John Lennox and the Myths of Faith and Science

It is a privilege to get to hear John Lennox in person, and I would recommend that if you are interested in matter of the Christian faith and science you should look up some of his debates or lectures.  In his first plenary session at the AG Faith and Science Conference, he focused on thee "myths."  These are ideas currently floating around about science and God that are false, and in their ways, dangerous to reasonable reflection on either topic.

Here are the three myths and a few brief thoughts about each.

1. There is a war between God and science.  The conflict is not about God on one side of the issue and science on the other.  There are very good scientists who do very good science on both side of the issue.  The conflict lies on a deeper, more worldview level.  What passes for the conflict right now is the difference between Theism (specifically Christian theism) and Naturalism/Materialism.  Lennox's basic axiom, as he called it, is that the universe is not neutral in its proclamation about God.  He detailed several issues concerning both the history and philosophy of science making the case that Christianity is the engine that drove the scientific revolution.

2. The more we do science the less we need of God.  This myth is a misunderstanding about God, or more appropriately, a conflation of ideas about gods and the idea of God.  If you define God as a simple explanation for things we don't understand, then it follows that the more we learn about the universe the less we need of God.  But only people who don't understand who the God of the Bible is define him that way.  It has always been the case that deeply pious people have done science and grown in their appreciation of God exactly because God is known to be the ground for, or reason for, all that exists.  Lennox used a wonderful image here - the more I understand about art the more I appreciate the greats and the more I understand about engineering the more I can appreciate the Space Shuttle.  The more we know about nature leads to the same growing appreciation of God, not less.

3. Science is coextensive with rationality.  This current conception of science is akin to what he calls scientific fundamentalism.  It is scientism which is the belief that science is the only actual means to knowledge about reality.  It is often claimed that evoking God as some kind of cause cheapens the explanation and has no place in science.  Lennox's approach to this was incisive.  There can be more than one cause for the same effect which do not contradict or exclude the other.  (This part of his presentation reminded me of Aristotelian causality.)  Why does the pot of water boil?  It boils because a heat source is applied to water and energy is released.  It boils because I want a pot of tea.  Both are correct answers to what caused the boiling, each in their way.  But the modern scientific endeavor wants you to think the first one is the only one.

One big-picture idea he made sure to put across is that the follower of Christ need not be intimidated by the bombastic claims of the New Atheism.  What matters is that their ideas are not very good and don't take much work to refute.  There is no "war" between science and the Christian faith.

A Necessary Corrective In The Current Atmosphere of Ministry

David Hansen, The Art of Pastoring: Ministry Without All The Answers, Revised Edition. (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2012). 219 pages.

I read this book in a day and a half. I never do that, but the Forward intrigued me and the book quickly pulled me in.  I am interested in the role of Pastor - how to define it, what it looks like from day to day, who the Pastor stands responsible to, and so on.  I am convinced that with the past 30 years (at least) of the corporatization of the pastoral vocation, we stand in an arid landscape and don't know exactly where to find water.

Hansen's book is water in a dry land.  Hansen refuses to be boxed in by the all too common expectations  every modern pastor knows, and instead, has his eyes on Christ and Christ's ministry to people.  My experience resonates with his when he says, "When I began the pastoral ministry, I had lots of books prescribing pastoral ministry - the so-called how-to books.  I had books on how to preach, how to administrate a church, how to do pastoral counseling and how to lead small groups.  They didn't help me" (pg 11).  Each chapter addresses an important component to the pastor's ministry as he discusses things like the pastor's call, preaching, prayer, and leadership.  Within each chapter his experiences as pastor of a yoked parish in Montana plays the central role, but as he makes clear the stories he relates are about the theology that shape them.

Pastors need to leave the dry land of management techniques and rediscover the fertile soil of Christ's kingdom among us.  Hansen is clear about his relationship with what we would call vision and mission statements, and he would rather see a pastor reading theology and preaching Christ.  You can't go wrong if you learn how to preach Christ from the pulpit.

In my opinion Hansen wrote a necessary book 20 years ago and I am thankful for its new edition and my fortuitous discovery of this gem.  From now on I will refer my pastor friends to this book and refer myself back to it when I need a course correction back to the good country.

If you find my review helpful, please say so on Amazon.

The Pastor as Philosopher

[This is one in a string of posts made up of me processing the role of the contemporary pastor. For the other posts follow the tag, "The Pastor."]

This one may seem like a stretch to you.  We are much more accustomed to thinking of the modern pastor as someone who is counselor, businessman, or cheerleader.  We might even stretch ourselves to think of the pastor as a kind of theologian (which we, hopefully, accomplished), but considering him or her a philosopher seems out of bounds to us.  But that might stem from two problems - evangelical anti-intellectualism and a short-sighted conception of what a philosopher is.

I want to save a discussion about evangelical anti-intellectualism for the future, so for now we will think about expanding our sense of what it means to be a philosopher.  Our current culture, and modern philosophy, has filled the term "philosopher" with the image of someone who speculates about or analyzes reality and the human condition.  And in an unfair turn to that conception, we have by in large decided that is a purely "academic" and non-useful expenditure of time.  Without spending a great deal of effort defending the role of philosopher as thus conceived, I am intrigued by how this term was understood at the roots of the Christian faith.

Citing Socrates the church historian, the Russian Orthodox priest, Gabriel Bunge, says, "One understands 'philosophy' in this sense preeminently as the perfect unity of Christian accomplishment in life and Christian knowledge of God" (Despondency, pg 17).  Thus understood, several early Christians were labeled as philosophers who would not be today.  Desert monks who sought the presence and wisdom of God in long stretches of silence and solitude were called philosophers.  Abbots who spoke in proverbs were as well.  Those who studied the leading thinkers of the Greek and Roman worlds were called philosophers, as were those who produced reasoned defenses for the Christian faith in the Roman world.  So, more properly understood, the philosopher is a lover of wisdom (which is the etymology of the word, anyway), and easily applies to anyone in the Christian faith who applies themselves to the things of God to understand them in a deeper and clearer sense and then strives to live by what they learn.

How could that not describe the proper role of a pastor?  The pastor as philosopher is a lover of God's wisdom and a liver of God's life.  And in the role of pastor, they lead others in this kind of life as their vocation intersects with their lives.

A few brief thought on what this means, intended to plant seeds for further thought, will suffice for now.

This kind of pastor is not satisfied with culturally conditioned evangelical pop culture.  They are not the kind of preacher who buys their sermons on the weekend and replaces all the specific references in order to make sure it sounds like they are not warming up someone else's leftovers.  This pastor is driven by the search for God's wisdom in his Word and in the world around him.  They know that wisdom rarely if ever fits into neat boxes of "5 Steps" or quick answers to life's tendency to bludgeon people.

Their reading habits are different than other people's.  While they may be aware of what "most people" read, they are hunting down more insightful and longer lasting things.  Their library - virtual or tree - reveals a fairly broad set of interests.  The philosopher pastor is a synthesizer and analyzer.   They learn how to take in what they encounter and filter it through the lenses of prayer and sound theology.  What comes out of them, then, is simply different from what most people can put out as a result of their pop culture consumptions.

They are driven by the fascination of seeing the things they learn about God's will and work applied to the lives of the people in their congregation and to the community around them.  And they are fascinated by conversations that reveal what Christ is at work doing in people's lives.

This pastor does not allow their role to be relegated to other boxes created by other professions that are, currently, better understood.  The pastor is a counselor, but not a professional therapist.  The pastor is a leader of sorts, but not a corporate CEO.  And on the story goes.  The pastor as philosopher is wise enough and courageous enough to play those roles when needed, but to not be cornered into one of those cubicles.  They take their cues from the biblical understanding of spiritual shepherding rather than from the career resumes currently at the top of the cultural importance list.

Early Christian Female Philosopher

One of the advances of the Christian faith is that women took a greater role in private and public life than they had in the Roman and African world around them.  It is a simple matter of history that Christians educated and learned from women at a time when it was ridiculous to think it possible.  I ran across one small example in an ecclesiastical history written by a man named Socrates.  This history covers the period of time from 305ad to 438ad.

There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in coming to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.

She fell victim to false political slander and was murdered.  Socrates adds, "And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort. This happened in the month of March during Lent, in the fourth year of Cyril’s episcopate, under the tenth consulate of Honorius, and the sixth of Theodosius."

Links with Little Context

God is dead - What next?
Source: Arts and Letters Daily

-A short review article of two books written by hard-core materialists about the search for meaning after the supposed death of God.  Materialist scientists tend to not understand their own views.-

From the article:

God’s death just means that we need to construct our own, non-authoritative narratives and art, replete with purpose and meaning. Instead of one unified story to which everyone subscribes, we should play around with a plurality of downgraded stories, which can form the basis of our day-to-day lives.

But, of course, this is what we already do, and it is less a solution than a re-statement of the problem. His various narratives won’t provide the emotional relief he wants. For just as Christianity made sublime and cosmic “truths” accessible on a human level, so it invested everyday human life with cosmic significance. With God out of the picture, this is lost.

Stand Firm: Or End Up on the Wrong Side of Eschatology

-A call for orthodox Christians to stand firm in the face of cultural pressure to give in, specifically on the issues of sexuality and marriage.-

From the article:

Athanasius was on the wrong side of "history." Good for him; Christians must always so station themselves. Our Lord was murdered on Calvary by the great dead historical hulk called the Roman Empire.

Income Inequality: You Can't Handle The Truth : Acton

-Income inequality might not be what you think it is.-

From the article:

The truth about income inequality? It’s not greedy business folks hoarding their money from the rest of us. It’s a carefully constructed political plan meant to serve power-hungry pols.

Ed Stetzer's The Exchange

-Interview with Darrell Bock, his book, "Truth Matters," and wise cultural engagement-

Evolution News and Views

-The Human Tail - another Darwinian myth.-

Pastor As Proclaimer In A Changing World

Whatever cultural props we thought supported our general world view are either gone or quickly going.  You

can no longer expect public schools to teach roughly the same moral system you do.  You can no longer expect the American legal system to "protect" our "traditional values."  You can no longer expect people to be morally enraged at the same things you are.  You can no longer expect people to have a general sense of what you do and what you believe when you tell them you are a pastor.

All this and more means the pastor now carries a certain kind of burden of proof.  I do not mean they need to justify their actual existence  (the point of all this is to underline the essential necessity of pastors) but that they need to pour effort into reclaiming their necessary role in the congregation and their culture.  So here are a few thoughts to help pastors and Christians think through this role.

1. Pastors become heralds of Christian orthodoxy. Right now a lot of pastoral practice centers on the practicality of what they bring to a congregation and a sermon, often reducing their role to a glorified counselor or self-help enthusiast.  Our culture is saturated with these kinds of people and so your congregation probably hears a lot of this kind of thing from day to day.  The Pastor does not need to be a copycat with a spiritual veneer, but something different altogether.

2. Pastors become intelligent heralds of Christian orthodoxy.  Not only do Christian pastors proclaim the truths once and for all delivered to the saints, they need to do it wisely.  This requires work; it means the pastor needs to intelligently engage the realities around him or her and the pressures on the lives of the congregation.  It does no good to preach and counsel as if we live in some imagined halcyon days when people grew up in church and simply need to be reminded of their Sunday school lessons.  The pastor is proclaimer and apologist.

3. Pastors work hard to let their faith transform all they are.  This may sound obvious on some level, but once we begin to do some serious self-analysis we will likely find out how much we have been shaped by the culture we live in.  This problem grows more serious the more post-Christian our culture becomes.  If you are a political creature, how honest can you be with yourself about how much of your biblical interpretation is based on your political preferences?  Are you a traditionalist in your faith fighting hard against everything that strikes you as different or changing?  This topic is complicated, but pastors must begin the process of doing this work on their own worldviews.

4. Pastors do not talk like everyone else.  One sure way of sticking out in a conversation or forcing someone to stop and think about what you are talking about is to use vocabulary and categories they never use themselves.  The more TV people watch the fewer words they use, the more alike everyone sounds, and the less individuals think for themselves.  The pastor, who has hopefully read their Augustine and Barth, has a completely different set of ideas to draw from about life and thus traffics in different, deeper, vocabulary.

5. Pastors must rise out of Scripture when they sermonize.  Again, this may sound obvious to some but I grow increasingly worried that pastoral work in 21st century America has less and less to do with the Bible and more and more to do with broader cultural and political concerns.  The people who actually make it into the pews on Sundays have spent all week listening to prosaic propaganda designed to sell them something shallow or short on actual life.  So when they sit down the pastor had better be different, and that requires letting the Word and Spirit do the talking.

The Pastor: Vital or Vestigial?

I believe things are changing enough both inside and outside the church that we need to begin revitalizing the role of the pastor in the congregation and the community.  Do pastors still have a significant role to play in a culture that prizes highly specialized and licensed scientific, therapeutic, and legal professions?  Can pastors still influence people and communities for God's kingdom?  Is it time for the pastor to learn more from the CEO than the theologian?  Do the people in the pews really want practical advice for daily living, or are they desperately in need of divine activity in their lives?  Our answers to these questions and so many more like them will shape the daily and weekly work of the pastor, the shape of our churches, and the role of the Christian in our culture today.

Without romanticizing the past, it can be said that there was a time in Western communities when the pastor was considered a leading expert on all things important.  For example, Puritan pastors started schools like Harvard and Yale.  The ranks of theologians were the same as the ranks of the pastors in the local parish.  We are still able to gain a great deal of pastoral, theological, and philosophical guidance from sermons preached in the English language 300 years ago.  Newspapers printed the Sunday sermon of the local pastor.

Things have changed,  and not for the better.  In very few circumstances is the local pastor seen in this light.  Rarely, if ever, is he or she known as an expert on human affairs and consulted as such.  If they actually are an expert on theological issues, those issues are considered so inconsequential by both the culture and the congregant, the pastor may as well be a published Ph.D. on Medieval Unicorn Literature.

Tracing this sad turn of affairs would be a complicated journey indeed, but it is useful to survey part of the cultural landscape as it is now.  With the knowledge and information explosion, there is simply more to know and the days of the "renaissance man" are probably over for good.  There can no longer be a single person out there who can be consulted on every issue.  Whereas there was a time an advanced degree covered almost every significant idea and intellectual trend, that simply isn't the case anymore.  It is impossible for a single individual to be deeply informed about every significant issue so they can speak to it wisely and creatively.  How much do you know about the international sociological consequences of fair-trade? Are the fair-trade advocates right?  Are you intimate enough with your Neo-Darwinism that you can speak to the alleged biological and molecular mechanisms invoked by its supporters?  How versed are you in current materialistic, secularist philosophy?  Have you developed a theology of the body robust enough to address the wave of homosexual activism?  And on it goes.

But it is more than just the information explosion.  There are other cultural trends the pastor and church are up against.

Western culture is simply turning more secular in its outlook all the time, turning the pastor into a de facto vestigial organ of society.  And we are not doing ourselves any favors, either.  Degrees in pastoral ministry focus more and more on simpler and simpler things, turning the theologians of our age into middle-level managers of volunteerism.  Pastors no longer carry their own torch of spiritual knowledge and wisdom into the marketplace, but have extinguished it in favor of the practical tips and tricks of mass production.  It allows us to fit in and succeed, after all.

My hopes with these posts is to lay out a vision in which the pastor is able to see their vocation as vital.  But that can't happen until the pastor transforms the way they think about their place in this world.  We cannot expect to have a sanctifying effect on the lives of those around us or the culture in which we swim unless our churches grow deeper in the wisdom and power of God.  We cannot have churches that grow deep until we have pastors who do the same.  It begins, and all too often, ends with the pastor.

Stoking the Furnaces: "It's People!"

An expressed lynch pin in the pro-life argument is that every human life is of absolute value.  An often unexpressed, but necessary component to the pro-choice argument is that some human lives are less valuable than others.  This value differentiation is sometimes put in terms of actual value and sometimes is expressed in philosophies that refuse to label some human life with terms like "human" or "person."  But no matter the form of expression the conclusion is the same - some human lives are worth less than others.

The pro-life position must hold to a principle that creates the only maintainable guard-rails for this argument: every human life is of inestimable worth.  If any human life is estimable then you can, and many do, put a dollar amount on a human being and treat it accordingly.  It has been argued over and over that without this principle in place, all kinds of incredible and bloody things become possible.  Often the pro-lifer is mocked as an alarmist, tugging emotions to make their case.  But the case is based on a simple, if often vilified, principle that keeps weak humans from becoming the targets of powerful humans.

Right now, the pro-choice position has sway in large parts of the Western world, and so it should not surprise us that some places of health and healing have gone so far as to use the remains of miscarried and aborted babies to stoke the furnaces.  It should break our hearts, but it should not surprise us.

From the article in the UK Telegraph:

At least 15,500 foetal remains were incinerated by 27 NHS trusts over the last two years alone, Channel 4’s Dispatches discovered.

The programme, which will air tonight, found that parents who lose children in early pregnancy were often treated without compassion and were not consulted about what they wanted to happen to the remains....

One of the country’s leading hospitals, Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, incinerated 797 babies below 13 weeks gestation at their own ‘waste to energy’ plant. The mothers were told the remains had been ‘cremated.’

Another ‘waste to energy’ facility at Ipswich Hospital, operated by a private contractor, incinerated 1,101 foetal remains between 2011 and 2013.

What was at one time considered a ludicrous warning (that severe and gruesome things will happen to people and with their remains if the pro-choice movement has their way) has become reality.  It has never been a slippery-slope argument to say that the pro-choice position will lead to things like involuntary euthanasia (already happening in parts of Europe), or now the desecration of infant bodies without the consent of their parents.  It has always been a logical extension of the principles and values at the heart of the pro-choice movement.

On a related note, doesn't anyone ever read Jonathan Swift's, "A Modest Proposal" in school anymore?

Isaac Newton - That Anti-Science Intelligent Design Wacko

A little clarity on what Isaac Newton thought about his science and his God. Excerpted from Evolution News and Views by author, Jay W. Richards.

"Here's how Newton explains the orderly movement of the planets around the sun in the General Scholium:

But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions: since the Comets range over all parts of the heavens, in very eccentric orbits. For by that kind of motion they pass easily through the orbs of the Planets, and with great rapidity; and in their aphelions, where they move the slowest, and are detain'd the longest, they recede to the greatest distances from each other, and thence suffer the least disturbance from their mutual attractions. This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And if the fixed Stars are the centers of other like systems, these being form'd by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially since the light of the fixed Stars is of the same nature with the light of the Sun, and from every system light passes into all the other systems.

In other words, the intricate clockwork of our Solar System and any other star systems that may exist required a master clockmaker. Indeed, Newton goes much farther than modern intelligent design arguments. He argues that the astronomical evidence points inexorably to the transcendent and all-powerful God of theistic belief."

Also note, "Sir Isaac Said What?"

Pastors Becoming Comfortable in an Uncomfortable Culture

Recently Thom Rainer posted some thoughts on "Ten Areas Where Pastors Need to Be Trained for the 21st Century."  There are a lot of good things to think about in the list, but two stuck out to me as being of particular value for the American pastor to figure out right now:

2. A non-Christian culture. Our nation is fast becoming a non-Christian nation. While we lament the relative decline in the numbers who follow Christ, we must also accept the reality that those in our community cannot be assumed to be like us, or to hold our values.
 3. The decline of cultural Christians in churches. The Pew Research project confirmed the dramatic increase in the numbers of people who have no religious affiliation. For our churches, this development means that most people do not feel cultural pressure to attend churches. More and more, those who are there are convicted Christians and not Christians in name only.

A quick moment's reflection on these two items should lead us to a sobering conclusion - if they are true we must relearn how to engage the culture around us.  And I believe they are true.

American Christians and pastors need to become more comfortable in a culture that is less and less comfortable with them.  I believe we still have a mandate from God - we might associate it with the Cultural Mandate (Gen 1:26) - to impact the world around us for the good and glory of God.  But we just can't rely on the 'same-old' way of doing and seeing things.  More and more, Christianity is foreign, misunderstood, and disliked in our culture.  So now we strive to make it native to new generations and powerfully true.

Secondly, we can no longer rely on our simple presence in a community to be a draw to those who don't attend.  Rainer is right that fewer people feel any kind of compunction to attend church (they need to come back for their kids' sake, they need to at least be Creasters, the Church can help them through a serious crisis, etc.).  So, the church needs to learn how to earn its place in the community.  I believe a church can be the health and heartbeat of a community and city, so now we need to be proactive about becoming exactly that instead of expecting people will assume we already are.

Can I put it in these terms? The entrepreneurial church, not in doctrine but in vision, will survive and eventually learn how to thrive.

Chronic Pain

Chronic Pain

Day dawns
Hope rises
Pain comes
Neck bows
Work belabors
Day done.

Night falls
Hope gone
Job undone
Pain stays
Sorrow joins.

I need
His will
His grace
His strength
For the next

Day dawns.

An Argument Putting Pressure on Atheism

This is a wonderful interview with a leading philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, who is also a Christian, about rationality and atheism, "Is Atheism Irrational?"  The title is designed to catch our attention, to be sure, but it isn't that far from one of the arguments Plantinga makes (briefly in the article, and in greater detail other places, video, book).  The article ends with a summation of his argument, but it covers a handful of other topics as well.

Plantinga addresses an area in which most atheists, especially those heavily influenced by "New Atheists," seem to have declared a win simply by intellectual fiat.  They don't see any evidence for God, therefore their reasonable conclusion is atheism - that the God of the theists doesn't exist.  Plantinga, however doesn't buy that simple move.  He makes the case for atheists making their case.  It is a belief about what is true in the ontology of the universe, so they don't get off the hook by simply saying they don't see evidence for God.  They need to supply their own evidence for the belief.

Plantinga addresses a very common objection to theism, the "problem of evil," but he deals with that well in terms of what is reasonable to believe about the kind of world we live in and the kind of conclusions made by intellectual honesty (my words, not his).

And eventually he addresses his argument that materialism, and atheism for the sake of materialism, makes the belief in atheism (really, any belief about the truth of things) irrational.

I have seen a few atheists dismiss Plantinga's arguments as a kind of question begging, but this only highlights their need to understand the arguments better than they do and go beyond the often simplistic triumphalism they exude.

To whet your appetite for the argument, here is the conclusion:

So if you’re an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.

Exclusive Tolerance, Pt 2

I think it is necessary to address a current and powerful idea about belief that seems to be in the air we breathe.  This idea has two complimentary components: 1. The only really acceptable belief is that if you do good things you are OK, and, 2. Anyone who believes a person needs to hold to a particular set of beliefs to be OK is hateful.  By “OK” I mean morally or religiously OK, as in either “saved” in its religious connotation, or “morally good” in a general cultural connotation.  

The second face of this idea is especially destructive.  It is the conflation of disagreement and hate.  It no longer can tell the difference between two people having a difference of opinion and the emotion of malice of one toward the other.  Once we unpack this problem, we see it also creates an ad hoc barrier between a person and knowledge.  If knowledge is, roughly speaking, a justified grasp of reality, and people reduce their differences to expressions of an emotion they have ruled out the deeper possibility of reaching an accurate grasp of an idea.  They have necessarily ruled out the truth of the matter helping to settle the disagreement.

As an interesting note to the current sociological expression of this idea, the hate is only perceived in one direction.  Imagine a teacher and student disagreeing over the answer to, "5+7."  Applying the current form of this idea about belief, the student is able to dismiss the possibility of him being wrong about the sum, and chalk the whole thing up to his teacher's hatred of him.  But, in a destructive twist of irony, the teacher (who is right) is not able to apply the same emotional standard to the student - she is not allowed to say the student simply hates her.  This is not only a hypocritical standard of judgment, it is deeply destructive in that is shields a person from what really matters - the truth of the matter.

We normally don't get angry with each other over the sum, "5+7."  We do get angry with each other over moral and spiritual matters.  So, in order to address this conflation of emotion and disagreement, I want to use the math example as a guide to talking about deeper things.  We think (generally speaking), the student would be wrong to conclude their answer of "13" is their emotional right, and that the teacher is simply expressing hate when she tells him he is wrong.  And we think this we because we still have (though it is arguably corroding) a sense that math and science are both knowable truths by everyone no matter their culture or background.  In other words, math and science are objectively knowable and applicable to all people.  The difference, then, between how we handle mathematical sums and moral judgments is in our belief about their truth value.

If mathematical truths are "out there," then we can all talk about them knowing that we are not casting personal aspersions toward each other when we disagree.  "Only emotionally unstable terrorists believe 5+7=13!"  We know, on some level, the truth of the matter is not up to us but is up to the universe - we know reality constitutes truth.  We have, however, accepted the claim that moral and religious truths are not "out there," but rather are within us - we are the makers of our own moral and religious truths.  Thus, when we disagree we are not appealing to an objective third thing, we are disagreeing on a personal level.

If this is true, one solution is to recapture the better sense of what makes moral and religious claims true or false - reality itself.  If we do this, then at least on one important level we have removed the truth-maker of religious claims from personal preference and put it back where it belongs.  Either God exists or he doesn't.  Either God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself or he wasn't.  These are claims on reality not on what sooths my psychological make-up.

Now none of this addresses an individual's emotions when they discuss differences of belief.  After all, the things we believe about religion and morality are usually very deep and important things to us and it can be easy to be emotionally invested in them.  But it disconnects the truth of the matter from how you or I feel about it!  Putting claims like, "God exists" back in the realm of public knowledge gives us really good reasons to reject the current cultural trend of projecting distasteful emotions upon people with whom we disagree.

I encourage you to reject this poison and refuse to engage in this kind of immature dialogue.  Talk about the truth with wisdom and love instead, trying to draw nearer to the truth yourself and help others along the journey.

Part 1

Exclusive Tolerance, Pt. 1

After the inter-faith panel discussion was over, he caught me and we had a quick and spirited conversation about something I said.  “When you say that, you exclude me,” he said.  At one point I responded to a question about unity in my church by paraphrasing Paul when he said, “Here [in the church] there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, but all are one in Christ.”  The panel I was on was brought together to talk about issues facing the family, issues we all basically agreed upon, but this one comment caught a Jewish psychiatrist as unnecessarily exclusionary.

His reaction is educational for me.  I, as a Christian who holds to exclusive truth claims, need to learn how to hold to the truth wisely and at the same time address this kind of reaction to what I believe.  Is it bad for me to exclude anybody?  Was I really excluding anybody, given the topic of that afternoon’s conversation?  Can I still work with him (which I might get a chance to do) on things we agree about while maintaining my set of particular beliefs?  Is it really up to me to defend the notion of holding to “exclusive” beliefs (whatever that means)?

In order to address his concern, I think it is necessary to address a current and powerful idea about belief that seems to be in the air we breathe.  This idea has two complimentary components: 1. The only really acceptable belief is that if you do good things you are OK, and, 2. Anyone who believes a person needs to hold to a particular set of beliefs to be OK is hateful.  By “OK” I mean morally or religiously OK, as in either “saved” in its religious connotation, or “morally good” in a general cultural connotation.

This Janus of a belief is an intellectual poison.

The first face is, seemingly, a very kind and tolerant belief.  After all, it purports to allow all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds "in" as long as they hold to some general sense of morally good behavior.  The truth is far more ugly than that, however.  The problem starts with determining who gets to say what is morally good in this general and vague sense.  For instance, the Christian faith has a very strong historical and philosophical sense of what a good moral life looks like, and yet many significant components of this point of view are not only left out of our modern sensibility, they are outright rejected as morally destructive.  In the place of these "traditional values" are offered a plethora of modern ideas of moral goodness, none of which ultimately cohere or withstand a great deal of scrutiny, but which have the one virtue of being believed by a fair number of influential and powerful people.  We have, thus, a coerced moral opinion holding court in culture with no particular ability to support itself with robust philosophical or historical defense.

So, if we have to make a determination of who gets to set the moral norms and enforce them, we are left with a couple of general options.  The first would be a belief in and pursuit of what is actually morally true, and secondly, an imposed set of moral norms decided upon by the current set of the culturally powerful.  The enforcement of either option is determined by the nature of the option.  In the first, reality enforces itself over time, and in the second, propaganda and power become popular tools.

By the very nature of things, any view of the world that is not dependent upon reality for the truth of its claims will need to use tools like power and propaganda to spread its gospel.  If cultures set norms, the only way to enforce those norms is for culture to become so overwhelming that it silences and marginalizes dissenters.  It really doesn't matter how congenial their story sounds, or how open-handed the reasons sound, in the end if the value of a set of moral claims is based in a cultural consensus, the only way to maintain it is to enforce it.

This is not to say that those who have made extra-cultural appeals have never used coercion.  Quite the contrary.  But they don't need to, and the cultural relativist does.

Secondly, it is simply true that we are all trying to convince others of something (or everything) we believe.  Some of us are proactive about it, others not so much.  But in honest discussion we are all positing a set of ideas we think true, or at the very least better than other ideas, and we would be happy if others felt the same way we do.  But, "Wait," you say, "I simply want people to get along and follow a simple moral code where they do what they like and don't harm anyone in the doing."  And plenty of people believe something very much like that, and do so in the spirit of getting along.

Do you want me to see things that way, or not?  Even if your claim is, on the surface of it, a claim for toleration of belief and action, it is a particular claim on how you want me and others to believe about what others believe.  You are exclusive in your tolerance.  But, that's OK.  There is nothing wrong in holding to a set of beliefs and wanting others to see things that way.  The hypocrisy creeps in when you hold to exclusive claims and then claim you are the only one who doesn't.

So, claim #1 is as exclusive as any other claim.  It just does not recognize it, and thus creates an intellectual and moral barrier between the believer and the truth of the matter.

Claim number two is even more insidious - it proactively creates hate-filled divisions between people.

Debating Creation and Evolution - The Good and the Possibly Bad

Lately, much has been made of the coming debate between Dr. Ken Ham and Bill Nye "The Science Guy" over creationism and evolution.  In my opinion, if you are interested in such debates you would do better to watch something like the video below of William Lane Craig and Sam Harris at Notre Dame.  I would also encourage you to follow this link to the Reasonable Faith website to peruse more debates of a higher caliber.

Though Dr. Ham is a bright and well-spoken individual, I disagree with his take on Genesis and creation, and I would take the label, "The Science Guy," with a large grain of salt.  Bill Nye is a current favorite of ardent atheists in large part because he is unafraid of publicly proclaiming his evolutionary views and he is fond of repeating current atheist bumper-stickers like, "evolution is a fact, not a theory."  But his fundamentalism about science makes him, well, unscientific in significant ways.

The reason, I think, this debate receives more press from atheists is that they are more confident of Nye's ability verses Dr. Ham than they are of the actual performances of some of the world's leading atheists against Dr. Craig in debate.  In fact, Richard Dawkins famously refused to show up for a debate with Dr. Craig claiming it was beneath him, then he talks ad nauseam about the Westboro Baptist leaders.

I really do hope the debate between Ham and Nye goes well, is civil, and helps to raise the level of public conversation on these issues, but I am more confident that debates like the one below have actually done that.

Arguing Against Evil

"The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for if mercy and justice were really only private whims of his own with no objective and impersonal roots, and if he realized this, he could not go on being indignant.  the fast that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still."

C.S. Lewis, De Futilitate

Links With Little Context

Thom Ranier: Seven Reasons Why Church Worship Centers Will Get Smaller
-I have discussed this possible trend with several pastor friends of mine for a few years.

Institute for Faith Work and Economics
Par 14 (!) in a great series on Christianity's historical responses to poverty

NY Post: The ACLU sues a catholic hospital for not referring patient for an abortion

My tummy aches. Ergo, there is no God - Joe Carter

Linus explains the true meaning of Christmas

An Atheist Talks About Salvation

Luc Ferry is a French, secularist humanist philosopher.  He writes with wonderful clarity, and his book, "A Brief History of Thought" is a kind of survey of Western philosophy.  One of the dynamics of the book that has made it so fun for me is that in one sentence he will express a significant truth with force and conviction, and with the next he will commit an egregious error or support an idea I find obviously false.  This excerpt is an example of the former:

"To reach this point [finding salvation - the theme of the book], the Moderns turned in two main directions. The first - I will not hide the fact that I have always found it faintly ridiculous, but it has acquired such predominance over two centuries that we cannot ignore it - are what we might call the 'religions of earthly salvation', notably scientism, patriotism and communism.  Unable to continue believing in God [one of his convictions of the Modern condition - we can no longer believe in God], the Moderns invented substitute-religions, godless spiritualities or, to be blunt, ideologies which, while usually professing a radical atheism, cling to notions of giving meaning to human existence, or at least justifying why we should die for them."

It is an undeniable reality of human existence - we are idolaters, and if we will not worship the One True God, we will worship any false one.  In the next paragraph Ferry borrows Nietzsche's word, 'idol', to describe these 'religions of earthly salvation'.  To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, when people stop believing in God, the don't believe in nothing, they will believe anything.

And he is right about the roles of these ideologies in the Western world.  Scientism is roughly the belief that all that there is to the world are material things, and the only source of genuine knowledge is the scientific method guided by metaphysical and methodological naturalism.  It has become, ironically, a religion for many.  Patriotism, in Ferry's sense, is the belief that our nation/culture is the pinnacle of achievement and worthy of our lives above all else.  Too many people have actually substituted their faith for their nation instead of using their theology to guide their love of neighbor.  And communism, despite all the utopian wish-dreams still attached to it, is a brutal and bloody master of human culture.  Yet, it promises the world and many are willing to become its servant.

Even a secularist recognizes the human tendency toward worship and idolatry - our need to find salvation.

Colorado Weather Right Now

Our highest high for about a 6 day stretch is projected to be about 12 degrees F.

Ding, Dong - Embryonic Stem Cell Research (should be) Dead

For years I have said that embryonic stem cell research is both deeply unethical and a scientific dead-end.  But the prevailing winds of culture were against me and I was dismissed or simply pooh-pooed.  I didn't know what I was talking about, apparently.  People up on their scientific conventional wisdom were of the mind that embryonic stem cell research was a kind of obvious magical cure for all kinds of horrific diseases (at the time, personified by Superman, Christopher Reeve, and Michael J. Fox).  Embryonic stem cells are undifferentiated human cells that could, theoretically, be coerced into any kind of adult cell and be used to replaced damaged tissue as in the cases of severe spinal injury and Parkinson's.  The promises were through the roof.

The catch, however, was twofold.  First, all the significant trials with induced embryonic stem cells created runaway tumors in their host, and in great quantities were deadly.  Secondly, the only way to harvest embryonic stem cells was to kill (or make use of donated dead) fetuses.  A baby had to die or be killed in order to pursue this highly suspect line of research.  It was an obvious encouragement for the abortion industry.

But the word on the street was that we had to do it, we needed to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into it, and that anyone who opposed it (usually those crazy Republicans and/or conservative Christians) were backwards and anti-science.  The alternative being bandied about was the research behind adult stem cells.  These are already differentiated cells (such as stomach and skin cells) that could be harmlessly harvested and then chemically induced "backwards" into the kind of pluripotency promised by embryonic cells.  But, no matter what the research showed, the scientific community's and pop-culture's money was on embryonic cells.

Very quietly, far away from the selective attention of the press, this story showed up titled, "Miracle of Science: 65 Diseases Treated With Adult Stem Cells, Biotech advances could make destroying human embryos for research a relic of the past".  The main thrust of the article is exactly what some of us have been saying for a long time - adult stem cell research is both ethical and scientifically superior.  Though the application of this research is still in its beginning stages, chemically induced adult stem cells (iPS) have real-life, verified cures to their credit, and no babies were harmed in their making.

Some quotes from the article:

They have learned how to reprogram adult cells so that they can do many things an embryonic cell can do. No human embryos are destroyed in the process. Along the way, embryonic stem cells—just a decade ago hailed as the future of medicine—have largely been bypassed. Some researchers still use them, but for now, the future belongs to adult stem cells and iPS cells, which are adult cells genetically reprogrammed to express specific genes.

 

Every year for the past 10 years, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded more adult stem cell research compared with embryonic research. For 2012, NIH grants totaled $146.5 million for embryonic stem cell research, but $504 million for adult stem cell research—a difference of $357.5 million. And the belief that adult stem cells are more promising than embryonic stem cells for therapies is now largely mainstream.

And later, the researcher highlighted in the article notes this about the debate in the past:

Hess said that the early 2000s brought fierce public debate over the ethics of destroying human embryos to acquire stem cells. Researchers and advocates for the use of embryonic cells promised that scientists would discover a miracle cure for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. "There was a lot of magical thinking going on," Hess said.

This "magical thinking" was so bad that Charles Krauthammer, himself confined to a wheelchair, called out both Reeve and Fox for selling false hope to a lot of vulnerable people.

Part of what is so interesting about this to me is that there was a time when people were being coerced into a point of view based on conventional wisdom and emotion, and almost nothing else.  Their voting habits were being scrutinized on the basis of whether they were going to vote "pro-science" and for embryonic stem cell research, or if they were going to side with the troglodytes and be "anti-science."  It was a big, public deal.  It embarrassed a lot of people into a view they did not hold personally.  And it was all false.

You used to hear a lot about embryonic stem cell research.  Will you hear anything about its demise? No.  Why?  The research is a really big deal and really does have all kinds of promise, so why?  In more cases than not, it might be because to report on the truth now will embarrass those who misrepresented it in the past.

Is it possible for the scientific conventional wisdom to be dead wrong?  Of course it is, and most people who consider themselves "scientific" or scientists of one kind or another would agree.  But they agree in principle.  Disagree with one of their currently held talismans, and you better have thick skin.

Does the work of science have built in fail-safes that are supposed to correct for false views and present views as accurate or true based on research and evidence?  Again, theoretically, yes.  But it doesn't always work that way, in fact, I might argue it almost never works that way on the pop-culture level of science.  Either you believe what the force of conventional wisdom believes or you will become the target of unrelenting personal smears.  And it should be noted that when a point of view begins defending itself with the ad hominem argument, its defenders either have not thought through their reasons for belief or there aren't any to be had.

And, finally, I find it provocative that a point of view on this scientific issue 10 years ago which was informed by good Christian theology alone has turned out to be supported by the research.  Could it be that accurately comprehending and articulating orthodox Christian theology is a clearer, long-term guide to truth in life than scientific conventional wisdom?

Well, now it's time for the long knives to come out.