Tale of 2 Scientists on CT

Check out this excellent article on 2 scientists, both believers, pursuing God and truth through their craft, even though one is a theistic evolutionist and one a young-earth creationist. We would all do well to heed their thought that the "war" between the 2 camps is doing much more harm than good, and too often reflects the same "demonization" tactics that exists in today's political world. Godly people disagree on this issue, and that's okay. Let us all keep pursuing God and his truth!

Faith and Evolution

I found this book review for "Nature's Witness: How Evolution can Inspire Faith" by Daniel Harrell in an email from Emergent today. I have not yet read the book, but I like the things the reviewer had to say about his own journey.

Check it out here. We have often tried to say on this blog that there is a beauty to much of science that points to a Creator if we let it. We cannot allow our ties to an interpretation of Genesis 1-11 become our Ptolemic, earth-is-the-center-of-the-universe belief--the white whale of our modern church--that ultimately destroys our credibility and points people away from the very God we are intending to support.

I especially like the quote the reviewer quotes about our real problem is not with evolution, but with what some scientists do with evolution to interpret the rest of the world (e.g. there isn't a God).

Accomodation and Naturalism

FYI, this is a continuation of a discussion started at http://stimulation81.blogspot.com/2007/09/does-science-disprove-my-view-of-bible.html. You might want to catch up there if something here doesn't make sense...

The 7-foot ninja is not a fan of poor thinking of inconsistent reasoning. And he's certainly not going to let me or anyone else get away with our own constructs. Here's a quote from is post:

What about the idea of accommodation, which Gordon invokes and you do as well? The idea that God withheld the whole truth from the ancient Israelites and just adopted the common cultural outlook to somehow express his word through is by no means a new thought. As a formal theory it goes back at least to J.S. Semler well over 200 years ago. The idea that we today have reached the maturity and intellectual capacity to really grasp what God has to say smacks of the chronological snobbery that C.S. Lewis so disdained. This is not postmodern, but thoroughly "modern".

I make no claims that we have "reached the maturity and intellectual capacity" to speak accurately for God. I would go so far as to say that 1,000 years from now those alive then will be questioning our understanding of both Science and Theology on various aspects. They will have progressed in the accumulation and sharing of knowledge in ways we can't imagine, just like we have in the previous 1,000 years. But any smarter? I doubt it. And certainly not any more mature, especially in the things that matter, like practicing the things that the Bible calls "wisdom" or avoiding the things of "fools."

I do however think that there is some merit to the idea of progressive revelation. God did not reveal the whole picture to those who lived before Jesus. And while I fully believe that Jesus' sacrifice was complete for our redemption, I don't think we know everything today that there is to know about that either.

Yes, God accomodates his communication to people for the situation that they are in. He speaks in their language, within their cultural limits, in ways they can understand. Does this mean he accomodates his message? No, not necessarily. And it certainly doesn't mean he waters down his message. Does it mean that we sometimes hear our own voices--whether our own wishes or our cultural norms or whatever--and attribute God's voice to them? Absolutely not. We do this both inside and outside the church, speaking for God or in the name of God in such definite terms on issues that we may have simply made up or we may be crazy or whatever. Do pomos often go overboard and throw out the baby with the bathwater on this accomodation idea? Sure they do.

Then he says, quoting someone who wrote on another blog I referenced:

Gordon says, "If the purpose of the Hebrew creation story was not to provide Israel (or us) with accurate scientific knowledge about the cosmos, why then do so many Christians reject any version of natural history that fails to conform to the Hebrew account?" In response I ask you, "If 'natural history' and 'science' by contemporary definitions automatically exclude God and his intervention in the world, why then do so many Christians accept the presuppositions of such theories and the slanted results that they produce?"

I do not think that "natural history" and/or "science" do automatically exclude God. Every human being has levels of constructs by which they view the world. As you have often pointed out, we rarely examine these constructs, or what Lesslie Newbigin called "plausibility structures" in his great book "The Gospel in a Pluralist Society." I on the other hand, in the proper contexts, love to deconstruct my own and others constructs. I'm wrong (probably a lot) in my assessents. I do it way too much for most of my Christian friends, including my own wife. But I think I do it BECAUSE I'm often proven wrong on things, not because I think I'm right on things. Perhaps I'm getting off point here, but I have come to see at least one aspect of maturity as being a healthy self-criticism. When I was 22, there were 4,208 things I knew to be true about theology, science, philosophy, etc. They were black and white. Now there are only 4 or 5 that I'm willing to stake my life on being true. I think that I have matured, but I certainly don't think that means I can speak for God with his authority on hundreds of topics and viewpoints.

So back to the matter at hand--just because (some, most, even all) materialistic scientists say that the theory of evolution denies the existence of God does not mean that evolutionary theory isn't a plausible scientific theory, anymore than just because Tim LaHaye says that the Bible clearly teaches a pre-trib rapture, premillenial eschatology means that if he's wrong (I think he is) Jesus isn't coming back at all (which I believe him to be).

Unscientific or non-scientific? Reply to BWolf30 #2

Here's another quote from the 7-foot ninja:

Next, there is a big difference between "'inaccurate' scientific facts" and non-scientific statements based on a phenomenal point of view. The Bible never does claim to be a scientific manual, but to acknowledge this and then claim error by contemporary "scientific" standards, albeit purposeful error, doesn't follow. Non-scientific doesn't mean unscientific.

I almost didn't make a post to reply to this, because I wasn't sure it was that vital to the discussion. But then I changed my mind. I'm going to assume that by "phenomenal point of view" you mean that because of the point of view of an ancient Hebrew--i.e. without microscope, telescope, advanced mathematics, geological understanding of plate tectonics, etc.--they make non-scientific statements that to us, if viewed as scientific commentary, would be inaccurate, but they are really just points of view based on the available information to that ancient Hebrew. In other words, when I wake up and say "Look at the beautiful sunrise" instead of "Look at the viewing of the sun as the earth rotates on its axis" you don't judge my first statement as a scientific inaccuracy. If that's what you mean, I think I agree with you.

But if that is what they are, non-scientific statements, then why do so many Evangelical Christians today take them to mean scientific things?

Scientific facts should be used carefully in situations of philosophic and theological discussion. Today's "understanding" of the human genome could become tomorrow's earth-centric solar system.

My main point is that the whole creation-science movement (of which I was long a part, at least in my belief) tries very hard to make the Bible say scientific things when it isn't. And even more egregious is that they make belief in these scientific biblical statements mandatory for being a True Christian.

Open to Evolution?

So when we left off a few days ago, I had journeyed from a 10,000 year old world to a 4,000,000,000 year old one (give or take a millenium or two), but still saw the need for God to have been involved in creating the world in a unique sort of way without the process of darwinian evolution. I still had a hang-up about God having to be directly involved for it to be "true" somehow.

Then I read Brian McLaren's book "A New Kind of Christian." At the same time I'm trying to reconcile emerging truths in the scientific world with my literalist biblical upbringing, I'm really discovering this emerging idea of postmodernity within me. I had read several Len Sweet books, studied a tiny bit of postmodern philosophy, and found that the music of postmodernity resonated in a unique harmony with my own soul. A friend recommended McLaren, and in his semi-fictional writing I found words to describe my world. I rediscovered for myself the mystery of God and the mystery that is Truth. Yes, Jesus is "the Way, the Truth and the Life." But while that sounds simple, it is wonderfully and beautifully deep!

If you've not read the "New Kind of Christian" trilogy, I highly recommend them. They are somewhat fictional, although by McLaren's own admission he's not trying to write great fiction. He's trying to fictionally describe his own journey into deconstructing the many human additions to theological (and scientific, and other kinds of) truth. It explores how our own cultures and languages and assumptions and upbringings can blind us to the beauty of truth. Maybe the best example is the word trinity. I am a total Trinitarian--I have long believed and taught that relationship is the greatest thing humans experience because it is the essence of the nature of God himself. But the truth is that "trinity" is a word we made up to describe as close as possible something completely indescribable. We finite humans often do this with truth, and then we decide to draw lines in the sand and live or die by our defining of truth instead of the truth itself.

I have come to think that this is absolutely true of our beliefs on evolution. We drew the line in the sand as evangelicals that evolution cannot be true. We never considered that there are other possible viewpoints that reflect the beauty of Truth, don't compromise on the message of Scripture, and uphold the scientific understandings of our universe. The only thing evolution violates is our construct, our "line in the sand" understanding of the truth of God's creative acts in the world.

The church did this with Copernicus and Galileo centuries ago, with the construct (biblically based and justified) that the Earth was the center of the universe. We now know that church leaders were silly to fight the sun-centered solar system idea on the basis of their biblical understanding. Could we be in the same position with macro-evolution? Have we thrown out the potential for understanding "the language of God" as Francis Collins describes it, because it's in a different language than our evangelical constructs will allow?

I say that we have. And that I don't want to anymore.

Lucy and the Beginning of Humans

This morning's San Antonio Express-News announces that a museum in Houston will continue with their plans to display the remains of Lucy, the most famous member of the australopithicus aferensis species. Scientists for many years believed that hominids probably evolved a larger brain at least at the same time--if not before--as they developed a full bipedal mode of walking. But Lucy changed that thought. Discovered in the early 1970s, she stood about 3 feet 8 inches tall, clearly walked on two legs, but still had a small brain capacity. Her kind roamed parts of the earth 1.5 to 4 million years ago. The big controversy for most people is whether or not Lucy should be allowed to travel and be displayed, or should such a find as this be protected from the probably accidents such a trip would incur.

But if you're a typical young-earth creationist, as I was until probably only 10 years ago myself, there are so many things in that first paragraph that you disagree with you can't see straight anymore, and they don't have anything to do with whether or not Lucy is fit for a tour. Creationist viewpoints range from such hominids as Lucy didn't really exist (the totally anti-intellectual viewpoint found in extreme fundamentalism Christianity, where Satan has manipulated the fossil record to trick us) to such hominids existed but are now extinct, not surviving long after the Deluge of Genesis 6. The age of the earth is chalked up to that Deluge, when God told Noah to build an ark and then he destroyed the rest of the world, wanting to start again with Noah's family and the animals he rescued. I hope to spend several posts showing how my own understanding has evolved in understanding evolutionary process and scientific theory in general.

10 or so years ago I had begun to see what I thought were horribly anti-intellectual turns among conservative Christians here in the US. While a staunch conservative myself, I was beginning to be challenged with alternative points of view, mostly as a reaction to the extreme fundamentalism I saw in my own tradition. I will not be able to do justice in just a few paragraphs to my changes in thought, but one early important piece was reading Hugh Ross's book Creation and Time (published 1994 by NavPress). Ross is an astronomer by education, and for him the stars in the sky point to the fact that the universe cannot be only 10-25,000 years old, unless you really start to say theologically that God is trying to trick us.

If the speed of light is a constant, then it took an enormous amount of time for the light of particular stars to come to earth, much much more than 25,000 years. In fact, even most Christian astronomers, according to Ross, believe the earth to be the 4 billion or so years that other scientists believe. To see anything else is to manipulate the clear evidence. Ross is what is called an 0ld-earth Creationist, or progressive Creationist. He rejects the idea of evolution having answers for the variety of life and the intelligence of humans today, but he believes that the clear evidence points to a very old earth. Even this is villified by the fundamentalists as some sort of capitulation to science at the expense of biblical truth. I will deal specifically with this thought (scientific truth contradicts biblical facts) in a later post.

For now though, I had evolved myself to thinking that old-earth creation better represents the facts as I knew them, and did not contradict a reading of the Bible except for the forced pseudo-literal reading of extreme fundamentalism. Conservative evangelicals will at this point probably see me heading right down a slippery slope into liberal theology, just like those who condemn the thinking of Hugh Ross, and leave me for "dead" theologically. But if you're still with me, I will pick up at this point in my next post.

The Language of God

I recently read Francis Collins' "The Language of God", and I'm going to spend a few posts trying to sort out loud (okay not really, but on paper. Okay, not really paper either, but digitally) my own evolution of thought on evolution.

First, some background on Collins. My first introduction to him was at the National Prayer Breakfast this past February, where he was the keynote speaker. Collins is the head of the Human Genome Project, which just a year or two ago announced the complete mapping of the billions of codes within human DNA. I'm not going to even pretend to understand much about this at all, but I do find it totally fascinating and--much like Collins--awesome. Collins saw himself for many years as a skeptic and agnostic, eventually as an atheist. But the beauty of molecular biology drew him back, along with what he calls the universal sense of a Moral Law. He read C. S. Lewis voraciously in his late 20s, and eventually became an evangelical Christian.

And therein lies the rub for most people who call themselves evangelical Christians. Collins is a confirmed evolutionist. And in most evangelical circles that's just a no-no. You can rant about Christian morals and then be outed as having homosexual sex and still get Christians to support you, or you can have a very public divorce and still pastor and make millions, but you better not say you believe in the theory of evolution, cause that's "straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200" kind of stuff.

Last week I was in El Paso, and drove through my old campus stomping grounds at UTEP. As I drove by the student union, I remembered that day 20+ years ago when I stood there with a microphone and speaker and debated students on various topics. I made several (stupid and/or ignorant) comments about evolution and those who supported it.

I was wrong.

Tune in to the next post to see how wrong I was.