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On this day, when we recall the awesome and awful death of Jesus of Nazareth on a Roman cross, I point you to perhaps the definitive article detailing his physical sufferings. The abstract of the article from the Journal of the American Medical Association states:

Jesus of Nazareth underwent Jewish and Roman trials, was flogged, and was sentenced to death by crucifixion. The scourging produced deep stripelike lacerations and appreciable blood loss, and it probably set the stage for hypovolemic shock as evidenced by the fact that Jesus was too weakened to carry the crossbar (patibulum) to Golgotha. At the site of crucifixion his wrists were nailed to the patibulum, and after the patibulum was lifted onto the upright post, (stipes) his feet were nailed to the stipes. The major pathophysiologic effect of crucifixion was an interference with normal respirations. Accordingly, death resulted primarily from hypovolemic shock and exhaustion asphyxia. Jesus’ death was ensured by the thrust of a soldier’s spear into his side. Modern medical interpretation of the historical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead when taken down from the cross.

HT: Justin Taylor

According to this recent Telegraph article, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former premeir of the athiest Soviet Union, has acknowledged that he is a Christian:

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Communist leader of the Soviet Union, has acknowledged his Christian faith for the first time, paying a surprise visit to pray at the tomb of St Francis of Assisi…

Mr Gorbachev’s surprise visit confirmed decades of rumours that, although he was forced to publicly pronounce himself an atheist, he was in fact a Christian, and casts a meeting with Pope John Paul II in 1989 in a new light.

Mr Gorbachev, 77, was baptised into the Russian Orthodox Church and his parents were Christians. In addition, the parents of his wife Raisa were deeply religious and were killed during the Second World War for having religious icons in their home.

HT: Ben Witherington

Thomas Sowell has a well-written piece at National Review Online in which he addresses the recent embarrassment to the campaign of Barack Obama. For those who haven’t read or seen the news in the past few days, Sowell is refering to Obama’s 20 year membership in a church pastored by Jeremiah Wright, and his regard of Wright as his mentor and spiritual advisor. The problem with Wright is his black liberation theology and blatantly racist ideology. Sowell states:

While talking about bringing us together and deploring “divisive” actions, Senator Obama has for 20 years been a member of a church whose minister, Jeremiah Wright, has said that “God Bless America” should be replaced by “God damn America” — among many other wild and even obscene denunciations of American society, including blanket racist attacks on whites.

Nor was this an isolated example. Fox News Channel has played tapes of various sermons of Jeremiah Wright, and says that it has tapes with hours more of the same.

Wright’s actions matched his words. He went with Louis Farrakhan to Libya and Farrakhan received an award from his church.

Wright’s sermons have been divisive and anti-American, damning America for spreading drugs in the black community and calling the U.S. the “US-KKK-a”. Sowell, and many others, are rightly criticizing Obama, not just for being a part of this church (It is America and a man can hold whatever views he wishes), but for now pretending that he had no idea that the church and Pastor Wright held such radical views. Here is a youtube excerpt from one of Wright’s inflammatory sermons.

For a man ful of rhetoric about uniting America, Obama has a lot of explaining to do concerning his double life.

In an article at First Things called The Pious Infidel, Steven Waldman discusses the religious beliefs of one of America’s Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s anti-Christian remarks are often trotted out by modern liberal activists in an attempt to show how one of our early, very influential politicians views were similar to their own.

Waldman’s excellent discussion of Jefferson’s views concerning God are enlightening. Jefferson believed in the ultimate superiority of human reason and rejected divine special revelation. He is often thought of as a deist, but, according to Waldman, Jefferson’s views were not explicity deistic:

Though the most Deistic of the Founding Fathers, even Jefferson was not a full-fledged Deist if we accept that philosophy as having had two fundamental tenets: a rejection of biblical revelation and a conviction that God, having created the laws of the universe, had receded from day-to-day control and intervention. Jefferson clearly did agree with the first part of Deism. But he did not agree with the second.

This claim is supported by numerous quotes. While some have claimed that Jefferson’s references to God being active in the world was mere politics, Waldman produces quotes from private letters which show that these comments were not made of political expedience. For example, in a letter to Eliza Trist, he stated:

… it is not easy to reconcile ourselves to the many useless miseries to which Providence seems to expose us. But his justice affords a prospect that we shall all be made even some day.

Jefferson was not an agnostic, but based on his reason alone, he felt sure that there was a God. More than that, he believed that America’s fate rested squarely on the intervention of this God.

Waldman presents a wonderful Jefferson quote from a letter to John Adams on April 11, 1823, in which he argues for intelligent design:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripedal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.

We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have exited thro’ all the time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.

I’d recomment you take the time to read the entire article to obtain the full flavor of Waldman’s exploration of Jefferson’s religious beliefs. The title, Pious Infidel, sums them up nicely.

Bart Ehrman apparently has a new book, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why we suffer. Dr James Howell, the senior minister at Myers Park UMC in Charlotte has reviewed the book here. The problem of evil and suffering is not new, is not to be glossed over, and has been substantially addressed by Christian philsophers and theologians throughout Christianity’s history.

Howell expresses his concerns with the scholarshipf of the book:

I was shocked by this book, but not because Ehrman rejects God. Ehrman is a very fine scholar, and a task incumbent upon a scholar is to engage the best scholarship written on a subject. Christians have known for 2,000 years that suffering happens, and theologians have grappled with many wise, meaningful approaches to how we believe in a good God in a world where bad things happen. Ehrman seems not to have made himself aware of any of them, or he ridiculously misrepresents various ways we understand the intersection of God and suffering. None of the great theologians who have deftly explored these matters is ever mentioned.

I’ve not read the book, but based on Howell’s review, it seems that the book is similar in nature to Erhman’s previous book, Misquoting Jesus, which I have read and reviewed in a nine-part series beginning here.

Howell, I think, makes the following important point:

Is this sheer sensationalism? It sells. But is there more? In “God’s Problem,” Ehrman narrates how he was reared in a narrow-minded church with a simplistic, harsh theology, and he’s glad to be out. His venom reminds me of the ugly fruit of bad churches: the rousing of strident denunciation among people who can’t (and shouldn’t) believe in the false God such churches foisted upon them.

Many have misjudged the truth of Christianity based on false representations gained while sitting on the pews of misguided churches. Ehrman is among them.

HT: Ben Witherington

It looks like our spam filter is no longer devouring every comment which it sees. I think it has been doing this for at least 2-3 months, although, we were not aware that this was the case. Anyway, thanks for reading and commenting.

Yesterday, I discussed some of the content of chapter 1 of Angus Menuge’s book Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science. The attempted reductions of agency, according to Menuge is one of the primary concerns of this book. Agency is therein defined as applying to any individual which has…

… representations of its own goals, such as desires, and the means to achieve those goals, such as beliefs, and whose behavior is rendered intelligible in light of those representations.

Menuge further states that an individual is an agent if his representations exhibit intentionality (they are about something beyond themselves), they serve as reasons for actions, and they involve self-representation. In the biological sciences, Darwinistic reductionism as explained away any evidence of agency in the natural world. Complex life only appears to be designed (design, of course, is an activity of agents), but in actuality is the result of blind processes of physical laws and chance.

Menuge distinguishes between two forms of attempted reductions of agency: Strong Agent Reductionism (SAR, which he examines more closely in chapter 2) and Weak Agent Reductionism (WAR, which he scrutinizes later in the book). Menuge states:

According to SAR, what Darwin only started now needs to be finished. Darwin provided the means for eliminating agency in our natural environment: the blind automatic mechanism of natural selection. Now it is time to apply the same strategy to ourselves, replacement of the occult talk of human agency with the blind automatic mechanisms of neurophysiology.

Menuge accurately describes, I think, the implications for human agency once the remnants of divine agency is removed from nature. Biology and psychology both target the notion of agency in their reductionist efforts.

I’ve just started reading Angus Menuge’s book Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science. In Chapter One (Title: Skyhooks and Cranes), Menuge references a “controversial metaphysical assumption” about what constitutes a scientific explanation in which one asserts that to understand a phenomenon one must identify the mechanism causally responsible. The “Crane” is the explanation based upon this mechanistic understanding of the phenomenon in question. Cranes are good, but “Skyhooks” are bad. By “Skyhook”, Menuge means an explanation with an appeal to non-mechanical agencies. The skyhook is an explanation that seems to be just dangling from the sky, not grounded in mechanical explanations. Actually, these are not Menuge’s terms, but are borrowed from Daniel Dennett and his discussion of proper scientific explanations. Much of the chapter discusses the reductionism which characterizes much of modern science. Cranes can be useful in demystifying phenomena such as human rationality. The cranes reveal that human rationality is merely (is reduced to) chemistry and physics such as the firing of neurons which arose in a purely naturalistic manner.

Menuge argues that the reductionist presents one with a false dichotomy in which one must choose “either (an) unscientific skyhook or (a) scientific crane.” At times, cranes have actually impeded scientific advances and the failures of these mechanistic reductions have actually resulted in great scientific advances. One should read the book to gain a better understanding of the full argument. Briefly, however, Menuge makes the following points regarding reductions in science:

1. Failed reductions, including the failure to provide a mechanism, do not necessarily mean a failure for science.
2. Successful reductions can be nonmechanistic.
3. Reductionist zeal can be bad for science.

Support for the above assertions are given from several examples. For one, the failure of Alchemist reductionism gave way to modern chemistry. If the alchemist had clung to his reductionism he would have been an obscurantist. Additionally, the Newtonian reduction of Kepler’s laws were not less significant because he did not offer a mechanism for his gravitational theory. Many actually resisted his scientific advances because his explanations appeared to be “skyhooks” instead of “cranes.”

Menuge summarizes:

“… Nonmechanical skyhooks can be very useful in science and mechanical cranes can be ideological figments. Mysterious skyhooks may shed a great deal of light, unifying and reducing other phenomena, whereas cranes may cast the whole world into darkness by denying the facts in front of our face.

Botched or overblown reductions can hinder science by obscuring realities that need to be explained. The identification of science with a favored reductionist program is a deplorable kind of scientism that prohibits the atmosphere of free inquiry and honest debate essential to true science.”

I want to apologize to the several people who’ve let me know that they have attempting to leave comments only to be blocked by our spam filter. You were not intentionally blocked. For a while we were getting so much spam that we altered our filter. Obviously, something has gone awry. I’ve let Jeremy know (He’s the brains behind running the website) and he is working on the problem. Thanks for taking the time to read and comment on the posts. I hope we can resolve the problem soon.

Update: (March 11 @ 16:47) We’ve made some adjustments, but all comments are still being blocked. We’ll keep working on this. Thanks for your patience.

Justin Taylor, at Between Two Worlds, has a couple of posts regarding Barak Obama’s opposition to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. In this political climate where one hears all sorts of rumors (many of which are false or at least gross exaggerations), Taylor seems to have researched this one well. The Bill Obama opposed is found here, which essentially states that infants which are born alive should have the full protection of the law given to other “human beings.” While it seems Obama’s opposition is primarily argued from a constitutional pespective, one cannot ignore the moral aspects of the issue.

Jill Stanek, at the Illinois Review, provides the Top 10 reasons Obama voted against this act.