Reasonings

Something I’ve Never Understood About Darwinism

The idea that the evolution of life was driven by a will to survive seems odd to me.  There is definitely a sense of progression towards more complex, more sophisticated forms of life, but does complex always mean better adapted or better able to survive?

I mean, really, if evolution operates according to the principle of bettering survival, why didn’t it stop with, say, bacteria, which seem to be surviving just fine?  Or even more complex organisms - algae, fungi, arthropods, rats, fish - are all quite well adapted and thriving.  That is, to say, as one ascends the ladder of evolution from simple to complex, one does not find anything like an increase in survivability.

This is the conundrum of The Spider and the Starfish.  Business organizations, according to this book, should consider operating more like a starfish, which is simpler, has more redundancy, and is hence much harder to kill and has a far easier time spreading.  The spider, on the other hand, being a highly centralized organism, is crippled by the loss of a limb and destroyed by the loss of its head.  Well, when you put it like that…

The trouble with this metaphor is that the spider does a lot more than a starfish.  If you want to be able to build a web, you need differentiated parts working together to achieve a coordinated end.

Getting back to evolution, we are fully aware that the spider is a more complex organism than the starfish.  Yet, the starfish is better at proliferating and surviving.  So in what sense is the spider more “fit” than the starfish?  It’s more interesting, certainly.  It can do more.  But who cares?  If the whole goal of evolution, insofar as a blind process can be said to have a “goal,” is the improvement of survival, there is no reason for a spider to evolve when much simpler organisms can and do survive as well - if not far better.

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I Just Love…

Using logic to prove the limits of logic.

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What a Lot of Theological Arguments Seem to Come Down To…

“It’s all about theology,” said the Bible professor.

“No, it’s all about relationships,” said the excitable youth minister.

“No, it’s all about spiritual disciplines,” said the contemplative pastor.

“No, no, it’s all about what you actually do,” said the volunteer.

“No, it’s all mission, about having a purpose,” said the goal-directed Type A personality.

“No, it’s all about what God did for us,” said the struggling sinner.

I would suggest God isn’t interested in having us all have identical personalities, gifts, talents, and struggles - that one person’s way of looking at things is the most important.  God separated these things into different people, the same way he separated sky and sea, light and dark, land and ocean.  That separation was an act of creation, and its result was good.  Before, everything was the same - “formless and void.”  God breathed difference into the world - contrast, separation - and things suddenly got more interesting.

The fight for unity should be not become a fight for sameness, that is, entropy, eradicating what God created.  The same way he made people male and female, he made people have different kinds of personalities and gifts — and not equally proportioned either.  (Is it unfair?  A useless question.)  We should join together as parts of a body, not as bricks in a wall, or drops in an ocean.

Said the cynical intellectual-type person.

General disclaimer - These thoughts are not fully formed.  Please let me know if something seems off or not right, and I’ll do what I can to correct.  Wisdom from God is “open to reason,” says James.

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“I Thought We All Were Children of God”

“I thought we all were children of God.”
- Esmerelda, as sung by Demi Moore in Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame

I find myself, lately, doubting Esmerelda’s point here.  What if she’s wrong?  What if we really aren’t all children of God?  What then?

It would certainly make the Bible make 70 jillion times more sense if it weren’t true.  It would make LIFE make 70 jillion times more sense.  I believe a lot of well-meaning Christians have a tendency to box God in to the idea of an earthly parent - tremendously loving in a self-sacrificial way, willing to discipline if necessary, but not a whole lot else.  There’s no place in this view of God for hell, weeping and gnashing of teeth, plagues, wars, justice, or for that matter… anything really awful happening to anyone at any time ever.

You only have to look at the world for 2 seconds to realize that a lot of awful things happen, with nary an apparent reason for the vast majority of them.  The God of the Bible never ignores this, never pretends like it doesn’t happen.  We can repeat Romans 8:28a (very a) to ourselves over and over, but it doesn’t make the image of God so vividly portrayed in books like Job and Revelation any less there.

Reading Revelation for the first time without bothering about the “meaning” of the images was a, well, revelatory experience for me.  The God pictured in this book looks very little like the love-and-love-alone God often depicted in the world of evangelical Christianity or its offshoots - this is a God of absolute power, majesty, and authority (and transcribed by the “apostle of love” no less!), whose will is perfect and just, while at the same time being terrible and fearful to behold.

Consider Revelation 16:4-7.  God’s angels are pouring out bowls of wrath in the world, the third of which turns rivers to blood.  I’m pretty sure some level of unpleasantness was intended to ensue from this.  And how do the angels and saints at the altar reply?  “Yes, Lord God Almighty, true and just are your judgments.”  How would we have responded?  I’m pretty sure I, being as squeamish as I am, would have thought something like “Aw, gee, God, are you sure that was necessary?”

It seems to me “God-as-parent” is not a big enough picture to hold this kind of revelation.  We need God as supreme sovereign and creator, absolute in power and holiness.  We need God as lawgiver and law-enforcer, the God of the whirlwind - God as warrior, even - for any of this not to jar our brains when we read it.

Dr. Fortner, a professor at Harding University, used to say “God is not your buddy.  God will eat your face,” which is a rather over-provocative and blunt way of expressing what I believe to be a profound truth that we often miss.

What’s more, I don’t believe we understand the magnitude and amazingness of God’s grace and love until we first understand God’s authority and justice.  After all, apart from justice, mercy is completely meaningless.  If we don’t deserve God’s love, if God is under no obligation whatsoever to love and care for us, and yet he does - and profoundly, deeply, self-sacrificially so, to the point of death on a cross - how much more astonishing is that?  How much more grateful would we be?  The one who has been forgiven much, loves much, after all.

The important passage here, I believe is, Romans 8, particularly verses 14-17.  There are a couple of points to make here.  First, clearly humanity does not start as “sons of God,” and not everyone gets to claim that title.  That relationship is not a natural result of God’s having created us that we are owed somehow - it is a product of grace, a gift from God that we don’t deserve at all.  Yet, he gives to those who are led by the Spirit.  The Spirit testifies for us that we are God’s children.  So, for those of us in the Spirit, we CAN look to God as our father, and praise God that we can!  We surely don’t deserve it.

And this also helps us not let the metaphor of God-as-parent allow subtle lies to leech into our understanding.  An earthly parent’s love for his or her child is a beautiful thing.  But if a parent does NOT love his child, the parent is a pariah.  Earthly parents have an obligation to love their children.  God is under no obligation to anything or anyone at all.  The very idea of “obliging” God is complete nonsense.

God is supreme, sovereign, holy, and just.  I would suggest that if we understand this first, then God’s love and mercy become all the more amazing, all the more powerful.

General disclaimer - These thoughts are not fully formed.  Please let me know if something seems off or not right, and I’ll do what I can to correct.  Wisdom from God is “open to reason,” says James.

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On Sharing Thoughts

I haven’t been posting much here, but it hasn’t been because I haven’t had thoughts to share.  I’ve just become less convinced that my theological and political reasonings, combative as they are, are of any use to anyone.  I don’t enjoy getting into arguments, but nor do I enjoy letting things that seem terribly wrong slide by uncontested.  Nor do I want to give the impression that I am not “open to reason,” as James describes true wisdom.

Therefore, I think it would be healthy for me and possibly useful to others to express, once again, my thoughts here, with the understanding that these things are still being worked out.  This is a blog, after all, not a compendium of finalized conclusions (even if I write as though they are sometimes).

At a recent Bible study I shared some thoughts that I had been keeping bottled up for a while, and folks seemed to appreciate them - even jotting a note down or two.  So expect some reasonings - unfinished, tentative, “open to reason,” but at the very least, there.

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This is Hilarious

John Cleese explains genetic determinism.

Hat tip to Uncommon Descent.

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“Your Faith Has”

I did a quick search over on BibleGateway.com for the phrase “your faith has” and found 8 entries from Matthew to Luke, all directed by Jesus towards someone who has just come to him for healing or forgiveness and received it.

“Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.”

“Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

“Recover your sight; your faith has made you well.”

I don’t believe this language is merely a cultural idiosyncracy or a euphemism. Today’s evangelical culture makes a big deal about giving God the credit for things, and it’s hard to argue with that, although it does strike folks as lame, silly, or contrived to see victorious athletes point upward, as if trying to deflect the glory they have received.  Preachers and ministers struggle with their desire to be praised for their talents with their desire to be humble before God.  And yet…

Here we have Jesus giving the credit for several miraculous signs, including the salvation/forgiveness of sins of one woman, not to God, but to the individual’s faith.  Does faith have power on its own?  This concept doesn’t seem foreign to scripture at all.  Consider Matthew 17:20:

[Jesus] replied, “Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

He didn’t say, “You can pray to God for X and God will do X.”  He placed a direct connection between your word and the action, based on faith even as small as a mustard seed.

I’m not entirely sure what my conclusion is on these points, although I’m leaning towards a few things.

1) I think we ought to be careful not to allow a false humility to disempower ourselves.  Rather than chastising ourselves for feeling like we did something and saying, “No, I know God really did it,” we should instead acknowledge the honest power that God has allowed us because of our faith, and not be afraid to use it.

2) The point isn’t that God is ultimately not in charge, but that he has willingly empowered us to do his will (or to do evil), and we should act like it.  It’s a great responsibility.

More thoughts to come.

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Why is Creationist an Automatic Disqualifier?

Intelligent design folks have tried their hardest to distance themselves from so-called young earth creationists, trying to create a bigger tent for other sorts of rejectors of Darwinism, as well as establish that they are trying to reason from observations of nature rather than religious texts or traditions.  Since some of the science used by many young earth creationists is plainly wacky, it would seem a wise decision to put some distance between ID and YEC, but for a lot of anti-religious people, it doesn’t really matter.

A lot of arguments against ID go something like this:

1) ID claims to not be creationism.
2) Many IDers are Bible-believing Christians who believe ID adds scientific credence to their beliefs.
3) Therefore ID is creationism.
4) Therefore ID is discredited.

I find this completely fascinating.  For this line of reasoning to make any sense, one has to define creationism to be the belief that God had anything substantive to do with the creation of life whatsoever, not merely a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and an acceptance of the traditional seven-day creation period.  If so, then fine, a lot of IDers are “creationists” by that definition.

The fascinating thing is the jump from 3 to 4.  A lot of IDers, looking at those lines with their own lenses, might guess that the discredit occurs because creationism has, in the past, relied on some plainly bad science to make its point, and be frustrated that people aren’t willing to see past that to engage newer and superior scientific arguments.  This would be foolish, however, as the more I read arguments from Darwinists the more I become convinced that “creationism” is to be discredited not because the evidence isn’t there or the science doesn’t work but because it points to God.  It’s hard to have a genuine scientific argument with folks who deem an argument true or false based on the conclusion rather than the evidence or logic.

If this were not so, why is it so common to hear Darwinists attack ID as trying to sneak God into the classrooms rather than engage in the arguments themselves?  Or mock ID’s big-tent acceptance of those who believe the designers were aliens or spiritual powers other than Jehovah God as a “ruse?”  Or focus on the motivations and religious backgrounds of IDers as if it proved anything about the nature of the evidence?

Darwinists are right to be nervous and defensive about intelligent design, but they would be more convincing if they spent more time trying to persuade that the evidence pointed their way, rather than that those ID folks have bad motivations, “bad” meaning “arguing in favor of an intervening God.”

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Christian Aesthetics

The following is a post from my previous destroyed blog that I’ve resurrected so that my friend Taylor’s post that links to it will no longer link to a 404 error. I’m also still proud of these thoughts and still endorse them, so here they are:

I should be packing now, but I’d much rather respond to a post my friend Taylor Williams put up on his personal blog today, so interesting did I find it. It’s a short post full of things to mull over, and here are my mullings:

I guess the primary thing that struck me is just how different Taylor’s sensibilities are towards creativity than mine. He says he chose photography because it was a fundamentally humble art form - rather than creativity, you simply “reflect” the beauty of things you discover. This is akin to the Christian life, in that we are to humbly reflect the glory of God to those around us.

Some things about this strike me as true, and others not as much. The division of photography from other art forms on this basis is a bit oversimplified. First off, there IS a good deal of creativity involved in photography, from what I am able to tell - finding new ways to look at things, using devices and personal skill - there is a lot of you in the pictures you take. I suppose on the higher level it’s less evident, as the immediate focus of a camera is something the photographer is not personally responsible for - but the photographer, by simply taking the photograph, is making a judgement on the subject, and inviting others to either share or reject that judgement - most likely hoping that people will enjoy it for the same reasons he or she did. The photo is full of the photographer.

The interesting thing is, other forms of art are pretty much exactly the same in this regard. Take lyric writing. On one level, there’s “creation” - once there was no lyric on this page, now there is. But on a deeper level I think it’s closer to photography than people might realize. For example, I find it intensely affecting when the long “I” vowel is held on a long note. I didn’t really come up with that, it’s just there, and it affected me, in the same way that that beautiful scene was there and it affected the photographer. So the lyricist puts that “I” on the long note because it sounds cool, and the photographer captures the scene because it looks cool - both actions full of the creator, in the sense of, “I found this neat - don’t you?” A lot of art, it seems to me, is essentially finding things that we’re not responsible for and arranging them and displaying them in ways to call attention to the things about them we like. I suppose there’s more evident arrangement and technical skill involved in lyric writing than photography, but I imagine some photographers out there would happily disagree. Nor is it true that personal skill always shines through lyrics while great photographs minimize the role of the photographer. The truly great songs are the ones that are so natural, so perfectly affecting, that they don’t seem written at all. It floors us that great songs were “written” because they seem to us to have been “discovered.” I suspect, in a very deep sense, they were.

So the distinction is less important here. I suspect Taylor enjoys photography not because it’s not creative, but because it allows him to share what affects him in a way that allows him to use his talents, which is what creativity mostly is, anyway.

After all, none of us are really “creating” anything. That’s God’s realm alone. But we get a thrill over mixing ourselves into this thing that we like, by “making” (arranging and manipulating) something or “capturing” or “reflecting” it, and gets us close enough to creativity to give us the thrill. That thrill, I believe, is a wonderful gift from God that we shouldn’t beat down. After all, he made us in his own image for a reason. Bible major syndrome (”I don’t want to glorify me, I want to glorify God“) can get too extreme in creative people, incapacitating themselves out of fear of becoming prideful. I’d like to think that it’s not pride to recognize when something is good, to recognize when you have a talent for sharing that with people in artful ways, and to take joy in what you’ve done. That’s a gift and we ought to treasure it. We are told to think on whatever is right, noble, pure, lovely, virtuous, etc. and so it seems like a good idea to me to be pumping out as much lovely, noble, pure stuff as we can, so we have more to think on.

Now moving on to Taylor’s idea of “humbly reflecting the glory of God to those around us.” I’m sure he does not actually have in mind by this what immediately popped into my mind, but then, I am a lot more cynical about this kind of thing (I bet). And that’s the idea of passivity, embodied in that wretched movie Joshua, in which Jesus returns to 20th century Alabama in the form of a really nice guy who changes a town into a utopia without ever being confrontational, aggressive, or offensive in the slightest way - a modernized Jean Valjean. But not terribly close to Jesus of Nazareth, it seems to me. Jesus did not simply lead a perfect life and expect other people to notice and fall down at his feet - he taught, he preached, he cajoled, he pronounced “woe,” he engaged, to use Steve Holt’s word that I find so appropriate. We, of course, should be reflecting the glory of God to those around us, and it should be so wrapped up in our identities that it shines from us, and we should be humble. But we have to make sure that humble doesn’t mean “not bold” and “not powerful” and “not willing to confront or offend when necessary.”

But that’s really a side point, I think.

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Welcome to Reasonings

Before I unceremoniously destroyed my previous blog, the Drawing Board, all my thoughts were interspersed together on a single blog. Now, taking the advice of my dad, I have decided to separate my goofy personal projects (the video games and musicals I create) from my (occasionally) more serious theological and political thoughts. The Drawing Board is still there, but it’s now exclusively dedicated to my amateur creative processes. Hope you enjoy!

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