Feeling Better

I may be ready to blog again. It's been almost a month since I have blogged regularly and I have enjoyed not thinking about anything too heavily.

I tend to live so much within my head, that when I begin to blog and comment with regularity my mind becomes too crowded and furiously moving to give my inner self the peace that it needs.

I can care too much. I can become obsessed with a particular idea too easily.

I have to rely on the other part of me to pull in the reins and cut myself off from my neurotic tendencies.

Japan's Disaster

Watching this disaster unfold is mind-boggling. I cannot imagine seeing my home washed away and the buildings around me crushed and the nuclear power plant in my town exploding and possibly poisoning everything I have ever known with radiation.

May God, and we, help the Japanese people.

When Words Reveal Too Much

I stood in the bathroom, hair tied back, scrub brush in my hand, sweaty from cleaning all day and I cried. Looking out at my husband, in the middle of a conversation, I cried.

He had tried to be positive and encouraging as we talked about the next year and our plans as I contemplated returning to full-time work and finally finding a career path. He offered ideas, found positions he was sure I could succeed in, and all I could do was try to disabuse him of his optimism and his attempt to help.

"J--, I'm 37. I have spent the last ten years primarily being a mother. I have spotty work history, no "real" experience and graduated from college 14 years ago. We are in dire economic times and I will be competing with 22 year old kids with no responsibilities. No one will hire me for the types of positions you are suggesting to me."

"But I believe in you. I believe that you can do these jobs."

"I believe that I can do them too...but it doesn't matter what I believe....it matters what other people, whom I have no control over, believe...other people who look at me and sum me up as a stay-at-home mom with unrelated work experience who has never really utilized her degree, which is now 14 years old, in any concrete way. That is all that I am to them."

"I think you're being too pessimistic."

"Pessimistic? It's not pessimism...it's reality. I have sacrificed a large portion of my life to raise our kids and make a home and be available. I don't regret it. I chose this life and I wouldn't change it.....but there are very real consequences for my choices. If something ever happened to you, I don't know that I could earn enough money on my own to take care of our kids. If you died in a horrible accident, how could I afford to provide for them? An entry-level job would never pay enough."

And then it came, a wave of sorrow and worry and recognition that threatened to overtake me. Speaking reality in cold, harsh words was too much for me to take. I had let the nervous words break free from my mind and enter into the world, filling the room with one of those secret worries that you try to crush when it first whispers to your consciousness because to let it grow and flourish would be too much to bear.

The words and thoughts were not new. They lingered in my mind occasionally as I lay in bed imagining what-ifs and what-would-I-do's, but now they had escaped and exposed my weakness.

Words are like that. I often don't know how strongly I feel about something until I have to articulate it, and once articulated, I face the effects of knowing what is truly within me.

For now, my words have become too much of a reality to me. They have created a world very different from the one in which I thought that I lived in, conceptually-speaking, and I feel caught between these two conceptual worlds, able to see into each of them, but not fully belonging to either.

I am going to keep my nervous words inside my head for a while, until I have decided whether I want to free them from their captivity.

If I decide to free them, I'll blog, though I may create a new blog.

Or I may stay in my self-imposed silence for a while.

I'm OK. There's nothing awful going on in my life. I just need to take a break from blogging and commenting and hopping from conceptual world to conceptual world for a while.

Rugby

For some reason rugby was on TV yesterday, and DH and I watched South Africa slaughter the USA team.

After a while, I realized that rugby is sort of like football, except for the part in which you get to beat the crap out of whoever has the ball until they give it to you, or until your entire team has crashed down on them and they have passed out from their lungs being crushed and have reflexively released the ball into your team's control.

Brutal.

Ineffability

This popped up in my reader from nakedpastor.com a while ago.

It made the rounds almost instantaneously in certain blog circles.

A couple of thoughts:

#1--I frequently feel this way. I'm in a place where it's easy for me to know what I don't think is true, but it is extremely hard for me to articulate what I do think is true. Negation is much easier than propagation. Whenever I want to put something forward about what/who God really is, I feel the limitations of my own words and thoughts. They're just not big enough. And even if they were, they are still bound by their own restraints.

#2--Even though nakedpastor hits it on the head with this one....as of yet I don't think that he, or anyone else who has posted it, has actually "shut up". So maybe we are good at ignoring the urge to simply be silent.

;-)

Ugh.

Several more days of sick kids. The Intuitive was up all night emptying his stomach into a trash can.

Does it make me a terrible parent that as I took care of him, wishing that I could make him better, that I also was thinking, "Oh crap.....I really hope I don't catch whatever this is."

Probably.

Bringing My Work Home With Me

I mentioned a while back that my job consists of performing and public speaking in elementary schools, a different one each day. The main topic that my co-worker and I address is bullying prevention. We present a puppet show in which a child is being mentally and physically bullied, and when the strict performance part is done, we move into a Q&A section in which we are still in character, but we are interacting with the kids, asking and answering questions.

So, everyday I discuss bullying with kids.

Today, as I was driving the kids home from school, I saw one boy tackle another boy, a boy whom The Rationalist has said is frequently bullied and ostracized, and slam him onto the asphalt road. I immediately stopped the car, got out, and broke things up, not physically thank goodness, but by telling them to cut it out. The kid who tackled the other kid said he did it because the other kid pushed him.

I asked them if they were OK and told them to go home once they said they were. The initiator's sister responded with mouthy, smart-alec comments aimed at the other boy. At which point I asked her if her parents were home and if I should go talk to them about the way she was treating people. She didn't say much after that.

I drove home in a deep funk.

The week before had incidents in which The Rationalist was called a "bitch" by his coach's son and had a teenager in our neighborhood pull out a small pocket knife and turn and walk toward The Rationalist, implying that he was going to do something with it.

He thought he was being hilarious.

In the meantime I had to talk to the teenager's father, who said that he knew that his kid had found a knife and that "it was like a tiny thing".

Yeah. Ok. Whatever. I don't care if it's a tiny thing. Your kid is a teenager and mine is ten years old. Your son looks like a grown up to my kid.

Then tonight I had to ask the soccer coach if his son had a problem with my son. He seemed surprised at my question. "What? No." I had to tell him that his son had called my son a "bitch" several times. Sitting off to the side was another mother who then spoke up and said that the coach's son was also mean to her son.

The cluster of these incidents in a relatively short period of time has thrown me into a concerned period of anxiety.

The Rationalist will be heading into middle school next year and, well.....middle school is middle school. It's probably safer to walk into a lion's den covered in hamburger meat than it is to walk the halls of most middle schools.

I'm seeing the tumultuous tween/teen years ahead and I am fearful....not so much at the thought of The Rationalist being a teen, but at all that he's going to have to deal with.

I'm also discouraged. Discouraged that kids can be so rotten and mean. Discouraged that parents are so out of touch with their children that they have no idea what their kids act like. Discouraged that I can't be there all the time, playing the part of neighborhood enforcer and self-appointed righter of wrongs.

In each instance, I have had stomach-turning anxiety about what the best thing to do was. Do I intervene and possibly embarrass a kid who is being picked on, who might not want my help? Do I talk to the father of the teenager, who happens to always have a group of thugs out in front of his house drinking in the middle of the day? Do I talk to my son's coach, risking the possibility that it might make soccer go sour for The Rationalist if the conversation doesn't go well?

At each point I had to take the time to consider the possible outcomes and the chance that by saying something, I might cause unintended consequences.

I forced myself to intervene, knowing that I might earn the title of over-protective mother, or annoying-lady-who-always-sticks-her-nose-in-everyone-else's-business. I had all of the awkward conversations. I ignored the urge to simply do nothing and take defensive measures, avoiding situations and hoping that everything would just work itself out on its own.

And the results?

Mostly positive. The coach had no idea that his son was acting that way. The father of the teenager at least knows that I am keeping close watch on my kids, and that I am not afraid(well maybe I'm a little afraid!) to get into things if I have to. The kids whose fight I broke up? Well, knowing kids, that will probably continue, but maybe next time they won't think that just because they are away from the school and adult supervision that they can get away with whatever they want to.

Still, even though nothing completely blew up in my face, it's made me weary. I don't want to have to have these conversations. I don't want there to be a reason to have these conversations.

sigh.

Catchy Songs, Dreadful Lyrics

James McGrath tagged me in a meme about CCM Praise songs that we have trouble with.

The one song that immediately came to mind, which is not actually a "praise" song is the Newsboys' Wherever We Go. It's actually quite catchy and was played incessantly on Christian radio stations when it first came out.

I still listen to predominately Christian music stations, so I know most of the CCM bands out there, and this particular song always rubbed me the wrong way.

It's kind of cute, but the lyrics always make me cringe, especially this part:

Wherever we go, the dumb get wise
And the crime rates drop
And the markets rise
It's a curious thing
But it's just our thing
Bullies make nice, crooks repent
And the ozone layer shows improvement
It's a curious thing
And it's humbling
Wherever we're led
All the Living Dead
Wanna leave their Zombie Mob
It's a touching scene when they all come clean
God help us, we just love our job

Maybe it's supposed to be tongue in cheek...but I know the evangelical circus very well, and someone, somewhere actually believes this stuff, that by merely being Christians, their very presence will improve crime rates, economic troubles, and global warming.

shudder.

As far as praise music goes, most of the time I am not really bothered by lyrics that truly don't make any sense when you sit down and actually think about them, or which represent God in a way that I personally don't agree with.

I am much more forgiving with worship and praise songs because I kind of see them as "love" songs...which can sound insipid, schmaltzy, and downright co-dependent in nature when you're not in love with anyone.

I don't like to mock the truly earnest. Bad praise lyrics may make me inwardly turn up my nose, but taken as an inherently limited way to express the inexpressible, I'm willing to let a lot slide by.

Soccer and Sickness

We've been busy this past week.

The entire weekend was consumed with soccer games. While watching the kids play and chatting with the other parents, I realized that I get as much out of watching them play soccer as they get out of playing it themselves. It's never a chore to watch their games. It's a family event, a way to spend time together in a fun setting.

After the soccer weekend, The Rationalist came down with a nasty virus, high fever and cold symptoms. I'm taking him in today to make sure he isn't harboring the next flu pandemic virus.

Although he's cranky when he's sick, he's also very sweet. He doesn't understand why we're letting him watch as much TV as he wants and letting him drink 7-Up non-stop accompanied by his favorite foods.

"You don't have to spoil me so much!" he says.

Very cute.

Parenting Your Mini-Me

Having children can remind you of the "you" you used to be. This is not always a pleasant experience. While you might have the inside line to understanding you child, you are reminded daily what a huge pain you must have been as a kid.

Oh, my poor teachers. However did they put up with me?!

The Rationalist and The Intuitive both have characteristics from DH and me. The Rationalist truly is a mini-me of his father, so much so that it is hilarious to hear them argue with each other. It's like watching clones battle with each other. However, even though The Rationalist is a mini-me of his father, he has some of my traits also...traits which I share with his father. The poor child got a double-dose of certain personality traits from us, and not only just the good ones either.

The Intuitive isn't exactly my mini-me, but he thinks a lot like I do/did. I knew that I was going to have trouble with this one when at 4 years old I overheard him telling his older brother, who is a conscientious rule-follower, that they wouldn't get in trouble for what they were doing as long as I didn't know about it.

At 4 he had already gained the insight that it wasn't the breaking of the rule that was bad, it was the getting caught part that was trouble.

I still remember that and am keeping it on file for when he hits the teen years.

He got that from me. I was a skilled liar when I was young. I never lied to get things, or to make up outlandish stories about myself. I only ever lied to stay out of trouble.

Who broke the lamp? Oh, the dog was running behind the couch and got caught in the cord and pulled it off the table.

Who ate the strawberries that were going to be used for dessert? Gee. It must have been my little brother.

Why did you get a zero for your homework? I don't know. I turned it in on time.

Who called Japan? Japan, who's Japan? I don't know anyone named Japan!

The Intuitive's propensity for gaming the system with his intuitive grasp of how people work was simply me reaping what I had sown, I suppose.

Before the Christmas Break, both boys had to finish mandatory science projects which were very involved. They had to do multiple trials of their experiment, graph their results, write up their hypotheses, results and conclusions and assemble everything on a large tri-fold poster board. It was a lot of work for them and for me too because I had to supervise the process, showing them how to use the graphing website, how to use Word to type out their reports, how to adjust the font to fit on the paper, how to format the text....etc., etc.

I was very thankful when everything was done and turned in.

During that whole process, when I was talking to The Intuitive about his project and what he had left to work on he said to me,"I don't have to get a good grade....I only have to pass."

A Maternal Brain Aneurysm was only narrowly averted. After catching my breath, I asked, "What do you mean you only have to pass?"

"Well...I don't care if I get an A or not. As long as I pass, I'm OK."

I had to sit down for a moment. Who was this child who was happy with just passing?

Suddenly, I remembered my third grade year. Many C's and D's on my report card....because I didn't turn in a single stitch of homework...because I didn't want to. I remembered my junior year in high school when I got a D in Health class, one of the easiest classes in existence. Even though I had A's on all of the tests and quizzes, I had decided that I didn't feel like keeping a Health Journal through the semester. Too much work. Too annoying. Not big on my list of things to do.

I consciously chose not to do it and took the hit to my grade....which was quite substantial.....but I didn't care. I didn't need an A in Health class. I only needed to pass it.

Yikes!

The more I thought about it, the more I saw myself in The Intuitive's tendency to procrastinate, to become distracted, to get lost in reading, to amuse himself in his room for hours and his tendency to keep his thoughts and emotions to himself.

Many of those traits I have actively suppressed in myself, either out conscious choice, or because of being forced to by the demands of life. The Intuitive is helping me remember myself.

The Intuitive is very smart, but he also thinks differently and more intuitively and he can't always explain how he knows things, or understand what teachers want from him when they word things ambiguously. I used to think it was because he was a lefty and right-brained.

Now, I remember similar moments from my childhood. I remember infuriating my kindergarten teacher, a wrinkled woman as old as Methuselah who would grab children by the ear and pull them towards their mats when they were naughty. We were pretending to deliver Valentines under doorways while we sang some sort of Valentine's Day song. Each child would spot a door in the room and slip the valentine under it and come back to their place on the carpet before the song ended. WHen it was my turn, I went over to a table and chairs and stuck my card under there.

My teacher berated me, asking me what I was doing, why was I shoving the card under the table? I was confused. I thought we were pretending. I was pretending that there was a tiny house under the table and a mouse who lived inside it. I was putting the valentine under the mouse's door.

It made perfect sense to me. My teacher, on the other hand, thought I was incredibly stupid. I don't remember if she grabbed me by the ear, or not.

I remembered fourth grade when I was marked wrong on a comprehension test of a story that we read. The question I missed was--How do we know that the princess and prince lived happily every after? I answered that we knew they lived happily ever after because the story told us that they lived happily ever after.

My teacher probably thought I was quite dim when she marked the answer wrong.

As dumb as my answer seemed, I had actually thought it through very well. In my mind there was no way to know if people were going to live happily ever after simply because they had solved whatever current problem they were facing. There were always more problems right around the corner that they probably hadn't even thought of yet. I had no basis to say that they would live happily ever after. The only way I could say that they would live happily every after was because the narrator said that they would in the story. Anything else was pure speculation in my 10 year-old mind.

Even at 10, I was a slave to what the text actually said, rather than what it didn't. Reading my thoughts into the text seemed like a strange, unnatural thing to do.

As I parent my children I am often left wondering which methods would be most effective at reaching them. Now, realizing that some of the traits that pop up in The Intuitive are actually my traits, I am sympathetic, and also wondering what would have worked for me at that age.

I had very little active parenting when I was a child, so I muddled through on my own, mostly, and just assumed that when teachers and school didn't make sense, that it was because I was weird and there wasn't much I could do about it.

Would I have wanted a parent like me, actively pushing me to do my best? Should I let The Intuitive just pass every now and then in order to learn that it's up to him to set goals and priorities and to motivate himself?

I'm not sure.

Moral Law and Being Human

Every once in while I want to knock C.S. Lewis around. He's quoted everywhere. He is the "go-to" guy in Christian apologetics. He's consistently relied on, too consistently in my opinion, by authors with an evangelical, intellectual bent. They like to pull him off the bookshelf to give themselves some intellectual street cred.

There is even a new C.S. Lewis Bible being sold. I shook my head in wonder when I learned that. Someone is finally publicly acknowledging Lewis as the fourteenth apostle.

I get tired of him after a while.

I guess I shouldn't blame them, because so far evangelicals have not managed to produce anyone like a C.S. Lewis in the last 50-60 years. He's all that they have.

Even though I get tired of hearing Lewis speak from beyond the grave through his fan base, I think I understand the fascination with his work.

Lewis was not a theologian, or a scientist, or a biblical scholar. He was first and foremost a story-teller. His life revolved around literature; teaching it and writing it.

A good story always takes place within a bigger picture. Grand epics are epic because they are about more than the individual; they involve a stream of action in which the individual is only one moving part.

Lewis, especially in his fiction, is always working within that larger view. His science fiction series begins with the idea that there is more beyond Earth and that a general system is incorporated in each planet. Earth's particular details only make sense in the grand scheme of the solar system. In order to understand what happens on Earth, Lewis tells us about what happens elsewhere.

He uses the general to tell us about the specific...and he is exceptional at it.

As with most of us, though, Lewis' strength is also his biggest weakness. Because he is not bound to the details of theology or biblical interpretation, or even evolution, though there were probably fewer details about evolution for him to address in his era, he slides past many objections and problems that might interfere with his big picture.

Perhaps, that is why he so often turns to fiction to express his theology. In fiction, he has the ability to fully convey themes in new worlds without having to account for the sludge and drek of this world, or deal with the annoying details that detract from the grand epic.

In recreating portraits of the Divine, he sidesteps the conflicting pictures we had beforehand. He boils mythological themes into an essence that can infuse his works. When Aslan is creating Narnia, or leading the children in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, we are not tangled up in trying to understand how God can be both a lion and God, or whether he is part of a trinity, or whether the earthly Christ we think of should be assumed to be like Aslan. Instead, we simply feel the force of his portrayal and don't bother ourselves with details.

It is just a story, after all. In reality, it is not Lewis' fault that he doesn't address the complications of interpreting "biblical" doctrine, because that is not his aim. He is trying to evoke a response in his reader, an emotional and psychological recognition of his themes.

Lewis' argument from Moral Law is one such successful emotional and psychological evocation. It succeeds because Lewis doesn't attempt to promote belief in God based on scientific proofs, or technically philosophical arguments. He uses a general philosophical and logical approach to communicate his ideas, but that philosophy and logic is firmly embedded in human nature, in the universal urges that humans have, and in the intellectual/emotional longings that humans express.

We should believe in God because we have an innate sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice. We should believe in God because every desire we have has something which will satiate, every nook in our being has a corresponding piece that will fit into it. We should believe in God because it gives us the best understanding of why humans are the way they are.

Those are my general impressions of Lewis.

In many ways, Lewis' approach is probably the best one that Christians have. In a world in which humans are noticeably more dominant, more intelligent, and more adaptive than most of the species on the planet, looking to ourselves for the answers to our questions is the probably the only thing we can do.

To postulate being human without morality is to postulate being inhuman.

It is one of our defining characteristics. We don't always respect the Moral Law, or always willingly acquiesce to it, but it is undeniably there.

What does it mean in the context of evolution and theology?

It means that we live within a human conceptual world, bound on all sides by our humanity. We can't escape it, or go beyond it. At every point in which we think we have, we have only expanded our own humanness in a particular direction, perhaps widening the dome we live under, but still remaining contained within that conceptual dome. Outside of the dome, things fall apart. There may be all manner of things outside the dome, but they are outside of our realm of comprehension. All that we can do is try to make our dome larger every now and then.

Moral Law, God, and religious experience live within that dome.

Moral Law and Evolution, Part 2

I'm almost done with The Language of God, but wanted to jot a few thoughts down before I forgot them.

As I read further into The Language of God, my impression of Collins gradually improved. He is in his element when he gets down to details in his field and begins to argue against the YEC and Intelligent Design movements through scientific evidence and fact. The funny thing is that the very evidence he uses in his book is the very evidence that made me eventually come to accept evolution. I came across most of the examples he used while watching Intelligent Design on Trial, a NOVA special on PBS about the trial that took place in Dover, PA when the school board clashed over evolution and intelligent design.

The fact that there actually are transitional fossils, that Michael Behe's example of the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum has been proven incorrect, and that the human genome has a fusion of 2 chromosomes that are present, yet separate, in chimpanzees, giving us 23 chromosomes instead of 24 like other primates, showing a direct link and traceable mutation between humans and chimpanzees....well it all made me realize that most of the "scientific" arguments of creationism and Intelligent Design were simply false.

It was a huge turning point in my thoughts. I finally understood why evolutionists were so infuriated by Intelligent Design and Creationism and why even Christian biologists had no qualms about believing in evolution. Evolution wasn't an attack on God by godless atheists, it was simply making sense of the very good evidence that has turned up within multiple fields of science.

I couldn't deny evolution on the basis of counter-evidence....because there wasn't any counter-evidence.

Collins explains all of this quite lucidly.

Unfortunately, when he's done with "science-y" part, he immediately moves back to the argument from Moral Law and more quoting of C.S. Lewis. This is the weakest part of the book because Collins is out of his depth. It isn't that the argument from Moral Law can't be persuasive, but it has no grounding in all of his scientific points. What seems to happen is that Collins is melding two different magisteriums without acknowledging what he is doing, and he has slammed on the brakes and switched gears rather suddenly.

Collins, throughout the book, continues to make assertions about "godless materialists" and "unnecessary ultra-liberal interpretations of Genesis" and believing in the "God of the Bible" and much of Scripture as "eyewitness accounts of historical events".

His motives for retaining his faith are very unscientific. And that is my main criticism of the book; it is a bit of a bait and switch. It doesn't answer the questions that I think that most people who pick up a book subtitled, A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, are looking for. There is no "evidence", from a scientific perspective, for his belief. Instead, he provides a description of the personal synthesis of his scientific understanding and his religious beliefs.

Here is the dilemma that Collins misses, maybe because of his background and not coming from a seriously impassioned evangelical faith from youth: the crisis that evolution causes for many people of faith has nothing whatsoever to do with science. It is a crisis of epistemology, a crisis of knowing what information to trust and where to look for the truth.

Collins writes at one point:

I do not believe that God who created all the universe, and who communes with His people through prayer and spiritual insight, would expect us to deny the obvious truths of the natural world that science has reveled to us, in order to prove our love for Him.(pg. 210)

On the one hand, Collins keeps asserting that the "God of the Bible" is not denied by evolution, yet he doesn't define what his picture of the "God of the Bible" looks like. Is it the God of the Bible who commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? Is it the God of the Bible who made the sun stop in the sky so that Joshua could win the battle? Is it the God of the Bible who killed a man for accidentally touching the Ark of the Covenant?

These are the questions about God that many fundamentalists and evangelicals struggle with. The Bible is replete with stories in which people have to act in discordance with what they see around them in order to please God. The Bible, the Old Testament in particular, is replete with stories in which God is portrayed as somewhat capricious and mystifying in his actions.

I will assume that when Collins refers to the God of the Bible, he is referring to a milder Christian version of a loving, forgiving, always benevolent God. A God such as that is compatible with reason, and curiosity, and human potential.

Collins gets it backwards. Christians are not in need of a scientist who can affirm theology; they are in need of a theologian who can affirm science. Those are strikingly different things. Collins can't give YEC-ers what they need, because theirs is not a position beholden to science, it is a position beholden to theological imperatives.

Collins simply doesn't have the expertise in the relevant areas to communicate a true synthesis of science and theology and how the two might work together. Even if he did, it would come at the cost of reshaping many of those theological imperatives that he so blithely brushes by without any good alternatives.

In trying to deal with the theological implications of evolution Collins quotes Lewis again:

For long centuries, God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself. He gave it hands whose thumb could be applied to each of his fingers, and jaws and teeth and throat capable of articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all of the material motions whereby rational thought is incarnated. The creature may have existed in this state for ages before it became man: it may even have been clever enough to make things which a modern archaeologist would accept as proof of its humanity. But it was only an animal because all its material and physical processes were directed to purely material and natural ends. Then, in the fullness of time, God caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say "I" and "me", which could look upon itself as an object which knew God which could make judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness, and which was so far above time that it could perceive time flowing past...We do not know how many of these creatures God made, not how long they continued in the Paradisal state. But sooner or later they fell. Someone or something whispered that they could become gods...They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God,"This is our business, not yours." But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives. We have no idea what particular act, or series of acts, the self-contradictory, impossible wish found expression. For all I can see, it might have concerned the literal eating of a fruit, but the question is of no consequence.(pg. 208) and also(C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, pgs 68-71)

The message comes across as "Genesis 1 and 2 don't have to be taken literally. Adam and Eve don't have to be real people.....but The Fall...that is definitely real."

Ok...maybe that's a simplistic evaluation of what Lewis is saying. After all, he wrote that passage many, many years ago and there is no telling how he would contribute to the current conversation in the context of further evolutionary proof and development. He was already ahead of many other Christians during his own time, we can't expect him to answer questions that weren't even being asked in his own context.

There is a problem with Collins using this quote from Lewis. On the one hand, he is unhooking the Creation story from possessing any scientific expectations or content. On the other hand, he is trying to locate the human condition within a real, historical, literal event labeled The Fall. Lewis, strangely enough, also isn't helping Collins' attempt to remove God as a constant interventionist in the evolutionary process. Collins, in his discussion of evolution, has said that tying God to the evolutionary process, and special creative influence upon it, is a bad idea....yet that is exactly what Lewis is talking about in this passage--God intervening to shape humanity, not only into a particular, mental/spiritual shape, but also in a particular physical/physiological shape.

I don't understand why Collins doesn't see this. In one breath, he is criticizing Paley's watchmaker analogy and ID and creationism as forming their arguments on human intuition, and in the next breath he is quoting Lewis, whose entire driving force in his work is predicated on human intuition about the Universe.

Collins doesn't seem to recognize it in Lewis, or in himself.

I still have a couple of chapters to go, and I think that I have at least one more post that I want to get to.

Moral Law and Evolution

In the midst of going back and reading my comments on AVI's post from a few years ago, I decided that I should read The Language of God, by Francis Collins because it was the focal point of AVI's posts and I never actually read the book.

I'm almost halfway through and I can definitely see what AVI meant when he referred to Collins as having used C.S. Lewis too much. The first couple of chapters are simply Collins rehashing Lewis' most famous apologetic arguments from Mere Christianity. I will assume that Collins does this because he thinks that his prospective audience is made up of those who have no knowledge of Lewis, or Mere Christianity, or the argument from Moral Law.

This is all well-traveled ground for me. Honestly, I'm at the point where when I pick up a Christian book and all it is is a rehashing of Lewis, or heavily dependent on Lewis' fleshed out fictional portrayals of the Divine, or simply dressing up Lewis' ideas and arguments, without even acknowledging that they came from him, that I seriously want to stab myself in the eye with a fork.

And it isn't even that I don't like Lewis. I have tons of his work on my bookshelves. It is simply that I expect more from a book than a reframing of someone else's work. I suppose that reframing is good every once in a while, but there are so many books out there reframing Lewis that I hardly see the point of why they continue to get published. How many do we need?

That's my little rant.

In one of the sections in which Collins interacts with Lewis, in the context of evolution and altrusim, Collins writes this:

Agape, or selfless altruism, presents a major challenge for the evolutionist. It is quite frankly a scandal to reductionist reasoning. It cannot be accounted for by the drive of the individual selfish genes to perpetuate themselves. Quite the contrary: It may lead humans to make sacrifices that lead to great personal suffering, injury, or death, without any evidence of benefit. And yet, if we carefully examine that inner voice we sometimes call conscience, the motivation to practice this kind of love exists within all of us, despite our frequent efforts to ignore it.

He goes on to dismiss evolutionary explanations for the conscience on the basis that sacrificing oneself denies one the privilege of furthering the individual's direct genetic line. It is not advantageous, evolutionarily speaking, for a person to die for an altruistic cause, so therefore the conscience that we have must be inexplicable in biologic terms. He refutes an example of worker ants sacrificing themselves in order to protect the queen because all ants from a colony carry the same exact genetic code, meaning that the worker ant is somehow involved, indirectly, in the propagation of its genes.

This is a weak argument.

Attempts to explain human altrusim in terms of evolutionary behavior that has a single individual's desire to reproduce will definitely seem strained. Many altruistic soldiers lay dead on the field of battle, cut down in the prime of their lives, no children, no contribution to the gene pool. The high death rate among altruists would seem to prevent altruism from developing as a beneficial, evolutionary trait.

On the other hand, many of the traits that humans possess, supposedly as a result of evolutionary selection, would seem to me to be directly related to a sense of altruism. Certain genes have a trickle-down effect and cause changes in the next generation, not only in one area, but in multiple areas at the same time. One example that comes to mind is the experiment done with silver foxes in Russia in which, by selecting for tameness and breeding only the foxes that seemed least fearful of and less aggressive towards humans, the experimenters wound up creating animals that were more like proto-dogs. Not only did the successive generations become more and more tame, but the coloring of their coats changed, they acquired the ability to make dog-like noises, their tails changed. In short, one selective pressure had a domino effect on their physical and social characteristics.

Isn't it possible that any number of evolutionary steps could have given humanity a radically different social and mental orientation?

One of humanity's unique cognitive traits is the ability to imagine: the ability to imagine the future, the ability to imagine what might have happened in the past if things were done differently, the ability to imagine what it would be like to be someone else, or what it would be like to experience what other people experience. It is the human imagination that allows planning and mental leaps of understanding and gives us an evolutionary advantage over other animals.

Because we have this imagination and are more prone to thinking beyond the simple individual urge to procreate, it would only be natural for humans to be altruistic when it came to the survival of their species as a whole. Humans are altruistic because they are socially tied to other humans and have the ability to see beyond themselves as individuals and to imagine the negative consequences for survival of not being altruistic.

We can recognize the value of altruism even as many altruists die. Because we can perceive how the sacrifice of one can save the many, we mentally reinforce the value within ourselves. Not all altruists die, either, and those who do may do so after already reproducing.

Also, we are the only species that has the ability to purposely direct our own evolution. At this point, purely biological/"survival of the fittest" evolution is a thing of the past for us. We influence our own biologic make-up, for good or ill, all the time.

We are more like those worker ants than we care to admit.

Does this do away with Moral Law? If we assume that conscience is the result of highly developed, constantly selected, evolutionary traits does that mean Moral Law has no merit?

I don't think that it does, necessarily. I do, however, think that it changes shape.

That's up next.

John's Gospel Demonless?

Just jotting a quick note to myself.

After the conversation with James on one of my posts where I mentioned not really believing in "spirits", I said that I should check out how each gospel portrays the activity of the demonic in the ministry of Jesus. I wondered if there was a difference between how the individual gospel writers portrayed demons and what they did and didn't do....and what Jesus claimed they were responsible for.

I haven't thoroughly checked all of the gospels or made any in-depth readings on the subject at this point, but in a quick word search for "demons" or "unclean spirit", and simply "spirit" I couldn't find one verse in the Gospel of John that refers to demons, or spirits....they're completely absent from the Jesus story.

The only time demons are brought up is when the Pharisees accuse Jesus of being possessed.

This strikes me as quite strange. I have read all of the gospels many, many times and never did I notice this before.

Anyone out there know of any resources that address this?

The Importance of Being Wrong

In my last post, I emphasized that humanity must be able to objectively look at the world around it and piece together some basic truths about how the world works. We can't live in a veiled universe that refuses to let us access it; which is not to say that it is possible to know everything.

On the other hand, people are wired to see what they want to see. Many people only read books, or listen to speakers, or pundits, or politicians who already agree with their own preconceived ideas. When we do that, it makes us confident that we have a grounding for our particular pet ideas. Consensus, especially within a group of people whom we admire, makes us secure in our own positions.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

--Oscar Wilde

I wish that quote wasn't true....but it is. When we find someone who can communicate ideas effectively and is charismatic, who appeals to our own emotions and intellect, who speaks and we simultaneously nod our heads, that person can pass on their ideas in a rapid way throughout a community of similarly oriented people. If one trolls the internet long enough, you'll see this in every quarter of it. There are a few wave-makers who write opinion pieces who are then quoted and linked to by hundreds and thousands of other people. You can go from site to site and read the posts and comments, in whatever niche of the internet which you are exploring, and you will inevitably hear the same ideas, talking points, even identical phrases used over and over again.

If it's the lefty blogs, there will always be someone referencing Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck as troglodytes, or tearing them apart. If it's the right-y blogs, Obama will surely be called a Kenyan Socialist trying to destroy the country with Obamacare. Every. Single. Time.

Perhaps this has been made worse by the sheer ease of transmitting ideas through the internet. Anyone, anywhere has access to almost any site. The opinions of a few can easily be disseminated and easily be repeated. For better or worse, the internet can operate as a Hive Mind, communicating with all the worker bees without even consciously trying to.

Keeping that in mind, and seeing the evidence all around us that people have a difficult time stepping outside of their own subjective, conceptual worlds, then wouldn't it be true to say that people, in general, are not objective, that we truly are blinded to opposing views and reality in some ways? Or that we are easily led and influenced?

Yes. That is true. The difference is that there is hope that we can overcome that subjectivity, that with enough information, and exposure and experimentation, we can learn a few things and maybe even change our minds.

I have personally come to suspect that the only way to begin trying to be more objective is to be completely wrong about something; wrong in an area that you never questioned, wrong in a way that you wouldn't have predicted, wrong in a significant way. Of course, being wrong isn't enough. You have to experience and recognize that wrongness for it to do any good.

"It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong."

--GK Chesterton

When you have the experience of realizing that you were flat-out wrong about an issue, or a person, or your own chosen actions you have a transformative moment....or you should have a transformative moment! ;-)

This is what is called repentance--recognizing your own proclivities for sin, or bad choices, or pride, or misunderstanding. People who understand the depths of their own failures and limitations are people who can excuse the same in others. People who never consider how similar they are to their foes are people who will never be objective.

These are two cornerstone concepts in Christianity; repentance and empathy.

Repentance provides a way of orienting yourself in relation to yourself and God and others and empathy is a way of recognizing that everyone else is in the same boat.

Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us....

With the measure you use, it will be measured to you...

Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy...

Identifying our own blind spots allows us to try to work around them, and knowing that we have them brings us a step closer to a type of objectivity.

In order to spiritually mature, we have to be willing to admit defeat, admit the possibility that we can be wrong.

If we can do that in our relationships with the help of our religious beliefs, then we should be able to do it politically and scientifically. When the world proves out pet ideas wrong, the correct response is not to fight harder against the possibility but to simply admit that we were wrong and try a different way.

My point is not that we need to repent, repent, repent. My point is that Christianity has an expectation that we should be able to see the world around us and incorporate new information to further our understanding. The criticisms aimed at the Pharisees and Saducees in the gospels frequently revolved around their inability to let go of particular views and be open to what they saw around them.

The principle is still solid. It isn't enough for us to know what we think and why and be able to explain it. It is a necessary aspect of life that we need to to be able to re-evaluate our stances in light of what we see and experience.