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numinousnic · 4 years ago

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i wanted to send anonymous love but you (wisely) jave anon off 😤 so i'm doing it un-anonymously. the feeling of getting little bunny kisses is what i'm sending specifically. Also! i'm curious to hear your thoughts on the silt verses from a religious studies major pov, if and when you have any.

There’s… just so much to think about when it comes to how The Silt Verses tackles religion: whether approaching it from a broader philosophical or religious studies perspective, or a more specific theological perspective. But what I kept coming back to again and again while listening was Rudolf Otto’s theory of the numinous. Which, as you can probably tell from my URL, is a theory I am very much into and haven’t gotten to lecture anyone about in a while, so this might get long!

But briefly: the numinous is the non-rational, deeply-felt experience of a metaphysical object that transcends the self. Otto theorized this experience to be the essence of all religious feeling — and by extension, the origin point of all religions — and I certainly think that holds true for how practitioners of the outlawed faiths of The Silt Verses experience their gods.

[Spoilers through Chapter IV of The Silt Verses under the cut]

PART I: Who was Rudolf Otto?

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) was a German theologian best known for his 1917 book Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy), in which he outlines his theory of the numinous. Tracing the history of religious theory can get tedious, so what’s important to know here is that Otto disagreed with the predominant approach to (the then-relatively new field of) religious studies at the time, which still very much followed in the rationalist, largely atheistic footsteps of the Enlightenment when it came to explaining and classifying religions.

(Important note: while Otto was slightly more charitable toward non-Christian religious traditions than his contemporaries, he was still an evolutionist, and thus believed that (Lutheran Protestant) Christianity was the pinnacle of organized religion, with all other religions ranking below it by degrees. There’s just a lot of racism and Eurocentrism going around in this era of religious theory, and as critical of the Enlightenment’s ideals as he is, Otto is not immune to their influence!)

Otto’s two main objections to the rationalist approach to explaining religion are:

The true essence of any conception of God cannot be fully explained in rational terms — language just isn’t equipped to encompass and express that!

The nature of religious orthodoxy fails to give meaningful attention to any non-rational aspect of religion. Instead, it focuses on what can be given structure through doctrine and dogma so as to best convey moral teachings.

Otto thought that this rationalist approach left religion too “bloodless,” to borrow my professor’s phrasing (which seems very apt for a discussion of the numinous as presented in The Silt Verses!) While he acknowledged that rational structure was important for religions, Otto didn’t consider it the most important aspect of religion. Rather, Otto argued, the essence of religion was experiences that couldn’t be rationalized: what he called the numinous.

PART II: So what is the numinous?

As previously stated, Otto defined the numinous as the non-rational, deeply-felt experience of a metaphysical object that transcends the self. This experience also transcends human comprehension, in some ways. Otto considered the numinous experience to be sui generis — in a class by itself — as it cannot truly be explained or rationalized through language or scientific classification: only experienced for itself. Here, Otto was hearkening back to the principles of Romanticism, which championed subjective human feeling and non-rational experience as a way of gaining knowledge of one’s self, the world, and what might lie beyond the world. To the Romantics, aesthetic experience — particularly of the natural world — was critical to sparking those intense emotions and disclosing that higher knowledge.

So what goes into the numinous? First, there’s the numen (Otto’s titular heilige, or “holy”): the metaphysical, transcendent object that, when encountered by humans, sparks the numinous. Then, there’s a cluster of interlinked emotional states that characterize the experience of the numinous: creature-feeling, the mysterium tremendum (and the associated majestas), and fascinans.

Creature-feeling is a feeling of absolute dependence, of being overwhelmed and made insignificant by something utterly beyond human comprehension. For Otto, the numinous is not an experience of “createdness” — awareness of one’s creation by a divine being — but one of “creaturehood”: awareness of one’s smallness against something far mightier.

The mysterium tremendum encompasses both the idea of mysterium — what is beyond human comprehension, what is unknowable and wholly Other — and the feeling of tremendum: the dread at witnessing something both awesome and awful. The mysterium tremendum is particularly aroused by majestas: the absolute overpoweringness of the numen’s divine urgency and energy.

Finally, fascinans expresses the enthralling effect that the numen has on those who experience it, and the yearning they feel for it. Out of all the facets of the numinous, Otto considers fascinans to be the most vital for religious feeling.

PART III: How is Otto’s theory of the numinous applicable to The Silt Verses?

Honestly: how isn’t it applicable? The Silt Verses is a story about the struggle between legal, but sterile faiths backed by government and corporate interests and outlawed, so-called “false” faiths that nevertheless have lasting, frightening power of their own. In this story, where rationalist and subjective conceptions of religion writ large are pitted against each other, determining the reality and (in)authenticity of religious experience is — often quite literally! — a life-or-death endeavor.

Obviously, The Silt Verses is also a horror podcast, so its depictions of religious experience lean hard on those aspects of the numinous that are more conducive to producing horror: creature-feeling and tremendum, most notably. Finch is utterly overwhelmed by the hunger of the Hollow as it consumes first his fields, then rabbits and drifters, and finally himself. For all their reverence for the Trawler-Man, Carpenter and Faulkner are nevertheless overcome with equal parts awe and dread when they find the fishing boat turned Saint, to say nothing of their barely-concealed terror upon encountering the Saint of the Waxen Scrivener (even though they consider it “false”).

But fascinans remains strong — and it makes the horror all the greater.

CARPENTER:

But that moment… alone, in the grey dawn, before a pondful of dead fish, knowing that I was seen, and understanding that all things in this world were connected?

That was the first time in my life I knew what terror really was.

The first time I truly believed in you, my river.

— Chapter I: “Let Me First Speak of Revelations”

Which, for me, also raises some intriguing doubts about the authenticity of those faiths that are legal in the Peninsula. Many, if not all of these faiths, were purposefully created and widely disseminated by the government (the Cloak) or corporations (Sweet Jolly Crunchtooth), for reasons less to do with genuine religious expression and more to do with social and economic control. Though a majority of people may follow these gods, whether they truly believe in them is another matter. Though Hayward is fairly cynical about religion in general, his comment that “country people just take their gods too seriously” would seem to imply that some level of ironic detachment is the norm when worshiping more modern gods. These rationally-constructed faiths leave little, if any, room for the numinous.

In contrast, outlawed gods have old, strong ties to particular environments: either uniquely hallowed grounds, like Penda’s Slake for Charity’s hunter-/hunted-god, or more general areas of influence, like repositories of written knowledge for the Waxen Scrivener. This focus on the power of environments, especially natural ones, to reveal and impart divine knowledge is strongly reminiscent of the Romantic ideology that Otto was inspired by when creating his theory of the numinous. And the sublime emotion experienced by these gods’ worshipers in these places, when confronted by the object of their worship that they’ve sought, or summoned, or even created?

FAULKNER:

(With quiet awe)

In the moonlight. In the reeds. I… can see it.

(Half-mad with terror and exultation)

CARPENTER, I CAN SEE IT!

TWIN MOUTHS AGAPE! TWIN MOUTHS AGAPE!

— Chapter I: “Let Me First Speak of Revelations”

That’s the numinous at work: an unspeakable experience of the unknowable, yet impending divine Other. It is awesome and awful — and despite its danger, and the sacrifices these outlawed gods demand of those devoted to them, the unique and utter sublimity of this experience is desired all the same.

#in which i answer asks #treeroutes #the silt verses #religion #the numinous #rudolf otto #tsv meta #my meta #sending SO many bunny kisses back your way #it was a delight to receive your ask and a delight to write a small essay in response!!

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llleeerrroooyyy · 6 years ago

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Environmentalism & Catholicism talk summary

The talk was by Dr Scott Powell and was titled "Catholics, The Environment, and the End of the World"

- "our very contact with nature has a deep restorative power" - quote by JP2 (the fav)

- Environmental consciousness has theological significance

- Pope Benedict quoted from 2010 that was saying that state of the environment is a huge crisis that cant be ignored

- quote attribution suprises people, most people assume its some random enviro activist, but nope its a pope.

- under his papacy the Vatican actually became the first carbon neutral nation (take that atheists ha)

- JP2 said at one point that you cant be authentically pro-life without being pro-environment (JP2 being the best, once again)

-Summer of 2015 - Laudato Si Encyclical came out

- the world finally started paying attention to what the church has been saying about the environment (note: nothing new in the doc, just a resstatement but people were hella shook)

- 2 big reactions to its publication

- people got very angry (eg the pope has no right to speak on these things hes a religious leader blah blah blah)

- people started twisting his words to fit their own political agneda (a big yikes)

- just a month or so later the Supreme Court ruled same sex marriage is now legal - everyone promptly forgot about Laudato Si and how angry they were (so much anger)

-Essential message of Laudato Si - We are NOT our own gods

-idea that applies to a broad range of moral issues

-Why does the Church think this way?

- all comes back to the big problem in the Church - human sin

-in 1967 a grumpy old guy named Lynn White Jr wrote an article about the historical roots of ecological crisis for the Science academic journal

-article was a big deal, defined conversation about religion & ecology for the forseeable future, the most cited document on the topic

-big claim was the Christianity was to blame for our ecological crisis bc Genesis gives us the right to abuse creation (hur dur)

- BUT HOLD UP THERES ANOTHER SIDE TO THIS STORY

- How we read Genesis matters!! because one way or another it gets cited in all kinds of contexts religious and non religious

- but it gets messy bc people only every frame it two ways

-atheist evolutionist, we all come from monkeys shut up about Jesus

-christian fundamentalist, everything happened in exactly 7 days bc we're taking this literally

-Both frames - wrong.

-side note - he talked about a debate he watched between Bill Nye and a Southern pastor and it was "like watching a train wreck" (i laughed, giggled and felt very validated by this burn)

-anyway what people dont talk about is the Catholic interpretation of Genesis

- Catholics teach the Bible is inspired by God and without error

-whatever the sacred author was trying to say - thats it

-Bible uses word "day" comes from translated hebrew word "yom" which can mean years,eons, etc

-its a story about the WHO not the HOW

- Why 7 days?

- in hebrew numbers are about quality more than quantity

-we're not trying to figure out "what time on thursday did God create the brachiosaurus"

- the word for 7 in hebrew, the same word used when making a covenant

-hebrews saw it as God saying vows to the world, everything he made he wedded himself to it, (ex: "I seven you")

-10 times it says "God says" and each of those 10 times creation responds

-creation is formless and void until he fills what is empty (at this point my mind practically exploded)

- he put fish in the sea , sun in the sky, etc

-7th day is day of rest - he vowed himself to creation, aka "seven'd" himself

-humans were created on the 6th day for the 7th day

-line 26 in the story "in image and likeness of God"

- hebrew word "selem" (idk on the spelling sorry) is word for image

- referred to statue/sculpture of the king put at city entrances so you would know whos in charge

- you are the "selem" of God - people should instantly recognize the king of our lives

-we are created by relationship, for relationship (woah)

-hebrew word for "to know" which is "yadow" doesnt mean to know about, it means to be the God of something

-aka the big PROBLEM THAT THIS ALL COMES DOWN TO

- using something of creation and making ourselves the gods over nature is WHY THE ENVIRONMENT IS IN TROUBLE WHY THIS ALL MATTERS

-some people think natural disasters are nature lashing out against us for our sins against creation/nature

-we're the only creatures on Earth where wee feel out of place, but Jesus became human to reconcile our relationship with God, creation is waiting for us to live out that call (woah!! woAHH!! woah!!)

-adam was essentially a glorified gardener - his task was to till and keep eden

- he fails at this (whoops)

-he's supposed to protect it, but fails because the snake comes into the garden and threatens eve (you had one job my dude, one job)

-it actually might not have been a snake tho

-"hanash" the word we translate as snake means something else in hebrew

-can refer to anything from a crocodile to a 7 HEADED DRAGON (never tell me the Bible is boring again yall i swear)

-so, to be in the image and likeness of God is to be a gardener

-ex: woman mistakes the risen Jesus to be a gardener, Jesus refers to himself as one, etc

-gardening means being faithful to small things

- small decisions to make ourselves holy, when we're holy creation will be satisified and will no longer "cry out in travail" (mic drop)

-all of creation will rise again just like us humans, he came to redeem ALL of it.

#anne rambles #catholic #seek2019 #environmentalism

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romancatholicreflections · 6 years ago

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11th February >> Daily Reflection/Commentary on Today’s First Reading for Roman Catholics on Monday, Fifth Week in Ordinary Time (Genesis 1:1-19). Today we begin reading the Book of Genesis and the story of Creation.

One evaluation of this book says this:

If the Hebrew Bible is indebted to any one biblical book for its daring historical argument, that book is Genesis. It is Genesis that transforms the history of a small, vulnerable kingdom at the juncture of three continents into a history of the world and humankind. Even without its first chapter – the magisterial account of creation – Genesis tells of nations being weighed in the historical plan of God. One lone God, Creator of all things, is portrayed restlessly juggling the fortunes of individuals and peoples to right the balance of moral justice. This is, properly speaking, neither a tragic nor, as often maintained, a “salvation” history – for its original audience believed its true outcome to hinge on present and future events. And so, Genesis, like the scripture it introduces, is sublimely open-ended, a preface to the present.

Joel W. Rosenberg, Harper-Collins Study Bible

Although Genesis is at the beginning of the Bible that does not mean that it was the first book to be written, still less that it represents an “eyewitness account”. In fact, experts distinguish a combination of accounts written at different times. In the final form in which we now have it, it is a later, sophisticated work, written with a specific purpose in mind. It is not a scientific account and it does not clash with more recent scientific discoveries because it is written on a completely different level.

It is more about God and our relationship with God than about how the world actually came to be. The central message is: There is only one God and he is the source of all that is; he is totally good and everything he creates is good.

It acts as an introduction to the five books of the Pentateuch, the Law of Israel, and shows how God brought order into a chaotic universe.

In our present selection of readings we only cover the first 11 chapters, which deal with what is called the ‘primeval history’ or pre-history, the Creation, the various ‘falls’ and ending with the incident of the Tower of Babel. The rest of Genesis is concerned with the origin of God’s people, with the first patriarch, Abraham and his immediate descendants – Isaac, Jacob and Joseph and his brothers. (We will cover that second part of the book in Weeks 12-14 of Year I.) The last word of Genesis is ‘Egypt’ and leads immediately into the Book of the Exodus, describing a much later period, where we find the Israelites living in Egypt.

Today’s reading begins with God bringing into existence what we might call the infrastructure of our world. This section introduces the whole Pentateuch and in a way the whole Bible. It shows how God brought an orderly universe out of primordial chaos. It forms a background for the call of Abram and the real beginning of the biblical story in chapter 12.

This first version of the creation story is attributed to the Priestly source. As such it is less detailed and more theological. Its primary focus is on God’s role. It aims at a complete logical classification of beings whose creation is deliberately fitted into the framework of a week which closes with the Sabbath day of rest. The text makes use of the primitive science of its day. It would be a mistake to look for points of agreement between the picture given here and the data of modern science. (Hence, the futility of the debate between the so-called ‘Creationists’ and ‘Evolutionists’.)

The text uses a scenario found in other creation myth stories but the emphasis here is very much on our world as the creative work of one, transcendent and all-good God existing before the world he brought into being.

Recounting the origin of the cosmos and its glorious centrepiece, earth, it shows God masterfully orchestrating the events of creation. Each phase follows more or less the same basic pattern established on Day One: divine command, result, divine approval, enumeration of the day. The effect is anything but monotonous. Like a musical theme with variations, the story shows the world gradually becoming more mobile and complex, until, by the sixth day, it is ready for self-perpetuation through procreation. (Harper-Collins Study Bible)

“In the beginning” is not seen as a beginning from infinity as suggested by the opening of John’s gospel, “In the beginning was the Word..” (John 1:1). It is not a creation from nothing; it is the beginning of recorded history rather than the origin of being which the philosophers seek to understand. The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the abyss/deep. There was a total lack of order and no light. God was absent. But with God there came order, an astounding and undeniable feature of a universe whose existence is often attributed to pure chance.

A “divine wind” hovered over the chaotic watery wastes of the deep. This is not the creative wind of the Spirit. Creation is said to have been brought into being either by the “word” or the “act” of God. But other translators do see the Spirit of God present in the phrase.

The deep or the abyss is the primordial ocean according to the ancient Semitic understanding of the universe. After God’s creative activity, part of this vast body forms the salt-water seas (vv.9f); part of it is the fresh water under the earth (Ps 33:7; Ezek 31:4), which wells forth on the earth as springs and fountains (Gen 7:11; 8:2; Prov 3:20). Part of it, “the upper water” (Ps 148:4; Dan 3:60), is held up by the dome of the sky (Gen 1:6ff) from which rain descends on the earth (Gen 7:11; 2 Kings 7:2,19; Ps 104:13).

The rest of today’s reading deals with the first four days of creation. First, there is light but the sources of the light are not yet mentioned. Light is created but not darkness, which is a purely negative concept. The creation of light is mentioned first, since the succession of days and nights is to be the frame in which the work of creation takes place. God saw the light as good and God separated light from darkness. It was “good” in the sense of being both acceptable and also intrinsically good. The light was called Day and the darkness Night.

“There was evening and morning, the first day.” In ancient Israel a day was considered to begin at sunset. According to the highly artificial structure of the creation story, God’s activity is divided into six days to teach the sacredness of the Sabbath rest on the seventh day in the Israelite religion. (We might remember, too, how in the Gospel the Sabbath begins on the evening of Friday. That was why Jesus had to be buried before sundown on Good Friday, when the Sabbath would begin, cf. Mark 15:42)

On each of the succeeding days the same formula will be followed:

– “God said: Let there be…”

– What was commanded comes into being

– God sees that his work is good

– The number of the day is given

God then made a dome or vault in the midst of the waters, separating waters from waters. The vault, that is, the sky or the heavens, now divided the waters above the dome from the waters below it. This is the universe as the ancients understood it in their visual observations from a vantage point they believed to be the centre: a flat earth and a curved and solid heavenly dome surrounded above and below by primordial waters. The water below produced springs from which rivers and lakes originated; the water above explained the rain which came through apertures in the vault. (The understanding of cloud-forming evaporation was still centuries away!)

Evening and morning made the second day.

The waters under heaven now are brought together and reveal dry land, thus producing ‘earth’ and ‘seas’. God saw it was good.

Next vegetation and plants appear bearing all kinds of fruits and seeds. (What is remarkable is that the succession of creations harmonises with a contemporary understanding of evolution: vegetation, swarming creatures, fish, birds, animals [mammals] and human beings.) Again, God saw it was good.

Evening and morning, it is the third day.

Lights are now created in the vault or dome to divide the day from the night. Light has already been created but now its dissemination is divided among the heavenly bodies. These will also mark seasons, days and years and give light to the earth. There is one great light to rule the day and a lesser one to rule the night, as well as the stars – to separate light from darkness. The names ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ are deliberately omitted because these were often treated as gods by neighbouring peoples. For God’s people they are no more than heavenly lamps dividing day and night and marking the seasons and times for festivals.

God saw it was good. Even and morning it is the fourth day.

Through all this there is the underlying refrain: “God saw that it was good.” The message is clear: there is only one God and he is totally good and everything he does is good, very good. Why then is there so much evil and suffering in the world? The answer to that question will come later.

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didanawisgi · 6 years ago

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Nonoverlapping Magisteria

by Stephen Jay Gould

“Incongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists.

At lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about "scientific creationism"? One asked me: "Is evolution really in some kind of trouble. and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming. Have I missed something?"

A lively pastiche of French, Italian, and English conversation then ensued for half an hour or so, but the priests all seemed reassured by my general answer: Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a homegrown phenomenon of American sociocultural history—a splinter movement (unfortunately rather more of a beam these days) of Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean. We all left satisfied, but I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief.

Another story in the same mold: I am often asked whether I ever encounter creationism as a live issue among my Harvard undergraduate students. I reply that only once, in nearly thirty years of teaching, did I experience such an incident. A very sincere and serious freshman student came to my office hours with the following question that had clearly been troubling him deeply: "I am a devout Christian and have never had any reason to doubt evolution, an idea that seems both exciting and particularly well documented. But my roommate, a proselytizing Evangelical, has been insisting with enormous vigor that I cannot be both a real Christian and an evolutionist. So tell me, can a person believe both in God and evolution?" Again, I gulped hard, did my intellectual duty, and reassured him that evolution was both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief—a position I hold sincerely, but still an odd situation for a Jewish agnostic.

These two stories illustrate a cardinal point, frequently unrecognized but absolutely central to any understanding of the status and impact of the politically potent, fundamentalist doctrine known by its self-proclaimed oxymoron as "scientitic creationism"—the claim that the Bible is literally true, that all organisms were created during six days of twenty-four hours, that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution must therefore be false. Creationism does not pit science against religion (as my opening stories indicate), for no such conflict exists. Creationism does not raise any unsettled intellectual issues about the nature of biology or the history of life. Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States among Western nations, and prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that choose to read the Bible as an inerrant document, literally true in every jot and tittle.

I do not doubt that one could find an occasional nun who would prefer to teach creationism in her parochial school biology class or an occasional orthodox rabbi who does the same in his yeshiva, but creationism based on biblical literalism makes little sense in either Catholicism or Judaism for neither religion maintains any extensive tradition for reading the Bible as literal truth rather than illuminating literature, based partly on metaphor and allegory (essential components of all good writing) and demanding interpretation for proper understanding. Most Protestant groups, of course, take the same position—the fundamentalist fringe notwithstanding.

The position that I have just outlined by personal stories and general statements represents the standard attitude of all major Western religions (and of Western science) today. (I cannot, through ignorance, speak of Eastern religions, although I suspect that the same position would prevail in most cases.) The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains—for a great book tells us that the truth can make us free and that we will live in optimal harmony with our fellows when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.

In the context of this standard position, I was enormously puzzled by a statement issued by Pope John Paul II on October 22, 1996, to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the same body that had sponsored my earlier trip to the Vatican. In this document, entitled "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth," the pope defended both the evidence for evolution and the consistency of the theory with Catholic religious doctrine. Newspapers throughout the world responded with frontpage headlines, as in the New York Times for October 25:

"Pope Bolsters Church's Support for Scientific View of Evolution."

Now I know about "slow news days" and I do admit that nothing else was strongly competing for headlines at that particular moment. (The Times could muster nothing more exciting for a lead story than Ross Perot's refusal to take Bob Dole's advice and quit the presidential race.) Still, I couldn't help feeling immensely puzzled by all the attention paid to the pope's statement (while being wryly pleased, of course, for we need all the good press we can get, especially from respected outside sources). The Catholic Church had never opposed evolution and had no reason to do so. Why had the pope issued such a statement at all? And why had the press responded with an orgy of worldwide, front-page coverage?

I could only conclude at first, and wrongly as I soon learned, that journalists throughout the world must deeply misunderstand the relationship between science and religion, and must therefore be elevating a minor papal comment to unwarranted notice. Perhaps most people really do think that a war exists between science and religion, and that (to cite a particularly newsworthy case) evolution must be intrinsically opposed to Christianity. In such a context, a papal admission of evolution's legitimate status might be regarded as major news indeed—a sort of modern equivalent for a story that never happened, but would have made the biggest journalistic splash of 1640: Pope Urban VIII releases his most famous prisoner from house arrest and humbly apologizes, "Sorry, Signor Galileo… the sun, er, is central."

But I then discovered that the prominent coverage of papal satisfaction with evolution had not been an error of non-Catholic Anglophone journalists. The Vatican itself had issued the statement as a major news release. And Italian newspapers had featured, if anything, even bigger headlines and longer stories. The conservative Il Giornale, for example, shouted from its masthead: "Pope Says We May Descend from Monkeys."

Clearly, I was out to lunch. Something novel or surprising must lurk within the papal statement but what could it be?—especially given the accuracy of my primary impression (as I later verified) that the Catholic Church values scientific study, views science as no threat to religion in general or Catholic doctrine in particular, and has long accepted both the legitimacy of evolution as a field of study and the potential harmony of evolutionary conclusions with Catholic faith.

As a former constituent of Tip O'Neill's, I certainly know that "all politics is local"—and that the Vatican undoubtedly has its own internal reasons, quite opaque to me, for announcing papal support of evolution in a major statement. Still, I knew that I was missing some important key, and I felt frustrated. I then remembered the primary rule of intellectual life: when puzzled, it never hurts to read the primary documents—a rather simple and self-evident principle that has, nonetheless, completely disappeared from large sectors of the American experience.

I knew that Pope Pius XII (not one of my favorite figures in twentieth-century history, to say the least) had made the primary statement in a 1950 encyclical entitled Humani Generis. I knew the main thrust of his message: Catholics could believe whatever science determined about the evolution of the human body, so long as they accepted that, at some time of his choosing, God had infused the soul into such a creature. I also knew that I had no problem with this statement, for whatever my private beliefs about souls, science cannot touch such a subject and therefore cannot be threatened by any theological position on such a legitimately and intrinsically religious issue. Pope Pius XII, in other words, had properly acknowledged and respected the separate domains of science and theology. Thus, I found myself in total agreement with Humani Generis—but I had never read the document in full (not much of an impediment to stating an opinion these days).

I quickly got the relevant writings from, of all places, the Internet. (The pope is prominently on-line, but a Luddite like me is not. So I got a computer-literate associate to dredge up the documents. I do love the fracture of stereotypes implied by finding religion so hep and a scientist so square.) Having now read in full both Pope Pius's Humani Generis of 1950 and Pope John Paul's proclamation of October 1996, I finally understand why the recent statement seems so new, revealing, and worthy of all those headlines. And the message could not be more welcome for evolutionists and friends of both science and religion.

The text of Humani Generis focuses on the magisterium (or teaching authority) of the Church—a word derived not from any concept of majesty or awe but from the different notion of teaching, for magister is Latin for "teacher." We may, I think, adopt this word and concept to express the central point of this essay and the principled resolution of supposed "conflict" or "warfare" between science and religion. No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as NOMA, or "nonoverlapping magisteria").

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch cliches, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.

This resolution might remain all neat and clean if the nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) of science and religion were separated by an extensive no man's land. But, in fact, the two magisteria bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border. Many of our deepest questions call upon aspects of both for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult. To cite just two broad questions involving both evolutionary facts and moral arguments: Since evolution made us the only earthly creatures with advanced consciousness, what responsibilities are so entailed for our relations with other species? What do our genealogical ties with other organisms imply about the meaning of human life?

Pius XII's Humani Generis is a highly traditionalist document by a deeply conservative man forced to face all the "isms" and cynicisms that rode the wake of World War II and informed the struggle to rebuild human decency from the ashes of the Holocaust. The encyclical, subtitled "Concerning some false opinions which threaten to undermine the foundations of Catholic doctrine" begins with a statement of embattlement:

Disagreement and error among men on moral and religious matters have always been a cause of profound sorrow to all good men, but above all to the true and loyal sons of the Church, especially today, when we see the principles of Christian culture being attacked on all sides.

Pius lashes out, in turn, at various external enemies of the Church: pantheism, existentialism, dialectical materialism, historicism. and of course and preeminently, communism. He then notes with sadness that some well-meaning folks within the Church have fallen into a dangerous relativism—"a theological pacifism and egalitarianism, in which all points of view become equally valid"—in order to include people of wavering faith who yearn for the embrace of Christian religion but do not wish to accept the particularly Catholic magisterium.

What is this world coming to when these noxious novelties can so discombobulate a revealed and established order? Speaking as a conservative's conservative, Pius laments:

Novelties of this kind have already borne their deadly fruit in almost all branches of theology.…Some question whether angels are personal beings, and whether matter and spirit differ essentially.…Some even say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation, based on an antiquated philosophic notion of substance, should be so modified that the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist be reduced to a kind of symbolism.

Pius first mentions evolution to decry a misuse by overextension often promulgated by zealous supporters of the anathematized "isms":

Some imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution…explains the origin of all things.…Communists gladly subscribe to this opinion so that, when the souls of men have been deprived of every idea of a personal God, they may the more efficaciously defend and propagate their dialectical materialism.

Pius's major statement on evolution occurs near the end of the encyclical in paragraphs 35 through 37. He accepts the standard model of NOMA and begins by acknowledging that evolution lies in a difficult area where the domains press hard against each other. "It remains for US now to speak about those questions which. although they pertain to the positive sciences, are nevertheless more or less connected with the truths of the Christian faith." [Interestingly, the main thrust of these paragraphs does not address evolution in general but lies in refuting a doctrine that Pius calls "polygenism," or the notion of human ancestry from multiple parents—for he regards such an idea as incompatible with the doctrine of original sin, "which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own." In this one instance, Pius may be transgressing the NOMA principle—but I cannot judge, for I do not understand the details of Catholic theology and therefore do not know how symbolically such a statement may be read. If Pius is arguing that we cannot entertain a theory about derivation of all modern humans from an ancestral population rather than through an ancestral individual (a potential fact) because such an idea would question the doctrine of original sin (a theological construct), then I would declare him out of line for letting the magisterium of religion dictate a conclusion within the magisterium of science.]

Pius then writes the well-known words that permit Catholics to entertain the evolution of the human body (a factual issue under the magisterium of science), so long as they accept the divine Creation and infusion of the soul (a theological notion under the magisterium of religion):

The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.

I had, up to here, found nothing surprising in Humani Generis, and nothing to relieve my puzzlement about the novelty of Pope John Paul's recent statement. But I read further and realized that Pope Pius had said more about evolution, something I had never seen quoted, and that made John Paul's statement most interesting indeed. In short, Pius forcefully proclaimed that while evolution may be legitimate in principle, the theory, in fact, had not been proven and might well be entirely wrong. One gets the strong impression, moreover, that Pius was rooting pretty hard for a verdict of falsity. Continuing directly from the last quotation, Pius advises us about the proper study of evolution:

However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure.… Some, however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.

To summarize, Pius generally accepts the NOMA principle of nonoverlapping magisteria in permitting Catholics to entertain the hypothesis of evolution for the human body so long as they accept the divine infusion of the soul. But he then offers some (holy) fatherly advice to scientists about the status of evolution as a scientific concept: the idea is not yet proven, and you all need to be especially cautious because evolution raises many troubling issues right on the border of my magisterium. One may read this second theme in two different ways: either as a gratuitous incursion into a different magisterium or as a helpful perspective from an intelligent and concerned outsider. As a man of good will, and in the interest of conciliation, I am happy to embrace the latter reading.

In any case, this rarely quoted second claim (that evolution remains both unproven and a bit dangerous)—and not the familiar first argument for the NOMA principle (that Catholics may accept the evolution of the body so long as they embrace the creation of the soul)—defines the novelty and the interest of John Paul's recent statement.

John Paul begins by summarizing Pius's older encyclical of 195O, and particularly by reaffirming the NOMA principle—nothing new here, and no cause for extended publicity:

In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation.

To emphasize the power of NOMA, John Paul poses a potential problem and a sound resolution: How can we reconcile science's claim for physical continuity in human evolution with Catholicism's insistence that the soul must enter at a moment of divine infusion:

With man, then, we find ourselves in the presence of an ontological difference, an ontological leap, one could say However, does not the posing of such ontological discontinuity run counter to that physical continuity which seems to be the main thread of research into evolution in the field of physics and chemistry? Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seem irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation.

The novelty and news value of John Paul's statement lies, rather, in his profound revision of Pius's second and rarely quoted claim that evolution, while conceivable in principle and reconcilable with religion, can cite little persuasive evidence, and may well be false. John Paul—states and I can only say amen, and thanks for noticing—that the half century between Pius's surveying the ruins of World War II and his own pontificate heralding the dawn of a new millennium has witnessed such a growth of data, and such a refinement of theory, that evolution can no longer be doubted by people of good will:

Pius XII added . . . that this opinion [evolution] should not be adopted as though it were a certain, proven doctrine. . . . Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of more than one hypothesis in the theory of evolution. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.

In conclusion. Pius had grudgingly admitted evolution as a legitimate hypothesis that he regarded as only tentatively supported and potentially (as I suspect he hoped) untrue. John Paul, nearly fifty years later, reaffirms the legitimacy of evolution under the NOMA principle—no news here—but then adds that additional data and theory have placed the factuality of evolution beyond reasonable doubt. Sincere Christians must now accept evolution not merely as a plausible possibility but also as an effectively proven fact. In other words, official Catholic opinion on evolution has moved from "say it ain't so, but we can deal with it if we have to" (Pius's grudging view of 1950) to John Paul's entirely welcoming "it has been proven true; we always celebrate nature's factuality, and we look forward to interesting discussions of theological implications." I happily endorse this turn of events as gospel—literally "good news." I may represent the magisterium of science, but I welcome the support of a primary leader from the other major magisterium of our complex lives. And I recall the wisdom of King Solomon: "As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country (Prov. 25:25).

Just as religion must bear the cross of its hard-liners. I have some scientific colleagues, including a few prominent enough to wield influence by their writings, who view this rapprochement of the separate magisteria with dismay. To colleagues like me—agnostic scientists who welcome and celebrate thc rapprochement, especially the pope's latest statement—they say: "C'mon, be honest; you know that religion is addle-pated, superstitious, old-fashioned b.s.; you're only making those welcoming noises because religion is so powerful, and we need to be diplomatic in order to assure public support and funding for science." I do not think that this attitude is common among scientists, but such a position fills me with dismay—and I therefore end this essay with a personal statement about religion, as a testimony to what I regard as a virtual consensus among thoughtful scientists (who support the NOMA principle as firmly as the pope does).

I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball). Much of this fascination lies in the historical paradox that throughout Western history organized religion has fostered both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heart-rending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in the occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held such secular power during so much of Western history. When my folks held similar power more briefly in Old Testament times, they committed just as many atrocities with many of the same rationales.)

I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectua] grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world's empirical constitution. This mutual humility has important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.

Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us.

As a moral position (and therefore not as a deduction from my knowledge of nature's factuality), I prefer the "cold bath" theory that nature can be truly "cruel" and "indifferent"—in the utterly inappropriate terms of our ethical discourse—because nature was not constructed as our eventual abode, didn't know we were coming (we are, after all, interlopers of the latest geological microsecond), and doesn't give a damn about us (speaking metaphorically). I regard such a position as liberating, not depressing, because we then become free to conduct moral discourse—and nothing could be more important—in our own terms, spared from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature's factuality.

But I recognize that such a position frightens many people, and that a more spiritual view of nature retains broad appeal (acknowledging the factuality of evolution and other phenomena, but still seeking some intrinsic meaning in human terms, and from the magisterium of religion). I do appreciate, for example, the struggles of a man who wrote to the New York Times on November 3, 1996, to state both his pain and his endorsement ofJohn Paul's statement:

Pope John Paul II's acceptance of evolution touches the doubt in my heart. The problem of pain and suffering in a world created by a God who is all love and light is hard enough to bear, even if one is a creationist. But at least a creationist can say that the original creation, coming from the hand of God was good, harmonious, innocent and gentle. What can one say about evolution, even a spiritual theory of evolution? Pain and suffering, mindless cruelty and terror are its means of creation. Evolution's engine is the grinding of predatory teeth upon the screaming, living flesh and bones of prey.… If evolution be true, my faith has rougher seas to sail.

I don't agree with this man, but we could have a wonderful argument. I would push the "cold bath" theory: he would (presumably) advocate the theme of inherent spiritual meaning in nature, however opaque the signal. But we would both be enlightened and filled with better understanding of these deep and ultimately unanswerable issues. Here, I believe, lies the greatest strength and necessity of NOMA, the nonoverlapping magisteria of science and religion. NOMA permits—indeed enjoins—the prospect of respectful discourse, of constant input from both magisteria toward the common goal of wisdom. If human beings are anything special, we are the creatures that must ponder and talk. Pope John Paul II would surely point out to me that his magisterium has always recognized this distinction, for "in principio, erat verbum"—"In the beginning was the Word."

Carl Sagan organized and attended the Vatican meeting that introduces this essay; he also shared my concern for fruitful cooperation between the different but vital realms of science and religion. Carl was also one of my dearest friends. I learned of his untimely death on the same day that I read the proofs for this essay. I could only recall Nehru's observations on Gandhi's death—that the light had gone out, and darkness reigned everywhere. But I then contemplated what Carl had done in his short sixty-two years and remembered John Dryden's ode for Henry Purcell, a great musician who died even younger: "He long ere this had tuned the jarring spheres, and left no hell below."

The days I spent with Carl in Rome were the best of our friendship. We delighted in walking around the Eternal City, feasting on its history and architecture—and its food! Carl took special delight in the anonymity that he still enjoyed in a nation that had not yet aired Cosmos, the greatest media work in popular science of all time.

I dedicate this essay to his memory. Carl also shared my personal suspicion about the nonexistence of souls—but I cannot think of a better reason for hoping we are wrong than the prospect of spending eternity roaming the cosmos in friendship and conversation with this wonderful soul.”

[ Stephen Jay Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," Natural History 106 (March 1997): 16-22; Reprinted here with permission from Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, New York: Harmony Books, 1998, pp. 269-83. ]

#Stephen Jay Gould #carl sagan #NOMA #philosophy #spirituality #science

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foggynightdonut · 4 years ago

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Review by PeformedPaleo 1 Stars Out Of 5 Not Scriptural, Whitcomb and Morris relied heavily on the Adventist claims of George McCready Price to promote a young-earth view. The scientific claims were plainly wrong based on the knowledge of geology available in 1770, much less what was known by 1960. More importantly, it is not based on careful reading of Genesis that takes Scripture seriously on its own terms. By misinterpreting Genesis 1 as a scientific description, it turns people away from thinking about God to arguing about science. Science is not the ultimate truth; by insisting that Genesis 1 is scientific they put too high a value on science. At the same time, it attacks the findings of science across a wide range of fields. Even many current young-earth advocates do not accept several of the arguments made in the book. This book has done great harm to Christianity by making the theological, historical, and scientific errors of creation science popular. Many people abandon the faith because they are taught that being a Christian means believing in a young earth, rather than rooting faith in Jesus Christ.

Editorial Reviews“The Genesis Flood by Morris and Whitcomb is one of the most important books of the past century. Prior to its publication in 1961, evangelicals were for the most part unprepared to answer evolutionists’ and modern geologists’ claims about the antiquity of the earth. Many blithely assumed that the days of creation in Genesis 1 represented long ages; others held to the 'gap theory'—the idea that vast eons elapsed between the initial creation of the heavens and earth (Genesis 1:1) and the formation of life as we know it (starting in Genesis 1:2). The Genesis Flood showed why such theories don’t do justice to the inspiration and authority of Scripture. The book revived evangelicals’ interest in flood geology, demonstrating that most of the geological phenomena usually cited as 'proof' of the earth’s antiquity are better explained as evidence of a catastrophic universal flood, as described in Genesis 6–8. In recent years young-earth creationism has come under heavy attack in evangelical circles again, and The Genesis Flood is as timely, thought-provoking, and helpful as ever. . . . A tour de force and a must-read resource for pastors, teachers, scientists, and anyone who is troubled by the conflict between the biblical account of creation and the ever-changing claims of modern evolutionary theory.”"When The Genesis Flood was published it was the combined voice of two courageous men crying, as it were, in the wilderness. They dared to take a stand against the pervading compromise on the issue of creation and the flood by robustly tackling head-on the uniformitarian geological assumptions that underpin the secular worldview on origins that had mesmerized so many Christians into compromising the opening chapters of God’s Word. Single-handedly these men with this book kindled a fire that today is still raging. Little did they know the global impact this book would have. Like so many others I know, I read this book as a young Christian in my teenage years when I was already a budding geologist, and it totally resolved my ongoing struggle to reconcile the geology I was learning in the secular textbooks with the true account of earth’s history in God’s Word. Not only did this book convince me that God’s Word provides the only reliable basis for understanding geology, but it was foundational in igniting my passion for and calling into full-time creation ministry to uphold the truth of God’s Word and defend it from compromise, beginning at the very first verse. This book remains a classic work that is a must-read for those who would be informed and equip themselves both to stand on the authority of God’s Word in every area of life and knowledge and to defend their Christian faith.""I have been privileged to have witnessed the rising biblical creation movement for the past forty years and have seen it used mightily by God to blossom into a major international force. The movement not only has shaken the evolutionary, “millions of years” establishment, but more importantly has equipped the church to share our Christian faith with renewed boldness. The publishing of The Genesis Flood fifty years ago is the recognized birthdate of a movement blessed by God, and this classic work is also now recognized as a monumental milestone in the fight against compromise in the church and for biblical inerrancy in general during our skeptical modern era. Finding a copy of The Genesis Flood in an Australian bookstore and devouring its contents was a key event that led me to join the modern biblical creation movement in the 1970s. Drs. Whitcomb and Morris became real ‘heroes of the faith’ for me. I saw them as giants in Christian apologetics."

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wucaro · 4 years ago

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Star Wars, Christian Politics, and the Power of Narratives

For a long time, I was taught that certain beliefs were the enemy of true Christianity. Life was war and everyone was an enemy - Muslims taking over the Western World, "progressive" Christians that didn't actually believe in the Bible were perverting the true word of God, evolutionists, atheists, people who fell away from the faith, the list never ends. True Christianity was seeing the Bible as the ultimate authority and taking all of its commandments literally - it was your foundation. Factors like science, culture, and your emotions were all fallible. Although my perspective shifted over time, I could never have predicted the anxiety that surrounded my faith evolution.

All of a sudden, I had become the enemy that I had always been taught to fear. I wasn't just afraid that if people knew my true beliefs they wouldn't see me as a Christian anymore, I was afraid that I would be seen as an active evil. I have never felt so much anxiety around my faith as I did last summer on missions. CSMP was just a blur of hiding in dark rooms, not hearing when people spoke to me, lashing out in random bursts, and being entirely mentally gone.

Eight beliefs I am often afraid of saying out loud

1. The Bible is not the inerrant word of God but a divinely inspired collection of people's best attempts to understand and follow God.

2. There is no hell - most if not all people are redeemed and restored.

3. Queer relationships are affirmed and glorifying to God.

4. Saving sex for marriage is more a result of patriarchy/culture than God's true moral decree and this belief has led to severe emotional, physical, and mental damage including the enabling of sexual assault (e.g. purity culture).

5. Evangelism is a tool of colonialism and white supremacism, and "loving people" has been used as a way to manipulate them into conversion.

6. American Christianity has enabled and driven white supremacy

7. Social Justice is as much a calling for the Church as evangelism and discipleship.

8. Not allowing women to serve in pastoral ministry is the equivalent of clipping the Church's wings and is a result of patriarchy

This is far from comprehensive but it is the beginning point of beliefs I am often afraid of being known.

A close friend told me recently that my idea of God is based more on my feelings than truth. What bothered me most about this sentence was the utter dismissal of the research, bible study, and work that I have done. It implies that I treat God lightly and that more traditional beliefs don’t hold personal biases. These beliefs are not a result of fickleness, cherry picking, a lack of respect for the Word of God, or theological laziness but come from a genuine pursuit of theology, truth, and Christ. Christians often don’t realize that a whole score of ex-evangelicals shifted in their beliefs because they went to seminary.

I feel at times that I was born with my fists up, constantly ready to defend my beliefs. I know now that the world is not my enemy and neither is the Church - and I can begin to put my hands down.

I’m so so thankful that I have leaders and friends who see the inclusion of different Christians perspectives as valuable and not dangerous. I’m thankful for the life group members who ask hard questions, the CSMP friends who wanted to learn, and our willingness to grow no matter how uncomfortable.

The second thing I’ve been thinking about a lot this quarantine is Star Wars.

Star Wars is fascinating in the way it captures the humanity in its villains (Kylo Ren, Anakin) and the reality that sometimes there isn't a true bad guy. Christian movements sometimes feel the same to me. We are all blind to our own flaws and cling to our own truths. Adam Driver said in an interview about Star Wars last year that Kylo Ren wholeheartedly believes that he is the good guy in this story. We all believe we're the good guys in our story and maybe we all are - but we still leave a trail of destruction in the wake of our good intentions.

I had a dream last night about a film that takes the aspects of conflict between the Church, the World, and itself and turns it into a fantasy, space film. Sometimes, I sit in amazement at the world George Lucas created and the power Star Wars holds over our social imagination. And I think that that's what we need - we need a creative outlet that can help us make sense of our faith and the world.

There is far more complexity in each "side" than we know. Christian fundamentalists are not only their blindspots. They're people who cook food for their sick neighbors, pour out endless love in prayer, people who show up for you and comfort you in all things. I often don’t understand how someone can love their own community so deeply and yet inflict so much damage on others. But that is also true for every one of us. We all cause unimaginable pain and create more good than we can comprehend. And in the end, we’re all just marching on towards the same thing - all things restored, all things complete.

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tradcatmaria · 7 years ago

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I'm not sure if you've been asked this before, but I would like to know, what are your views on evolution in general? Micro-evolution? Young earth vs. old earth? All that good stuff. You also seem to be well read and I was wondering if you might have any books to recommend on the topic of the Bible and evolution. Thanks in advance! (Love your blog btw!)

Hello!

Awww thank you!

Read my earlier post on this topic first (It’s about what all Catholics must believe about creation, whether they are young Earth creationists, theistic evolutionists, or another kind of old Earth creationist. I also listed my favorite organizations and YouTube channels).

I am a young Earth creationist (YEC), meaning that I believe God created the whole world in six 24 hour days and the world is less than 10,000 years old (Well, there’s more to it than that, but that was a little summary. You can read more here.). I do not believe in evolution. As for micro-evolution, I’ll share this quote from Answers in Genesis, which is probably the most popular YEC organization: “God placed the potential for tremendous variety within the original created kinds. This original variation, altered by genetic mutations and other mechanisms after the Fall (such as natural selection), led to the great diversity of living things we see today” (Answers in Genesis).

I’m not an expert, but I love this topic so much, so I’ve been collecting a lot of books about it. This is what I’ve read:

1. I Have Spoken to You from Heaven: A Catholic Defense of Creation in Six Days by Hugh Owen with Mark Koehne and Gerard Keane

2. A Catholic Assessment of Evolution Theory by John M. Wynne

3. Twenty-Five Short Answers to Big Questions About Creation by Ian Taylor

4. YES: Young Earth Science and the Dawn of a New Worldview by Jay Hall

5. Biblical Creationism by Henry Morris

6. Six Days: The Age of the Earth and the Decline of the Church by Ken Ham

7. The Bible and the Age of the Earth by Bert Thompson, Ph.D.

I loved all of these books, but the first and second are my favorites because they’re Catholic and just great books overall (The first one is my favorite of the two.). The third one is nice because it’s short. The fourth one talks about creationism from a scientific angle and the fifth one is from a theological point of view. The sixth one is more about why we should be YEC and the seventh one uses both scientific and theological arguments.

You can buy great Catholic creation books from the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation. The Kolbe Center has a lot of amazing resources in general and strong apologetics, so be sure to check them out.

I hope this helps! God bless!

Ad Jesum per Mariam,

María de Fátima

#Anonymous

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academicatheism · 7 years ago

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How do you define a rational person? Can someone be partially rational or is this a yes or no thing? Can this be dependent on situation i.e. can someone be rational in a situation and not rational in another?

A rational person is someone who can reason to a degree; it’s not an all or nothing thing. Some people are logical and rational experts; others are adept but haven’t reached a level of expertise; others are novices.

Cognitive dissonance theory shows us that yes, you can be rational in one respect and not in others, and that you can be rational enough to draw the right conclusion and yet not see how that has consequences for other beliefs you may have. The theistic evolutionists comes to mind. They’re right to conclude that evolution has happened and does happen, but wrong in not seeing how that leads to obvious theological consequences: no first sinner, no sin, and no need for a savior from sin. It damns their whole theology and yet they seldom concede that.

A novice might be able to look at “everything happens for a reason” and debunk it, but won’t be able to identify statistical fallacies like Hoyle’s. They might even buy it! Someone more adept may be able to see that a junkyard tornado making a 747 out of junk is not analogous to the beginning of life on Earth, but they’ll fail to identify a more subtle argument from analogy that relies on a faulty analogy. An expert will be able to call out a fallacious analogy with no trouble at all.

#philosophy #logic #reason

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kabane52 · 7 years ago

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The Justice of the Judgment of God?

I received a very thoughtful question the other day, and I want to use it to take the opportunity to address this issue more broadly:

I really hope you will answer this for me. One of the reasons I rejected creationism and embraced evolutionism was that is allowed me to disregard the notion that God would drown millions of people, which of course would include children, and simple say that the flood story was allegory only with no basis in reality. But now that I have re-embraced creationism, what am I to do? And how do you handle verses where God commands the killing of entire peoples and the smashing of babies onto rocks?

I appreciate your question and the spirit in which it was written. I won’t be able to provide you with a knock-down open-and-shut answer. But I hope I can make some notes which assist in thinking about the problem. I will begin by questioning the capacity of theistic evolution to truly deal with this problem, and then I will close by commenting on the problem itself.

1. In some ways, I don’t know how the theistic evolutionist has any advantage over the creationist here. After all, even if one believes that every instance of judgment in the Bible is pure allegory, it remains a fact that there are many who suffer and die today, including those who suffer and die unjustly. Unless one wishes to radically transform one’s doctrine of God, one is going to have to account for this reality whether or not one thinks the biblical instances of judgment are historical. The Bible provides a complex picture of suffering, one which is in many cases an instance of judgment and in other cases is not. That complex picture remains in force today. God continues to judge the world.

2. Moreover, in some ways the theistic evolutionist makes the problem worse, in that there are millions of years of intense animal suffering and death even prior to the coming of man- thus, human responsibility cannot be appealed to, even indirectly. So while it might help to solve a problem one has over divine judgment in Scripture, it ultimately can provide no more absolute answers to the problem, and even worsens it in key respects.

3. Most theistic evolutionists limit their conception of pure allegory to Genesis 1-11, while acknowledging the basic historicity of the rest of the Bible. Even if the entire OT is dismissed, as is done by liberal evangelicals such as Peter Enns and Kenton Sparks, one still has to deal with the NT. As I have studied OT and NT together, it has impressed me how little of a gap there actually is. We often perceive a gap because we expect to perceive one. But there are many words of love, forgiveness, and loving one’s enemies throughout the OT, especially in the prophets and Proverbs. It is a myth that Gentiles are left out of the OT story- not only does one find righteous Gentiles and witness to the Gentiles at every point along the biblical story, but the conversion of the nations is a major aspect of the prophetic hope.

By the same token, the NT is filled with words of judgment. The Lord Jesus prophesied against Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, and in prophesying against Jerusalem, He drew upon the rich treasure of such language found in the OT- including language found in the Pentateuch and Joshua against the Canaanites. Jesus warned that Jerusalem would be destroyed like Jericho was destroyed. Not one stone left upon another. St. Paul repeats this warning throughout his epistles, and in my view, the Revelation of St. John (chapters 1-19) is about this as well, with Babylon the Great being Jerusalem, which is symbolically called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. (Revelation 11:8). So when we read historical accounts of what happened in AD 70, we understand from the New Testament that what occurred was brought by Jesus against those who had rebelled against Him. Over a million people came into Jerusalem for Passover, and then the Romans surrounded the city, locked them in, and torched the whole thing. Hundreds of thousands died, including women and children.

Now, my point in saying all this is not to say that the problem is also solved by its presence in the NT, but that it is impossible to isolate the problem and target small portions for allegorization. This is part of the biblical vision of God.

We do understand, however, that God is not wrathful in the same way that He is love. These are not ontologically equal. There is a sense in which judgment, not mercy, is God’s “strange work.” This is because everything of who and what God is has been eternally manifested within the life of the Trinity. The creation of the world is so that this world might be incorporated into the eternal life of the Trinity. And God has certainly not been wrathful towards the other Divine Persons. So what, theologically, does one say about God’s wrath? We say that God’s wrath is not a timeless energy of God in the sense that God’s love, faithfulness and mercy are timeless energies. Instead, we understand that the wrath of God is a real, but contingent expression of the divine energies that is always and everywhere directed towards love of the creation. Even the eternal exile of Satan and the damned from the kingdom of God is for the sake of the perfection and beauty of the creation- no unclean thing may enter it.

Now, as far as the problem itself goes. Again, I do not claim to have neatly solved the issue. It is an issue I continue to meditate on. And it’s important to keep in mind that while we must affirm that every action of God in Scripture is just, we do not have to assert that we know in what way every action of God in Scripture is just. There is no shame in saying “I don’t know how to understand this action of God, but I trust that there is a reason. This is part of the biblical understanding of faith- faith not understood as blind belief in the face of evidence, but faith in the sense that God has established Himself as trustworthy by His faithfulness to us and to the world in His Son, so that we trust His goodness even when we do not fully understand it. While I do not claim to have perfectly solved this problem, I believe we can make notes that lessen its force and point us to a solution.

1. To begin with the conquest of Canaan. We have to understand what Ezekiel said: Israel is in the center of the world. This was true in both a symbolic, liturgical sense (the temple is the joy of the whole earth) but also in a literal, cultural sense: the land of Israel was at the commercial center of the ancient world, and trade routes from across the international order would converge there. This was done so that Israel might function as light of the world. And while Israel was unfaithful for much of its history, Israel did fulfill that calling in important ways. The alliances of David and Solomon with the surrounding nations seeded them with cultural knowledge and developments which were essential for creating the world as it stood at the time of Christ. I have discussed this in more detail in my article here. What this means is that the culture existing in the land of Israel is the culture which would flow out and impact the rest of the world. What God told Noah in Genesis 9 is that He would never again destroy the world by flood, but He would cut the sin of man off from its youth. He then gives Noah the authority to carry out the death penalty in order to preserve the social order from widespread decay, and Noah prophesies the death penalty for the Canaanites at the end of Genesis 9- but in Genesis 15, we are told that the Canaanites have not yet reached the full measure of their iniquity. Not yet, God says. I will say more about this aspect below.

When God does carry out the death penalty against Canaan, it is even then for the sake of the world. Because Canaan was at the center of the world, its culture would flow out to the rest of the world. In other words, the disease is contagious, as it was before the Flood. And if the contagion was left in Canaan, the entire world would have been corrupted and cursed- perpetuating the creation-destroying impact of sin. Instead of leaving Canaan be, God annihilated Canaan and put Israel there instead. In so doing, God pushed blessing into the world rather than curse, molding and shaping the nations so that they would be fully prepared and primed for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

2. God not only announced what He was going to do to Canaan, but offered a chance for salvation. This is a major part of the story of the patriarchal narratives. When we are told that Abram set up altars and “called out the Name of the Lord”, this includes a prophetic ministry of evangelization. Indeed, the patriarchal period is the third, prophetic stage of the Noahic world- just as the period after the return from Babylon is the third, prophetic stage of the Mosaic world. This is why there are so many similarities between the two periods- for example, Daniel is a New Joseph who is cast into a pit but elevated to the right hand of the king. Umberto Cassuto points out that Genesis 12 does not refer to people whom Abram purchased in Haran- but rather refers to souls whom Abram “made” in Haran. Thus, in Genesis 14, Abram has 318 fighting men, probably around 3,000 men total. That is why, after all, the king of Egypt asked to see Abram when he entered. Abram was no wandering nomad. He was a prince. And he was carrying out missionary work in the land- God reveals Himself to Philistines in Genesis 20, and the Philistines convert and are blessed. The same is true of Jacob in Shechem. The Shechemites decide to become circumcised and part of the family- that is why Simeon and Levi’s murder of Shechem is so utterly wicked. Jacob tells them it made him a “stench” to the people of the land, destroying his effort to minister to the Gentiles.

But that’s not the last word in Genesis: Jacob had become a stench, but Joseph is taken to Egypt in an incense caravan. And Pharaoh makes him his right-hand man and proclaims that the “Spirit of Holy God” is in him- not “the spirit of the holy gods” as some translations falsely render it. All the nations flow to Egypt to receive food from Joseph. So when we hear that the iniquities of the Canaanites were not yet full in Genesis 15, that doesn’t mean that God is sitting, waiting for them to make enough rope to hang themselves with. Rather, there are loads of Canaanites who are still righteous and attach themselves to Abraham’s family. The same happens at the exodus- God says to Pharaoh that He brings plagues so that “my name might be made known in all the Earth”, and when the exodus happens, a “mixed multitude” comes out with Israel- all are circumcised together in Joshua 5. And then in Joshua itself, we still see some Canaanites converting. The story of Rahab the Canaanite is linked with the story of Achan the Israelite- Rahab, a prostitute, is given restored tokens of virginity in the scarlet thread (this isn’t just a guess, this is a big theme which I will explain another time) and given an inheritance in Israel- a lifetime of sins are washed away by one act of repentance. This is the merciful God. And Achan is punished the same way the Canaanites are. It shows that God is no respecter of persons. The Gibeonites craftily avoid the herem by deception- but this is not wicked. This is how far they were willing to go to become part of the covenant- compare how the Canaanite woman craftily debated Jesus about food from the master’s table, and was blessed. The Gibeonites were given the high honor of serving the Lord’s house.

I know you asked about the flood. So why am I going on about this? I’m going on about it is because I feel that part of the problem people have with this issue is that they perceive that the God of the Old Testament is acting arbitrarily and nationalistically. That is, He kills the Canaanites because they are Canaanites and not Israelites. They never had a chance. But the OT teaches the opposite throughout. God gave them chance after chance. When Rahab saves the spies, she does so because she has heard of the mighty works of God in Egypt. Everybody had heard what happened to Egypt. It had utterly collapsed. They knew, as Pharaoh’s counselors did, that this was the finger of God. And they still raised their blade against Him. What the story of Rahab shows is that they could have been blessed and brought into the family with a moment’s repentance. Throughout the Scriptures, repentance is signified by dust and ashes- symbolic death. So indeed, all Canaanites would have to die. But some would die by repentance. Others by the sword. I suspect that there were other Canaanites, whose stories are not told, who converted as well.

3. One thing which unites the story of the Flood and the story of the conquest of Canaan is the theme of the Nephilim giants. In the Scriptures as I understand them, a Nephilim is a human being ritually consecrated to the service of Satan- Satan possesses them through his demons and grants them superhuman strength. Such strength is a feature of demonic possession in Scripture and in the modern world. Genesis 6 calls them “mighty men”, a word which refers to conquest in Scripture. The house of Seth feared the military might of the sons of Cain, and they became even worse by allying with the Devil. They gained the world, but lost their soul. In 1 Samuel 16-17, David first fights off an evil spirit tormenting Saul with his harp, then fights off the Nephilim Goliath- according to Joshua 11:22, there were Nephilim-giants in Gath. David’s fight is not merely against flesh and blood- but against the rulers and authorities, against the cosmic powers of that dark age. This links closely demonic torment with the Nephilim.

Likewise, when Israel fears entering the land, whom do they fear? They fear the Nephilim:

(Numbers 13:33) And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them."

Michael Heiser has made a very interesting point. He has pointed out that if you track the places where Israel is commanded to destroy all people- men, women, and children, it is only in those places where there are Nephilim. See his book The Unseen Realm for the detailed proof of this. I believe this goes some way in helping to illumine this problem. Those people whom Israel destroyed were those who were ritually consecrated to the Devil. I am not claiming that this solves entirely the problem, but that it sheds critical light on what precisely was going on. The same narrative of the coming of the Nephilim immediately precedes the annunciation of the Flood in Genesis 6:1-4.

4. We are told in Exodus 23:28 that God sent swarms of hornets ahead of Israel into Canaan. Now, if you lived in an ancient house, there wasn’t any closing of your windows. If there were swarms of hornets ravaging the land, you leave. This is especially so if you actually care about your family. We can conclude from this that the vast majority of people who were left were those who were there solely to attack the God of Israel and His people- or who were there because they were kept there by others. We simply are not told enough about the world before the flood to know precisely what did happen. We do know that Enoch carried out a prophetic ministry, one that is compared to Elijah’s- and one thing Elijah did is to gather a righteous remnant from an apostate culture- a remnant which was viciously persecuted by the apostates. Understanding that God works typologically, I strongly suspect that this happened before the Flood.

5. As Peter Leithart points out, when the typology of the conquest is used in Isaiah, it is a typology of liberation. The Second Joshua enters the land proclaiming liberty for the captives- He comes to destroy their oppressors. When we come to the Book of Joshua, we find, as noted above, that the real targets are those places with Nephilim- and also that most or all of the cities targeted are military fortress cities. The swarms of hornets that had been buzzing about for forty years undoubtedly would have driven much of the civilian population out as well, leaving a largely military presence and culture. And then we do find Gentiles converting in Joshua itself! Moreover, Gentile conversion is a major theme of the Book of Judges. The story of Judges opens with the Kenite Gentiles acquiring an inheritance through the Tribe of Judah, after which we are told that Othniel won a spring of water for his bride- and then we hear about the city of palms. That is an allusion to Exodus 15, where Israel comes to a place with twelve springs and seventy palms- twelve tribes of Israel water the seventy nations of the world. So the entire goal of the conquest of Canaan is to create a priestly nation at the heart of the ancient world who will provide light to the Gentiles.

I understand that your question was principally about the Flood, and I apologize if you feel that I did not deal with that directly enough. But the reason I focused so much energy on Joshua was because Genesis 1-11 is written in highly condensed narrative. There are many details that we are not told. But the language and context of the flood is applied extensively to the conquest of Canaan- for example, God’s decision to wipe out everything “in which is the breath of life” becomes God’s command to Israel to destroy “everything that breathes.” We ought to therefore understand that the way in which God fought against the Canaanites reveals the way He judges in general- including that supreme judgment on the “world that then was” in the Flood. The principal lesson I want people to understand about all of this is that whatever ethical problems one might have with the God of the Bible, He is not a respecter of persons. Not in the New Testament. And not in the Old Testament. God judges and blesses without regard to their nationality- if Israel behaved like Canaan, they would be destroyed just as Canaan.

As an addendum, I have found this article stimulating as well, and I appreciate its understanding of the depth and complexity of the problem:

https://alastairadversaria.com/2012/02/09/is-yhwh-a-war-criminal/

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whatisonthemoonarchive · 8 years ago

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DNA proves the existence of a Creative Superintelligence

It seems that many who have rejected Moon have gone on to reject the Bible as well. Without study of the ancient history and languages of the scriptures it is sometimes difficult to make sense of the Book of Genesis and other parts of the Bible. And even Bible scholars recognize the existence of flaws (such as contradictions and anachronisms) in the Bible. Based on the flaws of religion, religious leaders such as Moon and religious teachings, some turn to Darwinian materialism and reject the existence of a Creator altogether. But that would be a mistake.

Most arguments about evolution and intelligent design offer only anecdotal evidence and are inherently incapable of actually proving anything. We must get better evidence in order to get to the bottom of this! Fortunately, the science of modern communications easily provides us with the tools we need to get answers. Although the details are complex, the concepts are easily grasped by anyone with a high school education.

Patterns occur naturally – no help required from a ‘designer’. Many patterns occur in nature without the help of a designer – snowflakes, tornados, hurricanes, sand dunes, stalactites, rivers and ocean waves. These patterns are the natural result of what scientists categorize as chaos and fractals. These things are well-understood and we experience them every day.

Codes, however, do not occur without a designer. Examples of symbolic codes include music, blueprints, languages like English and Chinese, computer programs, and yes, DNA. The essential distinction is the difference between a pattern and a code. Chaos can produce patterns, but it has never been shown to produce codes or symbols. Codes and symbols store information, which is not a property of matter and energy alone. Information itself is a separate entity on par with matter and energy.

Proof that DNA was designed by a mind:

(1) DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code, a language, and an information storage mechanism.

(2) All codes we know the origin of are created by a conscious mind.

(3) Therefore DNA was designed by a mind, and language and information are proof of the action of a Superintelligence.**

Natural Selection is perfectly valid and has been proven time and time again. But most people will be very surprised to discover that no one has ever actually demonstrated that random mutation can create new information*. Information theory shows us why this is so: In communication systems, Random Mutation is exactly the same as noise, and noise always destroys the signal, never enhances it. In communication systems this is called information entropy, and the formula for information entropy is exactly the same as thermodynamic entropy. Once lost, the information can never be recovered, much less enhanced. Thus we can be 100% certain that random mutation is not the source of biodiversity.

This observation is also confirmed biologically by Theodosius Dobzhansky’s fruit fly radiation experiments, Goldschmidt’s gypsy moth experiments, and others. Decades of research were conducted in the early 20 th century, bombarding fruit flies and moths with radiation in hope of mutating their DNA and producing improved creatures. These experiments were a total failure – there were no observed improvements – only weak, sickly, deformed fruit flies.

We have proof that life on planet earth was designed by a mind – and that if life did evolve, the capacity to evolve had to be designed in. The word “Evolution” in the English language always refers to an intelligent process (in business, society, technology etc.) and the only usage in which it allegedly doesn’t is naturalistic Darwinian evolution. But communication theory shows us that Evolution by Random Process is a hypothesis without proof.

Finally this presentation concludes with a brief observation: There is an interesting correspondence between Judeo-Christian theology and modern information theory, the statement words and language are the essence of creation: “And God said… In the beginning was the WORD;” that the worlds were spoken into existence. http://cosmicfingerprints.com/read-prove-god-exists/

*In The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins claimed that a Darwinian process can create meaningful information, such as Hamlet’s phrase, “Methinks it is like a weasel.” Whereas it is very improbable to hit upon this sequence of letters all at one time, Dawkins attempted to show that the Darwinian step-by-step process could do it by taking advantage of small “mutations,” preserving the advantageous changes and getting rid of the unhelpful ones. And in this way such a process could eek toward the meaningful Shakespearian sentence. As Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt note in their new book, A Meaningful World,

'Dawkins is trying to demonstrate that in assessing the powers of chance to produce a living being or a complex organ, evolutionists are not claiming that, say, a functional grackle’s wing pops into existence in one fell swoop. Rather, evolution always works by cumulative steps, building slowly to the goal through a long series of functional intermediates.'

And in this way, Dawkins moves from a meaningless string of letters to the phrase “Methinks it is like a weasel.” But, as Wiker and Witt show, Dawkins’s experiment fails on at least two accounts. First, the process is not blind. That is, Dawkins programmed the computer with a target sequence of “Methinks it is like a weasel.” According to Darwinists, nature has no such goal. So the analogy is faulty. According to A Meaningful World, “The program mimics guided or teleological evolution, not Darwinian evolution.”

Second, “the functional intermediates aren’t functional.” For instance, even the starting sequence of WDLMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P does not have a function. Something truly mimicking Darwinian evolution would begin with a meaningful sentence and attempt to move to another meaningful sentence and maintain some sort of meaning (function) all along the way. “[A]ll nonsense strings would be eliminated as gibberish, only to be followed by another random go at the whole string on the next try.” https://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/11/random_mutation_generator/

**We can explore five possible conclusions:

1) Humans designed DNA 2) Aliens designed DNA 3) DNA occurred randomly and spontaneously 4) There must be some undiscovered law of physics that creates information 5) DNA was Designed by a Superintelligence, i.e. God

(1) requires time travel or infinite generations of humans. (2) could well be true but only pushes the question back in time. (3) may be a remote possibility, but it’s not a scientific explanation in that it doesn’t refer to a systematic, repeatable process. It’s nothing more than an appeal to luck . (4) could be true but no one can form a testable hypothesis until someone observes a naturally occurring code. So the only systematic explanation that remains is (5) a theological one. To the extent that scientific reasoning can prove anything, DNA is proof of a designer.

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mcdouglecompany-blog · 5 years ago

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The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design by Jonathan Wells. ACU Sunday Series.

This ACU Show consists of Chapters 1 and 2 and serves as an introduction to this fine book. You can purchase the book or audiobook at

https://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Darwinism-Intelligent-Design/dp/1596980133/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design by Jonathan Wells

Why Darwinism—like Marxism and Freudianism before it—is headed for extinction In the 1925 Scopes trial, the American Civil Liberties Union sued to allow the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools. Seventy-five years later, in Kitzmiller v. Dover, the ACLU sued to prevent the teaching of an alternative to Darwin’s theory known as "Intelligent Design"—and won. Why did the ACLU turn from defending the free-speech rights of Darwinists to silencing their opponents? Jonathan Wells reveals that, for today’s Darwinists, there may be no other choice: unable to fend off growing challenges from scientists, or to compete with rival theories better adapted to the latest evidence, Darwinism—like Marxism and Freudianism before it—is simply unfit to survive. Wells begins by explaining the basic tenets of Darwinism, and the evidence both for and against it. He reveals, for instance, that the fossil record, which according to Darwin should be teeming with "transitional" fossils showing the development of one species to the next, so far hasn’t produced a single incontestable example. On the other hand, certain well-documented aspects of the fossil record—such as the Cambrian explosion, in which innumerable new species suddenly appeared fully formed—directly contradict Darwin’s theory. Wells also shows how most of the other "evidence" for evolution— including textbook "icons" such as peppered moths, Darwin’s finches, Haeckel’s embryos, and the Tree of Life—has been exaggerated, distorted . . . and even faked. Wells then turns to the theory of intelligent design (ID), the idea that some features of the natural world, such as the internal machinery of cells, are too "irreducibly complex" to have resulted from unguided natural processes alone. In clear-cut layman’s language, he reveals the growing evidence for ID coming out of scientific specialties from microbiology to astrophysics. As Wells explains, religion does play a role in the debate over Darwin—though not in the way evolutionists claim. Wells shows how Darwin reasoned that evolution is true because divine creation "must" be false—a theological assumption oddly out of place in a scientific debate. In other words, Darwinists’ materialistic, atheistic assumptions rule out any theories but their own, and account for their willingness to explain away the evidence—or lack of it. Darwin is an emperor who has no clothes— but it takes a brave man to say so. Jonathan Wells, a microbiologist with two Ph.D.s (from Berkeley and Yale), is that brave man. Most textbooks on evolution are written by Darwinists with an ideological ax to grind. Brave dissidents—qualified scientists—who try to teach or write about intelligent design are silenced and sent to the academic gulag. But fear not: Jonathan Wells is a liberator. He unmasks the truth about Darwinism— why it is wrong and what the real evidence is. He also supplies a revealing list of "Books You’re Not Supposed to Read" (as far as the Darwinists are concerned) and puts at your fingertips all the evidence you need to challenge the most closed-minded Darwinist.

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blakewooley57-blog · 7 years ago

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jameshboyd · 7 years ago

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Think! Loving God With Your Mind

"Wise men store up knowledge..." Proverbs 10:14a "...I do not feel obligated to believe that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge that we can attain by them." Galileo (1) A key point in the history of western civilization was when philosopher Rene' Descartes issued his famous maxim "I think, I am." In this statement, Descartes basically founded the secular movement by stating that the sole basis for our existence is the ability to think and reason. As we shall see, the ability to think is vitally important, but it is a means to a greater end: to know and glorify the God who created us. Unfortunately, Descartes' logic has been used to create a false tension between natural reason and supernatural faith, and this tension has eroded the very foundations our society was built upon. History is loaded with examples of how Christianity, as an intellectual influence, has shaped the very world we live in. The Bible has inspired some of the greatest art (such as Da Vinci's "The Last Supper") and music (such as Bach's "Passion of St. Matthew," and Handel's "Messiah") ever produced. Some of our greatest colleges and universities were originally based on strong Christian foundations and specialized in training ministers. Our school children were once educated by McGuffey readers which relied heavily on Biblical themes. Yet today, the term "Christian" is often synonymous with ignorance and anti-intellectualism. What happened? In the words of the great Christian philosopher Francis Shaeffer: "To understand where we are in today's world-in our intellectual ideas and in our cultural and political lives-we must trace three lines in history, namely, the philosophic, the scientific and the religious. The philosophic seeks intellectual answers to the basic questions of life. The scientific has two parts: first, the makeup of the physical universe and the practical application of what it discovers in technology. The direction in which science will move is set by the philosophic world view of the scientists. People's religious views also determine the direction of their individual lives and of their society (2)." Shaeffer's timely words remind us that the Christian world view encompasses all of life and requires the ability to think clearly and analytically. The fact is, the Bible was written by thinking people, for thinking people. Throughout its pages, the desire for knowledge is a constant theme (Proverbs 24:5; 1Kings 3:9; Hosea 4:6). In fact, one of the key ways we are to love God is with our mind (Matthew 22:37). This is reflected in the lives of many prominent biblical figures. For example, both Moses and Daniel were well schooled in the educational systems of their day (Daniel 1:4; Acts 7:22). Mighty King David, Israel’s greatest monarch, was a military genius (1 Samuel 18:7) as well as a master musician (1 Samuel 16:18). King Solomon, known for his tremendous wisdom, also possessed a massive knowledge of many different subjects, such as agriculture and wildlife (1 Kings 4: 30-34). The Apostle Paul, who wrote roughly two-thirds of the New Testament, was trained by the brilliant Hebrew scholar Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). Furthermore, in 1 Timothy 4:13, Paul reminds his friend Timothy to "give attendance to reading" and later instructs Timothy to bring him some books that he had left behind (2 Timothy 4:13). This would indicate that reading was a high priority to the great apostle. In the words of Charles Spurgeon: "The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. Brethren, what is true of ministers is true of all people. You need to read ... Paul cries, 'Bring the books' -- join in the cry (3)." Given Christianity's strong emphasis on learning and education, it seems ironic that they are often seen as enemies. At the root of the controversy has been the issue of Charles Darwin's theories of evolution, as set forth in his book The Origin of Species. Obviously, the notion that humans evolved from lower life forms did challenge the notion of a Divine Creator (although contrary to popular belief, Darwin did not teach that humans evolved from apes, but rather that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor). In order to place Mr. Darwin’s theories in context, it is important to examine not only the ideas themselves, but also the attitude in which they were presented. For those who wish to dismiss those of us who do believe in a creator God as being "intolerant" or "narrow minded," keep in mind that some of the key battle lines were drawn by Darwin himself: "He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation..." (4) In prior generations, science was generally considered a study of God’s handiwork in creation. Is this irrational? It is interesting to note that the Holy Scriptures describe many natural phenomena thousands of years before they were discovered by modern science. For example, the Bible tells us that...

The earth is round (Isaiah 40:22),

The sea contains mountains and canyons (2 Samuel 22:16),

The elements of human life are found in the blood (Leviticus 17:11),

It also describes he water cycle (Psalm 135:7), and

...the deterioration of matter, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Psalm 102:26; Hebrews 1:10-12).

Could it be that the Bible is more up-to-date than we have ever begun to imagine? Of course, to acknowledge this would also mean to acknowledge the truth of an all-knowing, all-powerful God who holds us accountable to an absolute moral standard. Darwin's ideas gave intellectual justification to those who wanted to reject this notion. In fact, Sir Julian Huxley, a famous evolutionist and a descendant of Darwin's close ally, Thomas Huxley, openly admitted that that "...the reason we lept at The Origin of Species was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores (5)." Much of the tension between science and faith stems not from the Bible itself, but from traditions that have been added to it over the years. Galileo understood this: "...the holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word, the former as the dictate of the Holy Ghost and the latter as the observant executrix of God’s commands (6)." When addressing the science vs. religion issues, it is important to keep two important questions in mind: 1. What is the precise teaching of Scripture, as opposed to simply being common religious dogma? and 2. What is proven scientific fact, as opposed to being mere theory. Admittedly, both sides of the debate have often neglected these two precepts. By doing so, much unnecessary tension has been created between the scientific and theological communities. Unfortunately, many scientists attack belief in God as being "irrational" or "superstitious." However, to do this demeans some of the greatest scientific minds in history. In addition to Galileo, luminaries such as Newton, Keplar, Pascal, Mendel, Pasteur and countless others were all believers in a Creator. Would even the most militant athiest call these great scientists "irrational?" When the term "Creationism" is used, it is usually identified with those who believe that the Earth was created between 6000 and 10,000 years ago (7), but this is hardly a fair representation. Creationism is a larger and more diverse school of thought than many have been led to believe. In fact, there are a number of opinions among orthodox Christians as to how and when creation took place. For example, one of these theories is called "Progressive Creationism," which points out that the Hebrew word for "day" (as in "on the first day God created...") can also refer to longer time periods, thus allowing for the Earth to be billions of years old (8). Another is called the "Gap Theory" which teaches that there was a time gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, which could also be a span of billions of years (9). The key question is, when God said "Let there be..." what processes did this set into motion? That being said, I do interpret the Book of Genesis literally (as Jesus did, see Matthew 19:4), and I do believe that it gives a perfectly accurate overview of how the universe came into existence. However, this does not mean that it records every minute detail of how creation occurred (to do so would obviously fill countless libraries). In my opinion, this leaves open a wide range of possibilities. Although an explanation of my own views of these issues is beyond the scope of this work, I will simply say that the truth of the Book of Genesis does not stand or fall based on the age of the Earth. To paraphrase William Jennings Bryan, "Be concerned with the Rock of Ages, not the age of rocks." The same could be said about the theory of evolution itself. At its core, the word "evolution" simply means "to change over a period of time." No reasonable person would dispute that this occurs. It is important to note that there is a large difference between microevolution. and macroevolution. The former simply refers to evolution within species. Obviously, we see new breeds of dogs and cats, as well as new strains of vegetables and flowers. Bacteria and viruses mutate and become more resistant to medicine. This is of no consequence to religious faith at all, and I do not know of any Creationist who would argue otherwise. The latter refers to evolution from one species into another, which is a bit trickier. Contrary to popular belief, this idea is not universally accepted within the scientific world (10). The numerous missing links in the evolutionary ladder cannot be overlooked. In the ladder itself, several "rungs" are of questionable origin and some (such as Piltdown Man ) have been shown to be blatant hoaxes. In light of these facts, I would like to quote from a statement signed by over eight hundred British scientists, and is recorded at the Bodelian Library in Oxford, England: "We, the undersigned, Students of the Natural Sciences, desire to express our sincere regret that researchers into scientific truth are perverted by some in our own times into occasion for casting doubt upon the truth and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures. We conceive that it is impossible for the Word of God written in the book of nature, and God’s Word written in Holy Scripture, to contradict one another...physical science is not complete, but is only a condition of progress (4)." We will conclude our study as we began it, by revisiting Descartes. I recently heard a joke in which Descartes walked into a bar. The bartender asked him if he would like a drink. Descartes replied "I think not," and disappeared! This humorous illustration shows us how far our human wisdom will ultimately take us. In the words of noted Theologian J.I. Packer: "Man's mind becomes free only when its thoughts are brought into captivity to Christ and His Word; till then, it is at the mercy of sinful prejudice and dishonest mental habits within, and of popular opinion, organized propaganda and unquestioned commonplaces without. Tossed about by every wing of intellectual fashion and carried to and fro by the cross-currents of reaction, man without God is not free for truth; he is for ever mastered by the things he takes for granted, the victim of a hopeless and everlasting relativism." This, my friends, is where it all starts. The whole of God's glorious creation was intended to reveal His nature to us: "...the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can't see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being" (Romans 1:20, The Message Bible)(13). If you do not yet have a relationship with God, open your heart to Him right now. You'll be glad you did! (14) NOTES & BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1.Galilei, Galileo. "Letter to Christina of Tuscany: Science and Scripture." Quoted in Sherman, Dennis. Western Civilization: Sources, Images and Interpretations, Volume II: Since 1660. Sixth Edition. 2004, 2000, 1995. McGraw-Hill, New York, New York. p. 18. 2. Shaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 1976, Fleming H. Revell Company. P.20 3. C.H. Spurgeon (Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Vol. 9, 1863, sermon #542, p. 668) Quoted in"Thinkman's Thoughtful Words on Books" http://ift.tt/2v9h7EU 4. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man. New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1883. pp 606-607,619. Quoted in Sherman, Dennis. Western Civilization: Sources, Images and Interpretations, Volume II: Since 1660. Sixth Edition. 2004, 2000, 1995. McGraw-Hill, New York, New York. p 130. 5. Morris, Henry M. The Troubled Waters of Evolution. 1974, Creation-Life Publishers, San Diego, California. p. 58. Quoted in Why I Believe by D. James Kennedy.1980, Word, Inc.Dallas, London, Vancouver, Melbourne. p. 52. 6. Galileo, p.18. 7.For more on the Young Earth Theory, see answersingenesis.org 8. Progressive Creationism is explained at length at reasons.org 9. For a detailed explanation of the Gap Theory, see the writings of Finis Dake, C.I. Schofield and A.W. Pink 10. For an extensive list of scientist who accept the Biblical creation account, see http://ift.tt/2v95nCj 11. Quoted in Dake, Finis Jennings. God’s Plan For Man. 1949, copyright renewed 1977. Dake Bible Sales, Lawrenceville, Georgia. p. 20. 12. Packer, J.I. "'Fundamentalism' and the Word of God." First edition: 1958. Eerdman's Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan. p 143. 13. Peterson, Eugene H. The Message New Testament. 1993. Navpress. Colorado Springs, Colorado. p. 359. 14. If you need more information on a relationship with Jesus, see http://ift.tt/2vrYWww . © 2005 JHB from Blogger http://ift.tt/2v9an9R

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