withallyourmind.net

I was reading an excellent article found at Leaderu.com by William Lane Craig. The article is called, “Rediscovering the Historical Jesus: Presuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar.” As some readers may know, the Jesus Seminar is a liberal, pseudo-scholarly attempt to discover the historical Jesus. With great clarity, Craig exposes the Jesus Seminar for what it is.

Craig provides the following anecdote to illustrate the importance of presuppositions:

A presupposition is an assumption you make prior to looking at the evidence. Presuppositions are crucial because they determine how you interpret the evidence. Let me give you an example. Did you hear about the man who thought he was dead? This guy firmly believed he was dead, even though he was a living, normally–functioning human being. Well, his wife persuaded him to visit a psychiatrist, who tried in vain to convince him that he was in fact alive. Finally, the psychiatrist hit upon a plan. He showed the man medical reports and scientific evidence that dead men do not bleed. After thoroughly convincing the man that dead men do not bleed, the psychiatrist took out a pin and pricked the man’s finger. When the man saw the drop of blood trickle down his finger, his eyes bugged out. “Ha!” he cried, “Dead men do bleed after all!”

The Jesus Seminar think tank has concluded that Jesus did not claim to be God, was accidently crucified, and was definitely not resurrected. Their presuppositions exclude other viable alternatives. They start with a commitment to naturalism, a belief that states there are no supernatural causes, only natural ones. Therefore, the resurrection could not have happened, because it is supernatural. Rather than examine the evidence and allow it to lead to the most likely explanation, certain explanations are excluded a priori.

Similar tactics permeat the Darwinism vs. ID debate. Darwinian’s presuppositions exclude intelligent design, therefore any evidence must be interpreted in the light of an impossibility of intelligent causes. No matter what new discovery, it must fit into a naturalistic framework. Why? Because it is the only answer allowed. This is not science. This is dogmatism. A scientist will evaluate the evidence and draw the most likely conclusion.

Craig’s entire article is well worth reading, but I will conclude with another excerpt, which applies to whatever realm naturalism exerts its crippling influence:

But now the whole quest of the historical Jesus becomes a charade. If you begin by presupposing naturalism, then of course what you wind up with is a purely natural Jesus! This reconstructed, naturalistic Jesus is not based on evidence, but on definition. What is amazing is that the Jesus Seminar makes no attempt to defend this naturalism; it is just presupposed. But this presupposition is wholly unjustified. As long as the existence of God is even possible, then we have to be open to the possibility that He has acted miraculously in the universe.

Here’s a great link for anyone interested in Intelligent Design in general and the Fine-Tuning argument in particular: Robin Collins’ Homepage. As far as I know he is the foremost authority on the Fine-Tuning argument, and he rather impressively has both a Ph.D in Physics from the University of Texas and a Ph.D in Philosophy from Notre Dame

I admit it. I’m a skeptic. Now, before the reader jumps to too many erroneous conclusions, let me explain. I’ve always found it difficult to believe something just because I was told it was true and I was supposed to believe it. Whether this be certain religious dogmas or secular dogmas, I am prone to skepticism. I now feel free to admit that I am a skeptic because I understand that not all skepticism is bad.

According to J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, in Philosophical Foundations for A Christian Worldview, there are at least three major forms of skepticism (This discussion is part of a brief introduction to a much more involved discussion of skepticism as a philosophical position). The first is a position called iterative skepticism. This type of skepticism cannot even be considered a true philosophical position, rather it is a verbal game. When someone makes a claim of knowledge, the iterative skeptic asks, “How do you know that?”. To every answer, the response is another question, “How do you know that?”. The iterative skeptic offers no true philosophical position.

The second type of skepticism is called metaepistemological skepticism. Moreland and Craig state that these skeptics hold to an extreme form of naturalized epistemology. They reject philosophy and the quest for justification of beliefs and instead focus on how people form their beliefs.

Traditional epistemology provides an account of justification and knowledge, of epistemic virtues and duties and of how one decides what one ought and ought not believe. Purely psychological or neurological descriptions of causal, belief-forming processes are merely descriptive and not normative or prescriptive.

The third form is heuristic or methodological skepticism. In this case, the use of doubt enables one to reach a better understanding of things. Again, I confess. I’m a hueristic skeptic. Here are more comments of Moreland and Craig:

In this sense, skepticism is not a position to be refuted or rebutted, but a guiding method to help people understand knowledge. This form of skepticism is, indeed, very helpful, since doubting and questioning knowledge claims can lead one to deeper understanding.

The heuristic skeptic “employs the use of doubt to develop knowledge.” As part of our duty as Christians, to love the Lord with all our minds, we must avoid naivete. We must learn to think critically and consistently about the issues, religious and secular, which confront us.

The December Issue of Science Magazine has proclaimed “Evolution in Action” as it’s breakthrough of the year. Of all the scientific achievements of 2005, breakthroughs in evolution have been deemed the most noteworthy:

Amid this outpouring of results, 2005 stands out as a banner year for uncovering the intricacies of how evolution actually proceeds. Concrete genome data allowed researchers to start pinning down the molecular modifications that drive evolutionary change in organisms from viruses to primates. Painstaking field observations shed new light on how populations diverge to form new species–the mystery of mysteries that baffled Darwin himself. Ironically, also this year some segments of American society fought to dilute the teaching of even the basic facts of evolution. With all this in mind, Science has decided to put Darwin in the spotlight by saluting several dramatic discoveries, each of which reveals the laws of evolution in action.

A couple of major areas of study are highlighted by Science magazine. For more details, you may read the article. The first is the mapping of the chimpanzee genome. The similarity of our genetic material is purported to show our kinship with the chimp. Now, I think this is a wonderful accomplishment worthy of great applause and may lead to future good. However, I fail to see how this is an evolutionary breakthrough. This is not one of those testable and falsifiable elements of science which we often hear spoken of concerning ID as science. What experiment was done to show evolution to be a true theory? What was accomplished was a discovering of how things are (the chimp genome), and a comparison with other things we know to be true, and an attempted explanation of how the two might be related. The hypothesis is that the chimp genome and the human genome are similar because we evolved from the chimpanzees. Nice hypothesis. Where’s the testable and falsifiable proof? There are other explanations of the data. Perhaps the similarity is due to an Intelligent Designer using similar building blocks to design the chimp and the human. Mapping the chimpanzee genome hardly seems the evolutionary breakthrough it is proclaimed to be.

Another example given regards the mating habits of European blackcaps, birds who share breeding grounds in Germany and Austria. One group of blackcaps heads north for the winter, the other heads south. The northern group arrives at the breeding grounds a day earlier than the southern group and only breed with other northerners. The conclusion of this breakthrough is that the difference in timing may one day drive the two populations to become two species. Now, this is interesting information, but hardly a great evolutionary breakthrough. First of all, virtually no one doubts the existence of micro-evolution, subtle changes in a species due to environmental pressures. The problem comes with macro-evolution, the development of new body types, etc. European corn borer caterpillars and stickleback fish are also mentioned as examples.

So, these are the “dramatic discoveries” that show the “laws of evolution in action”. I find it interesting that the Science article states that one of the reasons these discoveries were chosen as breakthroughs of the year is because certain “segments of American society fought to dilute the teaching of even the basic facts of evolution.” This sentiment is a patently false statement. What certain segments of American society are fighting for is a fair evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinism. If the above “breakthroughs” are the best there is, one should be allowed to critically evaluate them and question whether they prove what they are said to prove. This article appears to be an attempt to boost the faltering confidence of the American public in a naturalistic explanation of origins.

The ID Update is carrying a three-part series by Albert Alschuler, a law professor at the University of Chicago, on the recent Dover decision regarding ID in the classroom. Alschuler’s Part II is an excellent discussion of some of the issues involved. I would encourage the reading of the entire Part II article. Of particular interest for this blog is the following excerpt:

Popperian images of science to the contrary notwithstanding, paleontologists rarely perform experiments or make predictions. They can’t. The dinosaurs are all dead. These scientists simply examine the fossil record in an effort to infer how life forms developed. Inference to the best explanation is the name of the game, and the proponents of intelligent design want to play.

It is important to make distinctions among the various scientific fields. For example, the work of paleontologists is quite different in nature than the work of a chemist or physicist.

A comment on Part II by Chris Roach contains the following paragraph:

Schools would be well served to use the debate on creationism and evolution to distinguish science from religion and philosophy, as well as to distinguish different branches of philosophy. The hardest of the hard sciences, such as physics and chemistry, proceed through experimentation. X will or won’t happen. And it will or won’t happen regularly and predictably. Saying these things with greater clarity and precision does not strictly speaking answer the bigger questions of these events’ significance. To use Aristotelian language, physics (and science generally) can explain efficient causes but not final causes.

In addition, the taxonomic or historical methods of biology are distinct from physics and chemistry. When the biologist finds fossils and tries to explain their significance and relationships, his methods are not so different from those of a historian or anthropologist. His activity is inductive and imaginitive. The presence of these historical and descriptive methods in what is ordinarily thought of as the experimental world of falsifiable hypothese would be a useful clarification of why such biological inquiry should not and cannot claim the same pedigree as, for example, formulae that show the effects of gravity or radiation. Competing, defensible explanations may emerge from the same facts. And those facts cannot be proven or disproven through experiments; they can merely be known as more or less supported by the evidence.

Evolutionary biology is a much different enterprise than chemistry where one can formulate a hypothesis, run a controlled experiement and determine the reliability of the hypothesis. One cannot, due to obvious time demands placed on the experimenter by evolution, take a chimpanzee and attempt to evolve it into a human. This does not mean macroevolution is necessarily false, but it certainly is not falsifiable in the same way a chemistry or physics experiment is falsifiable. Evolutionary biology consists of looking at present conditions and attempting to provide the best explanation of how things got from point A to point B.
It is difficult to falsify any claim regarding the past. When a mischievous child claims an alien broke the living room lamp, it is difficult to falsify such a claim. However one may reject that claim, because it seems less likely than the claim that the child was responsible for the action.

Paleontology, Forensics, Darwinistic evolution, and Intelligent Design, among other fields, are all about looking at present conditions and attempting to explain the past by offering the best explanation of the evidence. If the test of falsifiability excludes ID, then it also must exclude macro-evolution. Macro-evolution is not falsifiable, or, for that matter, testable in the “scientific” sense of the word.

This week’s Christian poetry selection, from his collection The Olney Hymns:

O Lord, my best desire fulfil,
And help me to resign
Life, health, and comfort to thy will,
And make thy pleasure mine.

Why should I shrink at thy command,
Whose love forbids my fears?
Or tremble at the gracious hand
That wipes away my tears?

No, let me rather freely yield
What most I prize to thee;
Who never hast a good withheld,
Or wilt withhold, from me.

Thy favour, all my journey through,
Thou art engaged to grant;
What else I want, or think I do,
‘Tis better still to want.

Wisdom and mercy guide my way,
Shall I resist them both?
A poor blind creature of a day,
And crush’d before the moth!

But ah! my inward spirit cries,
Still bind me to thy sway;
Else the next cloud that veils the skies,
Drives all these thoughts away.

Growing up, I would sing all the usual Christmas carols. I must have sung them hundreds of times, but never took the time to grasp the message. One of my favorites is “O Little Town of Bethlehem”. The lyrics are powerful. In the little town of Bethlehem, a glorious thing happened of which most of the world was unaware.

O little town of Bethlehem,
how still we see thee lie;
above thy deep and dreamless sleep
the silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
the everlasting light;
the hopes and fears of all the years
are met in thee tonight.

Merry Christmas to all!

I started reading Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto last night and he has a short chapter devoted to the Christian foundations of America and said a few interesting things about the so-called “separation of church and state” that I thought were definitely postworthy, especially in light of the recent Kentucky Court of Appeals decision detailed in my father’s last post and all the hub-bub about Christmas displays. Here are a select few quotes:

We must not forget that many of those who came to America from Europe came for religious purposes. As they arrived, most of them established their own individual civil governments based upon the Bible. It is, therefore, totally foreign to the basic nature of America at the time of the writing of the Constitution to argue a separation doctrine that implies a secular state.

The first purpose [of the First Amendment] was that there would be no established, national church for the united thirteen states. To say it another way: There would be no “Church of the United States.”…Nevertheless, a number of the individual states had state churches, and even that was not considered in conflict with the First Amendment. “At the outbreak of the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen colonies had conferred special benefits upon one church to the exclusion of others.” “In all but one of the thirteen states, the states taxed the people to support the preaching of the gospel and to build churches.”"…the Massachusetts Constitution was not amended until 1853 to eliminate the tax-supported church provisions.” (Quotes from Herbert W. Titus, Education, Caesar’s or God’s: A Constitutional Question of Jurisdiction)

As a matter of historical fact, the Founding Fathers believed that the public interest was served by the promotion of religion…[and] in 1811 the New York state court upheld an indictment for blasphemous utterances against Christ, and it its ruling, given by Chief Justice Kent, the court said, “We are Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity.”…The Pennsylvania state court also affirmed the conviction of a man on charges of blasphemy, here aginst the Holy Scriptures. The Court said: “Christianity, general Christianity is, and always has been, a part of the common law of Pennsylvania…not Christianity founded on any particular religious tenets; nor Christianity with an established church and tithes and spiritual courts; but Christianity with liberty of conscience to all men.”

The reason I mention these things isn’t necessarily that I think that the government should run the same way it did back then with state churches, etc., but that it is very clear from these quotes that this country was founded upon the principles of the Christianity of the reformation, and that the writers of the First Amendment did not take it to establish a secular state. And if the Constitution is going to mean anything as the guiding force of the government of this country, then it must be interpreted by what its writers meant. If we are free to reinterpret the Constitution in whatever way we see fit, it doesn’t even make much sense to have a Constitution.

While reading the blogs at Cadre Comments, I was alerted to an encouraging decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Kentucky. The ACLU had brought suit against Mercer county for a courthouse display which contained the ten commandments along with other important historic documents. The court ruled in favor of Mercer county. The decision contains the following comments:

The ACLU makes repeated references to “the separation of church and state.” This extra-constitutional construct has grown tiresome. The First Amendment does not demand a wall of separation between church and state. Our nation’s history is replete with acknowledgement and in some cases, accomodation of religion. Afterall, we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being….

We will not presume endorsement from the mere display of the Ten Commandments. If the reasonable observer perceived all government references to the Deity as endorsements, then many of our Nation’s cherished traditions would be unconstitutional, including the Declaration of Independence and the national motto. Fortunately, the reasonable person is not a hyper-sensitive plaintiff. Instead, he appreciates the role religion has played in our governmental institutions, and finds it historically appropriate and traditionally acceptable for a state to include religious influences, even in the form of sacred texts, in honoring American legal traditions.

Hopefully, more decisions like this will be made which will destroy the myth of the “wall of separation” between church and state.

As a Penn State Alum, I would like to take a moment to express what a great thing it is for Joe Paterno to be honored as coach of the year. He has endured a few years of criticism and hardship and deserves the accolades given this year. He has always showed great character and that deserves a reward.

“I never felt bad when we were 4-7 last year because I thought we had a bunch of kids that never quit. And that’s the joy of coaching. It isn’t 8-3. It isn’t 10-1. It isn’t 11-0. It isn’t any of that stuff. It’s did you get the most out of your football team.”

Well said, JoePa!