How do we tell which parts of scripture are true?

October 27, 2011 • 6:36 am

Pastor Swaim continues his sermonizing at BioLogos in “Maker of Heaven and Earth: Part 3.”  Here he addresses the crucial question of which parts of the Bible are true, and which merely metaphors that nevertheless express some “truth.”

The answer: whether the language is “poetic” or whether the writer clearly says he’s expressing historical truth. Clearly, the first part of Genesis, including the critical creation and Adam-and-Eve stories falls into the former category, and so isn’t literally true (ORLY?):

I contend that there’s more truth—about theology, anthropology, and ecology, and spirituality, and human dignity, and human responsibility packed into this short chapter than a hundred normal books could describe on their own. Like the parable of the lost son, that’s why it’s so powerful. It’s truthful, it’s just not historical. But don’t get tricked into thinking that’s the only kind of truth. But if Genesis 1 is not literal history, then how do we know that the story of Jesus’ resurrection in Luke 24 is literal history? Is that just another poem? How can you tell the difference? Usually it’s pretty obvious from the context. If I say, “Yesterday Pastor Eugene drove me to the store,” you understand I mean something very different than if I say, “Yesterday Pastor Eugene drove me up a wall.” One is clearly literal and the other is clearly symbolic, but they both may be one hundred percent true. Jesus and the gospel writers poked fun at the ignorant literalism of the people who didn’t understand the obvious metaphors when Jesus said things like, “You must be born again” or, “You must eat my flesh and drink my blood.” He was speaking life-changing truth, but he was not speaking literally. They should have been able to distinguish between things that are symbolic and things that are scientific. One is not more true than the other. They’re just different ways of expressing truth. So I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take Genesis 1 seriously. To the contrary, I’m suggesting we fail to take it seriously when, like a parable, we insist on taking it literally instead. When we make it about six days, when we make it simply a recipe for baking a galaxy. In contrast, in Luke 1, Luke insists that he’s reporting historical events carefully checked against the testimony of eye witnesses. That’s an unmistakable sign that he expects to be taken literally.

So what’s the stuff in Luke 1 that’s literally true, because it’s reported as history? Here’s some:

10 And the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the time of incense.

11 And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense.

12 And when Zacharias saw [him], he was troubled, and fear fell upon him.

13 But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.

and

26And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,

27To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name [was] Mary.

28And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, [thou that art] highly favoured, the Lord [is] with thee: blessed [art] thou among women.

29And when she saw [him], she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.

30And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.

31And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.

32He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David:

33And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

34Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

35And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

You know the story, and surely must agree with Swaim that because this is in historical language, its literal truth can’t be doubted!  As he says, it’s obvious from the context!  Imagine if we all divined historical truth from things like “context” and language rather than evidence.

And about Genesis, Swaim says this:

Most scholars agree that everything after Genesis 11 is intended to be literal history, and modern archaeology and anthropologists have accumulated libraries full of corroborating evidence. But scholars are divided about chapters 2 to 10.

Here’s some literal history from post-chapter 11 Genesis:

Genesis 17:

1And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I [am] the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.

2And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly.

3And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him, saying,

4As for me, behold, my covenant [is] with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations.

5Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee.

6And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee.

7And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.

8And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.

9And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations.

10This [is] my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised.

11 And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.

Genesis 19:

14And Lot went out, and spake unto his sons in law, which married his daughters, and said, Up, get you out of this place; for the LORD will destroy this city. But he seemed as one that mocked unto his sons in law.

15And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying, Arise, take thy wife, and thy two daughters, which are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city.

16And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two daughters; the LORD being merciful unto him: and they brought him forth, and set him without the city.

17And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.

18And Lot said unto them, Oh, not so, my Lord:

19Behold now, thy servant hath found grace in thy sight, and thou hast magnified thy mercy, which thou hast shewed unto me in saving my life; and I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me, and I die:

20Behold now, this city [is] near to flee unto, and it [is] a little one: Oh, let me escape thither, ([is] it not a little one?) and my soul shall live.

21And he said unto him, See, I have accepted thee concerning this thing also, that I will not overthrow this city, for the which thou hast spoken.

22Haste thee, escape thither; for I cannot do any thing till thou be come thither. Therefore the name of the city was called Zoar.

23The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.

24 Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;

Genesis 23:

1 And Sarah was an hundred and seven and twenty years old: [these were] the years of the life of Sarah.

Genesis 25:

7And these [are] the days of the years of Abraham’s life which he lived, an hundred threescore and fifteen years.

8Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full [of years]; and was gathered to his people.

And so on, all the way through Genesis 50. All literal truth; all “science.”  All a fairy tale.

The Daily Show: what’s science up to?

October 27, 2011 • 5:22 am

Courtesy of reader Daveau, here’s a funny six-minute clip from last night’s Daily Show: “What’s science up to?”

Republican strategist: Noelle Nickpour pronounces that “Scientists are scamming the American people right and left—for their own financial gain!”

Lots of global-warming and evolution denial from Republicans, and an interview with Nobel Laureate and well-known grifter Martin Chalfie.  Chalfie addresses the question of whether he’s scamming America, and why teaching science to kids isn’t equivalent to child brain-rape.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1006452&w=425&h=350&fv=autoPlay%3Dfalse]

Nickpour:  It’s very confusing for a child to be only taught evolution to go home to a household where their parents say, “Well, wait a minute. . . God created the Earth!”

Daily Show Interviewer Aasif Mandvi:  What is the point of teaching children facts if it’s just going to confuse them?

Nickpour:  It confuses the children when they go home.  We as Americans—we are paying tax dollars for our children to be edu-cated. We need to offer them every theory that’s out there. It’s all about choice; it’s all about freedom.

Mandvi: It should be up to the American people to decide what’s true.

Nickpour:  Absolutely! Doesn’t it make common sense?

Templeton funds inquiry into how God’s mind works

October 27, 2011 • 4:24 am

Lest you think that The John Templeton Foundation is funding research only at the nexus of science and theology—bad enough as that might be—do be aware that it’s funding pure theology, and spending appreciable bucks on it.

The University of California, Riverside publicity machine has announced that one of its Ph.D. students in philosophy has been awarded a two-year fellowship to study the mind of God.  

And, as postdocs go, it’s a very lavish one:  $81,000 per year for two years, plus $5500 yearly for travel to and in Europe.  As the press release says:

The fellowship is part of a larger Templeton project to bring the resources of analytical philosophy to theology and philosophy of religion, Fischer [chair of the UCR philosophy department] said, adding, “This is a significant achievement for [the candidate], and a truly exciting and wonderful opportunity.”

The fellowship enables young scholars to use contemporary analytic methods to pursue independent research in the fields of divine and human agency, such as moral responsibility and freedom of will; or philosophy of mind and its theological implications, such as the presence of the divine in a natural world and the emergence of consciousness. The Pennsylvania-based foundation describes itself as a “philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality.”

So what is the Big Question that the candidate is being given $173,000 to answer?

His postdoctoral research project, “Divine Foreknowledge, the Philosophy of Time, and the Metaphysics of Dependence: Some New Approaches to an Old Problem,” assesses a core Ockhamist thesis about foreknowledge. William of Ockham was a 13th century philosopher.

“The central contention of the Ockhamist concerns a point about the order of explanation. According to the Ockhamist, it is because of what we do that God long ago believed that we would do these things. That is, God’s past beliefs depend in an important sense on what we do, and thus, says the Ockhamist, we can sometimes have a choice about God’s past beliefs,” he explained. “The overarching goal of this project is to develop and assess this core Ockhamist thesis along two underexplored dimensions: the philosophy of time, and the metaphysics of dependence – both of which have seen an explosion of recent interest.”

This is an area about which I’m completely ignorant, and happy to remain so, because it sounds like a godawful cesspool of theological lucubration. It of course begins with three completely unsupported premises: that there is a God, that that God has a mind that has “beliefs,” and that how we act now somehow influences God’s beliefs about our actions long before we performed them.  It sounds as if what we do now, then, can go back in time and change God’s beliefs.  (That, at least, is how I interpret the gobbledygook above.)

Given those three bogus assumptions, the candidate will then spend many dollars ruminating about how God’s prior beliefs relate to the philosophy of time and metaphysics of dependence, whatever that means.

In other words, all the money is going to work out the consequences of a fairy tale.  So much money for so much “sophisticated” philosophy!

I haven’t named the candidate (though clicking the link will reveal the name) because this post isn’t so much about a cockeyed postdoctoral project as about the kind of hogwash that Templeton is funding—things that have nothing to do with science.  And of course, no Big Questions will be answered. (What makes me laugh about these “Big Questions” is that they’re always being “addressed,” but never answered.)

My Big Question is this:  which mushbrains at Templeton have decided to throw their money down this particular drain?

Science wins because it works

October 26, 2011 • 1:16 pm

From SMBC:

Not only that, but since Jesus didn’t have a corporeal father, his sex chromosome constitution was XO (X from mom, no Y from Dad).  That means that he suffered from Turner Syndrome, with gonadal dysgenesis and a webbed neck. And he would have been a female. Well, not quite:  Jesus would have been haploid, too, with only half the normal number of chromosomes (I think the “H.” in “Jesus H. Christ” stands for “haploid”), so in fact “he” would have been an inviable embryo.

h/t: JJE

A portrait of Ed Wilson

October 26, 2011 • 10:26 am

If you’re a fan of E. O. Wilson, you’ll want to read his profile (written by Howard W. French) in the latest Atantic: “E. O. Wilson’s theory of everything.”

It’s long, combining a vignette of Ed’s trip to Mozambique with a retrospective of his career, and makes absorbing reading.  The man is indefatigable, even at 82. Just a few tidbits:

  • Wilson’s novel, Anthill, is characterized as a “bestseller.”  Has anyone read it?
  • Ed denounces Steve Gould in a big way:

Wilson defined sociobiology for me as “the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior in all organisms.” Gould savagely mocked both Wilson’s ideas and his supposed hubris in a 1986 essay titled “Cardboard Darwinism,” in The New York Review of Books, for seeking “to achieve the greatest reform in human thinking about human nature since Freud,” and Wilson still clearly bears a grudge.

“I believe Gould was a charlatan,” he told me. “I believe that he was … seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer, and he did it consistently by distorting what other scientists were saying and devising arguments based upon that distortion.” It is easy to imagine Wilson privately resenting Gould for another reason, as well—namely, for choosing Freud as a point of comparison rather than his own idol, Darwin, whom he calls “the greatest man in the world.”

  • A lot of the piece is devoted to the flap over the Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson paper in Nature, which I’ve posted a lot about before (see here and here, for example).  Although the paper quotes some critics of their misguided attack on kin selection (including me), the article makes it seem as if this paper presages a huge revolution in our study of social behavior.  It doesn’t.  Here’s some of the Atlantic’s uncritical hype:
WILSON TOLD ME the new proposed evolutionary model pulls the field “out of the fever swamp of kin selection,” and he confidently predicted a coming paradigm shift that would promote genetic research to identify the “trigger” genes that have enabled a tiny number of cases, such as the ant family, to achieve complex forms of cooperation. His next book, The Social Conquest of Earth, expands on his theories—and takes up the question left dangling at the end of the Nature article. “It starts with posing the questions that I call the most fundamental of philosophy and religion,” he said. “Where did we come from, what are we, and where are we going?”
  • Wilson, despite being known as faith-friendly, is unsparing of religion, but also of philosophy:
Wilson announced that his new book may be his last. It is not limited to the discussion of evolutionary biology, but ranges provocatively through the humanities, as well. Summarizing parts of it for me, Wilson was particularly unsparing of organized religion, likening the Book of Revelation, for example, to the ranting of “a paranoid schizophrenic who was allowed to write down everything that came to him.” Toward philosophy, he was only slightly kinder. Generation after generation of students have suffered trying to “puzzle out” what great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Descartes had to say on the great questions of man’s nature, Wilson said, but this was of little use, because philosophy has been based on “failed models of the brain.”
  • Wilson proposes a theory for the origin of human sociality and social behavior, which involves the adoption of fixed campsites early in our evolution. That, he says, promoted much of the repeated human interactions that selected for our social behaviors and fixation on sussing out or fellow humans.  This sounds a lot more plausible to me than the invocation of stuff like fire or tool use as key factors in human evolution
  • Wilson also invokes, less plausibly, the importance of group selection in the evolution of human altruism:
“Within groups, the selfish are more likely to succeed,” Wilson told me in a telephone conversation. “But in competition between groups, groups of altruists are more likely to succeed. In addition, it is clear that groups of humans proselytize other groups and accept them as allies, and that that tendency is much favored by group selection.” Taking in newcomers and forming alliances had become a fundamental human trait, he added, because “it is a good way to win.”
  • Finally, what has always endeared Ed to me is his boyish enthusiasm for nature. Even in his ninth decade, he’s travelling all over the world, still collecting ants, still excited by nature and the prospect of a new field site.  His diligence and sense of wonder are an inspiration to all of us:
A FEW DAYS EARLIER, Wilson, remarkably, had taken his very first helicopter ride, a shuttle run that brought him from the nearby port city of Beira to the park’s immense floodplain, dotted by riverine pools thick with caucusing hippos and crocodiles, and finally to a close view of the mountain itself. “Mount Gorongosa!” he exclaimed to me later. “It has always loomed in my imagination as this dark, brooding mountain, but boy, is it magnificent; so bright, so full of life!”
And the piece, though a tad hagiographic, has a great ending:
“For every organism, there exists a problem, for the solution of which that organism is ideally suited,” Wilson said. We had been talking over lunch for about two hours, and Wilson had barely touched his food. He paused for a moment, taking a bite of chicken. “A lot of my work was done with pheromones; then came island biogeography, because I could collect enough ants in a short enough period of time to get an idea of the nature of fauna on different islands.” Only then “came the question, ‘What are the driving forces of evolution?’” He put down his fork, and gave a slight smile. “Ants are always there, and this has given me an edge,” he said. “I’ve ridden ants the whole way.”
Here’s a picture of Ed I took at lunch in 2007; I was at Harvard for the anniversary meetings of Wilson and MacArthur’s book, The Theory of Island Biogeography:

h/t: Madhave

Answers: rock and food contest, and a call for bad lyrics

October 26, 2011 • 6:06 am

Yesterday I put up a non-prize contest to guess the rock songs (along with their artists) that included the names of foods. I’ll put below which songs I was thinking of, though the readers clearly found many other ones I didn’t think of.  Too many people Googled, though I asked for your own neuronally-based knowledge.

Hamburger and malt (same song):  “I just can’t stop dancing” by Archie Bell and the Drells

Hot dog and french fries (same song): This is an easy one:  “Under the boardwalk” by the Drifters

Coke (the soft drink): I didn’t think anybody would get this one, at least for the song I was thinking of, “All summer long” by the Beach Boys. And nobody did get it, but some brought up other songs, unknown to me, that include the word “coke” as a drink.  The Beach Boys song, by the way, has some of the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard (we should have another contest on that; MacArthur Park is a contender). Here are a few:

Sittin’ in my car outside your house
(Sittin’ in my car outside your house)
‘Member when you spilled coke all over your blouse

T-shirts, cut-offs, and a pair of thongs
(T-shirts, cut-offs, and a pair of thongs)
We’ve been having fun all summer long. . .

Miniature golf and Hondas in the hills
(Miniature golf and Hondas in the hills)
When we rode the horse we got some thrills
Every now and the we hear our song
(Every now and the we hear our song)
We’ve been having fun all summer long

Latte: “Drops of Jupiter” by Train.  This has to be a contender for the worst lyrics of any recent song. These include:

Now that she’s back from that soul vacation
Tracing her way through the constellation, hey
She checks out Mozart while she does Tae-Bo
Reminds me that there’s room to grow, hey . .

Can you imagine no love, pride, deep-fried chicken
Your best friend always sticking up for you
Even when I know you’re wrong?

Cake:  “MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris. This song peaked at #2 on the American charts in 1968, and I remember the torture I felt each time it was on the radio.

Cherry pie:  “Cherry pie” by Skip and Flip (1960).  But there have of course been many other songs with this comestible.

Pumpkin pie: “Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie” by Jay and the Techniques.

Fudge: “Savoy Truffle” by the Beatles

Fried chicken: See “Drops of Jupiter” above.

Since we’re on to bad lyrics (and I have a whole collection of these), do put below which song has the worst lyrics you know of, and please include the really egregious parts.  Here’s a start:

Daddy loved and raised 8 kids on a miner’s pay,
Mommy scrubbed our clothes on a washboard every day,
Why, I seen her fingers bleed, to complain, there was no need,
She’d smile in mommy’s understanding way. . .

The work we done was hard, at night we’d sleep ’cause we were tard, [The lyrics are “tired”, but it’s pronounced to rhyme with “hard”.]
I never thought of ever leavin’ Butcher Holler.

–Loretta Lynn, “Coal Miner’s Daughter”

***

In the year 2525,

If man is still alive,

If woman can survive

They may find.

–Zager and Evans, “In the year 2525”

Eric MacDonald and NYT readers respond to Giberson and Stephens

October 26, 2011 • 5:42 am

Last week I highlighted an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Uncle Karl and Randall Stephens, decrying the unwillingness of evangelical Christians to accept the facts of science.  Yesterday, big-time Baptist Albert Mohler utterly rejected Giberson and Stephens’s views, defending the literal truth of the Bible.

Over at Choice in Dying, ex Anglican priest Eric MacDonald also weighs in at length about Giberson and Stephens’s piece, emphasizing the inherent difficulties in reconciling the Bible with any form of evangelical Christianity, even those forms that take the Bible as part metaphor.  I won’t summarize it Eric’s very nice piece, since that would not do it justice, but here are two excerpts:

The problem is — and Karl Giberson should be able to see this — that there simply is no reason to suppose, as evangelical Christians claim, that consulting the Bible is able to achieve any truth at all, let alone that there is a compatibility between the Bible and contemporary science. If Giberson and Stephens believes there is a way of reading the Bible so as to come to demonstrably true beliefs, they must show that this is so. Imagination will only take you part of the way.

Eric then discusses the accommodationist claim that atheists misunderstand religion as being, as Hume characterized, a body of beliefs subject to (Hume’s words) “argument and disputation”—in other words, a faith founded on propositional beliefs:

Of course, this is part of what the critics of the new atheism mean when they tell us that we do not understand religion, which is not, in the first instance, about propositional belief. Now, that may once have been true, but it is simply hopeless to make this claim of a religion all of whose speculative theories have been undercut by the discoveries of science. Since the days of the early Christian Fathers (as the early theologians are often called) philosophical-theological discourse has formed an integral part of the Christian religion. The formation of the core doctrines of the church — such as the nature of God, incarnation, redemption, promises of heaven and hell, etc. – was undertaken by men who instinctively thought in terms of Greek philosophical categories, and very soon membership of or exclusion from the church was based upon acceptance of beliefs formed on this basis.

For Christians to say, now, 17 or 18 hundred years later, that Christianity is not propositional is simply ludicrous. Early religion may have been totally unreflective, but the moment someone said that there was only one god the unreflective religion of myths and stories was inevitably replaced by claims to knowledge, claims which must, by their very nature, come into conflict with any other claims to knowledge, whether of other gods, or of the world itself. . .

Eric also drew my attention to a group of six letters in Monday’s New York Times disputing or supporting Giberson and Stephens’s piece.  I want to put up two opposing ones, both from Massachusetts.  The first is from a professor of neurobiology at Harvard:

To the Editor:

Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens would prefer evangelicals to embrace secular knowledge and science. This seems a tall order. For example, evangelicals should reject the notion “that humans and dinosaurs lived together,” while presumably holding firm to the central Christian tenet that humans have a life after death.

The secular status of both propositions is the same: There is no evidence in favor of the idea, and it conflicts with everything science knows about the nature of human life. On what basis should someone reject one of these notions and embrace the other?

Unfortunately, the only theology that doesn’t require daily contortions and contradictions is what the Op-Ed writers describe as “little more than a quiet voice on the margins”: to reject all supernatural fairy tales and superstitions, whether they come from an ancient book or not.

MARKUS MEISTER
Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 18, 2011

The writer is a professor of biology at Harvard.

I love to see distinguished academics going after accommodationism, and Meister’s point, while obvious, can’t be made too often:  there is no rational basis for reading scripture selectively, so you take some things as metaphor and other things as non-negotiable truths. As Eric said in his piece:

There is no more scientific basis for the belief in life after death than there is for the outlandish suggestion that humans and dinosaurs once roamed the earth together. Indeed, the more we come to know about the relationship between brain states and mind, the more certain it seems that there is nothing that can survive bodily death except the elements of which the body is composed.

The second letter is from a theology graduate student, one of those misguided souls—I use the word metaphorically—who tries to drag science down to the level of religion by claiming that these are both reason-based ways of investigating the world:

To the Editor:

While I agree with much of what Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens wrote, I disagree with the implied conclusion that reason is something that is necessarily “secular.” Such an argument also implies that faith is something that is, so to speak, added on to the universal truth of reason.

On the contrary, many theologians and philosophers contend that what we commonly call “secular” is itself a worldview that is born out of a particular history, tradition and narrative — that is, “secular” reason is not reason itself, but simply another kind of reason, just as Christian faith is a kind of reason.

MARC LAVALLEE
Arlington, Mass., Oct. 19, 2011

The writer is a doctoral candidate in practical theology at Boston University.

What on earth is “practical theology”?  I don’t have the heart to look it up. At any rate, I’m starting to realize that one of the tactics accommodationists use to comport science and faith is to simply denigrate science by pretending it’s a form of faith, or no different from faith in how it investigates the world.

But there is a big difference between them, and not just in their historical origin.  Secular reason, especially through science, tells us what’s true about our universe, while faith, based on revelation and dogma, tells us nothing.  As Hawking put it, “Science will win because it works.”  Practical theology, indeed!