force drawing me into a much deeper appreciation for the place of Christianity in history, and the uniqueness of the Christian message. It also opened my mind (frighteningly!) to what a truly post-Christian era will look like. It is this flow of history, both in retrospect and in prospect, as seen through Hart's analysis, that greatly strengthens my assurance in the truth and viability of the essential message of Jesus.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once remarked that “history has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.” And so the rewriting of history will always reflect prevailing current thought. This phenomenon is nowhere more blatant than in the selective retelling of history presently in vogue among the New Atheists. Hart’s book offers a scholarly retort to the history of Christianity in the West being offered up by Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennet, and Harris. I suppose that the Holmes observation might apply equally to Hart’s work. I will leave that case for others to make. But having read from the New Atheists, and having read Hart, I found Hart’s retelling of Christianity’s story to be the far more compelling.

Much of this book draws a contrast between the paganism predominate in the pre-Christian era, and the Christian “revolution” which supplanted it. It is popular in some quarters today to cast a nostalgic eye upon the supposed virtues of paganism, and to lament its overthrow. Hart demonstrates conclusively how preposterous these notions are. He does not gloss over, nor deny the sad history of injustices and crimes which have been committed in the name of Christianity, a litany of offenses which seems to completely engross the enemies of belief. Notwithstanding these blemishes, and with great skill and scholarship, Hart takes us on an enlightening stroll though history; he reveals how Christianity has advanced the sciences, social morality, and in particular, humanitarianism, far beyond the highest prospects of paganism. It is the Christian understanding of humanity, the elevation of what it means to be human, that is, in Hart’s view, Christianity’s most significant contribution. Against this backdrop, Hart paints the horrific prospects of inhumanity which lay before us in a post-Christian era. Here he finds an ally in Nietzsche's more thoughtful atheism. Hart deeply respects the intellectually honest unbelief of Nietzsche who clearly saw the frightening nihilistic consequences of the “death of God.”

In contrast to his respect for Nietzsche, Hart laments the shallowness of today’s trendy unbelief. “ ... the tribe of the New Atheists is something of a disappointment. It probably says more than it is comfortable to know about the relative vapidity of our culture that we have lost the capacity to produce profound unbelief” (page 220). This “tribe of New Atheists” has published a spate of atheistic titles over the last decade. Hart has offered a persuasive rebuttal. The gauntlet has been dropped. I anxiously await a scholarly response from the halls of unbelief. I doubt that one will be written.

Personal: Vacation!

2009-08-11T07:06:00.001-07:00

Where the dense vegetation of the wet Cascade Mountains meets the dry Central Oregon High Desert, there lies a remarkable, verdant stretch of glory known as the Metolius River Basin. From the northern foot of Black Butte, the Metolius emerges as a full-fledged river at its celebrated head. The image below is looking downstream near these headwaters, the springs being located immediately to the left of the picture. Above the river, in the distance, stands Mt. Jefferson.

It is in the delights and raw beauty of this piece of God's marvelous Creation that I shall enjoy the company of my wife, children and grandchildren for the next seven days. I will once more test those claims that frequent the pages of my Bible: the glory of God, even his attributes, are observable in the work of his hands. I'm sure I will not be disappointed!

If you find I am less responsive to your comments, you'll understand why. Blessings to you all, my readers!

David Hume and the Argument from Design

2009-08-02T21:07:00.000-07:00

The 18th Century Scottish philosopher David Hume was a leader of the Enlightenment. He was a renowned empiricist who is often credited with destroying the argument from design. But this characterization may not be entirely accurate. Did Hume accept the argument from design for God’s existence? Did he believe that the order we observe in the universe “proves” an omnipotent mind behind it all?

Larry Arnhart, a conservative blogger, includes the following in a post from earlier this year:

... the common assumption that Hume was an atheist is, I think, mistaken. While criticizing "false religion," Hume defended the "true religion" of "philosophical theism." Although he criticized many of the extravagant claims made for the argument from design--the same argument that is today made for "intelligent design theory"--Hume did accept a qualified version of the design argument.

Near the end of his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume wrote: "The order of the universe proves an omnipotent mind; that is, a mind whose will is constantly attended with the obedience of every creature and being. Nothing more is requisite to give a foundation to all the articles of religion, nor is it necessary we should form a distinct idea of the force and energy of the supreme Being."

At the end of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume sketches his philosophical theism in the language of his character Philo: "If the whole of Natural Theology, as some people seem to maintain, resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined proposition, That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence ...

This assumes, of course, that his fictional character, Philo, fairly represents Hume’s own ideas. It is also true that he goes on to state that any intelligent being inferred from Natural Theology would have no bearing upon human beings. Nevertheless, Hume, often represented as the atheist who destroyed the argument from design, apparently saw some legitimacy in the argument from design.

A tip of the hat to Bradford at Telic Thoughts.

Fusion: Randomness and Creation

2009-07-21T18:52:00.000-07:00

In this sometimes series, we are exploring the "fusion" of science and theology. Many Christian sites are responding to apparent contradictions between science and faith. My purpose in this series is to step beyond these problems to ask the question, "If science and the Bible are both revealing truth, what happens when we combine them? What new insights result from the fusion of growing natural revelation and special revelation?”

Einstein once declared that God does not play dice. His statement was less about theology and more about his initial distaste for quantum physics, but it serves as a backdrop to today’s post. Does God roll the dice? Did he create a universe regulated by chance, randomness? We Christians have difficulty with this idea of chance happenings. We prefer to think of God as the “Blessed Controller of all things” (J.B. Phillips translation of 1 Timothy 5:16). But physicists and biologists alike insist that all reality, from subatomic mechanics to genetic mutations, can only be understood as a flow of random events. Are they correct? Consider with me two contrasting theological frameworks:

1) God governs all creation with a “hands-on” approach, creating and then managing and superintending every detail, carefully orchestrating events to accomplish his purposes. If he did not special create each species, he at least intervened from time to time to guide the development of “irreducibly complex” biological systems. His directive influence extends not only over cosmic and biological evolution, but also over all human activity. He sovereignly guides every detail of the believer’s life, holds sway over the course of human history, even setting governments in place. In this way, the flow of creation moves unalterably toward the culmination of his over-all plan and purpose.

2) God initiates the cosmos, but then essentially leaves his hands off. He allows evolution to take its wandering course, and rarely intervenes in the affairs of human beings. But he is not the disengaged god of the deist; he is deeply interested and invested in the flow of human history (even entering into it in the person of Jesus) and interacts personally with people of faith. However he seldom exerts his directive influence; instead he chooses to let his creation take its natural course. His purposes are accomplish not by the force of his will and manipulations, but by the natural outplay of physical and spiritual laws.

In my previous Fusion post, I turned to the concept of evolutionary convergence to suggest that God might have created humankind “in his own image” using an entirely random evolutionary process. If this hypothesis were correct, it would mean that the second framework is no mere role of the dice. Rather, it would lead to this possible scenario: God created a vast cosmos, one of sufficient size to ensure the eventual emergence of planet capable of hosting life; he infused the cosmos with just the right chemistry to ensure that life could and would emerge and evolve upon that planet; and he waited patiently for nearly 14 billion years for these eventualities to transpire. After creating a universe capable of hosting and evolving humankind, despite its entropic nature, little or no direct divine intervention would have been required.

Such a scenario gives answer to the riddles posed by Richard Dawkins and others about the oddity of Christians assigning cosmic significance to human beings when we occupy an infinitesimal corner of an immense cosmos, and have been on the scene for a mere eyeblink of cosmic time. If, in fact, it best served the purposes of the Creator to allow his creation to develop according to natural laws, the scope of time and space may have been necessary.

But more importantly, such a scenario completely changes the playing field for theodicy, or the problem of evil. Under the first theological framework above, God must, in some answer for malaria, animal pain, millions of species extinctions, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, and indirectly responsible for Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, 9/11, and every other imaginable human ill. However, if God’s purposes are best served by leaving his hands off of creation, all such ills are seen in a different light, assuming that God’s choice of modus operandi was one of necessity, not of whim.

While this scenario may help to solve some problems for belief, for many it raises other problems and questions. Among them,

1) What considerations might prompt God to create and govern his universe in this way? What might compel him to leave his hands off of creation even when it is assailed by catastrophic horrors and unthinkable atrocities?

2) Does randomness presuppose Open Theology, or the idea that God does not possess perfect knowledge of the future? This question was raised by a reader in response to the earlier post on randomness.

3) Can such a view of randomness be integrated into the teachings of the Bible, which might seem to favor the hands-on God?

In upcoming posts, I will offer my perspective on these and other questions.

Briefly Noted: My Summer Reading List

2009-07-18T10:02:00.000-07:00

Well, actually, I read some of these books before summer, and I am not likely to finish them all before winter (I wish I could read books like my friend Wayne who devours one almost a day!) I may offer full reviews of some of these books, but it occurred to me that some of my readers may be looking for a summer read recommendation, so ...

Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, by N.T. Wright (HarperCollins Publishers, February 2008)

Many Christian universally accept the resurrection of Jesus as the pivotal event in human history. Most, however, fail to understand the full significance of resurrection. Wright (the Anglican Bishop of Durham, and one of Christianity’ s leading thinkers) offers a refreshing look at resurrection, its present and future implications. Evangelical Christians often emphasize “personal salvation” at the expense of the larger matters of God’s Kingdom purposes. Wright gently reminds us that it is not all about me! Those who think that they will “go to heaven” when they die should think again; Wright suggests otherwise. Those whose premillennial mindset gives them the perceived “right” to trample upon earth’s ecology should think again; those who think the earth is destined for the eternal ash heap should think again; Wright suggests otherwise. Those awaiting the “rapture” followed by seven years of tribulation should think again; Wright suggests otherwise. My emphasis here at OutsideTheBox has been upon how we got to this present moment; Wright’s sense of where we are and where we are headed fits in beautifully with where our cosmic and biological history tells us we have been.

The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal, Simon Conway Morris (Editor) (Templeton Press, May 2008)

Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge, happens to a Christian. Whether his faith biases him toward certain outcomes in his research, or whether it properly guides him down the correct path, will, of course, depend upon one’s presuppositions. But I find his work fascinating! This anthology about evolutionary convergence asks the larger question: Does biology offer evidence of ultimate purpose? Conway Morris and the writers joining him do not accept Special Creationism or Intelligent Design. They approach evolutionary science from a naturalistic standpoint. Nevertheless, they see hidden in the course of random evolution strong hints of teleology, a purpose behind it all. Convergence suggests that evolutionary outcomes are largely predictable without the interventions or superintendence of a Creator.

Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, Simon Conway Morris (Cambridge University Press, August 2004)

This earlier Conway Morris title arrived at my house from Amazon two days ago. I have only browsed the chapter titles so far. But the subtitle provides an overview. Conway Morris presents ample evidence that, given a planet like ours, and 3.8 billion years of random evolutionary wanderings, intelligent biped hominids (that’s us!) were bound to emerge. We are the inevitable result of the unguided, random processes of evolution. This is Conway Morris’s seminal presentation of convergence and its implications for intelligent, sentient life.

There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, Antony Flew (HarperCollins Publishers,

November 2008)

The title says it all. Antony Flew is a British philosopher who long led an atheistic charge against belief, insisting that we should properly presuppose no God until we have proof of his existence. He argued that the problem of evil was not solved by theists, and therefore stood as a powerful argument against the monotheistic faiths. In 2004, he did a remarkable turnabout. His deistic beliefs are not Christian; in fact, they suggest a rational basis for belief in God outside of religious faith. I’ve wanted to read Flew’s account of his “conversion”, and look forward to doing so.

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, David Bentley Hart (Yale University Press, April 2009)

[NOTE: I have now written a full review of this book which can be found here.]

Hart (who also wrote The Doors of the Sea which I reviewed here) is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher who is currently a professor at Providence College. Those who read into the subtitle a slightly dismissive tone (“its fashionable enemies”) do so correctly. Hart sets out to dismantle the underpinnings of today’s “new atheist” authors, (Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris) showing how their works rest less upon rigorous scholarship, and more upon the ethos of our age. When you serve up just what a culture is hungering for, you can make blanket proclamations devoid of logic or evidence; ill-informed masses will nod in agreement. The mere force of such atheistic declarations, coupled with the presumed scholarship of their sources, establishes the argument. Such assertions become easy fodder for Hart’s powerful refutation. Hart is nothing short of masterful. This book also showed up on my doorstep last week, and I am currently devouring it. I will offer a full review later.

So, if you’re still looking for that title to fill out your summer reading opportunities, you might find it in one of these five books.