withallyourmind.net

Thanks to all who have taken the time to read and/or respond to our thoughts throughout this past year. God bless you all and we wish you all a wonderful 2007!

In Appendix II of F. F. Bruce’s The Canon of Scripture, he refers to the “hermeneutical circle.” This phrase entails more than one meaning. It may be used to refer to a movement from exegesis to theology and back from theology to exegesis or it may refer to how one processes interpretively. Bruce urges care in any some circular process as it can easily result in what is called in logic a “vicious circle.” A vicious circle occurs when one assumes what he is attempting to prove therefore assuring that she arrives at the point she desires.

There have been several discussions in comments to previous blogs on one’s ability to be objective and arrive at objective truth. Bruce discusses our presuppositions, which we all inevitably have, and our ability to be objective:

The wise course is to recognize those presuppositions, to make allowance for them, to ensure that they do not exercise an undue influence on our understanding of what we read. It is the unconscious and unsuspected presuppositions that are harmful.

Regarding the attainment of total objectivity:

It is not given to mortals to attain complete objectivity… But one can at least acknowledge objectivity as an ideal and endeavor to approach it as nearly as possible, instead of decrying it as a misleading will o’ the wisp.

I think Bruce’s words are full of wisdom. Some feel there is no objective truth, while others feel that there may be objective truth but we are unable to reach it due to our inability to be objective. Bruce writes that we cannot obtain complete objectivity, but that does not keep us from obtaining knowledge of certain things. We recognize our limitations, strive constantly to be aware of our presuppositions, and follow after objective truth. It is the tendency of postmoderns to consider objectivity as a “misleading will o’ the wisp” that is unhelpful.

Ambition! We must be careful what we mean by it. If it means the desire to get ahead of other people- which is what I think it does mean - then it is bad. If it means simply wanting to do a thing well, then it is good. It isn’t wrong for an actor to want to act his part as well as it can possibly be acted, but the wish to have his name in bigger type than the other actors is a bad one.

C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (1944), “Answers to Questions on Christianity,” ans. 9, pp. 55-56

Reason is an essential part of the Christian faith. Christianity divorced from reason is a powerless ship adrift on the seas of culture. A fideistic faith is incapable of combating the “idols” which are built upon naturalism and secularism. Part of the reason that the Church in the west finds itself becoming increasingly marginalized in society is that it has abandoned the life of the mind. When challenged by the assaults of naturalistic philosophy and criticism over the past 2 centuries, instead of meeting those assaults head-on, the church capitulated and retreated into its cocoon of “faith”. Christianity finds itself struggling against the current of a society which has been allowed to progress apart from the principles of Christianity.

Christianity has not only erred in not fulfilling its iconoclastic purpose, but all Christians have failed in their personal relationship with God if they have shunned the life of the mind. The scripture, in many places, encourage us to use our intellect and reason in the service of God. We are instructed to “love the Lord (our) God with all (our) mind.”

It is debated among those involved in the effort to bring the life of the mind to its rightful place in Christianity as to whether this will ultimately bring about the revival and reform so desperately needed. First of all, let me say that whether or not it does so should not affect our determination to pursue a life of the mind in our own lives and to encourage others to do likewise, as this is a part of what it means to be followers of Christ. Having said that, I think that the cultivation of reason in the Church can bring about a substantial change in society, not to mention within the Church itself. Christianity, in many circles, has been made so weak and tepid by the influence of a secular society that it is unable to affect anyone in a way consistent with godly principles. It has subsumed the values of the world and merged them with Christianity to the point that Christianity might be rightfully understood to be absent at that point. It is only through the rightful return to an emphasis on reason and the life of the mind in the church that we have any hope of changing our society and reaching the world. Only by addressing the foundation (first principles) can the structure of the Church and society be changed. The Church has the antidote, but it has been made ineffective by its co-mingling with the philosophies of the world. How much reform and revival can be achieved? I do not know, but I do not see how any can be achieved without a return to a biblical emphasis on reason in the Church. We need not be afraid of the conflict of Christianity and culture. Truth will prevail if Christians will study to show themselves approved and to be ready to give an answer to those who ask about the reason for the hope within.

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

For Christ is born of Mary
And gathered all above
While mortals sleep, the angels keep
Their watch of wondering love
O morning stars together
Proclaim the holy birth
And praises sing to God the King
And Peace to men on earth

How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven.
No ear may his His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him still,
The dear Christ enters in.

O holy Child of Bethlehem
Descend to us, we pray
Cast out our sin and enter in
Be born to us today
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell
O come to us, abide with us
Our Lord Emmanuel

- Phillips Brooks

The following is a poem written by my wife, Cindy, for this Christmas season.

The Meaning of Christmas

The reason… Jesus came to earth.
The season… to celebrate His birth.
The need… a relationship with man.
The deed… God’s perfect salvation plan.
We’re lost… because of sin and shame.
His cost… His life! He took the blame.
Risen… He is alive to today.
Prison… He took my chains away!
Joy to all… Christmas brings good cheer.
Heed the call… The Savior is here!

- Cynthia Carey, 2006

Merry Christmas to all!

If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly, if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.

C. S. Lewis - The Abolition of Man, chap 2, par. 11, p. 53

Today, I conclude with a final post on the relationship of science and religion.

It is my contention that true science has always been a friend of true religion. This is becoming more and more obvious today as scientists are questioning the naturalistic foundations of scientific materialism and allowing the evidence to speak for itself. Phillip Johnson, author of several books, including Darwin on Trial, has spearheaded the effort to return science to its historical place and to strip culture of the naturalistic bias with which it has been blinded for the past 150 years.

Michael Behe, William Dembski, and others have done much to show how unscientific modern science has become. Beginning in 1996 with the publication of Darwin’s Black Box, Behe has shown how certain biological systems are unable to be accounted for by Darwinian mechanisms. These systems are irreducibly complex, by which he means that if one of several interrelated parts are removed, the system’s function is destroyed. The most famous example offered by Behe is the bacterial flagellum which is a machine like an outboard motor which propels a bacterium through its watery environment. The flagellum consists of a complex of greater than 30 proteins which are all necessary for the proper function of the system. Discoveries such as this confirm the statements of the Christian faith, specifically, that there is an intelligent designer who must have designed this complex system. No naturalistic mechanisms are known which can offer adequate explanation.

Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher, has written a number of books detailing the concept of specified complexity. He has developed an explanatory filter, formalizing a process by which design can be reasonably inferred from nature. In studying any natural phenomenon one must ask three questions. First, is it necessarily this way? If so, then design is not inferred. Second, is this phenomenon sufficiently complex to exclude chance? If not, design is not inferred. Finally, is this phenomenon specified, or does it exhibit an independently given pattern? If yes, then design may rightly be inferred. Humans use this type of reasoning intuitively all the time. Dembski has simply formalized it for scientific use. Human DNA exhibits this type of specified complexity and points to an intelligent designer who intentionally arranged its parts the way they are.

Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards published a book in 2004, The Privileged Planet, in which they argued that the Earth is a special place which is exquisitely fine-tuned for both the existence of complex life and the ability to discover our unique place in the cosmos. Many scientists are recognizing how chance and necessity are unable to account for the incredible fine-tuning of the laws and constants of the universe. If such values as the cosmological constant or the gravitational constant, among many others, were slightly different, complex life could not exist. All of these discoveries point to a Creator consistent with biblical teachings. Fred Hoyle concludes that it appears…

… a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.

Paul Davies, after promoting atheism, claims:

(There) is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all… It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe… The impression of design is overwhelming.

There are many other examples which could be offered. For example, the discovery of the Big Bang has tremendous implications for religious belief. Instead of an eternally existing static universe, the universe has been demonstrated to have a beginning. Someone must have caused it to come into existence. William Lane Craig has effectively argued from big bang cosmology to the existence of God. I conclude my discussion of the friendship of science to faith with this quote from astrophysicist and self-proclaimed agnostic, Robert Jastrow:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Science and religion, faith and reason, are not at war, but instead all lead to one truth grounded in the existence of the Christian God.

The position which dominates secular western culture in our day is called scientific materialism. Scientific materialism asserts that science is the only way to gain reliable knowledge and that matter (and perhaps energy) is the only fundamentally existing reality. All nonmaterial things either do not exist or are reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry. Carl Sagan claimed

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

Jacques Monod has claimed that biology has proven that there is no purpose in nature:

Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.

Anything can be reduced to simple, obvious mechanical interactions. The cell is a machine. The animal is a machine. Man is a machine.”

Edward O Wilson believes that the mind will be explained as…

… an epiphenomenon of the neural machinery of the brain.

The reason science and religion appear to be at war is traceable to the substitution of scientific naturalism for science as it had been previously understood. The war is a war of worldviews, not of science and religion. Science has been hijacked by a philosophy at odds with the philosophy which produced modern science in the first place. Richard Dawkins claimed:

Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory…we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.

Why? Because it is naturalistic. A professor from Kansas State University stated:

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.

Now, the definition of science has been debated by scientists and philosophers for a long time, but it seems to me that science should, if anything, be a search for truth and should be based on a willingness to go where the evidence leads. Modern science seems anything but this. Modern science is a product of a prior philosophical commitment. The commitment to naturalism is unquestioned dogma in education today. Harvard Biologist Richard Lewontin, in a review of Carl Sagan’s, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, admitted…

… we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism… It’s not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation… On the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes.

He goes on to state that this commitment must be absolute so as not to allow a “divine foot” in the door. To summarize, it is not religion and science which are at war, but naturalism and supernaturalism.

Next, encouraging recent trends.

Continuing with early modern science…

Boyle was not alone in his belief that scientific discovery not only reinforces religious belief but also enhances one’s devotion to God. Sir Isaac Newton was a deeply religious scientist. Newton wrote Principia mathematica in 1687, a foundational text for physics. In it he freely discusses the attributes and activities of God. Of Newton, Richard Westfall noted:

The fact is that Newton was convinced from the beginning that the universe is an ordered cosmos because he knew as a Christian that God had created it.

Galileo and Descartes were both devout Catholics. Galileo referenced Augustine’s doctrine of the Two Books in explaining his science. Descartes appealed to God’s immutability as a foundation for his work on the conservation of motion. Gassendi, a priest, discussed the soul and the resurrection in his works on physics. John Ray, an ordained Anglican priest, who proposed early classification systems for plants, was an esteemed fellow of the Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific society in continuous operation. In The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, published in 1691, he claimed,:

There is, for a free man, no occupation more worthy and delightful than to contemplate the beauteous works of nature and honor the infinite wisdom and goodness of God.

Other men whose devotion to God found manifestation in science include Roger Bacon, Copernicus, and Lemaitre.

The founders of the scientific revolution were very much aware of the order of the cosmos. However, over time the universe began to be thought of as a large machine running according to certain unchangeable laws and principles. The God of theism began to be replaced in the minds of many by the God of deism – a God who wound up the watch in the beginning but is now removed from the world and the universe now functions on its own without further help or guidance from God. It was not long until some disposed with the watchmaker altogether and became metaphysical as well as methodological naturalists. The natural theology of William Paley gave way to a positivist view of science that included the uniformity of nature, the regularity of law, and most significantly, the full sufficiency of physical causes. William Dembski traces the demise in three stages. Initially, nature was seen as replete with evidences of God’s action in nature. Then, divine action was located within divine laws. Finally, a mature positivism set in which explained nature without recourse to design. When Darwin arrived on the scene with his theory of natural selection, he made it, in the words of Richard Dawkins, “possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

Next, more on naturalism in science.