Here’s a great post on the topic du jour

And All These Things: Genesis and Evolution
The Church upholds a series of absolutes that Catholics are required to believe about creation:

The Church's declarations say nothing of whether or not God used evolution as the tool to produce the Universe in its current physical order. Therefore in the absence of further declarations Catholics are free to use their own prudence to determine what is true regarding this controversial issue.
(tags: evolution cosmos)

The epochal work of Galileo Galilei still reverberates in the modern mind. It required an iconoclastic temperament to continue asserting his revolutionary ideas in the face of traditional understandings and ecclesial opposition.

The Earth held pre-eminence in the cosmological model of the time. Geocentrism appeared self-evident; the Earth was the great Firmament fashioned directly by God; Man, clearly the apex of all living beings, was formed in the Creator’s image; and History was encompassed entirely in the ancient Scriptures. Galileo’s profound shift relegated Earth and humanity to a peripheral role orbiting the Sun. Galileo’s heliocentrism placed the Sun at the centre of the Universe.

But it got worse than that. Later work (Kepler, Newton) showed that the Sun itself was not the cosmic centre; all bodies in the cosmos are in relative motion. An unknown “Luminiferous Aether” permeating the universe was postulated to represent absolute ‘rest’. The Sun was displaced and Ether was now the ground of all being.

Ether held its place until fairly recently (1887) when Michelson and Morley attempted to measure its effect and came back with null results in every direction. There is no such thing as absolute rest.

Searching farther into the sky than ever before, astronomers showed that Earth pales into utter obscurity beside the Galaxy in which we reside. The Hubble telescope has reduced us by yet more orders of magnitude; our Milky Way is but one grain of sand in a vast glittering skyscape of galaxies, illuminating the cosmic emptiness with their pitiful, short glimmers of life.

The Cosmic Background Radiation, and Big Bang theory, proposed a great Singularity that would serve as a philosophical ‘centre’ of this immeasurable realm. But no, cosmologists deny us even this! There is no centre of the universe — space itself is expanding equally in all directions, as far as we can tell.

Carl Sagan grasped the essence of our very humble place in the universe, when he saw the “Pale Blue Dot” and wrote his famous soliloquy;

On [that pale blue dot], everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings,[ ...] every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

The mind-blowing scale of the universe, and our vanishingly small role in the immensity of spacetime, is a very significant challenge to the theistic notion that humanity has a special place and a meaningful destiny. The strongest possible theological response is needed, to reaffirm our role and reassure our hearts — It can’t be a knee-jerk defensive reaction (such as Galileo experienced) or a carelessly quoted cliché.
(I’ll be thinking about this in the next few days).

Note: this post is a tangential response to various discussions here, here, and here.

This series describes how Evangelical Christianity in the USA has lost its way. The essay on Eschatology is particularly striking.

The Fire and the Rose: The Heresies of American Evangelicalism
The intention of this series was to examine the essential dogmatic loci as they are popularly articulated or implicitly understood in American evangelical churches. By no means have I exhausted every facet of the problem in each locus; instead I stuck to one major issue that seemed readily apparent. For example, I discussed the doctrine of the Trinity in Part II, but not the attributes of God or the doctrine of election, to name two other areas of importance. Much less have I have examined all of the loci worth addressing in such a series.

* Part I: Introduction
* Part II: The Doctrine of God — a less-than-fully triune God
* Part III: Christology — a docetic Christ
* Part IV: Soteriology — a pelagian soteriology
* Part V: Holy Scripture — a docetic-propositional Bible
* Part VI: Eschatology — a gnostic eschatology
* Part VII: Ecclesiology — nationalism, or depoliticized discipleship
(tags: church error)

Not really

He Lives: No schism here. Nothing to see. Please move along.
"Movement atheists" are in fact identified by dogma, at least by any other name. Among the credal claims:
* Science and religion are incompatible
* Science is the only way we know things
* Religion has a net negative impact on society
* Atheists should be outspoken
* Atheists are persecuted

Furthermore the movement atheists have requisite pejorative names for the apostate: Accomodationists. Appeasers. And Coyne's muddleheaded faitheists.

A set of core beliefs that distinguishes plain atheists from movement atheists. Name-calling—and even contests (such as Coyne held) to come up with a suitably derogatory term (faitheist) for atheists in the opposing camp. And a huge corpus of writings casting aspersions on those who challenge the creed.

Call it what you like–except schism. Because it's nothing like that.

Quack.
(tags: atheism)

Among the crop of new interconnected web2.0-ey sites, here are a few that I find very useful

BackType tracks your comments across numerous blogs. It’s on sidebar #2 (Commentosphere) and I really like it. (cocomment & commentful are good ways to report the whole discussion, but I want to just show MY comments)

Delicious stores and indexes links that you choose, and allows a few sentences. It can post a daily digest to your blog (but that function seems to be going haywire at the moment!)

Friendfeed is probably the most well-known of the new ‘lifestreaming’ services; feed it your ‘favourites’ from various sites (youtube, delicious, RSS) and it will collate them into a stream of your online activity (see ‘Cool Stuff’ in the far sidebar)

Yahoo Pipes are a collection of online apps that do very specific things — like unix, when used in conjuction (piped) they be quite powerful. I use a yahoo pipe for feeding my amazon wishlist into friendfeed.

Three cheers for the bus drivers | John Minto
It’s 2009 annual report proudly states “over the 15 years since its formation Infratil’s average return has been 18 percent per annum…”
Let’s put that in some perspective. This year Infratil is paying out just over $32 million to its shareholders while the increase offered to drivers would be less that an additional $4 million in payments after three years.
The company can afford to pay the drivers more – it’s just become too used to thinking about them as a distant second to its greedy shareholders, despite the fact it’s the drivers who do the work that creates the profits.
The shareholders have had it too good for too long – it’s time for a bit more to trickle down from Infratil’s top table. Instead the company showed its contempt for its employees by locking out the drivers last month in an attempt to starve them back to work.
(tags: justice)

Speights and Barth on real men « P e r ∙ C r u c e m ∙ a d ∙ L u c e m
One of the most alluring features of Speights is their ad campaign, exploiting all the time-honoured associations between beer, horses, open spaces and ‘real’ men. Not only are there the amazing photos, (the ones of the river crossing and of the stag are two of my favourites) but one can also complete the Southern Man ID Chart, and sing the Southern Man Song which promotes:

Now I might not be rich
But I like things down here
We got the best looking girls
And the best damn beer
So you can keep your Queen City [Auckland]
With your cocktails and cool
Give me a beer in a seven
With the boys shooting pool

All part of what it means to be a ‘real’ man, right?

And then there’s Barth’s account in CD III/2 of what being a ‘real’ man looks like:

Real man lives with God as His covenant-partner. For God has created him to participate in the history in which God is at work with him and he with God; to be His partner in this common history of the covenant. He created him as His covenant-partner. Thus real man does not live a godless life – without God. A godless explanation of man, which overlooks the fact that he belongs to God, is from the very outset one which cannot explain real man, man himself. Indeed, it cannot even speak of him. It gropes past him into the void. It grasps only the sin in which he breaks the covenant with God and denies and obscures his true reality. Nor can it really explain or speak of his sin. For to do so it would obviously have to see him first in the light of the fact that he belongs to God, in his determination by the God who created him, and in the grace against which he sins. Real man does not act godlessly, but in the history of the covenant in which he is God’s partner by God’s election and calling. He thanks God for His grace by knowing Him as God, by obeying Him, by calling on Him as God, by enjoying freedom from Him and to Him. He is responsible before God, i.e., He gives to the Word of God the corresponding answer. That this is the case, that the man determined by God for life with God is real man, is decided by the existence of the man Jesus. Apart from anything else, this is the standard of what his reality is and what it is not. It reveals originally and definitively why God has created man. The man Jesus is man for God. As the Son of God He is this in a unique way. But as He is for God, the reality of each and every other man is decided. God has created man for Himself. And so real man is for God and not the reverse. He is the covenant-partner of God. He is determined by God for life with God. This is the distinctive feature of his being in the cosmos.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2

Guest Post: Dan Brown’s History of Science | MandM
The Da Vinci Code launched the literary careers of a whole faculty previously-obscure professors of New Testament Studies. Admittedly, they had good reason for wanting to put the record straight about Brown’s distortions of early Christian history. This time, it’s historians of science who might be upset by Brown’s misrepresentation. Because his contention that the Catholic Church has spent the last two millennia holding back the advance of science is as wrongheaded as the story that Mrs Jesus retired to the south of France with her kids.

It’s true that the Church did make a single significant mistake in 1616, when it banned Copernicus’s opinion that the earth orbits the sun. But in the subsequent trial of Galileo, the Catholic Church was siding with the scientific consensus of the time. Still, you can’t manufacture an eternal conflict from a single example, so proponents of the hypothesis have had to resort to a different strategy – inventing the evidence.
(tags: error dawkins science)

UPDATE: There’s no denying that Catholic Church made errors in the past, but it’s tried to make amends. Many of its scholars hold to theistic evolution, so it certainly is not hostile to modern science, despite the claims of agenda-driven “New Atheists”.

UPDATE #2: Many arguments advanced at Catholic Encyclopedia “Science and the Church“; among them:

The conflicts between science and the Church are not real. They all rest on assertions like these: Faith is an obstacle to research; faith is contrary to the dignity of science; faith is discredited by history. Basing the answers on the principles explained above, we can dispel the phantoms in the following manner.

A believer, it is stated, can never be a scientist; his mind is bound by authority, and in case of a conflict he has to contradict science.
The assertion is consistent on the supposition, that faith is a human invention. The believer, however, bases faith on Divine Revelation, and science on Creation. Both have their common source in God, the Eternal Truth … In case of an apparent difference between faith and science, he takes the following logical position: When a religious view is contradicted by a well-established scientific fact, then the sources of revelation have to be re-examined, and they will be found to leave the question open. When a clearly-defined dogma contradicts a scientific assertion, the latter has to be revised, and it will be found premature. When both contradicting assertions, the religious and the scientific, are nothing more than prevailing theories, research will be stimulated in both directions, until one of the theories appears unfounded. The conflict about the heliocentric system belonged, theoretically speaking, to the first case, and Darwinism, in its gross form , to the second; practically, however, disputed questions generally turn up in the third case, and so it was actually with the heliocentric system at the time of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galilei.

It is true, the believer is less free in his knowledge than the unbeliever, but only because he knows more. The unbeliever has one source of knowledge, the believer has two. Instead of barring his mind against the supernatural stream of knowledge by arbitrary postulates, man ought to be grateful to his Creator for every bit of knowledge, and, panting for truth, drink from both streams that pour down from heaven.

In my numerous discussions with atheists I’ve frequently encountered the charge that religion (viz, Christianity) is weak in its claims to hold “Truth”, whereas Science is very robust in that regard, because it uses more “rigorous” evidence and procedures in its quest for truth. Thus the (atheist) presumption that “science is everything” : scientific knowledge is the measure of all truth.

This claim is highly problematic, containing numerous unstated premises – - the omniscience of academia; the infallibility of the human mind; the perfection of current knowledge; the supremacy of a cerebral, analytical, skeptical way of understanding the word around us. It’s left-brain thinking to an absurd degree.

I’ve encountered a similar attitude when discussing the book of Genesis with very literal-minded readers. Truth is truth, plain and simple they say. If it’s not “true” according to their understanding, then it’s all a lie — are you calling the Word of God a lie!?? Such binary thinking is quite frustrating. Readers should not assume they have an infallible interpretation of what the original author wrote, and what was meant for readers to understand, when all sorts of context is missing, and language itself is an imperfect tool.

In the same way, reducing a religious faith to a bunch of propositional truth claims and cerebral arguments, to be verified or falsified by a scientific experiment, is a gross failure to comprehend religion’s broader purpose as a cultural touchstone. “What is Truth?” is an important question but not the *most* important question. Surely theists and atheists can agree that “How should we Live” is a more vital question facing humanity.

In this talk, Ravi Zacharias presents a solid case for why atheists have no acceptable answer for this all-important question. Pursuing the question from the angles of philosophy, the arts, and morality, Zacharias provides an illuminating discussion about the importance of this question and the consequences for failing to answer it adequately, while arguing that Christianity presents a satisfying answer.

Yes propositional truth and “proofs” are an important and significant part of the intellectual heritage of the Christian faith. There are numerous independent pieces of evidence to support a a rational conclusion that God exists. But endless philosophizing and arguing over abstractions won’t change the world. The most important part of Jesus’ message was not “I am God so everybody else shut up”; it was “This is how you should live“

Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians shows a better way:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Incidentally, the title of this post is a tangential reference to Ezekiel 33, where the prophet revealed a God who was not confined to earthly boundaries. God himself promised to be the shepherd of a scattered people. Without a prophetic voice and word the people would not have recovered. Ezekiel plumbed the depths of the spiritual nature of humanity, revealing both the negative of human sin and the positive of God’s deliverance. True religion is not an [intellectual] veneer, but an inner spiritual strength. The need is not for superficial change [mental assent], but an alteration at the center of living. The prophet recovers from the ashes of destruction a new and living faith. Yahweh is the defender of his people and not their destroyer; the preserver and giver of life, not the taker.

Over at Open Parachute I’ve participated in some entertaining discussions, without wishing to preach or anything, out of pure interest in the faith/science interface. Religion and Science are both cultural artefacts, but there is an extreme form of atheism posing as ’scientific’ that wants to assess the ‘validity’ of all fields of human endeavour [ed: just religion actually] through a rationalist, empirical, materialist lens. This school of thought finds it difficult to admit that religion might actually be a worthwhile endeavour, making all sorts of moral judgements, thoughtless dismissals of history, and grandiose claims of superiority. This attitude is rightly critiqued in the following (lengthy) book review:

A Modest Plea for a Historically Responsible Atheism « The Dunedin School
We cannot ignore Christianity as a whole and the problematic of the Incarnation in particular, Žižek claims, because these things form an essential part of the intellectual world of modernity. Christianity achieves its unique position in history because it is an essential element of modernity itself, an essential piece of the dominant logic of a globalising capitalist modernity.

After the onslaught of ‘school-yard’ atheists, reactionaries like Hitchens and Harris as well as better-informed critics like Dawkins; in Žižek’s arguments, we find that ‘the supposition of naive atheists that the West can leave behind either Christology or ecclesiology is worthy to be greeting only with ironic laughter’ (181). One cannot blithely ignore the centuries of theological thinking that lies at the back of any assertion of atheism, … not if there is to be actual, productive debate – not just people shouting at each other or simply restating their own presuppositions over and over again.
(tags: atheism faith)