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Amputees and God1 month ago
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Shroud of Turin Back in the News1 month ago
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How Can God Still Love Me?4 months ago
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Mano Singham writes a guest editorial for The Chronicle of Higher Education, "The New War Between Science and Religion." Singham has some academic credentials, he is director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education and an adjunct associate professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University. His article bemoans the fact that The Academy of Sciences is openly making room for religion and accepting the existence of religion as a domain beyond the level of scientific investigation:
The former group, known as accommodationists, seeks to carve out areas of knowledge that are off-limits to science, arguing that certain fundamental features of the world—such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the origin of the universe—allow for God to act in ways that cannot be detected using the methods of science. Some accommodationists, including Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, suggest that there are deeply mysterious, spiritual domains of human experience, such as morality, mind, and consciousness, for which only religion can provide deep insights.....Just a couple of problems with this take on things. First of all labels those who are wise enough to understand that more forms of knowledge exist than just scientific knowledge as "accommodation" is like accepting the Marxist label of all those who have not joined the party was "obstructionist" or the label of all those who dont' want to do it Stalin's way (which means other communists) as "revisionists." Who are these guys accommodating? The enemy of course. Just in using the term this self professed "new atheist" has drawn the battle lines. What's pathetic is the fact that he's not describing a new war he's describing a new peace, but clearly he doesn't want peace. It seems that the world of science has reaches a point where they are willing to accept religion as an area beyond their domain and to strike up a new peaceful co-existence. But the new atheist can't have this. Religion is the enemy it must vanquished and driven out of existence. Any attempt at understanding is mere accommodation, selling out. His rationale:
Prestigious organizations like the National Academy of Sciences have come down squarely on the side of the accommodationists. On March 25, the NAS let the John Templeton Foundation use its venue to announce that the biologist (and accommodationist) Francisco Ayala had been awarded its Templeton Prize, with the NAS president himself, Ralph Cicerone, having nominated him. The foundation has in recent years awarded its prize to scientists and philosophers who are accommodationists, though it used to give it to more overtly religious figures, like Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. Critics are disturbed at the NAS's so closely identifying itself with the accommodationist position. As the physicist Sean Carroll said, "Templeton has a fairly overt agenda that some scientists are comfortable with, but very many are not. In my opinion, for a prestigious scientific organization to work with them sends the wrong message."
Those of us who disagree—sometimes called "new atheists"—point out that historically, the scope of science has always expanded, steadily replacing supernatural explanations with scientific ones. Science will continue this inexorable march, making it highly likely that the accommodationists' strategy will fail. After all, there is no evidence that consciousness and mind arise from anything other than the workings of the physical brain, and so those phenomena are well within the scope of scientific investigation. What's more, because the powerful appeal of religion comes precisely from its claims that the deity intervenes in the physical world, in response to prayers and such, religious claims, too, fall well within the domain of science. The only deity that science can say nothing about is a deity who does nothing at all.....In the first line we can see the problem, the typical atheist understanding of religion ideas as "explanations." everything is science to the worshipers of scinece (scientism) the only possible form of knowledge is scientific knowledge; thus they can't see understanding supernatural as experience they see it as an attempt to explain natural phenomena. If that were the case it would make sense to see science as constantly expanding and taking over the real of SN. But the fact is the term SN was not invented as an expatiation but as a reference to an experience.[1] It is about the experience known as "mystical" which more often than not is understood as an experience of divine presence. The fact of it is he sees science as constantly expanding and taking away all the territory and crowding out the SN because he doesn't see the SN as having any basis in reality becuase it's not derived by means that he and his side control. That can't acknowledge any basis to it because to do so they would have to accept the notion of the validity of other forms of knowledge. He here pulls a bait and switch:
....In setting up a straw man argument he quotes what he terms a spurious argument" by NAS, the arguemnt is "many scientists and theologians have written about how one can accept both." But then in answering the argument he reduces it to "But the fact that some scientists are religious is not evidence of the compatibility of science and religion." That wasn't the argument, the argument was that both scientists and Theologians write about how both can fit together. So it's not just an argument by association that he reduces it to, but that intellectual content goes into proving the compatibility, a content that he doesn't even acknowledge let alone try to answer. He says: "As Michael Shermer, founder and editor of Skeptic magazine, says in his book Why People Believe Weird Things (A.W.H. Freeman/Owl Book, 2002), 'Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.'" That's just a means of dismissing the intellectual content without examining it. Some atheist guy says "this this stuff is no good but smart people are adept at making it seem good," so that means I don't have to investigate it now. That does not relieve us of the responsibility to investigate the contest becuase it totally side steps the issue "if they are smart why do they believe it in the first place?" Besides all of that why should we allow the atheist to set the definition and tell us "this is wired stuff." He wants 3% of the world population to tell 90% "your ideas are the wired stuff." Not by any stretch of the imagination can this be possible.
....Religion is a hell of a lot more than just an intellectual proposition. It's a way of life, it's culture, it's all our most cherished aspirations, self understanding, and sense of meaning in reality. Putting God concept in the "wired" category is reducing God to the status of being a thing in the universe. It's making God out to be just another thing added to the universe. A single piece of baggage that can be ejected as easily. That's necessary for the reductionist who has to see all reality as being one thing,that one thing is him, what he can control with his mind,[2] or what he gains the illusion of controlling because he's rented out his brain to the thought police to be used as they see fit, thus making him a small part of the controlling apparatus of all human thinking and understanding. The idea that this evil enemy that made him the ting he hates most (himself) is a real damper on this single reality that blows his illusion of control. Why should we assume that the standard is the atheist view so that departure from it is the "wired idea?" If the New atheist are as brilliant as they want to believe they are how do we know they aren't the "smart people who believe wired things?" Why Should we allow them to set the agenda? Especially when their views are represented by 3% of the population and belief in God is represented by 90%?[3]
....He spends the rest of the time trying to draw analogies between the Scopes Trial and the new situation. That's just circular reasoning because it assumes the standard is already set as the new atheist's view point and all opposition to that view is relegated to the category of "wired stuff" and put in with Scope's view. The problem is Scopes was a creations and we are not talking we are talking about scientists. We are not talking about just scientists who believe in God we are talking about both scientists who are willing to accept that belief can be a both valid and beyond scientific scope even if they don't believe in God, and Theologians and other believers who accept the value of science but still understand their faith as compatible with that value. To the New Atheists they are accommodating the enemy but to the rest of us they are the normal people because they represent over 90% of everyone. In that we also see another value to the concept of scientists who believe in God, not just that they do, not just that there's a content they have to talk about, not just that they are smart and they believe in something, but that they don't accept New Atheism as the standard of human rationality. They don't want to set the bar according to New Atheist ideology and the represent the majority of the scientific community (if the NAS is really the great hallmark of science that atheist have argued in the past that it is). It seems in reality that there's a new peaceful co-existence bewteen science and religion not a new war. New Atheists want to go back and fight the old war again, re-living a victory they can't match now, trying to pretend that all religious belief is on a par with the Mathew Brady character form Inherit the Wind.
Sources:
[1] My article on the truemenaing of supernature has appeared both in this blog (see "the Original Christian Concept of the Supernatural,"August 15,2012 URL:http://metacrock.blogspot.com/2012/08/normal-0-microsoftinternetexplorer4.html ) and on my webstie The Religious A prori. URL: http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-empirical-supernatural.html
[2]Richard H. Jones, Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 2000, 39. Google books online preview:
URL: http://books.google.com/books?id=sUgnio874NUC&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=revolution+against+reductionism&source=bl&ots=RfQNUal7yQ&sig=Wputdv-lWVTdRJ0lJem2hrXHKZI&hl=en&ei=rWusTp3zG4risQLZzKXdDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false
[3] Metacrock, "How Many Atheists Are there?" Doxa: Christian Thought in the 21st Century, Online Resource, URL: http://www.doxa.ws/social/percentage.ht
It seems to me that the accurate position of the Christian (or any other theist) is that it is necessary that God possess some contingent property or other, but there is no particular contingent property that God possesses necessarily. Am I going in the right path, or am I missing some important aspect of your argument? Thank you for taking the time to read this. (letter to William Lane Craig)[1]
....I'm always running into atheists who try to argue that necessary being is impossible. The other day I saw an atheist on a message board who was wondering "why do Christians mess around with this absurd idea of God as necessary? Why don't they just say God is contingent, it's so much more logical since God in the Bible is contingent?" In trying to clarify this mystery for him he plunged deeper into the unknown and asserted that a necessary God can't exist becuase being necessary would mean he can't create or do anything. Intrigued by this bit of whimsy I had to find out why. The logic is pretty straight forward: If God creates something he becomes creator. If he becomes creator then his status as creator is contingent upon his having done it. That makes God contingent: The argument might look like this:
....The problem is this is totally wrong, in fact he's wrong on both counts: it would be absurd to posit that God is contingent, then he wouldn't be God anymore, and it would be it is false to say that God become contingent if he does an act. Psalm 90:2 declares: "Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God." God is eternal. While Colossians 1:16 says: "For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him."
....In other words, God is eternal and creator of all that is. That means all that is is contingent upon God who has always been, thus having never been created and not being dependent upon other things God is not contingent but necessary. God's necessary status is not only based upon being NON-contingent but upon being necessary to all that is as the lynch pen and origin of it's existence. This has been the basic Christian concept since before Christianity: the Hebrew faith had it first (Genesis 1:1 for example). The one major thing that sets God of the Bible apart from all other concepts of God is the fact that it is based upon God as necessary and all things as contingent upon God. Zeus and Thor and Ishtar and all the gods of mythology are contingent, they are all produced by parents or the abyss or some such thing that preceded their existence and brought them into being. Not so with the God of the Bible he is the one and only God-figure who is necessary creator, non contingent himself but maker of all that is. It would be a super idiotic move to bail out of the whole tradition and render God on a par with all the godages of mythology who have only recently found new fan clubs.
....It's also wrong to assert that action makes God contingent. In all the message board fracases of which I've been apart I've gathered three basic concepts of contingent: that which can fail or cease to exist; that which is dependent upon something else (ontologically higher up the ladder of hierarchy) for its existence, or that which is not contradictory if the term is substituted for another. This last one is the counterpoint to logical necessity: All husbands are married men is a logically necessary sentence. If you change the terms; all Texans are married men, it becomes a matter of empirical nature. Perhaps only married men do live in Texas, we have to go check. But the concept of "married man" is descried as "husband" thus all husbands are married men and we know that just by knowing the meaning of the word. Yet this last version of contingency can be ruled out because we are not discussing the ontological argument thus I have not argued that God's existence can be understood from the nature of the terms. The other two versions can be collapsed into one thing: that which can cease or fail to exist, does so because the conditions that make it so could have changed or could change in future. So really contingency is basically about dependence for existence upon something else.
....Once we understand this we can see that God can't be contingent. If he was that would make him a creature then he would not be form everlasting to everlasting nor would he be the creator of all things. He would be mere demiurge. The creator of God would be God and there would still be a God so the atheist's purpose in argument would still be frustrated. Moreover, the doing of actions such as creation does not render God contingent. This argument really depends upon treating treating contingency like a virus. If God is contingent in one respect, such as his title as creator, then he becomes wholly contingent. That's only a title. God's actions do not make him what he is. His actions are an extension of who he is they dont' determine who he is. Contingency is not like a disease that spreads to the whole being. God's actions are contingent, they are contingent upon God's essence as necessary being.
....The atheist letter writer addressing William Lane Craig, speaks of contingent "proprieties" of God (at the top). I don't think contingency is a property. Its' a mode of being. It corresponds to the modal operators, such a necessity and contingency. In this case it's not the mode of being for God himself, not his essence, that thing that makes him what he is, his divine nature, but the mode of being for his title as creator, for example. So God can be contingent in title as creator but so what? Had God not created he would still be. The things he created would not be but he would still be. Therefore, God does not become contingent being if he becomes does contingent acts.
.... The standard concept for which I argue is always that God is being itself not merely "a being." This concept would help us here too. To the letter writer, Craig could have said (if using this concept) that since he acknowledges that some form of being must be that basic acknowledges God since God is the term we take to the concept of being itself or the ground of being. That is what is being expressed "Bede Rundle's position that it is necessary that something or other exist (namely, some physical Universe or other), but nothing in particular exists necessarily." That does not exclude God if God is being itself. IF God is a particular localized being, one of many then it might exclude him but how could it exclude the ground of being?
[1] Letter to William Lane Craig, "Must Some Contingent Being or Other exist?" Q and A Reasonable Faith website URL: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/must-some-contingent-being-or-other-exist
The issues with Craig's letter are much more complex then the one's I present here.
After two posts worth (Part 1 and Part 2) of carefully sifting the data, we arrived at the standard conclusion that pretty much everyone goes with: Jesus held the Last Supper as a Passover meal on Thursday night; and was executed and buried Friday. (Which is "Good Friday" only if, and only because, Jesus was raised to life again sometime between sunset Saturday and dawn Sunday. But this is a historical analysis series not a theological one.)
Sure, GosMatt and (to a lesser extent) GosMark have some oddities in the Greek that can cause some problems, but GosLuke's language is far more specific; and even taken by themselves, GosMatt and GosMark independently add up to that timing schedule once the narrative details are thoroughly accounted for. So GosLuke isn't simply settling things one way that could have meant something else in the other two Synoptic Gospels, just clarifying what the other two Gospels added up to after all.
Soooooo.... where's the problem? Why do even conservative Christian scholars sometimes talk like the question of the day when Jesus died is in doubt?
-----oh, wait. We're still missing one of the canonical Gospels.
Yep, factoring GosJohn into the account leads to most of the trouble. Click on the jump to see why!
Back in Part 1, I introduced some of the peculiar grammatic factors in GosMatt and GosMark which are solved by reference to the tradition that a rabbi (and/or family head) may hold the Passover seder service one night early in emergency situations such as (following the example of the revered Maccabees) an expected battle on the morrow.
The references to the Passover and (Feast of) Unleavened bread "after two days" found in GosMark 14:1 and GosMatt 26:2 seem tied instead to the "Little Apocalypse" teaching on Olivet's hillside and/or Jesus' dramatic departure from the Temple, not necessarily to the date of the Last Supper (relative to Passover), thus occurring Wednesday afternoon and/or evening if Passover started Friday sunset for example.
More problematically, on the face of it, typical English translations of GosMatt 26:17 and GosMark 14:12 seem to indicate that Jesus was preparing to hold the Passover at the normally expected time, i.e. making preparations on Friday afternoon if the Passover started Friday at sunset.
Why is that a problem? Well for one thing we haven't gotten to yet in the texts is any mention of when Passover started relative to the sabbath, but all four Gospel accounts agree that Jesus was crucified on the morning following His passover observance. So if it turns out they're saying Passover started Friday at sundown, then Jesus should have been killed Saturday instead!--just as if (on the face of it) the "two days to Passover" statements previously mentioned referred to the same day that the disciples were asking to make preparations for Passover (with Jesus leaving the Temple midmorning in GosMatt and having lunch in Bethany, although neither Gospel specifically calls out timing like that), Jesus would have been holding it Wednesday night and slain on Thursday (with Passover starting sundown the following day, Friday).
Either way, the church would have been slightly wrong to have settled on the Friday of Passover Week (Passover itself changes from year to year based on lunar schedules, i.e. the first full moon of the first month of the Jewish religious calendar) to commemorate the execution of Jesus -- it ought to be Good Thursday or Good Saturday, not Good Friday. My readers may have heard or read that some scholars suggest Thursday or Saturday as the day Jesus died; things like this are why they do so.
More importantly, if any Gospel accounts indicated a different timing (which my reader may count as foreshadowing!) there would be a contradiction between them which would be at least annoying even if explicable on stylistic grounds (because that means at least one author and/or his tradition or community was willing to move details around for effect instead of for historicity. This is not so much of a problem really by the standards of ancient historians, and we have a problem like this in regard to Jesus' Passover Week anointing meal in any case, but still, less trouble would be less annoying!)
Okay, everyone caught up now? Not yet? More catching up to be done, then, after the jump!
Fellow Cadrist Chris "Layman" Price has a fine article from a few years ago about the meaning of Good Friday which also traces the linguistic origins of the term.
This article is about historical harmonization issues with the timing of events on the first Easter weekend. There are a number of weirdities, among which is the question of whether Jesus died on a Friday or some other day!
The standard account (which I will eventually argue in favor of, by the way) is that Jesus holds what we call the Last Supper (instituting the first Lord's Supper) on Thursday night; is arrested outside Jerusalem later that night (or very early Friday morning around or after midnight); is run through an informal trial early Friday morning before sunrise; is taken to the Temple to be officially charged at first dawn Friday morning; then is crucified a little later Friday morning (after bouncing around between Herod and Pilate in close proximity while the Sanhedrin tries to get a ratification of the execution), dying sometime mid-afternoon Friday and entombed before sunset.
My reader may observe that there is no way to get "three days and nights" out of this account, even on the most generous reckonings of partial days; but that phraseology only occurs once in the Gospels, specifically in a scene of GosMatt, which in GosLuke's parallel account of the scene (Luke 11:29-30) doesn't feature that saying.
(My reader might also observe that Matthew, or whoever finally authored/edited/redacted our canonical Gospel According To Matthew, must have thought for whatever reason that that phraseology was historical to the scene, because GosMatt features the shortest dead-time of all the Gospel accounts, far less than what Jesus is reported predicting earlier at Matt 12:38-40. We'll be getting back to that oddity, too, later.)
If your mind isn't reeling yet over the idea that Jesus didn't properly predict how long He'd stay "in the heart of the earth" and/or that Matthew got the timing hugely wrong -- and we haven't even gotten to the first main topic of this article yet! -- and if you still happen to care about the historical issues involved here, click on down the rabbit hole! (Or down the sheep shute rather!)
I've been having an interesting discussion with Dr. Keith Parsons, an old friend, roommate and sparring partner of a friend of mind (Dr. Victor Reppert of Dangerous Idea) over at the Secular Web channel of Patheos, specifically in the comments of Bradley Bowen's article "This Knee Won't Bow".
Because Disqus (the comment engine at Patheos) gets kind of screwy trying to keep track of the threads of a conversation, and doesn't always indicate when a comment has been properly posted (leading to inadvertent double-posts), I'm going to try to collect our side of the commentary discussion (there are several threads) here for further reference. (Although Blogger's comment system has an intrinsic wordcount limit now, so we probably won't be able to continue in our own comments below, even if Dr. P wants to.)
This isn't my Easter "sermon" this year (I never really know if I'm going to do one of those beforehand), but a much more technical discussion, although on a very (and very properly) emotional topic. So unless you want to chew through a bunch of technical mulch from me, DON'T CLICK HERE ON THE JUMP!! {g}


