Category: Theo/Philo
Doug Wilson asks :
‘”How can a chemical reaction be hypocritical? How can the chemical reaction that is man be a hypocrite? Given [the atheist's] premises, it is like being indignant with a tornado, or vegetable soup, or sand on the beach — but Hitchens does it. They all do it . . . I am happy to make the point again, and it should not distress any of us that I am doing so. An argument is like a tool; you only put it down when the job is done. When atheists stop suspending their moral indignation from their invisible sky hook, then I will no longer amuse myself by pointing out their levitation trick” (God Is, p. 4).’
HT:Doug Wilson http://www.dougwils.com/
Found an interesting article by John Dickson called :Historical facts against atheist schoolyard delusions
which comments on Tamas Pataki’s (philosopher and atheists) recent article Ive highlighted a few extracts below by its worth a read here :
Here are a few extracts from John Dickson:
‘Pataki skirts around the issue when he says that the influence of the Judeo-Christian worldview on Western history has been “exaggerated.” This is itself a flimsy assertion, which he hopes readers will believe on account of the fact that, in other respects, he is a thoughtful writer. But I do not see how any serious ancient or medieval historian could accept that.
Western culture has been shaped decisively by its Hebrew and Christian cultural sources, as many specialists qualified to speak on the subject have shown, including Oxford’s Peter Harrison, Princeton’s Peter Brown, Baylor’s Rodney Stark, Macquarie’s Edwin Judge and others.
The Judeo-Christian shape of Western civilization is hardly discussed in the media, let alone given the opportunity to be “exaggerated.” Sadly, such insights are usually left to the cultural historians and political philosophers. One such expert, the atheist Jurgen Habermas of the Goethe University in Frankfurt, famously conceded:
“Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love … Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.”‘
‘This is something of a trend in recent atheist literature. Leaving aside the small, pardonable mistakes of those who haven’t felt it necessary to read any Bible since childhood (Dawkins’s placement of the Magi story in Luke’s Gospel, for instance), harder to overlook are the serious misrepresentations of scholarship found in atheist apologetics.
For example, Michel Onfray, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins all suggest that the very existence of Jesus is still in doubt among the historians. Dawkins cites an authority who has made what he describes as a “serious historical case that Jesus never lived at all,” one “Prof. G.A. Wells of the University of London.” But what Dawkins doesn’t say is that Wells is Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of London.
How would he react if someone made an eccentric biological claim and then cited a language professor as the “serious” authority. In reality, the Jesus-never-lived hypothesis is about as marginal in historical scholarship as young-earth-creationism is in biological science. ‘
‘What we got from the Jews and Christians
This revolution in the path to knowledge was the result of the shattering of the Greek worldview by the Judeo-Christian worldview. And we can date it precisely.
In AD 529 the Christian philosopher John Philoponus published his Refutation of Proclus echoing his Refutation of Aristotle. These were a stunning dismantling of the Greek doctrine of the rational, eternal universe in favour of a philosophical defence of the biblical notion of the universe as a created object with a beginning. And this gave us science as we now think of it.
The Oxford Classical Dictionary states things plainly: Philoponus
“influenced subsequent science to Galileo by replacing many of Aristotle’s theories with an account centred on the Christian idea that the universe had an absolute beginning.”‘
‘The breakthrough was immense. If the world is not an eternal, logical system but a creative work of art, we cannot simply think our way to understanding reality.
We must humbly inspect what the Creator, of his own free will, has produced and apply our rational powers of testing to comprehend what He has manufactured. Testing of what is, not rationalizing from first principles, will lead us to the truth about the physical world.
This is precisely the path John Philoponus opened up and it is exactly how the first modern scientists thought about their work. Isaac Newton, John Ray, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, William Harvey, Robert Boyle and the others: they were all inspired by the doctrine that the universe is a work of art from an utterly free Hand, not an eternally rational system.
What was required therefore was not more confident philosophical (or theological) rationalizing about the world but more probing of what is there in front of us, proposing theories about how it might work, testing those theories against other available facts and seeking confirmation from others: in short, the modern scientific method.
The monographs on the origins of science by Oxford’s Peter Harrison bear this out in compelling detail.
Tamas Pataki is totally wrong to suggest that the Greeks gave us the path of testing, experience and appeal to evidence. They gave us logic, for sure. But it was the followers of the Bible who insisted that logic alone cannot establish ultimate reality by deduction.
What is needed is “experience” – criticizing hypothesis from evidence and so verifying what is, not what ought logically to be. They applied this method first to the historical discipline, giving birth to the modern practice of history through research into primary sources (another story worth telling), and then to the physical world, giving birth to the empirical sciences.
What is perfectly clear is that Pataki’s dewy-eyed ode to the wonders of Greek thought and his caricature of the bumbling “soothsaying” of the Jews and Christians owe more to his own dogma than to either evidence or contemporary scholarship on any of the questions he touches upon.’
HT:Mike Bird: http://www.patheos.com/community/euangelion/
Last week I saw the UK premier of the controversial American film ‘Expelled -no intelligence allowed’ featuring Ben Stein and concerning the freedom of enquiry within Science .Specifically the freedom to infer an intelligent cause in the origin of life and its diversity.
This film was shown by premier radio ,with Justin Brierly as host, at Imperial college London, right next door to the natural Science Museum.
The Intelligent design inference ,like the naturalistic material inference which is the current default position for Science have metaphysical implications -it is these implications that make the subject of intelligent design and Evolution such a hot baked potato.
After the screening of the film there was a panel of 4 people, 2 on each side of the argument debating the film and its implications followed by a Q&A session.
On the panel was Dr Steve Fuller and Dr Alistar Nobel support ID, opposing them was Dr Keith Fox and Dr Susan Blackmore .
Dr Fox presented the argument that Intellegent design was a show stopper for Science; paraprhasing he said : all we can say is God did it ..then what , where does the research go then ?
In reply to this a few thoughts come to mind -:
1.Science largely arose from a Theistic perspective for 2 reasons:
a.Man was sinful therefore his faculties were suspect -he had an epistemological crisis-to over come ,which the scientific method provided via evidence and experimentation.
b.The universe is rational therefore a rational mind can comprehend it.
2.Science should follow where the evidence leads even if it leads towards design rather than blind chance,ascribing chance to a phenomena instead of design may be the show stopper -particularly if the phenomena in question was actually designed.
For further arguments go here http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1181
Dr Alistair Nobel quiet rightly kept bringing up the specified information content found within DNA in the cell was not unlike computer code,which needs an intelligence source to write it . The similarities betweeen code and DNA were used to imply Intelliegnt design as a reasonable inference .
‘Thus, oddly, at nearly the same time that computer scientists were beginning to develop machine languages, molecular biologists were discovering that living cells has been using something akin to machine code or software all along.To quote the information scientist Hubert Yockley again “The genetic code is constructed to confront and solve problems of communication and recording by the same principles found…in modern communication and computer codes.” Like software, the coding regions of DNA direct operations within a complex material system via highly variable and improbable, yet also precisely specified, sequences of chemical characters. How did these digitally encoded and specifically sequenced instructions in DNA arise? And how did they arise within a channel for transmitting information?
How indeed ?
Information is separate from the medium or substrate that carries it:
George Willams (Evolutionary Biologist) “evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains:that of information and that of matter…The gene is a package of information, not an object.The pattern of base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene.But the DNA is the medium not the message”
-no chance event has ever produced specified information yet there is a presupposition towards chance as the bringer of complexity that can not only produce a code and give meaning to the code but can also produce the means of transcribing and translating that code -Chicken and egg come to mind.There is much more to the film including the a link between Natural selection and the Nazi regime.
A great day out thanks Premier radio for the event .
The late theologian Francis Schaeffer talks about the Trinity amongst other things as a means of overcoming the problem of particulars verses universals.
He defines the problem as:
‘In the area of knowledge you have particulars , by which we mean the individual “things” that we see in the world.
At any given moment, I am faced with thousands, indeed, literally millions of particulars, just in what I see with the glance of the eyes. What are the universals which give these particulars meaning? This is the heart of the problem of epistemology and the problem of knowing’
With the Trinity we have a model for universals and particulars in that there is both personal unity and personal diversity within the relationship of the Father,son and holy spirit.
This communication between the three persons of the Trinity, is the model for family, the model for marriage, the model for mans need to be part of a community, the model for communication –as Schaeffer say ‘The reason we know anything is that he is not silent’.
The Trinity also answers the problem of consciousness as expressed by Ayn Rand :
‘If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something.’
Prior to the creation event God was totally alone with nothing else existing then he could not be conscious of anything except himself.
The answer to this problem is that prior to anything existing apart from God -God was in relationship with the members of the trinity-The Father is not the same person as the Son; the Son is not the same person as the Holy Spirit; and the Holy Spirit is not the same person as Father.The Trinity has particulars and universals they are three distinct persons; yet, they are all the one God.
There are some fundamental ideas that point away from a exclusively materialistic closed universe, towards a universe existing as a result of intent.Current evidence based thinking supports the idea of the universe existing from the moment of a singularity;described by Hoyle mockingly as the ‘Big Bang’.Either the universe had a initial agency cause or it has existed eternally there are no other options available as far as I can see.An eternal universe has several problems -one that is new to me is the idea of heat death as expounded by William Lane Craig – :
‘According to the second law of thermodynamics, processes taking place in a closed system always tend toward a state of equilibrium. Now our interest is in what implications this has when the law is applied to the universe as a whole. For the universe is a gigantic closed system, since it is everything there is and no energy is being fed into it from without. The second law seems to imply that, given enough time, the universe will reach a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, known as the “heat death” of the universe. This death may be hot or cold, depending on whether the universe will expand forever or eventually re-contract. On the one hand, if the density of the universe is great enough to overcome the force of the expansion, then the universe will re-contract into a hot fireball. As the universe contracts, the stars burn more rapidly until they finally explode or evaporate. As the universe grows denser, the black holes begin to gobble up everything around them and begin themselves to coalesce until all the black holes finally coalesce into one gigantic black hole which is coextensive with the universe, from which it will never re-emerge. On the other hand, if the density of the universe is insufficient to halt the expansion, as seems more likely, then the galaxies will turn all their gas into stars and the stars will burn out. At 10[30 ]years the universe will consist of 90% dead stars, 9% supermassive black holes, and l% atomic matter. Elementary particle physics suggests that thereafter protons will decay into electrons and positrons, so that space will be filled with a rarefied gas so thin that the distance between an electron and a positron will be about the size of the present galaxy. At 10[100] years some scientists believe that the black holes themselves will dissipate into radiation and elementary particles. Eventually all the matter in the dark, cold, ever-expanding universe will be reduced to an ultra-thin gas of elementary particles and radiation. Equilibrium will prevail throughout, and the entire universe will be in its final state, from which no change will occur.
Now the question which needs to be asked is this: if, given sufficient time, the universe will reach heat death, then why is it not now in a state of heat death if it has existed for infinite time? If the universe did not begin to exist, then it should now be in a state of equilibrium.’
The problem with an eternal universe that has always existed is that we have an infinite regress, that is we’d have an infinite series of moments to surpass in order to arrive at this moment. The infinite past would never catch up with the present so that no causality would be effected. That leaves the idea of an agent causing the universe to exist,further to this idea I came upon this idea from a guy on a forum called forhisglory which I like :
1.The universe, and everything in it, is contingent ,that is it does not have to exist (it is not certain to exist-it is not logically necessary)
2.This contingent nature of the universe gives it the potential to not exist or to change its nature .
3.Something that has potentiality is by definition an effect of some cause.
4.Contingent entities cannot cause there own existence .
5.Therefore, there must be pure actuality, that exists as a necessary being, to actualize all that is contingent. We could call that pure actuality God.
Here’s a quote from G.K.Chesterton:
So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in
humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition.I am proud of being fettered by antiquated
dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic
friends repeat with so much pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated.
G. K. Chesterton, from The Autobiography of
G. K. Chesterton (1936)
In an age where Jesus is repeatedly reinvented and the gospel is presented in the media with, in some cases , breath taking bias ,witness the recent Channel4 program by Howard Jacobson called: ‘ Christianity: A History’.
According to this program Christians are antisemitic as the New testament is full of anti-Jewish rhetoric, encouraging hatred and antisemitic attitudes.I didn’t recognise anything in the program that in any way accurately represented Christianity as I have known it .
I found this program amazing and perplexing , I’ ve been a Christian for over 25 years and have never come across antisemitic attitudes amongst Christians in the UK,or anywhere else I have been.
In fact the situation from my point of view is the exact opposite, for instance on my bookshelf is a book by Edith Schaeffer called ‘Christianity is Jewish’ which expounds on the Jewish roots of Christianity.
Also I have several journals regarding the Jewishness of Christianity some authored by, most notably, Dr David H Stern who produced the the Complete Jewish Bible as well as the excellent book ‘Restoring the Jewishness of the Gospel: A message for Christians ( Stern is part of the Messianic Jewish movement in Israel ).
From the the Times article regarding Jacobsons Program:
‘ “That’s a wonderful way of putting it,” said Dr Karen Maitland, of the Jewish Community of Lincoln, when told by her interviewer (Jacobson) that Christianity’s relationship with Judaism was Oedipal: a younger religion in terror of a cruel parent religion.’
This Oedipal religion is not the Christianity I have known.In fact a Pastor in my old church and good friend is a Jew.
There’s no denying the historic use of the Gospel as a justification ,however tenuous, to antisemtic behaviour on the part of some, but this is not part of good news Christ brought.
Biblical Christians realise as Paul said that they have been grafted into Israel; Romans 11 :
‘I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! For I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. 2 God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.’
Howard why didnt you quote this in scripture in your program ?
From Viktor Frankl by way of Richard Weikarts discovery institute paper:
“If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted, with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment–or, as the Nazi liked to say, of ‘Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”
Can Viktor rest easy now these nihilistic ideas are banished or does a million copy best seller like Dawkins God delusion spell out within the west at least, an increasing tendency to accept the naturalistic narrative along with its corresponding low view of humanity ?
