The John Templeton Foundation’s Big Questions website is chugging away at a slow pace after having been moribund for a while. And it’s still purveying the same brand of accommodationism. But in contrast to other websites, it’s said to pay its authors very well. Shame on those scientists who aren’t religious but still publish there! But the religious and religion-friendly scientists also take advantage of the site, including Martin Nowak and Ian Tattersall as well as today’s highlighted accommodationist, Dr. Denis Alexander, who’s written a new article called “How are Christianity and evolution compatible?” (Note: it’s “how,” not “whether”.) There’s also a long and tedious author-led discussion following the piece.
Alexander, a molecular biologist, is Emeritus Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St. Edmund’s College of Cambridge University. Wikipedia confirms my memory that this is a Templeton-sponsored Institute:
It was established in 2006 by a $2,000,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation to carry out academic research, to foster understanding of the interaction between science and religion, and to engage public understanding in both these subject areas.
Alexander, an evangelical Christian, has long been in the Templeton stable. His Institute was founded by them, he’s published at least one book with the Templeton Foundation Press, and is on the Board of Trustees of the Foundation. He writes extensively on how science and religion are compatible and, in fact, how science gives evidence for God. His Templeton-published book, The Language of Genetics (note the similarity to Francis Collins’s title: The Language of God), has this précis (my emphasis):
Alexander surveys the big picture, covering such topics as the birth of the field; DNA: what it is, how it works, and how it was discovered; our genetic history; the role of genes in diseases, epigenetics, and genetic engineering. The book assumes the reader has little scientific background, least of all in genetics, and approaches these issues in a very accessible way, free of specialized or overly technical jargon. In the last chapter, Dr. Alexander explores some of the big questions raised by genetics: what are its implications for notions of human value and uniqueness? Is evolution consistent with religious belief? If we believe in a God of love, then how come the evolutionary process, utterly dependent upon the language of genetics, is so wasteful and involves so much pain and suffering? How far should we go in manipulating the human genome? Does genetics subvert the idea that life has some ultimate meaning and purpose?
You know what his answers to most of those questions are already. And what the hell is that theology doing in a science book? Surely Templeton sees Alexander as one of the prize thoroughbreds in their stable, so willing is he to twist science into supporting God.
Frankly, I’m a bit distressed by how a prominent British biologist can be so religious (aren’t the Brits supposed to be less soaked in belief than Americans?), and especially by how Cambridge University has corrupted itself by taking $2,000,000 to found an institute aimed at harmonizing to science and superstition. To use Dan Barker’s words, it is studying a subject without an object.
But on to Alexander’s piece, which has two points (these are my words):
1. Everything we know about the world, especially evolution, is absolutely consonant with the existence of God. In fact, evolution and life bespeak the presence of God.
2. Even though scripture may appear to conflict with evolution, as in Genesis, that’s just based on a form of literalism that is a modern innovation. Early theologians like Aquinas and Augustine did not take scripture literally, but read it metaphorically, and so would not be disturbed by evolution. The Genesis story was always understood to be a metaphor, and that is how it was interpreted up to the rise of fundamentalism in the 20th century.
Really? Do I have to go through these misconceptions again? I’ll try to do so briefly, though I tend to get angry when I read stuff like this—particularly point #2. The claim that both lay religionists and Church fathers didn’t see the Bible as telling literal stories (except, of course, the ones about Jesus) is a willful misreading of people like Aquinas and Augustine, and if you read them, as I have, you’d know that. Alexander is either ignorant about their writings, or (I suspect) deliberately distorting them to support his views. And it’s maddening.
Alexander first tells us that many theologians and pastors accepted Darwin’s theories soon after they were broached in 1859. And he’s right, although what they accepted was evolution, not necessarily the idea of natural selection. The latter idea, which Darwin saw as his real innovation, wasn’t widely accepted, even by biologists, until the 1920s or so.
Alexander then tells us The Truth, i.e., his own interpretation of theology, which he says is in line with that of the early Church fathers. (By the way, I don’t think Augustine is seen as a “Church father”, and believers have called me out for saying that he was). Here’s Alexander’s view of God and creation, thoroughly Tillichian:
The biblical creation theology of the early Church Fathers, mediated to the European Church by great theological scholars such as Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, provides a framework within which evolution can comfortably be accommodated. The Christian understanding of God creating is very different from human types of creating. God as creator in the Christian view is the ground and source of all existence. Anything that exists, be it the laws of physics, mathematics, quantum fluctuations, Higgs bosons or the processes of evolution are therefore, ipso facto, aspects of this created order. When human beings make things they work with already existing material to produce something new. The human act of creating is not the complete cause of what is produced; but God’s creative act is the complete cause of what is produced.
So speaking of God as the ‘creator’ of the evolutionary process is not some attempt to smuggle ‘God language’ into a scientific description, as if God were some ‘extra component’ without which the scientific theory would be incomplete. Far from it, for then such a concept of ‘God’ would no longer be the creator God of Christian theology. Rather the existence of the created order is more like the on-going drama on the TV screen – remove the production studio and the transmitter and the screen would go blank.
The biblical writers underline this point by employing the past, present and future tense when speaking of creation. God is immanent in the created order, an insight with a Christological focus in the New Testament, where John insists in the prologue to his Gospel that “Through him [Jesus the Word] all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” and the Apostle Paul makes the astounding claim that not only by Christ have all things been created, but also that in Christ “all things hold together”.
So God created everything and then let it run, and everything that happened couldn’t have existed without God, who sustains everything from bosons to bisons. There is, then, no observation about nature that could refute God’s causation. Alexander then denies that he smuggles God into a naturalistic paradigm, asserting that that paradigm couldn’t even exist without God. But of course Alexander has no evidence for the “blank TV screen” scenario save the Bible and what he was taught by his religious peers and authorities. The Ground-of-Being God, while it has it roots in early theology, has for Very Sophisticated Theologians™™ completely replaced the interactive, theistic God for one reason: the G.o.B. God cannot be refuted. He’s more or less deistic, or at least sustains things in a way that we can’t fathom or test. It’s the refuge of the beleaguered believer.
I’m a bit confused about how God, who creates the universe and then let it run, is still claimed to be active in it: this seems to be an unholy compromise between theism and deism. In fact, Alexander says this:
It was such reflections that led 19th century theologians like Aubrey Moore to celebrate Darwin’s theory because, in their view, it helped to move theology away from the deistic notion of God the distant law-giver to the idea central to Christian theism of the creator God actively involved in upholding and sustaining the complete created order in which the evolutionary process is a contingent feature.
How, exactly, does God “uphold and sustain” a naturalistic process, one that requires his constant upholding and sustaining lest the t.v. screen become blank? Perhaps I’m theologically naive, but if God lets evolution run, how does he “uphold and sustain” it at the same time? Would a bird fall if he wasn’t there? That would seem to imply active intervention. Or perhaps we simply couldn’t have birds without God. Yet it all seems like the Argument from Having Your Cake and Eating it Too.
But never mind. There are two juicier bones to worry. One is Alexander’s bizarre view of evolution:
This [the “God-upholding-and-sustaining” process just described] is the evolutionary process which, as a matter of fact, provides the best explanation for the origins of all the biological diversity on this planet. Taken overall it is a tightly constrained process. The late Stephen Jay Gould likened evolutionary history to a drunk lurching around on the side-walk, but the point about a side-walk is that it’s a very constrained space. In the phenomenon known as ‘convergence’ the evolutionary process keeps finding the same adaptive solutions again and again in independent evolutionary lineages. Replay the tape of life again and it’s very likely that the diversity of life-forms would end up looking rather similar. There are only so many ways of being alive on planet earth. A pattern of order and constraint is rather consistent with a God who has intentions and purposes for the evolutionary process.
This is arrant nonsense. How do we know how constrained evolution is? Convergence, in which unrelated species develop similar traits (the fusiform shape of fish, ichthyosaurs and porpoises is one example) shows only that organisms have to adapt to an environment in which they live, not that evolution is in some way “constrained.” After all, fish left the water to become all the terrestrial vertebrates we know, and then went back to the water in the form of aquatic mammals and marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs. What kind of constraint is that? And often there is no convergence: humanlike intelligence evolved only once, as did feathers and the elephant’s trunk. Those are one-off adaptations, and further show a lack of constraint.
As for getting the same species we have now (humans are the important one, of course) if we replay the tape of life, I have a big section in my book on why that’s probably not true. For one thing, mutations may be quantum phenomena, not repeatable in a replayed tape of life. And if the raw materials for evolution differ, so might its products: the animals and plants we have today. Further, the Big Bang itself, so I’m told by Sean Carroll, was a quantum-like phenomenon, and if it were repeated (and presumably God made that happen, too), the likely result is that we wouldn’t have Earth and the Sun. We’d have other planets and galaxies, but probably not the ones we have now. And if we can’t guarantee Earth, can we guarantee humans? Perhaps there might still have been life on other planets, but would it be the kind of life made in God’s image?
In sum, Alexander’s claim that the “pattern of order and constraint” is consistent with a God with “intentions and purposes for the evolutionary process” is dumb, for precisely the same pattern can be explained by naturalism. I defy Alexander to show how what we see in evolution would differ had God not produced and sustained it. In fact, how does he explain the many disease organisms afflicting humans which evolved to torture us only after hominins had evolved? Are the body louse and the HIV/AIDS virus consistent with a God who had intentions and purposes? To me such things look like the pure opportunism of naturalistic evolution.
Finally, what is most maddening is Alexander’s distortions of early theologians. He claims, as do many G.o.B.s, that Augustine the Hippo (yes, it’s a joke) and Aquinas did not take scripture literally, and that literalism is a misguided product of our own time. This is also the position of many modern and Sophisticated Theologians™ like David Bentley Hart.
And they’re wrong. But first: Alexander’s contentions:
. . . a sizable segment of the American Church has adopted a literalistic stance towards the interpretation of the Bible. Reacting against the inroads of liberal theology into its ranks in the earlier decades of the 20th century, many American Christians started reading Biblical texts, such as Genesis 1-3, in a highly literalistic manner, as if it were teaching science rather than theology. Such modernistic handling of ancient texts inevitably leads to a clash with science.
Once we return to a more traditional way of interpreting the Bible, assisted by the early Church Fathers, then any possible clash between science and Biblical texts simply vaporizes. Augustine, for example, wrote a commentary between AD 401 and AD 415 entitled The Literal Interpretation of Genesis. The twenty-first century reader coming to this volume expecting to find the term ‘literal’ interpreted in terms of strict creation chronology and days of 24 hours, is in for a surprise. Instead Augustine read Genesis 1 as a theological literary text written in highly figurative language. Other Church Fathers (such as Origen, 3rd century) did likewise, as did Jewish commentators like Philo of Alexandria in the 1st century.
The biblical creation theology of the early Church Fathers, mediated to the European Church by great theological scholars such as Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, provides a framework within which evolution can comfortably be accommodated.
I’ve written about this over and over again. While it is true that both Augustine and Aquinas, for instance, entertained a metaphorical interpretation of some scripture, that was overlain on an absolutely historical interpretation as well. Both readings were seen as necessary, with the historical truth taking precedence over the human interpretation. And while Augustine did waffle on whether the “days” of Genesis were 24-hour days, he didn’t waffle on the existence of Paradise, the Garden of Eden, the Fall, and so on. I will quote from V. J. Torley at Uncommon Descent; yes, he’s a creationist and Intelligent Design advocate, but I’ve read the parts of Augustine’s City of God that Torley cites below, and he’s right. In his piece “Misreading St. Augustine,” Torley says this:
St. Augustine is often cited by theistic evolutionists (see here) as a theologian whose mindset was hospitable to the modern neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. Unfortunately, theistic evolutionists who make these claims are guilty of the same carelessness as Dr. David Bentley Hart: they haven’t read St. Augustine’s own writings on the subject. Instead, they’ve read essays and scholarly commentaries instead of sitting down and reading the texts themselves. If they did that, they would discover that St. Augustine expressly taught that the world was 6,000 years old (City of God, Book XII, chapter 12); that creatures of all kinds were created instantly at the beginning of time; that Adam and Eve were historical persons; that Paradise was a literal place; that the patriarch Methusaleh actually lived to the age of 969; that there was a literal ark, and that the Flood covered the whole earth; and that he vigorously defended all of these doctrines against skeptics in the fourth century (yes, they existed back then, too), who scoffed at them. The curious reader can confirm what I have read by consulting St. Augustine’s City of God Book XIII and Book XV.
. . . Let me finish with a piece of advice for Dr. Hart: if you’re going to defend Christianity, do it intelligently. Don’t misquote sources that even skeptics can check for themselves, and don’t gild the lily. Please portray the past accurately, warts and all.
So while Denis Alexander touts Augustine’s “metaphorical day-length” idea as consonant with evolution, everything else cited by Torley isn’t. Alexander is, to my mind, either ignorant of Augustine or deliberately hiding the rest of the man’s views.
The same goes for Aquinas. Yes, Aquinas also saw room for metaphor, but maintained that each section of the Bible must be read as both historically accurate and containing further meanings for the reader. And if you read the Summa Theologica, you’ll find that he believed not just in the historicity of Adam and Eve, but also in Paradise, the creation, the Fall, and Noah and his Big Flood. Hilariously, Aquinas also devoted a lot of the Summa Theologica to angels, in which he was deeply interested. Aquinas muses extensively, in the section called “Treatise on the Angels,” on how many angels there were, how they moved, what they knew, what they liked, and what they wanted. What a waste of a good mind!
One could say the same thing about Alexander and his accommodationism. How much more might we know about molecular biology had Alexander devoted his considerable intelligence to biology rather than squashing theology into the Procrustean bed of science! If he did to science what he did to the history of theology, he’d be excoriated for distorting the facts. As it is, how many people actually read Aquinas and Augustine these days?
No, Biblical literalism was not an invention of 20th century Fundamentalism. It was there from the start. So were metaphorical interpretations, but for the great theologians Aquinas and Augustine—I really hesitate to call any theologian “great”—literalism was their first priority, and interpretation took a back seat.
h/t: Mark
Why does it matter to modern theologians, especially to theologians who are trained scientists, that the views of Aquinas and Augustine represent their own?
This is quite confusing to me. When I read these people trying to reconcile their views with those of Augustine or Aquinas I read them as bragging that their views are ancient or medieval.
I wondered this myself and I think the answer is that they think they are getting to the true meaning because the original guys interpreted things that way. I. Order to appreciate why they think this is important, it helps to remember that religion isn’t progressive but dogmatic. It has no interest in progressing past an age and learning (it’s adherents, thankfully, often do as we see with cherry pickers).
I. Order = in order
Also, it helps to understand that religion is authoritarian so if the original guys say something is so, it must be so because they are the authority.
Also, the original “Church Fathers” were closer to Jesus and therefore practiced the true faith, which always bears an uncanny resemblance to beliefs of whoever is speaking, and does not resemble the beliefs of those misguided heathens down the street.
And they know this because they were there.
Oh, wait…
Well, the assumption is that authority closer in time to an event or a text is likely to be more likely to be true on the facts as to what was meant by that text or event.
This applies to not just religion but to, say, social mores. See also the law, as to a crime or an accident. Or most anything. Like The Federalist Papers as to the meaning of a Constitutional provision. Who is more likely to reflect the intent of the lawgivers–Alexander Hamilton and James Madison or Antonin Scalia and Glenn Beck?
I think if we actually knew what Augustine (or Matthew, Mark, etc.) thought about a particular doctrine or issue, it does have a bearing on what early Christianity’s formal position was. I don’t see how thinking that is bizarre. Although a question would then arise as to how typical Augustine (etc.) was on an issue, especially as to the average guy lay adherent’s views. X authority may have viewed it metaphorically–that doesn’t mean others did, or that the common church-goer did. Read that priest’s screed on Hell in James Joyce’s Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man. He may have thought Hell was a metaphor, but he obviously wanted those he was indoctrinating to think it real.
If there’s one thing good about Dr. Alexander’s position, is that he makes it absolutely clear that his theology is nothing more than a giant conspiracy theory. Why Jesus creating and sustaining existence rather than the holodeck operators or the matrix programmers or the aliens controlling your thoughts with their mind rays?
…but, presumably, God left the sustenance of bosoms to Victoria’s Secret?
b&
They don’t seem to realize (as Leibniz did, but didn’t manage to solve) that creates a gigantic problem of evil.
Oh, yeah. “With great power comes great responsibility.” Like the responsibility to call 9-1-1….
b&
Q. How are science and religion compatible?
A. Cognitive Dissonance.
Fork over the $2mil, Templeton!
A: Cause I likes it. Intellectual suicide indeed.
//
Cambridge University didn’t accept the Templeton money, St Edmund’s College did. Cambridge and Oxford are unusual in how they are set up and the colleges are independent entities in most ways. Note the wording on the Faraday’s about page, “St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge” no reference to them as a “Cambridge University” institute. Note the institute is not on the University’s list of Institutes and Centres.
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/research-at-cambridge/centres-and-institutes
You mean Aquinas.
Yep, fixed, thanks.
How come the Very Sophisticated Theologians™ Don’t agree with the Sophisticated Theologians™ Who don’t agree with the Theologians.
Maybe we could start our own religion called something like GoBianityism and declare ourselves Very Very Very Sophisticated Theologians™™™. All we have to do is make stuff up.
Oh wait, that has been done 30,000 times before.
Doctor Coyne:
Two typos:
1) In the second paragraph, “Templeton-spondored”.
2) In the third paragraph from the end, “Augustine also devoted a lot of the Summa Theologica to angels” should read “Aquinas…”
Second one fixed previously, thanks for calling attention to the first, which I’ve also fixed.
Most readers call me “Jerry,” by the way.
It’s entirely possible that denominations differ on this point. But if believers have been telling you that no denominations consider Augustine as one of the church fathers, rest assured that they are talking out of a part of their anatomy usually employed for other purposes. He was referred to as such when I (many years ago) suffered religious education, and a quick look around the web reveals a number of authoritative-looking sites identifying him as such, including no less than churchfathers.org and newadvent.org, which houses the Catholic Encyclopedia.
Augustine is definitely highly revered in Catholicism. Let’s not forget that he also lived nearly four centuries after the purported events occurred that launched Christianity. It is somewhat of a coincidence, to put it charitably, that so many of the core dogmas in the Catholic Church were developed after Constantine converted and the Church had political and military clout. Now, there was a means of enforcing on a wide scale which beliefs were true and which were heresies. Then again, if we look at the root meaning of “heresy,” all the beliefs were heresies in relation to one another.
It must be terribly frustrating for evolutionary biologists when fellow biologists with PhDs so mangle their field. I cant think of any academic discipline that has to put up with this uninformed speculation. How would biochemists feel if vague religous/mystical pronouncements on protein folding were put front and center in intellectual discourse.
Rigorous training in evo should be mandatory for all advanced bio degrees
I think only biologists, geologists, and cosmologists/astronomers have to put up with this nonsense because those are the only sciences that are addressed (incorrectly, of course) in the bible and the koran. At least, I don’t recollect anything in them about the periodic table, or Newton’s laws.
A certain Mr. Ken Ham provides a very useful distinction, between “observational” science and “historical” science–useful in the sense that should you hear anyone making such a distinction, you know immediately that they are babbling ignorantly.
On the other hand, other fields have to put up with equally invincible ignorance. E.g., climate scientists and anthropogenic climate change deniers.
On the the third hand, *all* humans to some degree have to put up with this BS because ignorance affects us all (to varying degrees).
The phrase is, on the gripping hand. And, if you need more than three hands, your problem is probably unspeakably cthulhonic and best not…well…spoken of….
b&
Alexander:
Replay the tape of life again and it’s very likely that the diversity of life-forms would end up looking rather similar.
End up???? That is an anthropomorphism.
…Unless he means that all life forms will end up looking rather similar after the sun explodes and cooks us all to a crisp.
Well, it’s an anthropomorphism because this is, don’tcha know, all about creating PEOPLE: the “spearhead”, the absolute, perfect culmination of God’s creation….oh, wait, my back hurts, I’m choking, and I think my appendix is acting up again….
But at least the light-sensitive cells in your eyes are on the right side of your retina. Oh, wait, you mean you’re *not* a cephalopod?
This comment made me laugh so hard that only my aged enlarged prostate prevented me from involuntary urination. The same condition also causes difficulty when voluntary urination is the goal. One would think a quality designer would never have made either of these easily mitigated errors, or executed an easily accomplished change order once the design oversight was recognized. It’s not as if correction of this minor flaw even barely approaches the same degree of difficulty as creating a universe from nothing but a thought.
Ha ha! With women, it’s the opposite problem as the uterus is dragged down with gravity & pushes on the bladder.
Once the prostate gets cancer and is removed this “feature” will respond in the same manner as described by Diana.
Your remark causes me to wonder what my odds are of developing the big C in my prostrate:
http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/prostate/statistics/age.htm
This has nothing to do with anything, but I can’t help wondering: Is “prostrate” an autocorrect error, a typo, or an intentional misspelling for humorous effect?
I would never have realized my error if you had not notified me. I am prostrate from extreme embarrassment, and my prostate ain’t doin’ so good, neither.
🙂 My dad always says “prostrate” and I’m always correcting him like some sort of tourette’s like reflex. My poor dad. It’s bad enough he could one day get that condition but he has a smart assed daughter to boot.
The mammalian urethra/prostate design was copied from the highly successful arthropod oesophagus/brain relationship. What could go wrong?
What they say: “Science and religion are compatible”. What they mean: “Science and my version of Christianity are compatible”. What Cambridge seems to not understand is that science is about testing hypotheses, not rationalizing conclusions you already accept. That “institute” should be quietly swept under the rug. Better yet, eliminate it with great fanfare to admit publicly “We were wrong!” (which is what HONEST people do…).
Oh, yes! +1 for sure.
…and they even have a peculiar definition of, “compatible,” too.
What they’re trying to claim is that science hasn’t contradicted any of their core beliefs as a Christian.
This is, of course, patently absurd on the face of it. Especially since the CERN team’s discovery of the Higgs Boson, we know that the gods no more fiddle at subatomic or any other scales than we’ve known since Newton that they don’t at planetary scales.
But, much more fundamentally, they’re grossly incompatible in their epistemologies. Science is the apportioning of belief in proportions indicated by a rational analysis of empirical observation. Religion is nothing without faith, and faith is the explicit rejection of the foundational principle of science: faith insists belief be apportioned by various means, from the authority of others to personal intuition.
Claiming the two are compatible is like claiming that North Korea is a democracy because citizens of North Korea participate in the government, and it’s therefore a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
b&
I’d still like to know how they reconcile the bodily Resurrection of Jesus with The Law of Conservation. Either Jesus rose bodily obeying the laws of Physics and he’s somewhere in the Universe now and living forever or he went to “another realm” and his mass and energy disappeared. If it’s the first, there needs to be an explanation as to 1) How he took flight with no equipment; 2) How he continued to breath as the air thinned; 3) How he didn’t get fried by radiation after the miracle of breath holding took place; 4) How he didn’t…oh what’s the use? All this will be answered with “mystery” and then continued assertions that any of the above is not only compatible with what we know about nature, but also that we have good reason to believe it happened.
To be fair, the Resurrection is perfectly compatible with the cosmology of about 2500 – 3000 years ago. Jesus bodily rose into the sky and flew up to the dome of the firmament. Once there, he passed through an opening in said hole and thereby entered the Kingdom of Heaven.
The obvious problem with Christianity is that it makes no sense whatsoever in the context of modern science. But it is perfectly reasonable…if you restrict yourself to an understanding of the Universe that was already hopelessly outdated by the time of the Caesars.
b&
Only some such cosmologies – those of the Epicureans, Peripatetics and Stoics, for example, are not compatible either.
Saying it’s compatible with some understanding of science in some culture 3000 years ago would seem to me even a stretch for Sophisticated Theologians. Usually, the line of reasoning they use reconciles Genesis with modern cosmology as well as evolution, so I don’t think they’d do such an obvious shifting of the goalposts to explain away a resurrection that violates biology and physics.
The usual arguments I hear debate the historicity of Jesus and the likelihood of the resurrection in that context. They don’t touch the science, there’s never any debates on the scientific compatibility.
Oh, certainly — no modern theologian would admit that the Bible only makes sense in the context of the ignorant superstitions of the common masses of the time. But it is the explanation for why the original authors thought up the stories in the first place and why people bought into them originally. Jesus ascending into the sky to go to Heaven was a perfectly reasonable thing for him to have done, because that’s how people thought the world was constructed. “Up” was only a single direction, not a sweeping and infinite expanse. Give somebody from that era a lift in an helicopter and they’d ask you how long it would take you to fly all the way to the Firmament overhead.
To modern ears that all sounds absurd, to the point of incomprehensibility. But in the backwaters of the early Roman Empire, it would have been the only thing that made sense.
The challenge for the theologians is to “reinterpret” what was a very matter-of-fact story into something allegorical that doesn’t clash too obviously with either the story or our modern understanding of the Universe. A Sisyphean task, to be sure, but it keeps today’s rubes’s asses in the pews, and asses in pews pay theological salaries.
b&
As usual, glad to see you’re on the same page. I’ve had the “up” discussion before as well. Given that we now know that we don’t have to get too far away from Earth for the word “up” to become meaningless, where precisely is Heaven? If it is supposed to be a metaphor, what evidence is there (both for Heaven and for the metaphor)? The most reasonable explanation is that the writers of the era literally thought Heaven was up there somewhere.
This fits in very nicely with literal belief in the firmament above. Given that there was no way to scientifically investigate such things, thinking that the blue sky also contained water (in the same way the blue seas do) seems reasonable. It takes an absolutely massive conspiracy theory to think that separate authors from separate eras participated in building the same completely reasonable assumptions, but only meant them metaphorically.
Of course, to apply this consistently, why then is the death of Jesus and the associated afterlife not a metaphor as well? What criteria is used to determine that exegesis of the Old Testament yields an elaborate metaphor, which would likely have been developed with a priori knowledge that their writings would one day be shown incorrect via empirical means that the writers had no way of knowing about? And, if the conspiracy runs deeper (the writers did know that they could be wrong), why didn’t they leave some hint as to precisely what the metaphors mean? Why predestine great minds to waste lifetimes trying to decipher meaning, only to have rampant disagreement even two to four thousand years later?
I saw Eric MacDonald chime in with his response to Jerry earlier and point out that Augustine said it mattered not whether the time was 6,000 or 6,000,000 years. Yes, he may have said this, but this doesn’t demonstrate that Augustine didn’t believe in instantaneous creation X years ago and even given the statement that it doesn’t matter, that doesn’t demonstrate that Augustine didn’t actually think that it was indeed 6,000 years ago. It’s absolutely true that it doesn’t matter whether Augustine thought it was 6,000, six million, or 6^100 years ago that instantaneous creation happened. If he thought it happened at all, he was asserting something that modern science has thoroughly debunked.
All the more so since rain come from the heavens. The ancient descriptions of the portals of the firmament opening and the waters pouring forth sound poetic today, but they’re also quite realistic if you know nothing of the hydrologic cycle.
Exactly right. We all know that it was last Thursday, and it was Queen Maeve who Created….
b&
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
159 Faith and science: “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.” “Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are.”
The first sentence pretty much says it all.
It took hundreds of years for the Church to apologise to Gallileo et al. I guess it takes faith longer than reason to work out what the truth is.
Martin Luther said reason was the enemy of faith, but then he wasn’t too popular with the Catholic Church at the time either. He’s not exactly my go-to guy, and I find the quote ironic, but it’s reason that shines the spotlight on the illegitimacy of faith.
I’ve been following a thread on a Catholic forum and some members there are demanding that scientists apologize *to the church* based on their flawed understanding of modern cosmology — so it appears it ain’t over yet.
Got link? – might go there for the lulz.
I’ve tried twice to paste a link, but it hasn’t shown in the comments yet. I’ll check back later and try again if necessary.
Here it is — hopefully.
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=889794
I occasionally get into some discussions with people on that site. This member LinusThe2nd is absolutely insufferable, though it is entertaining when the threads develop enough to see the sophisticated believers go through their mental contortions against many members who are more conservative and fundamentalist.
As for lulz, here’s a good comment from Darryl B: “I don’t believe the earth is entirely stationary. I believe the earth is oscillating a very small amount, and that is what produces the high tides low tides. Or it could be the gravitational pull of the moon (not).”
A favorite tactic the fundamentalists use against the sophisticated believers there:
S: I don’t believe God just poofed everything into existence in six days.
F: You believe Jesus was miraculously resurrected don’t you? (Knowing that all Catholics *must* believe that.)
S: Of course.
F: Then God could surely have worked another miracle when he created Earth. Amirite?
The literalists actually are right here. If God could break numerous natural laws, for which there is not one iota of evidence that they have been broken, then yes, he could’ve created everything ex nihilo.
Once the assertion is made that God can occasionally, or hell, that God can even break the laws of nature one time, any understanding of anything is off the table. Sure, God could’ve done this 2,000 years ago and he could’ve also made everything 6,000 years ago. He also could’ve done it right now. But why constrict it to right now? Maybe he did it 5 minutes into the future and we’re living in our own memories. Until a theologian outlines an objective way to determine what is metaphor and what is not, it makes no sense to center an entire worldview around one miracle that must be taken literally.
Thanks!
I think we can edit this theological verbosity down to one sentence, “Faith, properly understood, is above reason, where properly understood means what we proclaim to be true.”
People have been pointing out absurdities in Alexanders argument. There are some questions I’d like to ask him: what evidence is there that God sustains existence. What is the mechanism and how could God stop sustaining it?
The problem is Alexander would have an answer to all of these questions. And if you didnt like those answers he’d have an answer to that! For 2000 years the best minds of Europe have devoted themselves to creating this labyrinth of pseudophilosophy called theology. Every set of mutually incompatible attributes claimed for God, every absurdity has a dozen arguments made in support, and each of thos has a dozen in turn, and so on and so on. It doesn’t matter how bad the reasoning is as long as it leads to something else and its impossible to win an argument because theres always some obscure medieval theologan who said something on that point.
The only thing you can do is stand back from the whole thing and make a compelling argument why the whole enterprise is bullscheist
“There are some questions I’d like to ask him: what evidence is there that God sustains existence.”
Easy. People have believed for centuries that god exists, created the world, and sustained it. This is their explanation for where everything comes from. From this idea, you then progress to the reverse: that the existence of everything proves that god exists, created the world, and sustained it. So God not only implies existence, but existence implies God, and they become mutually necessary such that you can’t have one without the other. It becomes an automatic, self-contained cycle, which simply swallows anything offered as a counter and dumps it in the “everything” folder unthinkingly.
Of course, there is the nagging problem that this is completely circular logic that assumes what it sets out to prove, is completely arbitrary in singling out the god hypothesis as if it were the only possible explanation for everything, adds no further information beyond tacking on a “Goddidit” to every fact we discover, and doesn’t justify itself at all with even an iota of evidence, rational argumentation, or precise and well-informed theory. It also doesn’t even have the decency to explain what this god thing is supposed to be, considering all the competing views people seem to have of it. But who respects intellectual honesty like that when it comes to issues of faith, eh?
Yup, all that, plus ignoring the 3.3 billion people who still don’t believe in any type of monotheism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations#Adherent_estimates
Well, well, well.
1)
Also, note how it’s “Christianity,” not “Islam,” or “Hinduism,” or “religion”. Smuggling the conclusion into the premises a little, eh, Dr. A?
2)
a) Do you have any evidence to support this idea?
b) A muslim (or hindu) says the same thing that you do, but substitutes the name “Allah (or Vishnu)” for “God”. Prove he’s wrong and you’re right. Show your work.
c) I claim that both you and the muslim are wrong; that the machine runs by itself. In other words, sir, I have no need of your hypothesis. This time I won’t even demand a proof; simply convince me of any one aspect of my life, beliefs, or ethics that necessitates your god, or that would even offer an improvement relative to the secular way of living I now practice.
3) To find one small piece of an immense work that supports what you want to believe (i. e., since Augustine might not have believed that the creation days were literal 24-hour days, he was therefore not a literalist) is a completely illegitimate misrepresentation of Augustine’s thought.
a) It reminds me of creationist acquaintances I have who will thumb through a book on evolution looking for one thing they can nitpick, and then, on that basis reject the entire contents of the book.
b) I believe that Mr. Torley called you out on the same misrepresentation.
c) Although I prefer to attribute to ignorance rather than to malice whenever possible, the long history of literal interpretation of holy books is so well-known that I can only conclude that you are prevaricating. Now, is it the case that your ground-of-being god does not address himself to the issue of lying? Or if he does, does that not make him a personal and moral being? It appears that, like Professor Hart, you are trying to have your Tillichian cake (when it suits) and eat it too. However, I understand that you receive a lot of money from the Templeton foundation, and it there is one thing I’m sure of (I wonder if you agree?), it is that it is very difficult to make a man understand something when his entire paycheck depends on him not understanding it.
4) As for your misunderstanding of evolution, I suggest you take Dr. Coyne’s criticism to heart. Perhaps you might even consider reading his book; the title of the book is the same as of this website.
Prevaricating does not seem to be quite accurate, and is still giving Alexander the benefit of the doubt. I think the most accurate word would be “lying.”
Hmm, I may need to check a dictionary; I was under the impression that the two words are synonyms, and that “prevaricating” is merely the ten-dollar form. I could be wrong (wouldn’t be the first time).
More words to live by from Augustine the Hippo:
“Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics [astronomy, biology, geology, etc.]; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.”
Thanks Peter N – I was going to add this as likely Augustine’s most important message.
Augustine here was following in Origen’s footsteps:
“What man of intelligence, I ask, will consider as a reasonable statement that the first and the second and the third day, in which there are said to be both morning and evening, existed without sun and moon and stars …?
Men of intelligence knew when literalism couldn’t be true – in so far as was crassly obvious. Augustine was stupid enough, however, to commit to the literal truth of Adam as the unique common ancestor of all humans. Stupid enough to believe that the universe could not be older than biblical calculation allowed.
Devout enough to believe that infants who died unbaptised would burn in hell for all eternity. Ascertained from a forensic analysis of Paul’s epistles.
Alexander’s depiction of Augustine’s non-literalist theology is cherry-pickingly risible.
Problem I have with both sides of this argument is that neither Denis Alexander or Jerry Coyne or myself for that matter are qualified to comment on what Augustine or Aquinas, may or may not have meant. This is the province of those who can read and understand late classical and medieval Latin, and have some idea of the intellectual context in which both thinkers were writing. Thinkers separated by nearly a thousand years, which generally means those qualified to comment on one are not necessarily qualified to comment on the other.
Scientists should really stick to science and leave the history of ideas to historians.
On Augustine his context and meaning, Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent is informative.
Let’s examine this authoritarian stance you’ve taken about who is qualified to comment on what.
First, some practical considerations. You do realize, that given your parameters, there would be very few people who could comment on Aquinas and Augustine. I wish I could draw a Venn diagram in this reply but essentially, your restrictions would mean that only a subset of Classicists who are interested in Christian Church Fathers could comment; this would amount to about 5 guys! Okay I’m using hyperbole but you get the point: there aren’t a lot of Classicists in the world and of those few Classicists, there are fewer that are interested in Christianity and even fewer of those that are interested in founding church fathers. Classicists like the fun stuff that happened in the Greek and Roman empire much more and Christianity is a small side show to that.
Now, let’s go beyond the practical considerations because it turns out that we don’t need to consider them. Why? It turns out that others have thought about the same restrictions so they actually already consulted those 5 guys. Inceed, people seriously interested in Augustine and Aquinas, do the due diligence of consulting Classicists when translating this stuff. You see, Classicists think about all those things you mentioned when they interpret text and put it into the vernacular. What!! You’re telling me I don’t need complete a 4 year under graduate course, followed by a 2 year Masters and a 4 year PhD before reading and understanding Augustine and Aquinus! Wow! You must also be telling me I can learn about all the Roman emperors and those philosophers like Epicurus too!! Classicists are great! Yes the are. Yes. They. Are.
You know who else are great? All those scientists who do all that science work so that Classics grads like me can explain why evolution is real and there is no controversy between religion and evolution because one is “belief” and one is fact. Or all those scientists that do that science-y work to understand the universe so I know that particles can pop in and out of existence so something can come from if not nothing, very little and that our universe wasn’t made for life but the opposite given all the dark matter. I can learn enough to comment on it all I want!
So, here I am a liberal arts grad with all this cool science knowledge and it’s awesome that there can be scientists or musicians or store clerks or anyone else who wants to learn with not only science knowledge but Classics knowledge. Cool eh? This is what it is to live in a society. A society where Carl Zimmer and Jennifer Ouellette (Humanities grads) can write intelligently about science and Jerry (a biologist) can write intelligently about the thoughts of men who wrote in Latin.
Brava, Diana!
I’ve defended Humanities grads so many times on here and promoted Humanities grad science writers and now I finally got the chance to support the scientists! 🙂
Yes, that was very well said. Also, I wonder what kind of specialist education Marcus Small got that makes him qualified to comment on who is qualified to comment on things.
I studied Computer Science. Perhaps only people like me are qualified to properly comment over the Internet? After all, we have a better understanding of how the information is transmitted as opposed to those who have only been instructed in the usefulness of the medium.
Yes, that is a fair response, my post was ill thought out. Jerry Coyne has actually taken the rouble to read about what he comments on.
My post was written late in the evening, not my best time of day.
I find it a bit baffling that any Christian would argue that Genesis refers to a non-literal day. By doing so they are arguing that you can’t trust the plain words of the bible but should, instead, assume the meaning may be off by a factor of around 700 billion. Apply that same factor to other parts of the bible and nothing in the bible has any coherent meaning. Stone to death could mean give a lollipop. Virgin could mean woman who has had sex with everyone on earth, multiple times. Died on the cross could mean had indigestion. And back in your lifetime could mean back in a trillion years.
The non-literal day argument undermines the veracity every single claim in the bible.
And that is Ken Ham’s message 🙂
Uhg, I have to go with Ken Ham on this one. :-0
It is tempting to say that biblical literalists are more honest about what the bible says based on that, unfortunately in other ways they very much are not, as shown by how they dodge around problems of biblical errancy, when suddenly the bible is selectively not literal, and isn’t meant to be read as a science book, etc.
You are right Scote – even Ham picks and chooses which verses he deems truth via a ‘simple reading’ and those he deems out-of-date, trumped by other verses, etc.
Not to mention what they (don’t) do with Luke 14.33: “In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.”
We often find ourselves in the strange position of giving a very qualified nod of…errrm, respect… to the biblical literalists like Ken Ham. They, like us, at least do not put up with the intellectual dishonesty of accommodationism.
Maybe not so strange. When I was a fundamentalist, we always expressed preference for an honest atheist over a namby-pamby agnostic, and we not infrequently heard the other side say that they felt that fundamentalists were more honest (relative to the bible, that is) than were liberal christians.
Perhaps an appreciation for the proverb, “Know thy enemy”?
Very true, and it prompts me to get out another one of my favorite quotations:
“But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”
-― Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:13-14
“…any Christian would argue that Genesis refers to a non-literal day…” Doesn’t the Bible somewhere say that 1000 years to us is like a day to God?
What do those people who insist that Bible literalism is a 20th century invention rejected by earlier believers make of Bede’s calculation 1300 years ago that the world was created in 3952 BC or Ussher’s 17th century calculation of October 23, 4004 BC? Perhaps Bede and Ussher weren’t True Christians.
“God’s creative act.” A cursory list of point mutations and chromosomal aberrations should clearly demonstrate that we could do without such wanton creativity. But I digress…
So Alexander’s magic agency is a deistic iteration of turtles all the way down, trying to smuggle in a magic-of-the-stopgap. Except that now the gap is crushed flat by testing, if everything that is acting in nature is non-creationist there isn’t anything left.
I’m also confused about how an Emeritus Director of an Institute for Science and Magic can fumble both. The one thing of his presumed stopgap handwaving thingies that isn’t one is quantum fluctuations. We know from Bell test experiments that there is no magic involved at the basis of physics. Indeed Alexander’s original claim is that it is not the basis but the philosophical model (“cause”) of an actual causality light cone that he has attempted to hijack for his magic delusions.
Either Alexander claims that quantum mechanics is erroneous. Or he, like Miller, claims that statistics is (as some fluctuations would be exempt from the distribution). In both cases he makes a mockery of areas that has shown themselves to be vital for science.
That reminds me of this new article of Thornton, he who resurrects proteins [my bold]:
“To find out how many evolutionary paths to these mutations exist, Thornton and colleagues took their resurrected GR—a little six-protein cluster that normally sits inside cell nuclei—to the library.
This “library screening” approach involved making a huge number of mutant variants of the ancestral GR that didn’t work. These non-functional proteins were then allowed to be rescued by other mutations that might make them functional again. If a”rescuing mutations” allowed a GR protein in the library to function again, it was introduced back into our own ancestral GR protein to see it could restore GR to its moderns level of functionality. They did – or rather, one did.
“In the library we found the historical permissive substitution,” Thornton told Astrobiology Magazine. “We recovered the substitutions that actually occurred during history. But we didn’t find any others despite searching through thousands and thousands of them.”
To the question of, “How many evolutionary paths lead to modern GR?” the astonishing answer was, “One”. Of all vast numbers of possible variants, only one particular set of mutations rescued our ancestral GR protein and brought it into its modern form. The only two mutations that actually succeeded are the same ones that we currently have.
“Among the huge numbers of alternate possible histories, there were no other permissive mutations that could have opened an evolutionary path to the modern-day Glucocorticoid Receptor,” said Thornton.
The odds of this happening at random in the necessary order are astronomically small.
“If evolutionary history could be relaunched from ancestral starting points, we would almost certainly end up with a radically different biology from the one we have now,” said Thornton. “This very important protein exists only because of a twist of fate.””
““If evolution is really dependent on these low-probability chance events that open up the pathways to new kinds of biological organization, then it means that it should be very hard to predict what the outcomes of evolutionary processes are likely to be,” Thorton told Astrobiology Magazine, “And what forms life on other planets would actually take.”
By trekking down alternative evolutionary GR paths and discovering that all but one led to a dead end, science may have started proving that life’s current form is due to a series of fortunate events.”
Contingency, thy name is Evolution.
I wouldn’t be too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Certain predictions are going to be pretty much slam dunks. For example, if the planet in question has an inhabited large body of water, you can easily predict the broad outlines of the food chain. There will be photosynthetic organisms that live very near the surface, and they mostly won’t be mobile. There’ll then be a series of organisms of increasing size, with the smallest mostly feeding off the photosynthetic organisms and the largest being exclusively carnivorous. And the apex predators will be shaped basically like dolphins and tunas and sharks.
Now, will the photosynthetic organisms use chlorophyll? Perhaps. It’s got a lot going for it. But there may well be other alternatives. But, if they do use chlorophyll, we know that the atmosphere has been oxygenated, and we can be reasonably confident that the “animals” use hemoglobin in their circulatory systems.
I think we can also be reasonably confident that all life on the planet will share a common ancestor, even if they don’t use DNA for their genetic encoder. In order to construct plausible pathways to divergent ancestry, you have to make unreasonable assumptions about biospheres that are separated at the time of abiogenesis but that merge later, and without the one biosphere wiping out the other.
b&
I am very interested in the hypothetical possibility that there could be alternative forms of proteins, completely unlike the proteins used today for specific tasks. For example, if an Earth 2.0 exists and if there is selective pressure to bind and transport oxygen, then perhaps alternative forms of ‘hemoglobin’ proteins might evolve to bind and transport that oxygen which are completely different from the family of hemoglobin proteins today.
This is a neat little trick that can be used again and again be it in regards to evolution or in regards to something like the big bang.
Everytime a new discovery is made and knowledge is increased it brings us closer to god ergo god closer to us, regardless of apparent biblical contradictions because the passages in question are metaphors. It’s a reverse moving the goalpost.
And it is cognitive insulation against future discoveries of science. The dude is trying to build god a bunker and in the process protecting his own faith from being shattered by his intellect. It’s quite clever although utterly dishonest in the bigger scheme of things.
Unless we find our alien overlords and they tell us how it’s done, his god ain’t going nowhere, but on the flipside the bible will gradually lose its fundamental meaning and literalists will be a thing of the past.
Now if only there was some way we could help him spread the good news about god and science.
To the pulpit fellow heathens! 🙂
Ah, but who sustains God? MegaGod? And who sustains him? GigaGod? After all, if creation requires active sustaining from a powerful being, something’s got to be preventing god from collapsing into nothingness, or else we would too. 😉
Turtles all the way down until… Ceiling cat.
I thought it was Basement Cat down below?
Ceiling cat is at both ends. You must have faith.
God sustains himself and because we haven’t collapsed into nothingness his existence is proven. He’s uncreated and eternal.
“God sustains himself and because we haven’t collapsed into nothingness his existence is proven. He’s uncreated and eternal.”
Answer #1: MegaGod laughs at this half-assed excuse and points out that, by this logic, we might as well postulate that the universe sustains itself.
Answer #2: Of course he does! Because god-magic! 😀
#1: God sustains it because he has to do something that is of importance. When everything is metapohrs god’s last refuge is beyond the universe. Goes for the multiverse as well. Otherwise he’d just be the distant law-giver, as a certain molecular biologist would put it. 🙂
#2. Oy! It’s not magic! It’s FAITH! 😀
Those people who think that Aquinas and Augustine were literalists are making the mistake of taking their exact words literally. Clearly, when these two great thinkers appear to be reading the Bible literally, this is in fact just a metaphor.
Once again, by judging religious texts by what they plainly say, instead of how they must be reinterpreted to not sound completely stupid, atheists reveal themselves to be just as bad as fundamentalists. 🙂
As usual, Jesus and Mo are way ahead of us.
Well, that hit the spot. 🙂
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Why can I see that religion and science cannot be compatible, yet PhD’s see it otherwise? And I’m only using the idea that religion has no proof, and science has to.
Someone please explain this to me.
Because having a PhD doesn’t automatically rid you of cognitive biases and dissonance.
A PhD may have a lower probability of being deluded, but their delusions are far more elaborate. Their smokescreens will contain smokescreens. The most elaborate delusions are perhaps those of academic Sophisticated Theologians, like Dr. Alexander.
The bad news is that no amount of education will save them. Their ego in regards to their education will never allow it.
I think fear of death/the unknown is one of the big players in regards to keeping faith in light of facts regardless of education.
The great equalizer doesn’t care about IQ.
Pliny the in-between just posted a Pictorial Theology apropos to this thread, including a link to a must-read poem.
http://pictoraltheology.blogspot.com/2014/07/once-again-pliny-should-be-shot.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PictorialTheology+%28Pictorial+Theology%29
Yeah, Origen read the theological literary text in such highly figurative language, that, following Matthew 19:12, he fucking castrated himself. Not a literalist at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origen#Asceticism_and_castration
Sub
It may be all well and good to make such pronouncements. One of the obvious questions that should be asked these compabilistionists is the following: Supposing they were not compatible and that they got their reasoning wrong, what consequence would that have for 1) Science 2) Religion.
ViK
Brilliant article! Informative, succinct and spot on!
I’ve been thinking a lot about the evolution of god(s). Unlike natural selection, holy memes evolved from a selfish perspective to benefit the few (preachers and/or other leaders) and oppress the masses. This imaginary G.O.B. paraded by Very Sophisticated Theologians™ highlights and quantifies this selfish concept as it financially benefits those that spit out this nonsense. In addition, these ignorant and selfish “guru’s” try to make their rap historical, which requires another leap of faith altogether.
Human evolution is wondrous, awe inspiring and fits beautifully with the diversity of life in our natural world and universe. Religion hijacks and contradicts the natural world and stuffs our minds with supernatural nonsense. We do, however, have great forces on our side: time and continued evolution carried out by the brute force, beauty and surprising inconsistency of natural selection.
One life, one planet. We can cherish or destroy; the choice is entirely up to us. – Sir David Attenborough
Far be it from me to criticise your assessment of Alexander, about whom I have myself written invidiously. However, to quote from Uncommon Descent in support of your reading of Augustine comes as a bit of a surprise, and basing your judgement on Augustine’s method of interpreting scripture on one chapter of one book of the mammoth City of God simply amazes me. How could you possibly be so uncritical as to suppose that this chapter (which is really but part of a continued criticism of chronology which others have opposed to Christian chronology, wherein Augustine himself says that 6,000, 600,000, or 6,000,000 or an heretofore unnamed number would make no difference to the argument) provides evidence for the kind of fundamentalism that has become common in the United States simply boggles imagination.
Augustine, for instance, tried on numerous occasions to try to understand and interpret Genesis, and, for the most part, gave up in distress. He makes a very pointed statement about this in his Confessions, where is states:
Which rather puts a stop to the careless assumption that Augustine is a literal fundamentalist. Understanding Augustine, as well as the general position of the Church (or churches) is a matter for scholars, not for convenient potshots released against individual targets. I find it regrettable that your critical mind should have regressed to the point where simplistic carping seems to you sufficient answer to your critics.
By they way, Augustine was certainly one of the early Fathers of the Church. Even the Venerable Bede, who wrote in the seventh century (to Augustine’s fourth and fifth), is commonly reckoned as one of the (last) of the Church Fathers.
Eric, you apparently didn’t read what I wrote. I have read all the sections by now of Augustine and Aquinas as literalism, and it’s clear to me (perhaps not to theologians) that they took much of the Bible literally, including isntantaneous creation of species, and of Adam and Eve, Paradise, the Fall. Aquinas believed in a young earth.I could give quotes just like you do showing that Augustine believed in these things. Do you deny that he believed in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve as our ancestors, instantaneous creation of species, the Flood, and so on? Those are explicitly anti-science and antievolution.
And do you deny that Aquinas was obsessed with angels, and discussed them at length, and believed they are real? If not, are they simply metaphorical angels? Give me a break!
As for your snarky comment, saying that my critical mind has regressed to simplistic carping, that is simply unfair, because I have read those passages and the commentaries on them (and NOT just by Torley; by the way, sometimes even creationists can be right about some stuff!). I expect you to apologize for that if you at all prize civility. For my part, I mourn your increasing sympathy with faith and its supposed benefits. I don’t know why this is happening, or you’re abandoning the atheism you used to espouse so eloquently, but at least I don’t insult you about it.
As for Augustine being a church father, I once called him that and was ripped apart by a theologian on another website because, he said, Augustine was not considered a Church father. That was his take, not mine. So don’t give me tsouris about it.
Jerry, I apologise if you think that my criticism was unjust. However, while it is true that Augustine took some things literally, he was not a fundamentalist in the modern sense, and it is important to make a difference. Not having a scientific cosmology, or knowing what is known today about the age of the earth, of course Augustine took his lead from the book which was, to his mind, a source of truth. But he did read the book in diverse ways, which would be anathema to contemporary fundamentalists. His use of allegory and analogy in biblical hermeneutics is well known (and I give an example above), and so it is simply mistaken to couple him with contemporary fundamentalists, even though he could be sometimes literal in his interpretation of the Bible. It is the historical context that is important, not individual interpretations which are fairly literal in their understanding.
And yes, of course Aquinas believed in angels (indeed, for him, as I recall, each angel constituted a separate genus of being), but that understanding did not obviously conflict with what was known about reality in his day, for he, along with many others, thought of creation as established in a hierarchy (or great chain of being) in which existent beings were linked in an ascending chain of being each one having a higher type of being that the one below it in the hierarchy. This may sound to us completely far-fetched — indeed they do — but that is because we are living now not then.
My point about carping is simply that you cannot establish what Aquinas of Augustine believed unless you are more familiar with their opus than you seem to be, and therefore you make historical associations (as between Augustine and contemporary fundamentalism) which are simply not true to the facts. Augustine was not only very intelligent, but he was also familiar with what was known (‘scientifically’) in his own day, and it is an anachronism to associate him with the know-nothing fundamentalists of today.
As to your comment about mourning my “increasing sympathy with faith and its supposed benefits,” you will have to look hard and long to find an appreciable change in my outlook from the one with which you were familiar some time ago. What I have opposed is the increasingly faith like dogmatism that has seemed to undermine your own criticism of religion over the last few years. You would, however, have been able to read, in many things that I wrote (had I left it up to be read), my own continuing belief that religion does have its benefits (and may still have), despite my strongly expressed criticism of institutional religion as an overweening and irresponsible exploitation of power. One thing that I refuse to do, in the light of the increasing assault on the West by Islam, is to attempt to destroy the religious foundations (both Jewish and Christian) of Western forms of governance, which may leave Islam as the only religion left standing for those many people for whom religion is a sine qua non of the good life. Nor am I disposed to criticise religion in the very simplistic way which, it seems to me, has become too common amongst the new atheists. My opposition to religious power and its irresponsible use is as strong as ever.
Hi Eric, good to see you engage in the comments. 🙂
So basically you see Christianity and Judaism as beneficial because they provide an alternative to Islam?
In that case I can’t help asking why such an alternative is necessary, unless you are under the impression that religious belief is innate in the human mind?
Do you really think the lack of religion creates a void that needs to be filled by something similar to religious belief?
I appreciate your point of view here as well, and certainly agree that there is a stark difference between fundamentalists and, to borrow a phrase from the theologians, classical Christian thinking. Fundamentalists are easy to dismiss as their assertions are obviously and directly contradictory to observations about the world. I think there’s some core themes, particularly in Western religion that are common to fundamentalism and sophisticated arguments and they simply can’t be explained away no matter how much they try to get the findings in science to comport with other metaphysical claims.
That said, like Jesper, I don’t see where you’re going with your concerns that if Christianity and Judaism were dismantled, we’d have the problem of Islam being worse than it is today. First, on all fronts, it appears that secularism is making progress against all three religions, so I’d expect Islam to be weakened significantly if Christianity were to virtually disappear.
Second, and more relevant than hypothetical arguments, it was merely a decade ago that the United States waged its own holy war after September 11. In President Bush’s mind, this was a call to battle by God. There’s no way to guarantee we wouldn’t have entered into ill-advised conflicts with a less religious person in charge, but we certainly wouldn’t have had someone who is paranoid that Gog and Magog are loose in the Middle East.
Perhaps one could argue that this is because President Bush was too fundamental in his beliefs, and a more refined religious outlook would have suited him better. I’ll believe that when the Catholic Church stops causing more harm than good, especially in the Third World countries where it is has influence unconstrained by secular thought. I’m just not seeing what the issue would be if the rest of the world were to take on a rational, humanist stance against Islam rather than risk holy wars built on fantastical notions about Armageddon, saving souls, fighting demons, etc.
Do I think religion is necessary? Probably. And I think atheists are oblivious to the needs the religions fulfil for many people. So, the destruction of Christianity and Judaism will have, I believe, catastrophic consequences in a world that is quickly turning into a clash of faiths. At least Christianity and Judaism, for all their faults, enabled the development of science and democracy and a respect for freedom of thought (despite the halting steps on the way). Islam will certainly not do so. The foundations of our civilisation are still rooted in religion, whether we like it or not, and religion’s destruction will, in fact, leave a void for a great many. Besides, despite all the criticism from the new atheists (and others as well)much of Christianity, for all its faults, is grounded in rational thought about existence, and its discoveries about the human spirit are not of negligible consequence for the health of our society. Fundamentalism should be opposed, not because it is religion, but because it is so obviously irrational. It is hard, however, to read someone like Ed Feser (whether you agree with him or not) and accuse him of irrationality.
I’ll butt in here shamelessly once again.
“Do I think religion is necessary? Probably. And I think atheists are oblivious to the needs the religions fulfil for many people. So, the destruction of Christianity and Judaism will have, I believe, catastrophic consequences in a world that is quickly turning into a clash of faiths.”
That’s a bit of a contradiction. How will the demise of Christianity and Judaism be catastrophical in a world where faith is the source of conflict?
“At least Christianity and Judaism, for all their faults, enabled the development of science and democracy and a respect for freedom of thought (despite the halting steps on the way). Islam will certainly not do so. The foundations of our civilisation are still rooted in religion, whether we like it or not, and religion’s destruction will, in fact, leave a void for a great many.”
What religious principles are responsible for the development of science?
“Besides, despite all the criticism from the new atheists (and others as well)much of Christianity, for all its faults, is grounded in rational thought about existence, and its discoveries about the human spirit are not of negligible consequence for the health of our society.”
What rational thought is it grounded in and what discoveries about the human spirit ( I presume you mean mind ) has it made?
Well, of course, you can always reduce religious conflict by reducing the number of religions to one (supposing there is no internal conflict in that religion, which is a bit of a stretch), but there are some religions that are simply better than others, and Islam is not one of them. Freedom of thought in the West of course gives us carte blache to criticise Christianity, and even some are daring enough to criticise Islam, but, to a large extent, people are afraid to criticise Islam, so Judaism and Christianity are the fall guys here, leaving Islam largely untouched. I do not think this is a healthy thing, and I say it again, that, while I have some serious questions about the activities of Christians, and am ready to condemn them, I will no longer strive to demolish either Christianity or Judaism. They are a bulwark against an overweening Islam, and we need such a bulwark. Most of the new atheist critique of Christianity is fairly simplistic criticism of fundamentalism, which is, by any measure, sub-Christian. But once this is done, Christianity still has a magisterial theological tradition which is not all a matter of obfuscation, even if some of the more anthropomorphic ideas of God are non-starters. However, religion as a devotional and ethical practice is still going to use anthropomorphisms. This is inevitable, but it does not necessarily get to the heart of Christian belief, and both Jewish and Christian theology has developed systems of great rationality and power. I find most new atheist criticism childish, quite frankly, with little tendency to attempt to understand theology, which is not simply dismissible in the way that many new atheists believe. Does it achieve to knowledge? I don’t know, but the simplistic critique that is often done of Christianity as well as Judaism simply doesn’t make any attempt to answer this question except by playing the fairies at the bottom of the garden game, which is so far away from traditional understandings of God as to be laugable.
I never said that there were religious principles that were essential to the development of science, but I will still point out that it was within a Christian and Jewish civilisation (where Christians have given scant attention to Jewish culture, unfortunately) that science and democracy developed. It didn’t develop in Islam or India or China. It developed in the Christian and Jewish West, so the cultural foundations of science were there. They were not make of whole cloth. As for the idea that Islamic civilisation was there first, this is a mere misunderstanding. The Arabian hordes conquered an ancient civilisation, and early Islam made use of its philosophy and science (many of the experts were not Muslim or were converted Christians and Jews, and many Muslim philosophers and scientists were dismissed as heretics). The notion of Islamic civilisation is largely a myth created by Western students of Islam trying to bolster injured Muslim pride.
“Well, of course, you can always reduce religious conflict by reducing the number of religions to one (supposing there is no internal conflict in that religion, which is a bit of a stretch), but there are some religions that are simply better than others, and Islam is not one of them. Freedom of thought in the West of course gives us carte blache to criticise Christianity, and even some are daring enough to criticise Islam, but, to a large extent, people are afraid to criticise Islam, so Judaism and Christianity are the fall guys here, leaving Islam largely untouched. I do not think this is a healthy thing, and I say it again, that, while I have some serious questions about the activities of Christians, and am ready to condemn them, I will no longer strive to demolish either Christianity or Judaism. They are a bulwark against an overweening Islam, and we need such a bulwark.”
Instead of striving to reduce the number of religions to one I’d rather go for none, but both of those scenarios are not founded in the reality of things. The best we can do is to remain firm on the principle that religion is a private matter and that the separation of religion and state is a core tenet in a democracy.
I agree that Islam is in dire need of some fundamental internal change, but it is simply not true that we do not criticize Islam. You don’t even have to leave this site to find some .
What Islamic societies do you think are threatening western civilization to such an extent that a movement of similar principles is necessary on “our side of the fence” to counter it?
There are atheists in fox-holes and many of us have done our military stints in our respective societies.
Are you afraid we lack the will to defend our friends,families and allies with every last bit of our being and that that kind of dedication is reserved for religious human beings?
But again, where are the Islamic armies knocking on our doors?
“Most of the new atheist critique of Christianity is fairly simplistic criticism of fundamentalism, which is, by any measure, sub-Christian. But once this is done, Christianity still has a magisterial theological tradition which is not all a matter of obfuscation, even if some of the more anthropomorphic ideas of God are non-starters. However, religion as a devotional and ethical practice is still going to use anthropomorphisms. This is inevitable, but it does not necessarily get to the heart of Christian belief, and both Jewish and Christian theology has developed systems of great rationality and power. I find most new atheist criticism childish, quite frankly, with little tendency to attempt to understand theology, which is not simply dismissible in the way that many new atheists believe. Does it achieve to knowledge? I don’t know, but the simplistic critique that is often done of Christianity as well as Judaism simply doesn’t make any attempt to answer this question except by playing the fairies at the bottom of the garden game, which is so far away from traditional understandings of God as to be laugable.”
What is your definition of fundamental belief?
And speaking of Christianity what exactly is at heart of this particular religion that has more than 40.000 denominations? What values do they all acknowledge as fundamental facts?
“I never said that there were religious principles that were essential to the development of science, but I will still point out that it was within a Christian and Jewish civilisation (where Christians have given scant attention to Jewish culture, unfortunately) that science and democracy developed. It didn’t develop in Islam or India or China. It developed in the Christian and Jewish West, so the cultural foundations of science were there. They were not make of whole cloth. As for the idea that Islamic civilisation was there first, this is a mere misunderstanding. The Arabian hordes conquered an ancient civilisation, and early Islam made use of its philosophy and science (many of the experts were not Muslim or were converted Christians and Jews, and many Muslim philosophers and scientists were dismissed as heretics). The notion of Islamic civilisation is largely a myth created by Western students of Islam trying to bolster injured Muslim pride.”
But exactly what western religious foundation is science build upon?
That should be pretty easy to point to if it really were so.
And out of what western idea did western religion evolve?
Thank you for making it clear why you so suddenly shifted from attacking Christianity to defending it (from the New Atheists). It is your fear of the “Arabian Hordes.” You must build up the ranks of Crusaders to save civilization. At least now we don’t have to wonder what caused your sudden change of heart (and tone).
OK, I feel the need to jump back in here, too. You say the world is “quickly turning into a clash of faiths?” I (and probably Pinker) would argue that the world has been a clash of faiths for a very long time, and if anything, it has been improving recently. Also, you say “Christianity and Judaism enabled the development of science” and “Islam will certainly not do so.” But Islam already has, long before Christianity and Judaism.
Also, I think, “I apologise if you think that my criticism was unjust” is the example you get when you look up “notapology” in the dictionary. It is not your criticism you should apologize for; it is the insults.
If you really think that things have been improving lately you haven’t been paying attention.
Maybe you missed my point. I was referring to Pinker’s thesis in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Violence has been decreasing in the world over the course of history. Yes, maybe things have been worse from 2004 to 2014 than they were from, say 1984 to 1994, but if you take a long view, you find the opposite.
I disagree that religion is probably necessary. There is no doubt that on an individual basis, it has helped many people, but I remain unconvinced that it helped them in a way that secular means could not, with the added bonus that secular beliefs are backed by reality. It relates to Hitchens’ oft-used quote: “Name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever.” In the same way, contentment, happiness, or whatever other measure of well-being one wants to use is not monopolized by religion and there are studies showing that non-religious societies have happier people and non-religious people commit the fewest crimes. With no evidence indicating that religious societies are more moral or happier, on what grounds is religion probably necessary (short of compelling evidence that there actually is a God who cares that we are religious)?
Concerning Feser; I would not accuse him of irrationality in context of his metaphysical arguments for theism. The real problem I have with his logic is that after “refuting atheism” with scientifically compatible claims (compatible but certainly unnecessary in light of modern Physics), he’ll turn around and use this to support the dogmatism of the Roman Catholic Church. There are deists who leave the argument at the God of the philosophers, but in criticism of New Atheism, this seems exceedingly rare and in religious people in general, even rarer.
Where Feser’s assertions fall flat (and this is not specific to only Feser) is the claim that Christian metaphysics, “properly understood” is not only not in conflict with science, but highly likely to be true. IOW, if Jerry or anyone else doesn’t come to the same conclusions after reading Augustine or Aquinas, then they aren’t properly understanding. But, for any potential high ground Feser gains, he loses it when he seems to deliberately refuse to acknowledge that New Atheist arguments are aimed at specific societal problems where religion intrudes into places it doesn’t belong and causes turmoil. There is at least some irony in the fact that he seems to completely miss the point that the central claim running through New Atheist works is that evidence should be supplied if you want someone to agree with your assertions.
This is true whether it is an obviously contradictory fundamentalist claim or simply an unsupported, internally consistent argument. The burden still lies on the theologians who have internally consistent claims that contradict other internally consistent claims to provide evidence for why their claims should be preferred.
Actually the person referred to refers to chapter 12 of Book XII and Books XIII & XV.
That the book is mammoth is no surprise, as after having read the Buybull front to back quite some time ago, I’ve found there’s scant evidence to support the Plan 9 From Outer Space level of bad historical fantasy that is the christian holy book, just lots of important sounding, dense verbiage.
The HBO series Rome is far better and doesn’t pretend to accurately describe reality.
This smacks of “the little people dinna ken”.
IIRC, Augustine also said something along the lines of “The BuyBull is written as a parent to a child”.
Producing one quote that appears to support your argument doesn’t negate the others which appear to support Jerry’s. Just shows how inconsistent and muddled Augustine’s arguments are – just as the holey book is similarly afflicted.
The quotes from the OP can arguably show that Augie came down on whatever side – truth or meaning – suited him.
Quelle surprise.
” How could you possibly be so uncritical…”
“…the careless assumption…”
“…a matter for scholars, not for convenient potshots…”
“…your critical mind should have regressed…”
“…simplistic carping…”
Rough day today, Eric? Methinks you should reacquaint yourself with Da Roolz.
Also, instead of “By the way, Augustine was certainly one of the…” you could written, “Regardless of how others see him, you are correct that Augustine was one of the…”
But you appear to have misread that sentence as badly as you have misread the rest of the post. You certainly seem to have missed the part about “the curious reader,” which, I think, is telling.
What was that you said about a critical mind regressing?
I think it’s simpler than that. The sophisticated theolgians (STs) involved use “active” in a variety of senses, either intentionally or unintentionally keeping the term vague and confused. This allows listeners who believe in an interventionist God to be happy, the listeners who believe in a more deistic God to be happy, and allows the STs to avoid answering critics who attack either notion of god by responding “that’s not what I meant by active.” IOW, its a linguistic dodge of the philosophical issues.
Maybe like the battery in my phone upholds and sustains the Words With Friends game I’m playing on it. No battery, and the game ceases to exist. But the battery doesn’t dictate the moves I or my opponent make; it doesn’t dictate the content of the game.
To me, that sounds very deistic. So I’m sure some ST will be along to tell me its more than that but not intervening in the moves, which would leave evidence, and oh I’m just not getting the subtle in-between-these-extremes meaning of what “active” implies.
IIRC, he’s getting the whole point of Gould’s metaphor wrong. Gould had his sidelwalk constrained on one side (by a wall? Gutter? I don’t remember) but not on the other. The point being that in such a situation the drunk will naturally wander away from the wall, and will even wander arbitrarily far away given an arbirtarily long time. The biological parallel to this metaphor is that because organisms have a “lower limit” to the complexity they can have and still be functioning organisms, we can expect arbitrarily complex organisms to evolve over long periods of time without any “drive” or “direction” towards higher complexity being needed to explain them. His metaphor was an argument against the laymen’s common “ladder” misperception of evolution. There is no ladder, no “progress” towards more complex organisms. You’ll get them stochastically given enough time and a lower limit on organism complexity.
“Maybe like the battery in my phone upholds and sustains the Words With Friends game I’m playing on it.”
I think the idea is more that god works like some kind of uber-magician whose magic brings things into being and keeps them there. Distract god for a moment, the magic stops, and the magicked item vanishes in a puff of smoke. By this, I don’t mean to invoke the anthropomorphism of comparing him to a magician, just that the mechanism is both creator and sustainer, not just sustainer (batteries don’t create games, namely).
If the anthropomorphism is too distracting, imagine a magic amulet, magic gas, or magic {insert abstraction here} that did the same feat.
“God as creator in the Christian view is the ground and source of all existence. Anything that exists, be it the laws of physics, mathematics, quantum fluctuations, Higgs bosons or the processes of evolution are therefore, ipso facto, aspects of this created order.”
ergo God as creator in the Christian view is the ground and source of all evil, sin, disease, tragedy, etc, and any semblance of free will in the world.
Theology…
…it is story telling all the way down.
Indeed, and it may be none the worse for that.
Why burn hereticals at the stake if it all was metaphorical? Accomodationism gives me the creeps.
Obviously, because burning them at a stake was a literal metaphor for the metaphorical fire they were about to enter for all eternity!
You ask how Cambridge University has allowed itself to become corrupted and yet, the British University system has changed into a profit-motivated business in the last 20 years or so, with paying “customers” rather than students. As long as the cash rolls in, they aren’t particularly worried by agendas.
Well, that’s exactly how we’re doing it here (USA), now. 🙂 We’ve found it most profitable to opt for “adjunct” professors rather than hiring for tenure-track positions. This way the adjuncts have the luxury of working 2 or 3 other jobs just to make ends meet.
Western Michigan University faculty this year held a food drive for the adjunct staff who were simply not paid during school breaks.
It’s hard to imagine just who would want to teach anymore; it’s dismal to think about how low on the priority scale our intellectual capital is held. Or what that bodes for the future.
In response to
“How, exactly, does God “uphold and sustain” a naturalistic process, one that requires his constant upholding and sustaining lest the t.v. screen become blank? Perhaps I’m theologically naive, but if God lets evolution run, how does he “uphold and sustain” it at the same time? Would a bird fall if he wasn’t there? That would seem to imply active intervention. Or perhaps we simply couldn’t have birds without God. Yet it all seems like the Argument from Having Your Cake and Eating it Too.”
I want to precede this by stating that I am in no way religious. My metaphysical ideology is similar to that of Spinoza, i.e. pantheism.
From the pantheistic viewpoint, God can both allow a process to run and uphold that process simultaneously, because God is the process and God is the nature that allows its sustenance. God is the matter, the force, the space-time, the math, etc. That’s how.
At the core of every person’s unconscious mind lies this information. We as a species have to take the proper steps to realize this, and religion is a much easier pill to swallow; it resonates well with the frequency of the truth. It’s like religions are vehicles to pantheism. They can stop there almost any time, but you have to get out; you have to nudge your way into a previously (consciously) untraveled path in the fractal of your experience.
That’s the part about pantheism that I never got. We already have a perfectly good word for the Universe: “Universe.” What is gained by renaming it, “God”? Either nothing, or you’re right back in the same boat as the theists, worshipping and asking favors of a personal entity that simply doesn’t exist.
b&
I agree, there is no real need to call it “God”. I was only doing so because this is a discussion about “God”. However, there is a reason many others do so, and that is to show through language the idea that divinity is synonymous with the universe. I don’t do any asking of favors or worship. Those concepts are typically fundamentally excluded by a pantheist. Worship becomes in actuality, simply an appreciation and reverence of nature (the universe), while asking for favors becomes affirmations. The only personal entity is yourself.
I’m afraid you’re still confusing matters with the word, “divinity.” What is added with such religious language that is more important than making people think you’re referring to a mystical superperson?
Is it not enough, as Sagan did, to express awe and joy and wonder at the world around us, without appealing to the primitive superstitions that are all religions?
b&